Joan Houlihan's Blog

and we all shine on..(or not)

2009-12-15T11:35:00.000-08:00

Coming off a year of teaching in two MFA programs, one private workshop and several Colrain manuscript conference/intensives, I approached Stephen Burt's collection of essays (Close Calls with Nonsense, from Graywolf) in a rather more practical state of mind than I might have a year ago. Knowing how difficult it is for students to find the words to talk about poetry (including, maybe especially, their own), and knowing that the vocabulary necessary to articulate how a poem works or doesn't work takes time to learn, I admire Burt's well-articulated, incisive commentary on each of the poets he's chosen to examine. I especially enjoyed reading his remarks on Rae Armantrout, a poet I've liked—and truly enjoyed—for a long time, but whose "explainers" often seem more concerned with the project of language writing as a whole than with talking about the effects she alone achieves in her poems. For example, I've often laughed out loud reading her work, but not run into anyone who talks about her odd wit. Burt does. And, while he sets her writing in the context of the other language writers, he doesn't leave her reified there. In fact, his movement in each of the essays is from context—of time, place, poetic "school"—to the particularity of each poet, each poem he examines. This seems just right to me, and this is a great book for students of (mostly) contemporary poetry, one I'll certainly assign.

With Burt's essays in mind, I revisited the article by Matthew Zapruder ("Show Your Work!") wondering if Burt's work would satisfy Zapruder's call for a "new kind of criticism." It seems to me that yes, it does. It certainly answers Zapruder's invocation/provocation that critics need to "guide the reader past his or her resistance (to new poems)," or that they need to "write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader." Like Vendler (Burt's former teacher at Harvard), Burt's strategy as a critic in Close Calls is one of guidance and explanation, with the aim of bringing the reader into a state of ability to appreciate. In other words, the critic as teacher. But isn't this what critics have been doing all along (some obviously better than others)? Zapruder's call for something "new" in criticism again strikes me as a call coming from lack of knowledge. Vendler has been doing this for many years. For that matter, hasn't Burt? In fact, revisiting Praising it New—The Best of the New Criticism, a terrific collection of critical essays on and by the New Critics edited by Garrick Davis, reminds me that critics have been doing for decades what Zapruder says he wants done; that is, teaching the reader how to read new poetries. Yet, he's right, I think, in that there is a widening gap between poem and reader.

Maybe the explosion in numbers of those who call themselves poets and the resulting plurality of poetries in the last 10 or so years, while great for those who would be poets, has not been so great for those who would be readers. While Vendler has come round to Ashbery and Burt to Armantrout, for two "outlier" examples from a decade ago (and Burt to several others more recent), the rush of poetry toward less "graspability" is much faster and more widespread than any critic might hope to keep up with. Granted, the rush seen in journals and newly published collections, is mainly one of (to use Burt's term) epigones and not particularly worthy of attention, but—and here is where I differ with the strictly explanatory role of the critic—how can readers possibly know in such an onrush, what is worth paying attention to, if not through the evaluative function of criticism? I suspect that Burt's answer to this is simply that what he pays attention to is by definition, worth paying attention to, and that the critic is not (or should not) be in the "rating" business or, as he says, "placing poets in order of supposed importance, as if criticism were akin to constructing brackets for basketball tournaments, or (worse yet) to judging cases at law." Meanwhile, Zapruder oversimplifies what I see as the evaluative dilemma for critics by stating that "Critics can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people. The second is to write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader." Aside from the fact that one can opine that something is good or bad and rely not on personality or reputation but on critical thinking to prove the point (no insistence needed), and even if we imagine that anyone who decides to write about poetry has access to all poetry, has read it all, and has no preference for some poetry over others, is utterly "objective" about poetry, what would be the point of writing about one thing over another if not preference? And what is that preference if not a kind of rating?

There are many more books of poetry not noticed than written about negatively, so, obviously, preference comes into play, even when the preference is to negatively spotlight a book. Furthermore, choice is a preference and so in some way also a "rating," albeit a personal one: this book is worth notice, this one, by implication, is not. But if, let's say, something is worth noticing because it's receiving a ton of positive notice that the critic thinks is not justified, why not say so? Rather than avoid overt rating, I think more critical writing should do just that--evaluate. Guidance depends not only on learning how to read what someone says is worth reading, but learning how to see what's not worth reading, how to make distinctions between and among all of the possible things to read we are presented with constantly. I don't see how critics can abandon evaluation, not teach readers how to decide what's good, better, best. If an education in poetry does anything, it seems to me it should at least help poets not only to to say something about poems, but to evaluate them, to make distinctions between and among them and yes, to render a judgment on them. As with any field, there are practioners who are better than others—-more experienced, more talented, original, exciting, and so on. Readers—and students—are not helped by an avoidance of this reality. Learning how to form critical judgments vis a vis poetry isn't helped by simply taking on the opinion of the day, but by understanding how a critic forms his or her opinion. Learning how to think about a poem may lead to appreciation, but it also, necessarily, leads to evaluation. I don't see how these are separate ends, nor that they should be.

The Poetry Rapture--Who's In?

2009-04-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

If there were a poetry Rapture today and only the "best" poets were plucked out and taken up, would anyone notice? First, would there be more than say, five? And what would the criteria be for their plucking? Second, even if there were hundreds, I don't think their absence would make even the smallest dent in the current poet-population which, according to poet Seth Abramson, has swelled to nearly 50,000 practicing (writing and publishing) poets in the US due to the prevalence of MFA programs. This is a staggering number of people at least trying to be poets (and by that I mean published poets) and aside from the obvious question—-why are people aspiring to be poets, given that most will go into debt for a degree in poetry, a debt unlikely to be paid back by practicing or teaching it), and given that they are not exactly welcomed by our society or held in much esteem, and especially given that, according to a recent article in Newsweek, poetry readers are declining nearly as fast as the poets are being minted--I wonder about the role of poetry critic as evaluator. I think that a big part of what a critic (and I include book reviewer in that designation) should do is to at least state their opinion, at most make a considered evaluation of the work they want to write about. Just as an editor must finally decide on a poem or a manuscript for publication and have reasons backing up his or her decision that can be articulated (the basis of the Colrain poetry manuscript conferences), I think a critic should also engage not only in explication, but evaluation. This does not seem to be a widely-held view.

