AGAINST THE GRAIN

 

The problem with private laments made public is that too often the concealed sadness and the mixed feelings remain private, the difference being that there is now an audience that needs to puzzle out the encrypted melancholy and inside jokes."Against the Grain" , published in October 2009 in Slate, is a piece where the language isn't enough to empathize with. This is the experience of walking into a room you thought was empty only to find someone already inside, talking to themselves, eyes staring to a distant spot. This
 irreconcilably subdivided poem spends a lot of time muddying the distinctions between things being dragged and those creatures that do the dragging, and author Genwanter adds to this patchy mess pale Latin quotes and the creased, leathery visages of Freud and Jung to confuse things all the more. Given the dedication of the poem to Joy Young, Genwanter's wife from what I understand, "Against the Grain" is an agonizingly ambivalent love letter, conveniently wrapped up with the mock-question toward the end whether he may address her as "Freud Jung"; there are cross currents here Genwanter isn't able to navigate; this poem quickly locates the nearest sinkhole and allow the sheer weight of it's un-mortared allusions take it down into the ground, pass the gas pipes and the water mains.

This is an act T.S.Eliot has already mastered and performed to perfection, succeeding due, most of all, because Eliot was a phrasemaker, a polisher of potent lines. For all the fragmented allusions and elusive centers his poems contain, the poet was quotable, memorable, which makes the task of pouring over and debating his poems a joy; there is in Eliot the instinct that informed him that while he was purposefully not making sense in his work, IE, getting to a fine honed point, he was still required to write clearly enough to create a sense of the psychic states and subtle desolation he felt. One walks away from Eliot's work not knowing what he meant, perhaps, but one certainly grasped the less obvious nuances of how he felt. Genwanter isn't quotable here, he isn't even clever, and he's unable to get the balance between the self-mocking and the dead earnestness that could have made this a workable pastiche; it reads as if he tossed his papers on the lawn and pieced them back together willy nilly after running over the pages several times with a lawn mower. This barely deserves the word pastiche, which implies a skilled blend of disparate elements; this is more like newspaper clippings, snapshots, and shreds of pages torn from classics and diaries, bulging, frayed and clipped together with a twisted paper clip .

A VALENTINE FROM FRANK BIDART

 

photo by Ted Burke

An interesting poem, bearing the name “Valentine”, I suppose, because so much failure to keep solemn promises, lies, thefts and endless manner of behavior that wind up harming those close, beloved, trusted equally rationalized with the evocation of “love”. What we come to read is an emerging realization that the most intimate term of selflessness and dedication to other people is used to keep wives, husbands, children, and generations, latched to and lashed by psychologies that do them ill and rob them of what they can become. It begins in youth, a young man experiencing duplicities in the name of love, and in the righteousness of untested conviction makes a pledge, he says , my case will be different: 

How those now dead used the word love bewildered

and disgusted the boy who resolved he

would not reassure the world he felt

love until he understood love

Conviction gets tested in intervening years and, finding that experience won’t conform to the dictates and conditions of theoretical idealness, the protagonist discovers the need to invent new definitions for old words, that meanings are subjective and change, colored by experience and coined from reflex; he uses love in situations he thought he’d never find himself in, he uses a term he had wanted to keep personally uncorrupted.

Resolve that too soon crumbled when he found

within his chest

something intolerable for which the word

because no other word was right

must be love

must be love 

The hardest task in the world one lives in with others is explaining oneself, of getting across the nuances and finer points in the terms they use; meanings and context get larger, less focused, the ground rules one has set for themselves for authenticity are negotiated, compromised. How one thinks of love becomes private, internal, a condition of being that’s rare and precious and finally incommunicable in terms that are not false. “Love” becomes a short hand for any impulse one has, any obsession that forms and becomes malignant, harmful.

Love craved and despised and necessary

the Great American Songbook said explained our fate

my bereft grandmother bereft

father bereft mother their wild regret

How those now dead used love to explain

wild regret

Banged about, exhilarated, betrayed and betrayer , the protagonist shoulder’s his abused idealism, attempts to be stoic about the pragmatic choices he’s been forced to make with his idealism given a life that took it’s own course despite his plans to discover the meaning of “love” and so use the word unambiguously. But ambiguity is all there is here, and he becomes cynical, debasing and expanding and modifying his beloved term to the degree that words and actions are not coherent and congruent. It’s a sad sequence of snapshots Frank Bidart has given the reader, a compressed tale about the making of cynic who couldn’t sustain a passion for life beyond the disabusing of his optimism. This is compression at its finest, and the sentences take odd turns and twists of implication without an overgenerous supply of biography; this is writing Don DeLillo, who writes the best sentences in American English, would enjoy. Like DeLillo, the history of a particular word is traced and its modulations are succinctly characterized. One may lack a name, one may not know anything in the way of biography, but what makes this poetic is the beauty of the revelations; it unfolds like a bright conversation you’re overhearing where you’ve pieced together the scenario although you lack the back-story. The effect is that you recognize something you’ve seen elsewhere. It is the shock of recognition.

POE

It would be a mistake to approach Edgar Allan Poe with the expectation that there’s a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems. He might insist that there is, in his essays like “Eureka” that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker. In any case, I think it is a mistake to approach Poe with the expectation that there’s a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems. He might insist that there is, in his essays like “Eureka” that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker.