I attended the Harvard-sponsored (actually, sponsored by the Woodberry Poetry Room, newly headed by Christina Davis, who is doing an amazing job there) "Critical Contexts" last Monday evening, a discussion of poetry by critics Adam Kirsch, Stephen Burt and Maureen McLane. The critics sat in easy chairs, facing the audience and engaged in an open discussion of single poems first, then moved to more general discussion about the state of poetry and its criticism in America. Each presented a poem that they admired. Kirsch read Joshua Mehigan's "Spectacle" from The Optimist, an unrhymed sonnet, a moving and precisely rendered account of a fire sans sentimentalism or melodrama. Burt read a poem by Allan Peterson from his Juniper Prize winning book All the Lavish in Common, and Maureen McLane read two poems: "Mockingbird" by Devin Johnston, and a long poem by Okeana Kalytiak Davis The Lyric "I" Drives to Pick Up Her Children from School: A Poem in the Postconfesssional Mode. Each critic then went on to describe why they chose their poems and what they liked about them. I appreciated Kirsch's very clear explication of, and considered remarks about, "Spectacle" and, though I'm not drawn to formalists as a rule, I made a note to get that book. I am already a fan of Allan Peterson (published him years ago in Perihelion and have followed his work) and Burt's description of why Peterson's poem worked for him also worked for me. I had serious doubts about both of McLane's choices which seemed to be calculated to show that she wasn't only into the post-avant-ish poem by Davis, but could also like a more traditional sort of poem by Johnston. I wasn't impressed by either poem on first reading/hearing and was glad she passed out copies of each so we could spend a little more time with them. Since I liked Davis' And Her Soul Out of Nothing very much, and have liked much of her work since, I was disappointed to see this kind of pointless and frankly, self-indulgent, kind of poem from her. It went on and on and ON and then went on some more, and after the third page of a list of banal declarative statements beginning with "I" ("i" thinks love is what wrong./"i" feels elizabeth bishop reprimanding "i"./.."i" thinks jude law probably doesn't know how to read."/"i" knows that no lover can be her "objective correlative", still/..) "I" felt pretty bored with the silliness of it all. Yet another of "those" poems designed to show how clever the poet is, how in-the-know about the usual poetic techniques and devices, how ironic it all is. So, as much as McLane wanted to maintain that even if Davis was merely "activating the language field" (whatever that meant) she thought it was a worthwhile, even entertaining, poem. Meanwhile, I was thinking that for every moment spent on such a transparent and self-indulgent exercise in "intellectualism," a moment was lost for some other, worthier, more exciting and interesting, poem. In fact, I felt rather like I was being subjected to something, not, as she may have hoped, opened up to a new way of perceiving. But what did she hope to gain by bringing us that poem? Maybe it was simply designed to get a conversation going in the audience. First questioner was Dan Pritchard, from The Wooden Spoon (and I was looking for him, hearing he would be there, and being an admirer of his blog, and not knowing he would be so young—and he was looking for me—maybe not thinking I would be so old ;-)— and, as it turned out we were practically sitting next to each other). Dan asked a question bearing on my own, as yet, unasked question: his was about the use of words "in some poems" that were not intended to "mean" anything—how did the critics apprehend and respond to such work, where words were mainly "aritifacts" and not meant to convey meaning or communicate? (i.e. Langpo and its spawn). All talked about intentionality, post-modernism, etc. (in other words, went, and very quickly, to LitCrit theory). My question was related, but a little broader—I wondered how they could evaluate poems (e.g. Davis'), either in relation to others using the same or similar strategies (Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe et al.) or in relation to a poet doing something altogether different (Mehigan, Peterson, Johnston, e.g.). I would take either one—I really just wanted to know how they dealt with the problem of evaluation. How do you determine when something is better or worse than something else when you don't know what "it" is? And if you can't evaluate, what are you doing as a critic? Burt's response was basically, the "dead mouse" school of criticism ("It's like when my cat brings a dead mouse and drops it on my doorstep—here, a gift for you, I hope you like it! That's how I feel about finding a poem to talk about and presenting it to you.") Ok. Thanks. I don't really like dead mice though. And are you bringing me one that, in your expert opinion, is better—-meatier, prettier, more intact—-than some other dead mouse? McLane claimed that "The proof is in the thing." But not this thing (Davis' "poem"), not for me. Kirsch was the only one who recognized what the question entailed and spoke a little about the problem of evaluation and the critic's responsibility—-was it, in fact, a responsibility of the critic? It hadn't occurred to me that it might not be. Clearly, though, not everyone who writes about a book of poems, e.g., feels a responsibility to evaluate it. Then what is the purpose? An extended endorsement? That's something I'm still thinking about.

Meanwhile, and coincidentally, a blog eruption on the same subject (sort of) occurred over at the Poetry Foundation web site. A poet (Matthew Zapruder) posted some comments about poetry criticism, and a lot of heat was generated there, including some from me. Mostly, it's the same sort of argument, with people like Michael Robbins and Kent Johnson (an inveterate poetry activist, seems to have a bigger view of all this, along with a sense of humor) along with some others, all lining up: we-like-a-poem-we-can-understand(the benighted literal-minded philistines) vs. we-like-a poem-that-we-can't-understand (the in-the-know, we are hip and you're not, "believers"). Every time I try to get to the actual kind of poem I'm talking about, you know, the kind that you can't read, and post it, everyone scatters away then returns with a theory in their mouths. Nobody wants to tell me what they think of the actual poem, only point to all the sources I haven't read re: post-modernism and its discontents. Oh well. I thought we were talking about poems, but it turns out that's never the case, and if I try to do it again, well. I don't know what will happen. I can hardly wait to find out.

origin of the pieces

2008-11-28T16:24:00.000-08:00

What's broken commands attention. Glass shatters and there is surprise, danger, sharp edges, and the scattered pieces reflect light in unexpected ways. A disturbance of wholeness and immediately we are provoked to wonder: what was it before it broke? The contemporary poem has been decisively shattered by various techniques such as fragmentation, juxtaposition, collage, ellipsis and manipulation of space on the page. Ashbery and Graham have been using these techniques for many years, as have a host of newer poets including D.A. Powell, Joshua Clover, Dan Beachy-Quick, Matthea Harvey, Karen Volkman, Andrew Zawacki, Noah Eli Gordon and many more—in fact, so many more that the trajectory of contemporary American poetry is decisively aimed toward non-linerarity and fragmentation (of idea or image, or both) and away from the (still) prevailing mode of narrative, confessional, lyric and meditative"I"-based poems. Of course, there have always been poetries operating apart from the I- driven narrative and lyric, and a healthy crosstalk has been going on among and between all current and past styles for many years, as, for example, between lyric-I, narrative, and Language Writing, or between poems and other types of writing such as essay, discourse, fiction, journalism and speech—everyday idiom or heightened rhetoric.