He was a virtuoso of leaping rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could suggest the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects. But he was also a genius of mood, despair, and obsession. Much of the time, what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision. (One does admit, though, that his dissociation of sensibility in the sheer sensory overload of decay that made his metaphors and similes ripe with rot likewise sacrificed sense and logic and as often as not became a species of hackwork. An exercise in hackwork, the writer of which tried to elevate to greatness by extreme bouts of overwriting the same limited scale of ideas.) “The Raven”, “Lenore”, “Annabelle Lee” are fairy tales for depressives. Explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough.

Poe was a precursor of decadence to come, through which beauty had been redefined as something being achieved only at a living thing or object’s point of decay. Poe’s poetry (and stories) gave rise to the notion that funeral detail and a desire for the last nap called death are attractive and to be desired. Suggesting that the dark side was actually a means to achieving a higher aesthetic being. Poe’s work is about disintegration in all manner, where expertly honed rhymes and rhythms of his writings disguise but then reveal the burning, churning glory of pure form, energy, freed from the bondage of corporeal existence. He wrote quite a few essays outlining these ideas, particularly “Eureka” and “The Philosophy of Furniture”. In his fiction, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is his most vivid and brilliant realization of his idea of metaphorical entropy. He was a virtuoso of rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could submit the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects. But he was also a genius of mood, despair, and obsession. Much of the time, what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision. “The Raven”, “Lenore”, “Annabelle Lee” are fairy tales for explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough.

In one of his essays, Edgar Allan Poe summarizes one essential element of his philosophical musings by asserting that we are cursed with “the memory from before birth”. A slight and wavering recall of a time when calm and serenity were in place and there was nothing like distortions or crass money, family, or religion to make us nervous or devious; only half alive (if “alive” at all). The upshot of his baroque hypothesizing was our constant and at times overwhelming desire to return to such a nocturnal, darkened, stressless state; perhaps even return to the womb. In any event, his misgivings were a desire for sleep from which one needn’t wake up from; death, in other words.

Received message. Here is the corrected text: It would be a mistake to approach Edgar Allan Poe with the expectation that there's a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems. He might insist that there is, in his essays like “Eureka” that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker. In any case, I think it is a mistake to approach Poe with the expectation that there's a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems. He might insist that there is, in his essays like “Eureka” that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker. He was a virtuoso of leaping rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could suggest the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects. But he was also a genius of mood, despair, and obsession. Much of the time, what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision. (One does admit, though, that his dissociation of sensibility in the sheer sensory overload of decay that made his metaphors and similes ripe with rot likewise sacrificed sense and logic and as often as not became a species of hackwork. An exercise in hackwork, the writer of which tried to elevate to greatness by extreme bouts of overwriting the same limited scale of ideas.) “The Raven”, “Lenore”, “Annabelle Lee” are fairy tales for depressives. Explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough. Poe was a precursor of decadence to come, through which beauty had been redefined as something being achieved only at a living thing or object's point of decay. Poe's poetry (and stories) gave rise to the notion that funeral detail and a desire for the last nap called death are attractive and to be desired. Suggesting that the dark side was actually a means to achieving a higher aesthetic being. Poe's work is about disintegration in all manner, where expertly honed rhymes and rhythms of his writings disguise but then reveal the burning, churning glory of pure form, energy, freed from the bondage of corporeal existence. 

He wrote quite a few essays outlining these ideas, particularly “Eureka” and “The Philosophy of Furniture”. In his fiction, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is his most vivid and brilliant realization of his idea of metaphorical entropy. He was a virtuoso of rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could submit the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects. But he was also a genius of mood, despair, and obsession. Much of the time, what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision. “The Raven”, “Lenore”, “Annabelle Lee” are fairy tales for explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough. In one of his essays, Edgar Allan Poe summarizes one essential element of his philosophical musings by asserting that we are cursed with “the memory from before birth”. A slight and wavering recall of a time when calm and serenity were in place and there was nothing like distortions or crass money, family, or religion to make us nervous or devious; only half alive (if “alive” at all). The upshot of his baroque hypothesizing was our constant and at times overwhelming desire to return to such a nocturnal, darkened, stressless state; perhaps even return to the womb. In any event, his misgivings were a desire for sleep from which one needn't wake up from; death, in other words.

MEANING AND MURK

 

Experimental poetry, once a form that challenged established verse writing in both form and aesthetic, has shaped the history of Western Poetry. Throughout time, daring and expansive poetry has influenced younger poets, eventually becoming the new standard and displacing the old guard. This ongoing cycle of experimentation and rebellion has persisted since the emergence of literate individuals seeking to convey profound inspirations through language that surpassed mere description. However, what we witness today is a recycling of previous Avant Gard ideas and gestures, with slight modifications? The norm has become experimentation itself.

Yet, amidst this landscape, a group of poets known as the New Formalists have emerged. These poets, weary of free verse and open forms, choose to compose rhymed poems with traditional meter. Their presence and potential to undermine the hegemony of the experimental tradition have sparked controversy. Each individual is entitled to their preferences in literature and their critical rationale for appreciating particular forms of expression. Emotional responses, subject to marginalia and deformation, take on a poetic quality of their own. While they may not capture the essence of our fluid states of being, they allow us to engage with our recollections through a lexicon that momentarily aligns with our perceptions. This poetic guesswork, never definitive, perpetuates the dissension among those who eagerly await their turn to speak their worlds into existence. Nonetheless, it brings an indispensable quality—our love for the process of using language that mirrors the fluidity and unpredictability of experience.