As with fragments from an archeological dig—pot shard, parchment piece, splinter of bone—we are provoked into imagining the whole from which they came. Engaging us in that imaginative act gives the broken poem interest, as well as intellectual or emotional traction, a handrail however shaky or newly constructed at every step. I was interested to see this described in another way in the article Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise . An excellent and visual example of provocative fragmenting is Mary Ruefelle's A Little White Shadow (Wave Books)—a small, lovely book that is itself an art object, each page seemingly smeared with white-out, allowing only glimpses of phrase, image, line, that tantalize into imagined sequences and narratives, a possible world, a back story now invisible but informing the surface.

The reading of shattered poems is inevitably accompanied by the question: what was it before it broke? Is there a hint of story to be reconstructed? An identifiable emotional center? A tradition, a form, an historical construct of any kind? Any sense of a wholeness that shadows a poem, whether it is only hinted at (the ongoing sense of prayer haunting DA Powell's Cocktails) or obvious (the sonnet form broken and reassembled by Volkman in Nomina) is, it seems to me, what gives the poem's brokenness its power.

Sensing the existence of an integrity behind even the most apparently broken poem, a reader uses that sense to navigate and cohere small islands of linearity, similarity or mood within the poem. How far apart the islands lie, how much of a leap from one to the next is required by the reader, and whether or not the reader senses a wholeness shadowing the display of dispararities has, I believe, a lot to do with the success of such a poem.

genius doesn't die

2008-09-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

Seeing the large, round, beaming black man coming toward me in the Casablanca restaurant in Harvard Square was a thrill—the hug was warm, fiercely close, long and so welcome. We had met at last. This was the poet I had come to admire and love from a distance and in the best way possible for a writer: through his writing—-poems, essays and of course, emails. At that point he hadn't started his blog. In 2001 I was one of two finalists for the Black Warrior Review's chapbook competition, the other was Reginald Shepherd, someone I hadn't heard of. When I looked him up and saw his poems and his publication history, I was immediately impressed and very honored to have been considered a contender of his, even briefly. Did I then write to him and tell him so? No. He wrote to me, to tell me so. What winner bothers to write such gracious things to the loser? This was the quintessential Reginald Shepherd, and thus began our seven years of email correspondance, phone calls and three actual meetings: the first in the Casablanca. By the time we met, his emails had been a life raft and inspiration for me during a catastrophic personal event, I had come to know many details of his life and struggles (as well as joys) and I was eager to meet him at last. We quickly fell into talking—-life, love, poetry—-and the voice and presence I had come to know and rely on in his correspondance—- super-intelligent, aware and empathic—was embodied and unmistakably human. That voice, that presence, remains with me now: vivid, expansive, filled with courage and humor. I talk with him still.

Peace and poetry, Reginald.

a modest proposal for poetry

2008-09-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

Bill Knott is right. As he states on the Harriet Blog, the problem of poetry publication in America is "systemic." It is based in economics and it has driven poets and their would-be publishers into a smaller and smaller rat-box where they bite each other's tails and claw each other's eyes out—the poets, trying to push the lever that will release the book-pellet, the publishers, trying to push the lever that will release the funding-pellet to make the book.

Why don't publishers and poets cooperate, you ask. Why don't the poet-rats who want the publication pellet, help the publisher-rat get to the lever they need to push? In 2004 and 2005, due to the efforts of Foetry.com, some poetry presses were legitimately criticized for their contest practices, and, aided by CLMP, succeeded in making their contests more transparent and guidelines more accessible. But Foetry.com didn't know when or how to stop and spawned its own set of rats who continue blindly gnawing every publisher in sight, to wit: why don't publishers read manuscripts for free? Why can't they publish books without trying to get money to enable them do it? Why do they publish people they might have gone to school with or worked with—-even when it's not a contest? How dare they make judgments on the worth of someone's work and publish someone without making sure they've never heard of them, met with them, taught with them, had coffee with them, read previous work of theirs, etc.? And does a publisher think because they started a press and/or run it, they are entitled to publish who they want and when? Mostly: Why are they stealing my money? I paid the equivalent of two cups of Starbucks coffee and now my manuscript hasn't been selected! What did I pay for? Someone to open an envelope? It's all subjective anyway. It's got to be that the one who got published knows somebody! ("How many poets does it take to change a light bulb? 200. One to change it and 199 to claim he knew somebody."*) I demand that these rats be held accountable! And so forth and so on. You get the drift.

Meanwhile, the market for poetry is NOT THERE, the selling of poetry books is NOT HAPPENING (except for, you know, Billy C.), and the funding for the arts is NOT being directed towards poetry as Bill Knott correctly points out. Even an organization that was fortunate enough to receive 100 million dollars to put towards poetry, has asserted that they are "not in the business of funding." The money will be used to support poetry, yes, but only as this organization dreams up its own ways to do it, not to support those already working hard to make poetry happen—-the poetry publishers or even the poets themselves.

Granted, it is the audience for poetry that's missing and that's what is driving all this rat-biting and baiting, but while the unnamed organization is trying to create the readership (to effect a "trickle-down" economics), the rats are harming each other. Here is my modest proposal: let's kill off the presses! Let's make sure no press is allowed to charge a fee for reading a manuscript, ever. People should do things for free in poetry anyway, shouldn't they? Since the grants are so difficult to obtain, and since most small presses depend primarily on reading fees, that will take care of the ones with an already precarious existence (nearly all of them). Next, let's make it extremely difficult for anyone to START a press. Let's go back a few decades to when there were only a few presses that would publish poetry (e.g. university presses would survive since they are attached to, and funded by, institutions). Then, when the masses of MFA rats are swarming, looking for a publisher, so they can get a book, so they can get a job, they will not find one. We will be back to the time when being a poet did not automatically mean having a book—or, we will move ahead to a time when other means of producing poetry (e.g. internet publishing) will take hold and become respectable. So: Kill the poetry presses to save poetry!

At a minimum, an all-out assault on poetry presses will drastically reduce the number of them, thereby drastically reducing the number of poets expecting to be published, thereby drastically reducing the amount of poetry published, thereby giving the poetry that does get published more attention in the market, thereby creating a more interested readership, thereby increasing demand for poetry. Many fewer presses equals more selectivity, equals bigger readership. Side bonus: the paucity of publishers would discourage everyone who can pick up a pen from becoming a poet. The MFA programs would either disappear completely in the process—-why go through the program when there are only about three poetry presses left in America to publish you?—-or become a purely educational experience, like liberal arts degrees in general.