Personally, I am drawn to poetic writing that possesses the rare quality of being both fresh and unique. I am less concerned with the theoretical aspects of a poem, whether experimental or traditional, and more interested in how it resonates and functions. If a poem evokes satisfaction in its readers, it becomes worth exploring the artistic endeavor undertaken by the writer—bringing skill and spontaneous inspiration to bear on the page. Poets such as Ron Silliman and John Ashbery have captivated me with their indirect approach to expressing life's complexities. Similarly, Thomas Lux and Dorianne Laux have invited me to follow their lines of thought, leading to unexpected and extraordinary results.

AFTER THE FACT, a poem by Mary Jo Bang

 Poet Mary Jo Bang has the unique ability to write a polemical poem that is both a superb example of straight talk-there is not mistaking her fevered sentiment for anything else--and an elegant sample of exquisitely placed similes and metaphor The power of "After the Fact" comes from the first lines, a narrator setting up the world he/she lives like it were subject to templates from which only tragic outcomes can result. The sin of this all, the source of the outrage, are the actors in the self-limiting melodramas--buffoons peacocks, egomaniacs, narcissists with trigger fingers mistaking the contrived circumstances of their cause for the way things required to go.

Sleep tight, you martyrs.

And you criminals who killed for a narrow share

of power and a few rotten spoils.

Enough is enough.

This is very tough stuff, an indictment with a sting, an x-ray to the heart of the matters; while those who wage wars justify their aggression in the many slippery rationalizations that seek "justice" through a rhetorical back door, the results of their righteousness, their efforts to set the world right, only make the tragedies worse. The calamity multiply, the genocides continue, the planet darkens even more and becomes unlivable-the only thing that seems to renew itself is the rhetoric that proclaims a vision of aggressive human perfection, a heaven here on earth, while the heart grows harder, colder. The fatal schemes, the complete waste of what's best in this existence, contract not just the heart, but makes the universe appear to shrink to a burned out cinder.

The corners converge, causing the globe to grow smaller

than all of time times space divided

by every petty difference.

The center would not hold for Yeats; it contracts for Mary Jo Bang, become a flaming ball of contentious bad faith. It's a simple morality tale, a simple but profound choice that each of us needs to make, to make decisions exclusively based on self-seeking, or to help others, create community, cooperation. Bang's poem/polemic provides the profound example of selfishness when it's codified with a language that adopts some leaner rhetoric of justice, peace, and harmony and uses the terms to rationalize an institutionalized State of War. It is the tragedy of trying to make the mystery of life comprehensible through fear-- investigating the life and ways of a Villainized Other is to trade with the Devil.

The girl newly dead on the sidewalk says,

"Excuse me, but—

what kind of moral force is brute moral force?"

The poem can be said to lack subtlety, but a muted message in this instance could be so finely wrought that even an informed reader would miss the point in searching for clues among the ambiguities. This has the brilliant, placard bearing power of Ferlinghetti's political poems, particularly "I Am Waiting"; it is a succession of one lines and witticisms that crystallize the crisis and makes it memorable. This is a poem meant to get you thinking about something besides whether it works as a poem. It does just that.

I don't think Bangs' poems encourages passive martyrdom of any kind, if I understand your question correctly. It has more the feel of a scaled-back soliloquy delivered in the last act of a Greek Tragedy, the summation presented while the evidence is plainly visible, undeniable, to anyone who might have been involved in debating war and power-grabbing in the abstract. The poem operates under the assumption that the evil doers--politicians, generals, corporations--are shamed to silence while the damnable curses are cast, but beyond this minor suspension of disbelief --politicians, generals and corporations won't reform themselves and seek justice rather than justice as the result of a good scold--we realize the poem isn't intended for the perpetrators of misery, but the citizens who've been seduced by a well-oiled propaganda.

We are governed solely by our consent, and the further implication is that the governed population's failure to hold their representatives to a higher, more consequential standard is just as responsible for the grim tales told here. Our songs, our campaign slogans, our policy discussions are geared to assure us that the greatest good is the intent, and that it surely will be the result. Mary Jo Bang's speech--and that is what this is, finally, a speech--shows the reader that there are leaders elected in our name who are singing of their esteemed virtues while everyone else can see the devastation they leave in their wake.

A POET IS NOT NECESSARILY A NICE PERSON

 Ezra Pound, was a politically reprehensible and one of the worst major poets of the 20th century. Traitor, reactionary, race-baiter, I have no sympathy for a man whose ambition had more to do with having power and influence over whole populations rather than poetry itself. He was, though, an idea man about the craft and art of the poem, and some of his criticism remains relevant. The way we discuss the quality and function of the image and the modifiers that do and do not attend it in context draw heavily from his notions about ridding ourselves of the weight of literary history and devising a poetics that can can help the reader perceive the world in new ways.  Pound didn't want to stop there, of course, he desired to rule the world and aspired to be The Boss. A bully and self-aggrandizing creep he may have been (and traitor) but some of the ideas, at least, had value. He wanted poets to have the trifecta of prestige items with power, the pen, the scepter, the   sword.

 Eliot, Thomas Stearnes, was allied to Pound as an antisemite and race baiting neurotic who disguised his bigotry in a tradition of genteel Classicism, but I will defend him as a poet; too much of his images, his cadences, his drifting allusions hit the mark ; he is one of those writers who had an especially strong gift for getting the elusive essence of alienation, dread, spiritual desolation in a dehumanizing culture in his poems without turning them into padded, freighted dissertations. It is one of the tragedies of contemporary literature that Eliot, whom I think is one of the strongest poets of the last century, should happen to be, politically, a callous and malicious monster. Even dried up white guys who are lousy with nonwhites and can barely conceal their frothing anti-antisemitism can, at times, describe a mood or provide nuance to circumstances that transcend their repulsive politics and personalities. 

BILLY COLLINS, HEAD BANGER

 Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, in a 2016 chat with a Wall Street Journal reporter, talked about “banging his head” against the likes of Joyce, Pound and their attendant difficulties and his eventual decision to align himself with poets like Philip Larkin and Robert Frost and “poets, who dare to be clear.” Superb models to use if you're aspiring to write in contiguous sentences, unmarred by needless line breaks. Poetry readers should be grateful that Collins found his voice in the place where the conversations are actually happening, in the world and not the rheumy chambers of a book-addled soul. Difficult poetry that is actually good is difficult to write, and there are only a few among the millions who do so who actually deserve attention, praise, and continued discussion. At this stage, it becomes increasingly the case that there are far too many poets in the world who are trying to out-perform Stevens, Eliot, Stein, Olson in pushing the limits of poetry; the last group I paid attention to who managed difficulty that intrigued, provoked and which stopped making sense in a variety of works that made younger poets like myself examine the tropes I was using and attempt, with some success, to put it back together again, perception and images in newer works that come out just a little more out of the long shadow of previous and still present genius. 

Billy Collins on Being an Only Child, and Why Majoring in Poetry Is Like Majoring in Death – Speakeasy - WSJ:

So thank you LeRoi Jones, Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Paul Dresman, Bob Dylan and a few dozen others read in fifty years of reading for helping me, no, forcing me beyond my self-entombing idea of genius and moving me closer to the public square. No longer a younger poet stumbling in his attempts to master what seemed to be the fashion at hand, I'm old enough to accept the less stringent view that the only criteria for judging a poem's style, format, complexity and other such matters is in how well it works on the reader who is reading it? Difficult or clear as glass, does the poem make a music one wants to understand? 

Billy Collins, of course, has his own amazingly effective style of clear poetry, and it's a marvel to read how he begins with a scene, a situation performing what is often a banal household task--listening to jazz, paying bills, a drive in the country, a bit of coffee in the city--and then a reverie of a sort, a memory triggered by some inane object, a recollection often seasoned with a light application of Literary Reference, just enough to expand the notion or expose a contradiction in his assumption (the insight often being a dead sage's warning or mere reflection about matters of pride and exaggerated expectations)And then there's a seamless transition to the scene from where he began his writing, the material world unchanged but, for the rumination that we've just read, is not the same as it was. His genius and flaw are the same heightened talent, his ability to produce these compact missives of everyday wonderment continuously. That's not to denigrate his skill at writing them, as the economy of his language, the resourcefulness of his imagination to find new twists and inlets within the limits of his style, and the genuinely resonating effect of his phrase-making mark a writer who works his pieces; he is a professional, aware of his audience, aware of his materials, an artist who refuses to let any of his ideas get muddied by the pretense   of deeper intimations. William Carlos Williams had the view that the thing itself is its own adequate symbol. Whatever one seeks to describe in the world one sees is already complex. Collins, more so than Williams, explores connections, fleeting though they are, of the things around the world his imagination creates a frame for when he departs from home. His strategies, of course, are more varied than what I've described, but this is a recipe he uses as often as not, a template he can expand, revise, contract at will, a habit he does splendidly. This makes him a good artist, a good craftsman, but it is also something that makes me want to call him a writer rather a poet.

He is, I think, the equivalent of the old school local newspaper columnist who would, twice or thrice a week, write 700 words or so about something in the news, in his life, whatever comes to mind, who would end his reflection that effectively left the reader reassured and just a little confused as to the purpose of that day's topic. The secret, though, was less to give meaning to the community one recognizes, but rather create the sense of texture. Columnist and poet Collins have skills that remind of things that you cannot quite put a finger on--something is lost, something     is joyful, something is sad or funny, but how, why, what is it?

I might mention as well that Collins' work seems to be a sequence of experiences that are uninterrupted by work situations. Others can, I imagine, provide me with poems of his where work is an element, a strong one, perhaps even the subject of the poem, but it occurs to me that Collins, at least in many of his poems, is a flâneur, a walker in the city, a watcher, the character who observes, records, relates the isolated bits of daily experience, testing the limits of his ideas, constantly re-acquainting himself with his fallibility. Please don't mistake that for a bad thing. It's nice work if you can get it.

KITTY CORNER

 I love cats as much as the next premature curmudgeon, and I can't help but think that Christopher Smart is half pulling our collective leg with his rock-slapping waves of adulation for his cat. Years ago I wrote a poem called "The Praying Mantis" that was a list of self-contained sentences, each beginning with the title phrase and then completing itself with a some qualitative drivel; the point was, of course, was to lampoon the baroque phrased claims you come across in self-penned biographies, press releases or eulogies that overshoot the commemorative mark. The challenge was to see how many fresh takes I could get starting from the same premise and at what point would I sense that I was done, winding up the sequence on a diminished, perhaps exasperated note?