Frankly, I'm amazed that any small publisher of poetry would continue in the face of the ongoing ignorance and sheer vindictiveness of certain rats-in-the-box.** Whatever good was done in the name of fairness vis a vis poetry contests has been done. Now for the coup de grace: Put poetry presses out of business altogether through continual harassment, defamation and a refusal to support them, and then let angry readers ask for it, demand it—-We want poetry! We want poetry! Can't you hear it now? No, neither can I. The box is so small. Can't we at least be kinder to our fellow rats?

*Tip o' the hat to Ernie Hilbert.

**I have good reason not to name them. They are persistent and litigious. I have been harassed and I know many others have too and there is an especially disturbed individual in our midst who is making it nearly impossible to have these discussions openly—I don't like receiving nasty emails, being cyber-stalked or being defamed on the internet—and I have heard it’s worse for others.

not mere rhetoric

2008-08-11T12:16:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to be a poetry critic? Should a poetry critic also be a poet? Aren't all poets critics by necessity? After all, poets think about their work, how to best revise it, how it might work differently and so forth. Even when proceeding by pure experimentation, poets will figure out what they've done once they've done it. Many, if not most, poets are also teachers. How do they teach poetry without analyzing, comparing, discussing and evaluating, then articulating their thoughts to an audience? Some poets are also editors, requiring them to make judgments of work submitted to them. How is this done if not by thinking critically about poetry, seeing the poem as an aesthetic object and attempting to understand and articulate, if only to oneself, how and what it is doing?

At the Harriet Blog, DA Powell sees a separation between poet and critic while Reginald Shepherd argues for their natural, if not inescapable, coupling. I agree with Reginald. Books get reviewed, submissions accepted or rejected, and seminars and poetry workshops conducted all on the basis of thinking critically about poetry. There is hardly a way to be a poet and avoid teaching it, writing about it, talking about it, blogging about it, etc. Everyone's a critic as they say, and nowhere is this more obvious than in poetry. But isn't poetry criticism a separate field of knowledge? What constitutes poetry criticism as a discipline, where and how is it studied, and where does it fit in the field of poetry? What training should a poetry critic have? These questions are being provoked as I read the terrific Praising it New: The Best of the New Criticism, a newly-published anthology of the writings of the New Critics edited by Garrick Davis. I am struck by the intellectual depth, rigor and commitment to poetry and truth these critics had.

After another, related, reading, "The Shakespeared Brain", an article by Phillip Davis, I did some research on rhetoric, its history and terminology. Useful in writing and also in criticism, the study of rhetoric seems to have gone the way of studying grammar. Perhaps the brain studies described by Davis will inspire more study of the way language usage affects thinking, and rhetoric will return as a hot new field of study. A few years ago I proposed an alternative course of study for an MFA in poetry that doesn't include writing a poetry "thesis" or taking workshops, but instead would be an MFA in Poetry Criticism—comprising the reading of and thinking critically about, poetry, with a minor focus on writing your own (and maybe a major focus on rhetoric!).

boredom as concept

2008-06-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

Coming of age in the warhol-inspired, electric-kool-aid-acid-test, krapp's last tape, happenings, conceptual/ performance/installation art, open/visual/concrete poetry era, the discussion of "conceptual poetry" taking place on the poetry foundation blog in Kenneth Goldsmith's entries, seems very familiar, even retro, to me, but I know I must be careful not to conflate what happened then with what's happening now, however similar they may seem (how aggravating it is to hear "oh, that's nothing new"!). And besides, so what if the concept of "conceptual poetry" is not new? Maybe it's time to revisit it and enjoy it again. It's got some new elements, has expanded to include more "art-y" and "performance-y" bits (open poetry meets conceptual art) and has overall new energies and confident practitioneers which give it a nice new shiny look and feel. The problem for me is not that it's been done but that I didn't enjoy it the first time around. For one thing, the people who were "into it" were pretentious and full of inflated rhetoric and insubstantial ideas all wrapped up and presented as intellectual daring. I admit I sat through the whole of Warhol's film of a man sleeping* trying to be as avant-garde as my hippie friends, but even then, I had nagging doubts. Why wasn't I seeing a Bergman film, or some other cutting edge film like "Jules and Jim," or "8 1/2" -- something that had substance and meaning or joy and daring, something that I could enjoy and savor or at least not be bored by? Why deliberately subject myself to something boring, especially after the enforced boredom of a classroom? Raising these questions only got the response: "Ah-ha! That's how you're supposed to react. You're supposed to get bored and ask why you're bored. The boredom itself is the experience!." Well. I was already plenty bored, why ask for more? The only way to watch it, really, was to be stoned, the way we all read Ashbery then. Maybe that's the answer re: "conceptual poetry"—-Caution: Do Not Enter Without Drugs.

* Sleep is described thus: "Andy Warhol used a fixed camera position in his 1963 film titled Sleep. The film shows a complete night’s rest over eight hours. Much like the man in the movie, the viewer is tempted to drift off indecisively into unconsciousness. Like in a dream, you don’t have the forethought to know how long you will be in this altered state, and what awaits you after it ends."

an apple is what you do with it

2008-06-10T04:55:00.000-07:00

While writing a review of Matthea Harvey's Modern Life, and pondering (again) the penchant of some contemporary poets for using words as playthings without respect for their meaning(s)--implied, contextual, inflected, literal or metaphorical--I noticed the most recent New Yorker article on Pound's influence ("The Pound Error") which included this:

"Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” was the formula of the movement that Pound invented, in 1912: Imagism. In the Imagist model, the writer is a sculptor. Technique consists of chipping away everything superfluous in order to reveal the essential form within. “It took you ninety-seven words to do it,” Pound is reported to have remarked to a young literary aspirant who had handed him a new poem. “I find it could have been managed in fifty-six."

The seed of the trouble lies in what most people find the least problematic aspect of the Imagist aesthetic: the insistence on "the perfect word," l.e. mot juste. This seems a promise to get language up to the level of experience: artifice and verbiage are shorn away, and words point directly to the objects they name.

Language becomes transparent; we experience the world itself. "When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish," Pound wrote in 1915. This is a correspondence theory of language with a vengeance. We might doubt the promise by noting that in ordinary speech we repeat, retract, contradict, embellish, and digress continually in order to make our meaning more precise. No one likes to be required to answer a question yes or no, because things are never that simple. This is not because individual words are too weak; it’s because they are too powerful. They can mean too many things. [Italics mine] So we add more words, and embed our clauses in more clauses, in order to mute language, modify it, and reduce it to the modesty of our intentions. President Clinton was right: "is" does have many meanings, and we need to be allowed to explain the particular one we have in mind."

As both editor and poet, Pound was especially aware of the power of a word. It reminds me that the expression "it's only words" (used, astoundingly, by Hillary Clinton—-another Clinton!—-in reference to Obama's speeches) is, or ought to be, anathema to any poet (or writer) claiming to be the real thing, yet we have had decades of poets who write in just that way—-with no respect for, or love of, words. (Curiously, Ron Silliman refers to my review of Harvey as "dissing" her book. In fact, I've probably paid closer attention to her actual poems than any other reviewer. Other reviewers talk mainly about the "project" she has engaged in, not the actual writing.)

Meanwhile, thanks to Ron Silliman's amazing list of links (where I now go for my poetry news fix, along with Poetry Daily News), I came across this, a discussion of how scientists are working on understanding how the brain decodes meaning:

"The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it."

Pound would have been pleased by such a discovery, I think: the direct correspondance between word meaning and experience.

where have all the ladies gone?

2008-05-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

I've been steered toward the review of Over Summer Water, by Elizabeth McFarland on this month's Contemporary Poetry Review by a complaint on Wom-Po (the Women's Poetry List-Serv founded by Annie Finch, of which I am a member). First, the complaint: it was stated by a couple of Wom-po posters that they found the review "demeaning" that the reviewer referred to the author's "ladylike" clothing in an author photo and harped on the "littleness" of her vocabulary. Another poster felt the review reflected the overall tone of the Contemporary Poetry Review as not "respectful" of women and also "catty" (odd word here for the purpose). I am a staff reviewer for the CPR, so I was not only curious about the actual complaint in relation to the review, but also curious about the perception of CPR as "hierarchical" (this must mean "patriarchical"??) and as not often reviewing books by women (this review is characterized as an "aberration for them."). I discovered CPR on the web in 1999 and championed its inclusion on Web del Sol where I was then (and am now) a poetry editor for Del Sol Review as well as editor of Perihelion. I wrote my first review for CPR in 2004 (on DA Powell's trilogy). The CPR is a remarkably intelligent and lively online journal dedicated solely to poetry criticism and the only such journal I know of (Parnassus is in the same league, but also publishes poetry along with reviews and essays), and certainly, it is the only one of its kind on the web. So, I checked out the archives of CPR for reviews of books by women. There are also essays and interviews, but just quickly checking the archives, it appears that there is a preponderance of books of poetry by men reviewed. (I don't feel like actually counting them all up, maybe somebody else will and let me know.) For that matter, there are more male reviewers. On the other hand, there is a continuous "Call for Critics" banner on the front page and I know they are always looking for more reviewers. Why aren't there more female reviewers on CPR? Do they apply and get rejected? (Hard to imagine that, if the writing is good enough.) And, if there were more female reviewers, would there be more books of poetry by females reviewed? I dunno. Judging by me, no. ;-) But judging by the other female reviewers, maybe. Of course, Kathleen Rooney wrote the review on Elizabeth McFarland's book, and that was seen as a sexist review, so….not sure how that works. Are female reviewers only supposed to review other females, and those, only positively? Not sure. One thing I am sure of is that complaining about the state of things is much less effective than acting to change things. Apply to CPR! Become a reviewer! Write reviews of women's books!

Now about the actual review: I think it's a terrific review and I'm glad I ended up reading it, albeit because of a complaint. I was surprised that Rooney began the piece with a poem that had such "ugly" vocabulary ("greed", "rotted ground", "gluttony", "bloated and deformed") then went on to make the case that McFarland was, in fact, squarely set in the romantic mode of the era as both poet and editor. I had the idea initially that she would argue for a trajectory toward Plath beginning with McFarland. But McFarland's other examples were all in the usual high-romantic, didactic mode of the time. It's a thoughtful and sympathetic portrait of a talented woman unable to free herself from cultural constraints (and yet, some of her lines are more than fashionable as Rooney points out). The reference to her clothing is simply that—-her actual portrait and "costume" a reflection of the "costume" worn by poets of that time. It's instructive, I think, to look back within one's own lifetime, to an anthology of the '70s, for example, to understand what "period style" means. And yes, there is a period style now—-think about it.

"where the children are not"

2008-04-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

Reading Nomina, Karen Volkman's latest, intermingled with Larry King's interview of the women from the polygamist cult and the contrast is informative, both ways. For Volkman (whose "Crash's Law" is one of my favorite books and "Spar" not even close), there is a lesson to glean from these women, which is: undecorated, simple, stark, and powerfully emotional. The lesson for the polygamy women from Volkman is: risk within boundaries, yes, but with bold imagination, love of language and rhetorical nerve. It was astonishing to witness the impovershment of language and the mechanical, sometimes frightened, demeanor of these women. When one of them fought back tears while showing the cameras "where the children are not" it was hard not to be teary also. Meanwhile, Volkman has managed to do everything possible with the language except elicit emotion. She indeed is using boundaries (the sonnet form) to amp up the poems' risks via compression, but what she does instead of accessing something human and of interest to the reader, is to show off her considerable talent. Why is it so difficult to use language in the service of emotion? These poems are dazzlements of cleverness, energetic and lush with sound (and I do love sound!), but ultimately, empty towns. Where are the citizens? There are exceptions, and this one on the Academy of American Poets website is one that engages me beyond mere admiration:

Sonnet [Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,]
by Karen Volkman

Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,
the earth, blue egg, in its seeping shell
dispensing damage like a hollow hell
inchling weeping for a minor sea

ticking its tidelets, x and y and z.
The blue beneficence we call and spell
and call blue heaven, the whiteblue well
of constant water, deepening a thee,

a thou and who, touching every what—
and in the or, a shudder in the cut—
and that you are, blue mirror, only stare

bluest blankness, whether in the where,
sheen that bleeds blue beauty we are taught
drowns and booms and vowels. I will not.

I do love how it recalls so much of poetic tradition (Hopkins, Stevens, Dylan Thomas, the Romantics and sonneteers) while still being new. Masterful lines here, and the book as a whole is highly accomplished, more than worthy of admiration. I just want something human, some emotional core, at least some of the time.

what didn't die!