The praying mantis returns no phone calls,

The praying mantis will not shake your hand,

The praying mantis does not pay sales tax,

The praying mantis had been to the moon and found it drab and without a bar,

The praying mantis ignores streetlights and no smoking signs,

The praying mantis does not hear what you have to say,

The praying mantis is the other side of the story,

The praying mantis loves a hammer with sturdy, curved claw,

The praying mantis will have lunch when he's done with you,

The praying mantis is a close, friend of Sammy Davis Jr.,

The praying mantis directs traffic until it's an atonal film score,

The praying mantis says nothing but means volumes,

The praying mantis cured cooties and shared it with no one…

The litany went on another sixty lines, until the absurdity grew tiresome, or my imagination failed, or both, but the point is that it was interesting to witness the momentum one could get attributing massive potential to things of seeming small consequence. I was interested in how the praying mantis could, by his lack of interaction with the larger human world, could seem, given the colliding box car cadence, seem a larger, more powerful force, one mere mortals should respect lest his restraint fall and said insect really show us what for. I had been thinking of every cliché portrayal of hip and badass cool I had come across, from junkie jazz geniuses, the Beats, white Negros and tortured renditions of existential cool; the sort of man who so agrees with himself-in-the-world that he is privy to great amounts of power, but that power is with held because there is no need for an ostentatious display. In other words, a state so slippery that attempts to describe it accurately result in growing amounts of absurdity, some of it baffling. Smart, it seems, wants the habits of his cuddly kitty to embody something purposeful with the divine, to reveal a connection with a heavenly agenda that our intellect prevents us from sensing much of the time but which a cat, with senses tuned like delicate instruments, can pick up on and be affected by.

For then, he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon

**his prayer.

For he rolls upon prank to work it in.

For having done duty and received blessing, he begins to consider himself.

For this, he performs in ten degrees.

For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.

For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.

For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.

For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.

For fifthly he washes himself.

For sixthly he rolls upon wash.

For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.

For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.

For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.

For tenthly he goes in quest of food.

For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.

For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.

For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.

For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.

For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.

For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.

For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.

For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.

There is a belief that there are absolutely no coincidences in God's Universe , that nothing, nothing at all happens my mistake, that what people and creatures do is , to greater or lesser degree, the result of a divine intervention against our baser natures. One can see why Smart was inspired by his cat, cats being a creature that, while domesticated, still seem independent, engaged with invisible forces, acting in accordance to stimulus humans have little or no capacity to discern.

Smart injects so much purposefulness and subtle intent in his cat's movements that assuming that he's using the creature to mirror his self-image is unavoidable. Or at least something to consider as one pursues alternative readings. He seems to be writing about his own lazing about, it seems, his own time eating, musing, writing, taking walks, talking , just being rather than doing something more active, productive and profitable. His cat is connected to a spiritual path, or at least he sees hints of it with each lick, purr, fur ball and odd reclining angle, and mounts an indirect argument that his very being, those times when he is thinking of the connections between stationary objects, the contemplative mode, is precisely how his God intended him to be in this life. Arguing that God didn't want me to work is something I've never had the nerve to try.

Some had commented elsewhere that these might be called "attention poems", something I like the sound of.I like "attention poem", as in a particular thing--creature, object--getting an unusual and , I think , unexpected focus. I'm one of those who thinks that citizens come to know the world through addressing it formally, "knowing", in this sense, being more than a formal recognition of origins, functions, and utility; imbuing a mantis, a cat, a building with qualities alien to them is a way of developing an intimate relationship with those things that might otherwise be problematic. We give them extraordinary qualities through a fanciful rhetoric, itself distorted and careening along the tracks so that they may become ordinary to us. It may be a shamanistic ritual transposed to the written word, an exercise of the will to imagine a realm of metaphysical propositions in an effort to assimilate a bit of the virtue and power the tropes would imply. It would seem a way of making that which is ultimately unknowable--the thing in itself--less of a concern and more an asset in our way through the day, the weeks, the months, the years.

Thinking again, the use of the word "ordinary" doesn't do justice to Smart's evocation. Nothing in the way Smart describes his cat seems an attempt to reduce something in size. A better phrase would have served the point better, which is my feeling that Smart, on some level, was trying to associate himself with the subtle and sublime qualities he attributes to his dear cat and, perhaps , have those same graces become a part of himself. You could also assert that the very act of sensing these things in his pet and having the language mastery to sufficiently align the motion with the spiritual nuance and attending effect comes from an innate quality, that these conditions already exist within Smart . He would be, then, be in the act of recognizing what he already knows , that part of the shared condition within his God's universe that is within himself and the living things around him. Not that the poem is meant to be the beginning of a campaign toward universal spiritual suffrage for all creatures great and small, but his close reading of Jeoffry's manner offers an enticing clue to his greater cosmological sense.

BIG BOX ENCOUNTER

 It's springtime, the temperatures rise, the flowers blossom and the nostrils swell with the scents of clean air, a sweetness that hearkens you to younger, hardier, randier days. At the drop of a hat, when the instincts overcame your better thinking in tandem with a like-minded partner--heads and genitalia swelled with the flush of urge and there was no argument to stop the rearrangement or removal of over and underclothes. Desire had its logic, but it was without language or syllogism, no conventional tools at all; it was an eroticism of things in your surroundings being focused, like perspectives that vanish to the same point, the same conclusion; you have to get your nut. This moment in the day, after the stolen looks, the limping banter and sly insinuation, has been dictated. You vanish, you get your rocks off. And for the rest of your life you relive those moments, as there is in the accumulated memory the incidents that have the psychic tabs sticking out. The days at work, the conversations you find yourself having, your appropriate discussion with someone half your age set you up for visions of old youth and the energy stream you hadn't dipped into for years. The current race reminds of you of every erotic thing you'd performed; for a moment you find yourself slipping between dimensions, the conversation you're actually having and the bedtime story you're presently reliving.

BIG BOX ENCOUNTER

My student sends letters to me with the lights turned low.

They feature intricate vocabulary, like soporific and ennui.

Like intervening and kinetic and tumult. He strings words together

like he's following a difficult knitting pattern. He is both more

and less striking without a shirt on. I know this from the time

I ran into him at Wal-Mart buying tiki torches and margarita mix

and, flustered, I studied the white floor tiles, the blue plastic

shopping cart handle, while he told me something that turned

to white noise and I tried not to look at his beautiful terrible chest,

the V-shaped wings of his chiseled hip-bones. I write him back.

I tell him there are two horses outside my window and countless weeds.

I tell him that the train comes by every other hour and rattles the walls.

But how to explain my obsession with destruction? Not self-immolation

but more of a disintegration, slow, like Alka-Seltzer in water. Like sugar in water.

I dissolve. He writes enthralling. He writes epiphany and coffee machine.

He is working in an office, which might as well be outer space.

I am in the mountains. The last time I worked in an office, he was ten.

I was a typewriter girl. I was a maternity-leave replacement for a fancy secretary.

I helped sell ads at TV Guide. I was fucking a guy who lived in a curtain-free studio

above a neon BAR sign on Ludlow Street, and all night we were bathed in pot smoke

and flickering electric pink light. Here, the sun goes down in the flame

of an orange heat-wave moon. The train thrums and rattles the distance,

and I think of his chest with the rounded tattoo in one corner and my youth,

the hollows of his hip-bones holding hard, big-box fluorescent light.

—Erika Meitner

Meitner's poem gets that layered desire right, exquisitely so, especially as she tries to talk about her young male friend's seductive use of big words while trying to study his shirtless chest and bone structure. She dissolves, she says, and her memories are no longer ordered by date, but become, it seems, a series of membranes she passes through. The connection with the actual moment is tenuous as the euphoric recall gives way to biographical detail, wonderfully, enticingly offered up here in the guise of bars, tiki torches, Walmart stores.  The community she lives and works in, for a moment, seem cruelly banal as the light of previous glories of skin loom large. The authority of the senses rules out any other possibility; for a moment, a fleeting moment, the promises one has made and the commitments one has taken matter, not a wit. But one is anchored to the moment they are in--the mate, the job, the children all require your attention. All you can do is step from the time machine, brush off the dust, return to the world at hand.

SOME QUESTIONS I WAS ASKED AND THE ANSWERS I GAVE

 

What did you discover about yourself while writing your poem?

Usually, I write to find out what comes after the sentence after the one I just wrote. I have a particular set of strategies, notions of musical phrase, cadence, rhythm, and structure I’ve developed over a good many years—and this isn’t implied that I’ve mastered this form of poetry, free, at all — and I’ve internalized these linguistic habits much as a jazz musician internalizes his training and notions of theory; I come up with a first line and consider what object, word, image, attitude it contains and try to imagine what sounds musical and rhythmic and a logical expansion on the details the first sentence contains. It’s theme and variation, improvisation of a sort in the moment of creation, seeing where the initial idea takes me, stanza to stanza, until I come to a place to a poem where it can end with a resolution (or irresolution) that satisfies me, and perhaps satisfies a reader. What I discover about myself is that there is another way to explore emotion, experience, spiritual and philosophical concepts without resorting to the mechanical language of the academy.

How can I take the line "my shadows hold the wisdom of a crow's mysterious intelligence" for a line in a poem and make it more poetic with the use of allusion and metaphor?

You can’t redeem this line, no matter how hard you might labor, not if you want to write a good poem. This is the kind of image someone new to writing poetry often writes when they’re trying to be/sound profound. Never try to sound smart, learned, philosophical in a poem: effective lines that resonate with readers on more profound concepts come from the best and most effective use of language to get across experiences and notions that are not easily conveyed through conventional prose. “No ideas but in things” is how master American poet William Carlos Williams put it. Let the object, that thing in the world that is in the situation being written about, be itself, without the flimsy abstraction. Read Williams, read TS Eliot, read H.D. and come to understand the way each is using language, and understand as well not just what they’re saying but also what they're leaving out. But trying to shoe horn a line you think is profound into a poem, a line that attempts to make a big statement, will only result in an awful poem. Be more direct, get rid of the “literary” language. And if a phrase comes too easily to you in the writing, get rid of it. Avoid the trite, the clichéd, the abstract. Have your poems come out as clear statements of experience, convincing recollections, not crowded with weak attempts at a higher language.

Does a knowledge of correct matter if you're writing poetry?

Of course, it does. There is the notion that poetry is an expressive free for wall where the rules of grammar don’t matter, and this is incorrect. Writing poetry, whether you’re a new formalist, a romantic, a practitioner of avant gard strategies, a fan of rhyming or someone ruthlessly in the camp of the free versers, is writing, a means of communicating to the reader. I'm a believer that one has to know the rules of the game before they discard them, too. A knowledge of correct grammar, of how to most cogently compose your thoughts and make them ready for the world, provides you with a working knowledge of forms, structures, gives you access to effective rhythmic devices, gives you a proper sense of how to use metaphor and simile. We all know, of course, that great jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane didn’t just get up on the band stand and start honking away ; their brilliant improvisations were based on profound knowledge of music theory and harmony, and based on relentless wood shedding, of practice in an effort to strengthen their skills as jazz improvisers. Their knowledge of music forms were internalized and gave them tools to compose their greatest sorties. The same goes for poetry. Every poet I’ve admired and studied—Eliot, Stevens, Shakespeare, Laux, Ginsberg, Baraka, HD—understood the fundamentals of writing and could work their way around the rules ; their writing was great, singular, and utterly fresh until now because their innovations acknowledged the traditions which had come before even as the poets broke away from them create their own work.

What's the difference between free form poetry and free verse poetry?