2008-03-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to announce that Perihelion, the online journal of poetry and mayhem, has risen from its cyberashes and is now available for your reading pleasure. Lots of freshness here, including some off-the-edge poems as well as a new editorial staff, and just in time for spring and all its beauty and buzz:

PERIHELION

We'll open up for submissions soon. Stay tuned!

reality bites

2008-03-13T03:47:00.000-07:00

When poets start to focus on getting a manuscript published, it seems such a daunting and impossible task (so many contests, so many poets entering them, so many presses, so few open to submissions) that they don't look past that initial publication. (I know I didn't.) So what happens? Here is some straight talk from William Logan on the subject (first published on the Poetry Foundation blog):

"My theory about publishing poetry is so depressing, I’d rather not put it on the page. Here goes. Take the trade and university presses, and the better independents. The first year, I suspect most poetry books sell between 500 and 1000 copies. Let’s say 750. Perhaps 250 of these go to libraries, where ten get taken out and read. (By this I mean read cover to cover. Otherwise it’s not reading; it’s browsing.) Two hundred are bought at readings or by fond friends and ignorant relatives. Of these copies, 20 might be read (if we’re talking about my relatives, the figure is lower). The remaining 300 copies are bought by the few people in the country who read poetry, and of these fifty copies might be read. By my count, the book gets fewer than 100 readers the first year. Perhaps the book receives one or two reviews (an editor told me that half the books he publishes—this is a New York publisher—get no reviews at all.)

The second year is worse. Now the book sells 30 copies, of which perhaps five are read. The books in the libraries gather another 10 or 20 readers. The third year the book sells 15 copies, or is remaindered. After six or seven years, the public library copies get sent to the Friends of the Library sale. The university library copies gather dust. My advice is, if you want to write poetry, learn to love silence.

Say, then, that in three years, in a country of 300,000,000, a book of poetry sells 800 copies. You could search through five football stadiums, each seating 75,000, before you could find one buyer. If I’m correct that only about 100 of those buyers finish a book of poetry, you’d have to search through 40 stadiums to find even one person who had read the book. We live in a minor art. That doesn’t mean we love it the less, or hate it the less.

There are exceptions; but—let’s be honest—few poets selling ten or twenty thousand copies will be of any interest 50 years later. There were dozens of poets who sold much better than the young Eliot or Pound. Stevens’s Harmonium sold so poorly it was remaindered for 50 cents a copy. If you sell a lot of books and want a lasting reputation, hope that you’re Robert Frost."

Best: "My advice is, if you want to write poetry, learn to love silence."

How many a*holes does it take to fill a bluehole?

2008-03-12T11:20:00.000-07:00

Only one. And that one is Alan Cordle, tireless crusader rabbit of the poetry world (a librarian who started what promised to be a worthwhile poetry site called "Foetry" a few years back, and, well, wasn't). Cordle (or, as I like to call him, Alan Curdle) has been sending me occasional emails threatening to "expose" me for taking on an alias to try and talk sense into some of the participants there, last year, I think. Hmm. Funny how he seems offended by the idea that I spoke through a sockpuppet on Foetry. I wonder where I got the idea that was the way to do things there? And why is he suddenly fixated on me? I have no idea. Sir Alan of Bluehole, one might begin to see that as a form of harrassment you know. I've also received your complaint that your wife's book of poetry is being ignored. I wonder why. It must be a conspiracy of silence! Or, maybe it's one of the vast majority of poetry books that go unnoticed, unread and unreviewed. So, Alan Curdle, to help your situation, and to make sure your wife gets the attention she deserves, I've requested that her book be mailed to me asap for possible review. Not promising anything, of course, except absolute honesty if I decide to review it.

musing on the line

2008-02-20T10:11:00.000-08:00

All this talk of ellipticism and parataxis has naturally led me to a deeper consideration of syntax and the poetic line in general. By a happy coincidence I discovered I had a copy of the newly-published (Graywolf) The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach, a fantastic articulation of many of the issues I’ve considered over the years, and many I have not. It's the first book I've read on craft that has real application to reading, appreciating and evaluating many of the contemporary—-dare I say "post-avant"—-poets. One of the many provocations the book provides is the idea of a line that is syntactically coherent but semantically incoherent and the thrill such tension can produce (for example, such as Ashbery can regularly produce). Longenbach's exploration of the line reminds me that overlooked in the critical assessment of elliptical poems is an examination of how the work of the line is enhanced or weakened by what's inside the line—-word choices, denotations and connotations. As Longenbach asks, how can a poem’s "syntactical eruption" be "exciting rather than merely confusing?"

I am also reading Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life, a good collection to read in tandem with Longenbach.

unsweetened peonies

2008-01-26T08:32:00.001-08:00

In a previous entry, Chad Parmenter's comment introduced the idea of a possible relationship between ellipticism and parataxis—something I started thinking about and now have followed a little further. While ellipsis and parataxis are different (but not opposite) types of grammatical constuction, it's true that many contemporary poems are characterized by paratactic constructions and that, therefore, the "space" left by the disconnected sentences, phrases or fragments is elliptical, that is, to be filled in by the reader. Generally, a heavily paratactic poem signals its modernity. The opposite of parataxis, hypotaxis, is more often seen in older poems. A poem by Jane Kenyon, for example, already seems dated due to its reliance on hypotactic constructions (among other things, including its predictable movement toward the epiphany):

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

The poem is immediately "updated" when parataxis replaces hypotaxis, fragments replace full sentences and juxtaposition is introduced:

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies bloom, send out light.
The rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers! Big as human
heads. Staggered by their own

luxuriance: I had to prop them up
with stakes, twine.

The moist air intensifies. Their scent.
The moon moves around the barn

to find out what it's coming from
in the darkening June evening.

I draw a blossom near, bend close, search it.
A woman searching a loved one's face.

Many older (or not so older) readers of contemporary poetry are put off by the contemporary poem's parataxis and resultant syntactical shifts, just as they find cinematic jumps unpleasant rather than exciting. Because a poem no longer has a recognizable stylistic façade, the reader may find it impossible to enter—where's the door? A poem's subject matter is less of a readability problem for some than the (defeated) expectation of familiar syntax.

Further updating occurs when Kenyon's poem is rearranged toward an "eastern" rather than "western" ending (these are terms I first heard from April Ossman at a Colrain conference). Briefly, the western ending is one that ends the poem with a swelling wave of music and a clash of cymbals; the eastern ending is a chime struck once that reverberates throughout the landscape. The original, western ending:

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

As experienced poets know, the extreme westernization of a poem's ending can often be alleviated by a simple swapping of stanzas:

Peonies at Dusk

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

So the poem ends with a whimper, not a bang, and has a more contemporary feel. Now, with a paratactical syntax, and relineation into couplets (another contemporary trend):

Peonies at Dusk

Outrageous flowers! Big as human
heads. Staggered by their own

luxuriance. I had to prop them up
with stakes, twine. The moist air

intensifies their scent. The moon moves
around the barn to find out what

it's coming from. In the darkening
June evening I draw a blossom near,

bend close. Search it. A woman
searching a loved one's face.