Free form poetry is a term used by terrible scribblers to hide the fact that they haven’t the faintest idea of what constitutes a good poem. Free form poetry will feature unrestrained expression, an excess of emotion, either show itself to be clogged up in clichés, sentimentality and bathos, or it can be utterly impenetrable in regard to any kind of readability or coherence. Many free form stanza writers will justify their cryptic, ungrammatical , spiteful, rigorously incomprehensible efforts as being “experimental” or “avant garde”: the gruel schleppers who use words like that are often eccentric, show an inability to accept advice for suggestions that might help them become better writers. Free form poetry is without craft, it is without art or any kind of creative integrity. It is the writing equivalent of puking, where all that awful, dreadful, disgusting stuff is just emptied onto the page without regard to revision.Free verse poets, the great free verse writers—Whitman, Dorianne Laux, TS Eliot, Ginsberg, WC Williams, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, many others—understand the fundamental techniques of writing poems, have been long time students of other great poets and have studied their methods in a variety of ways and have, in turn, mastered the techniques themselves. These are matters of rhythm, scansion, scale, the varying ways in which one uses metaphor, simile, allusion, and allegory among other facets. I could go on, but the free verse poets are real poets because though they don’t rhyme and there are shifting notions of pacing and rhythm that are obvious in their verse, there is also a clear understanding of techniques that they’ve made their own and have used to create their respective voices , the point of all that being is that its obvious there is skill , craft, and real inventive language being used to bring the reader into the poem, into the journey of ideas and feelings the well-written poem can evoke. Not every free verse poet is a great writer—as with any other art form, there are standards by which an artist is judged by reader and critics, and the simple fact of it all is that not everything is a work of genius. But it must also be said that the least of the free verse poets have at least an understanding of the craft and long history of poetry. Free formers do not, as a rule , and that’s a sad fact.

What did Charles Bukowski mean by "failure is freedom"?

It should be obvious if you’re familiar with Bukowski’s writings. As his recurring character Hank Chinasky wanted to do nothing more but play the ponies, drink, have drunk sex and sometimes write a poem, failing at something, a job, a marriage, a promise, some commitment to lead a responsible and principle life, frees you from the pressures of having to measure up and allows you to become something that isn’t scripted. Laziness, sloth, self-loathing, and inebriation were more honest things to be in this existence . You only had to be your smelly, repulsive self. If you and others have low or no expectations about you, the margin of disappointment is very low or nonexistent.

A POEM BY JAY ALLYN ROSSER

 Clumsy titles don't grab me at, but it's useful to see if the ill-phrases follows suit in the actual work. Fortunately, J. Allyn Rosser's poem After the Service, the Widow Considers the Etymology of the Word Salary , published in Slate in 2009,transcends the gabby quaintness. For starters, I would have junked the original title of this poem had I written and instead stared at the finished piece for a few moments, finally relying on the old trick of making the last full phrase of the poem the name of the piece. In this case, "Sighs for My Meat". Odd, strange, a communication from someone who can't find the words, this alternate title fits the Eliotesque tone of exhaustion, ennui, boredom that barely conceals the feeling that inevitable death is catching up with them. Too many poets consider the purposeless disguising of meaning to be enough to make a poem and to force it, even though private language isn't always an element that makes for a good poem. One is, of course, compelled to fill in the blanks, but we do get the gist, we get a crystallized essence, that of someone alone, after a service, returning to the daily rituals and routines where the familiar things are made strange, foreboding.

This morning began like anyone's:
coffee. Mine a bitter roast
too weak for the daytime
that keeps me up half the night.

The coffee is meant to give purpose to one's day, but it only ruins one's waking hours and time of sleep, and tastes bitter, as she knows half-sleep is not good for you. The days ahead are approached with caution, a creeping dread that changes the flavor of what's in the cabinet.

Back home, I liven things up
by microwaving popcorn:
an edible jazz I feed to the trash
for our walk to the curb.

It's not hard to see why the small matters that might have made home life a joy in the past seem a burden now, but it's an attempt to distract one from the core set. All the things we make become waste, all things of this earth return to the earth.

At the end of the day, one shadow
seems made of a deeper gray:
have I somehow earned this
by refusing for years to fear it?

I was speaking to a friend the other night on the matter of aging and he, a robust 70-year-old, remarked that he is at the point in his life where half the people he's ever known, his age, are dead. To combat his despair, he remains active: his hand goes out toward new friendships all the time; at times this seems like a mild mania he suffers from and one wonders how convincingly he can become best friends with a host of associates he's known only scant years and who, generally, are fifteen to twenty years his junior. But he smiles, this man who's been to many funerals, he is gracious, he is engaged with his world and community and he, perhaps, has found something that essence that of attitude, of spirit, that prevents the objects of his world from becoming harbingers, reminders, latent symbols of demise. But Rosser's speaker hasn't this resilience, a creature of habit for whom the familiar items seem merely to taunt and withhold truths. There is a parsing of the words one uses to describe their quality of being--a dissection, in other words, of something that is already dead.

Here at last my martini
embalming its hollowed olive,
and, as apparently originally intended,
salt for my salary, sighs for my meat.

A martini, embalming, a hollowed olive, the price one has paid for their life, salt for the meat, we have a language that finds itself conflated, with meanings and emphasis spilling over one another, a pickled narrator pondering the inevitable from the standpoint of something that is not living in any vital way but merely preserved. Rosser's language is masterfully exact in the sort of round-robin associations these bouts of pronounced foreboding can bring. This flesh is scarred, embattled, without a determining will to make a change this late in life, this flesh is tired, wounded. This is the internal narrative of someone waiting for the other shoe to fall.