White peonies bloom, send out light.
The rest of the yard grows dim.

Now the debate over author intentionality, the meaning of meaning and all such like concerns begins--the concern of translators is also the concern of any reader of a literary text--how to balance the stylistic or "surface" with the intended (and unintended) authorial purpose(s). Many poets use surface manipulation to achieve terrific, often unexpected, results. The idea of poetic development, as it applies to some inner, psychological (or spiritual) evolution (and hard-won "truths") seems also a somewhat outmoded, heavily romanticised concept of the Poet. After all, Khalil Gibran (my favorite "poet" in high school!) or Rumi or good old Babba Ram Dass (sure wish he could be here now) and others of the high-minded supercharged spiritual school of poetry certainly have reached some heights (or depths) of inner development--but what have they got to show for it in re: to the actual writing? Obviously, no connection, and never has been one, between personal goodness, suffering, enlightenment and whatnot and great writing. I remember this conundrum well from my hippified youth--guru-worship vs. the drek of the guru's actual writing--swing low, sweet platitude.

The play's the thing

2008-01-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

While Ellipticism has been applied to a poetic style or school, it seems to me that the idea of what's missing, and how that perpetrates the creative act (both in composition and interpretation), is everywhere. In a restaurant, overhearing only bits of a conversation and filling in the rest; in a face to face conversation where gesture and facial expression fill in the unspoken text, perhaps with contradictions to, or support for, the actual words spoken; at the movies, where cinematic jump cuts and flashbacks elide the linearity of a plot; or through background music that supports, denies, or introduces an entirely other world--all add another dimension to the spoken word. This is also true in drama (and maybe a better comparison than film, since dialogue in drama is of utmost importance) where playwrights get to use all the surrounding apparatus of dialogue (action, gesture, prop, music, costume,
scenery) to emphasize, confound, or subvert the spoken word. Having begun my writing life writing plays, not poems, I am always interested in the correspondences between and among these two forms, especially in re: to the idea of "meaning." In theater, the concept of the fourth wall is a great one to apply to the poem wherein the reader can “peer into” the world of the poem with the sense of overhearing something meant to be private. Just as in a play, where the audience is not overtly included (except occasionally, by design), but whose presence is crucial to the creator, a poem needs to be "looked at" in order to exist at all. For the playwright, as for the poet, the audience determines effect. When Arthur Miller built a small cabin in the woods in order to write in isolation the play that was hounding him (Death of a Salesman) he still had no idea that this play that had a hold on him would have a hold on an audience. On opening night, as he stood in the back of the theater and watched the curtain come down in complete silence, then stood for a moment as no one moved or spoke he thought: "It's a failure" until, as the story goes, someone remembered to applaud and "the whole house came down."

In a recent New Yorker article (Dec.23, 2007), John Lahr quotes Harold Pinter: "I think there’s a shared common ground [among people] all right, but that it’s more like quicksand." Pinter's plays, of course, depend on the elliptical moments, those pauses fraught with multiple meaning, looks and intonations, all the missing words among the characters and what's not said is most powerful. Perhaps such power is hard to achieve on the page--certainly the poetic "leap" that Bly proposed as existing and reproducible is one way to put the fraught back into the pause for a poet. Unfortunately, many contemporary poets have only the empty pause--much like the dreaded "dead air" on a radio program--to show for their elliptical efforts.

By the way, I wonder what ever happened to "verse drama"--is there anything in contemporary poetry that would fit that description? Maybe Gluck’s Meadowlands? I think the Poetry Foundation is trying to revive the form with an award for such.

Deeper into January

2008-01-01T06:28:00.000-08:00

Along with the contemporary poem's romance with ellipsis and various indeterminacies comes a weird relativism; that is, a sense that the poem can be re-arranged in many different ways to achieve different, and sometimes better, results than the ones in the author's own version. This raises the question of inevitability--is the final, perhaps even published, poem the best poem it can be, or is it simply where the author stopped revising it? It also raises the issue of author intention: where is the border, if there is one, between the author's intended "meaning" and the reader's perceived "meaning?" Does the author's intention matter in the reading of a poem? Should it? Or (as I believe), should the poem trump the poet? Often the poem is better than the poet allows it to be, or enables it to be. Here is the original, relatively straightforward, poem:

In January

Ted Kooser

Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.

Here is another version with no other changes but in line order:

In January

This Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers
is lit, or so it seems to us:
only one cell in the frozen hive of night.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.

In this version, the poem starts inside the café and moves outward to the city as a whole. It hangs together because each line has a wholeness of its own but is not linked by necessity of narration to its immediately preceding or succeeding line. The gaps, or ellipsis, between and among lines, allows movement of them to other positions, and produces a different frisson. While the opening line of Kooser's original poem is superior to this opening—it is a more striking image, while this opening is simply good description—the ending of this version strikes me as better. The last line, while arguably too big (a "western" ending which I'll discuss in another entry), is less faux-epigrammatic (the "bigger the window" etc., echoes "the bigger they come, the harder they fall" and ending on that line calls attention to the clever, but empty, echo—empty because while the literal part of the line may be true, a bigger window trembles more in the wind, its epigrammatic echo has no real resonance in this poem). Also, compared with the author’s original version, this version seems more mysterious, less linear and, to my mind, more interesting in its progression for those reasons. It’s also a bit darker, less cozy, more about the menace outside, the unpredictable nature of weather, winter, and the bridge out of the city is not safe, is one that creaks. It is, in fact, ancient. This ending is not as pat as the ending in the author’s version.

Here is a third version:

In January

A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
This Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers
is lit, or so it seems to us:
only one cell in the frozen hive of night.

Many poems can be upended to good effect. This seems surprising, but if you think about it, poets write toward the epiphany, the big idea, the emotional high, and that very progress is itself a cliché no matter how well or originally it's written. That's because we expect the wind-up before the pitch in every kind of discourse, not just poetry. It's how the mind works and so we echo that working in writing. One way to lessen the predictability of this kind of writing is to "delay cognition" through a simple grammatical strategy like prolonging a clause, or not stating the agent/subject immediately. In this version of Kooser's poem, the big ending lines are first, so now the poem becomes an exploration of that mighty conclusion, something like the cinematic flashback, and the emotional center shifts from the menace outside, the indifference of nature, to the small but enduring grace of human company, giving the poem another kind of feeling, less dark. The line about the "one cell" now has a very different resonance as the poem moves toward, not away from it--and the "hive" speaks of human contact, the sense of huddling together in "one cell" more than alienation in the bigness of a winter night, an indifferent universe.

Looking at all three versions, it seems to me that the author's own version is the weakest of the lot, but could be improved greatly by cutting the line "the bigger the window" altogether, and re-arranging the lines once again:

In January

Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.

A poem is on a continuum of creation. The poet chooses when to stop. Sometimes the poet doesn't know best, but the poem does. The poet needs to listen to the poem.

looking for mr. elliptical

2007-12-28T09:21:00.000-08:00

Since I’ve been asked by Chad Parmenter to participate in a symposia on the subject of Elliptical Poetry, I’ve been pondering the meaning of ellipticism—in poetry and everywhere else. Stephen Burt applied the word to a handful of poets in the early ‘90s (see American Letters and Commentary, Issue #11 and, online, my interview with him in Perihelion) but they didn’t then and don’t now seem to have much in common other than the fact that their poems had and still have lots things left out. In the strict definition of the word, at least as it best applies to writing, elliptical means "Of or relating to extreme economy of oral or written expression" and ellipsis, "The omission of a word or phrase necessary for a complete syntactical construction but not necessary for understanding." (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

The poets—Jorie Graham, Lucie Brock-Broido, Liam Rector, et. al.—that Burt cited seem "Elliptical" enough (note however, in my email correspondance with Liam Rector a few months ago, he made the point that he no longer wrote "that way" and that his poems were now "voice-driven" and in a recent conversation with Lucie B, she asked "what does that mean anyway, elliptical?") but the question I have is: what contemporary poetry is not elliptical? Isn’t poetry by its very nature economical, often to the point of obscurity, and full of "holes"—unanswered questions, hints, deliberate or unintentional implications? So, in order to discover what’s truly Elliptical Poetry, I’ve been looking for contemporary non-elliptical poetry lately, through a random sampling of contemporary poetry journals. Such journals yield tons of starkly elliptical poems, like this one, from Conjunctions (I cite only the first 6 parts):

I.
The rostrum is able to mail.
Malachy owns a keyshop.

II.
Safeguard is better than barter.
Great Wall with tourists and tiffin.

III.
Crinoline is surface for stencil.
Brinkmanship begets a willow.

IV.
Expression is tinder or organ.
Muppets maneuver toward maunder.

V.
Sultan brings pleasure on raisins.
A date palm is edgy or eider.

VI.
Helmut does straddle the chicken.
Synecdoche is plangent or pointed.

from Broken Code by Matt Reeck

As with an old rock-built wall in a pasture, the lines balance one upon another in such a way that the light shows through all the spaces between. It’s the kind of poem where the holes are most prominent. Editors call it "line stacking." Yet, looking at what might be the polar opposite of such a poem, one that’s warm ‘n fuzzy with connectivity (what Silliman believers call "school of quietude" poetry), I see that it too is elliptical:

In January

by Ted Kooser

Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.

What’s missing? Into what holes may a reader fall? For starters, who is this "us" and what does the "it" in the second line refer to? Is "it" the overall idea that the night looks like a "frozen hive" or is "it" the idea that only one cell in that hive is lit? If the latter (which is probably the case), then why does it only "seem" to be lit? The colon, a very popular form of punctuation these days, nicely joins the next line in a kind of cinematic jump, from outside to inside, instantly. The hole, what’s left out, is of course the transition between the two lines. In the fourth line, the word "whose" opens into a hole—how do "odors" have "colorful shapes"? In the fifth line, who is laughing and talking? There is no subject and the "tick of chopsticks" is ghostly—who’s making that happen? And so on, and so on. In other words, my literal-mindedness has exposed holes in this poem, but mainly they are the kind of holes that make a poem, a poem—use of metaphor, lack of narrative transition, equation of seemingly unlike things by means of juxtaposition or punctuation, grammatical ambiguities, etc, etc. Only a churlish reader would object to what’s missing here because what’s missing is unnecessary. One can enjoy and understand this poem well enough without knowing more than what’s given.

So, the question about ellipticism remains: what kind of poem is not elliptical? And, if all poems are elliptical by definition, then what does the term Elliptical Poetry mean, if anything?

unheard maladies

2007-12-27T13:40:00.000-08:00

Reading poetry submissions for my workshops, manuscript conferences, and for the magazine I edit, Perihelion, often puts me into a state of reverie that is related to the kind of state I achieved when reading poetry in my youth—that is, I am transported and moved—except where I am transported to, and what I’m moved to do, has changed. For example, I am often transported from my couch to my kitchen by a mighty wave of boredom and moved to shout obscenities as I go. And if a poet walks across my path at that moment, then don’t wait up for that poet because I’ll be busy disposing of their body in my backyard, digging a hasty hole, or I’ll be burning the poet with his or her manuscript taped to the chest for a burning booster. It makes a lovely light.

Poetry rage is an under diagnosed condition among editors. The symptoms include: involuntary head shaking, bitten finger tops, auditory or olfactory hallucinations (e.g. a constant sense that something smells bad), restless sleep and, last stage, unexplained weeping and tearing of paper. Why do people write such awful poems? The question haunts me.

I used to believe that becoming a poet had to do with necessity of expression, a need to convey thought and emotion so ineffable that the usual speaking and writing channels just couldn’t handle it. Now I think it’s something else: an incredibly accurate diagnostic instrument, more informative than a brain scan—only in a poem can someone impart such banality of concept, such disconnected thinking and flatness of affect so quickly and effectively. Economy of expression allows instant exposure of one’s interior landscape, and puts me in the role, not of editor or even something so worthwhile as therapist, but rather as unwilling witness to the same terrible thing the poet must undergo on a daily basis: the sense of nothing at all to say. Is anybody there? the poet seems to ask. Can anyone see a worthwhile thought, a flash of originality, somewhere here, back here, behind this wall of clichéd babble about my relatives, my lost love, my incredibly ordinary life? How about over here, behind this hastily built stack of nonsensical utterances and clever-sounding lines that don’t connect to one another? Am I here? Am I still alive? Help, please help me, tell me you can read this, it’s my last chance of communicating my existence, that I was here.