 I've said some rude things about Camille Paglia when the academic-turned-public intellectual was a regular columnist at Salon.com. I was berating her for basically wasting the opportunity to be smart about cultural and political issues by lavishing each form of self flattery. To court cliché, even Norman Mailer has more modesty. I haven't changed my mind, but I should mention her 2005 collection of poetry criticism, Break, Blow, Burn. It's the liveliest collection of critical remarks I've in years. Camille Paglia published her collection of poetry essays Break, Blow, Burn (now in paperback) in 2005, and straight away there were those neoconservatives who seized upon the firebrand professor as one of their own, someone to bring "reason" back to the classroom.It was hoped in some discussion groups I've recently emerged from that Paglia is Sanity itself, ready to unfasten the choke hold of incomprehension that's been around literary criticism for decades. The short version of all that conversation was that Paglia would be the celebrity academic intellectual who would sift through the Great Books and present a straying society the Values and Virtues William Bennett cherishes almost as much as he does a solid poker hand and a stall stack of chips. Hold the phone. I don't think Paglia represents "a voice of reason", since the word "reason" is the last thing you want to apply to a close reading of a poet's work. It implies, by default, rationality, and it's never been the poet's assignment to reason through experience as if he or she were a scientist trying to classify and categorize the world about them.

Rather, poets, good poets, and their work continue to attract us because of the way in which they usurp the instructed ordering aspects of language and instead find ways to integrate what is seemingly inexpressible, felt experience, the "interiority" of being, with what is observed in the factual being. It's perilously hard poetry to write successfully and, even when it's done well, reviewers toward totalizing, sense-making totems that bring a reasonable and agreeable sheen of coherence to a work; the way we've come to discuss poems falls too often in the smelly troughs of conventional wisdom, received perceptions, cracker-barrel philosophy, simplistic and simple-minded platitudes, all of which are devised, by consensus or conspiracy for readers and reviewers, to have the world remain entirely comprehensible and sane.

The voice of reason is the enemy of good poetry, and that is what Camille Paglia knows better than any other commentator; a poet, she argues in Break, Blow Burn (now in paperback) is that a poet, though a conscious and determining artist, acts nonetheless as a conduit for the wild strands of personal narrative, religion, myth, comprehensible realism, rage, philosophy merge, blend, twine and twist in the same discussion. Poetry is the language of unreason, another way of taking the pulse of the culture as seen from the particular and individual poet's voice who lives within and yet is compelled to view it askew. The essays in Break Blow Burn argue that the poems under review are not required to "make sense", to deliver a singular meaning, easily digested and disposed of, but exist instead to provide a subtler, more nuanced , more complex sense of what experience entails. Many ideas from many sources come to bear on a poem's thesis, and Paglia pulls them out, addresses them, and demonstrates the fascinating dialectic of the way ideas, images, expressions and varied idioms influence one another, offer shades of inference, change meanings.

It wasn't enough that the national discussion on poetry was already pathetic and contrived, a contest between assorted second and third generation splinter groups of specialized enclaves trying to inhale what was left of the air in the tiny room where the debate raged. Amazingly, the conversation had become as dumb as it was insulated. In the 2001, the New Agers and refugees from shoe gazing concerts got into the act with the publication of Roger Housden's slim collection Ten Poems to Change Your Life, in which he presented the undefined general reader with a set of poems, varied to gender, nationality, religion, lifestyle orientation, that they might consider between errands and cell phone chats:" The Journey" by Mary Oliver ,"Last Night as I Was Sleeping," by Antonio Machado, "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman ,"Zero Circle" by Rumi, "The Time Before Death" by Kabir,"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda , "Last Gods" by Galway Kinnell, "For the Anniversary of My Death" by W. S. Merwin, "Love After Love" by Derek Walcott "The Dark Night" by St. John of the Cross .

A high-quality selection, give or take exceptions according to tastes, but Housden's intent seemed less to introduce readers to the wonders and varieties of perspective poetry might offer than to bring us to the lectern where he would deliver his Message of the Day. Following each poem, there was a light discussion of the life's circumstances the preceding poet wrote about and Housden would extrapolate through a number of nimbly massaged points of literature, theology, popular spirituality, to give the imagined reader a broader perspective, a moment's respite from that crackle and insistence of contemporary consumption. The aim of the collection, hardly surprising, was to have the stressed audience abandon their cell phones, lap tops, and exercise equipment and make time to smell the roses before they were gone , trampled under the heel of progress.

It's not an original premise, but it remains sage advice all the same, and one could for the moment put their disdain for the use of a poet's work as fodder for a feel-good mill, although containing the contempt was harder than it would seem. The irony was that the fresh perspectives, the original language use, the carefully crafted evidence of subtle intelligence interrogating the problematic nature of existence was being used as another means of delivering readers to insights they already know. One hoped, even prayed, one hid under sheets of wishful thinking; any way of bringing readers to quality poets was worth a bit of pimping by an enterprising editor and motivational guru. Or was it?The problem remained that the skewed thinking that characterizes much of the best work would only confuse and further complicated the world for an audience that wanted assurances, not ironies from what they read and reflected upon. The mind was already a roiling with contradiction and discontent. Housden's editorial genius was his ability to ignore problematic subject and stir his declarations skyward, looking over the hill for the displaced Gods who formerly assured us a coherent world.

Ten Poems to Change Your Life turned into a series of five similarly named collections, a choice gathering of poets per volume, followed by Houston's compulsively upbeat chats. A gimmick has been established for Housden and was performing handsomely—the books, pocket sized, were perfect for bookstore cash register stands as impulse purchases, and in the dozens.

One despaired seeing that Housden's books sold while the poetry section remained the slowest selling in the store where one worked; the audience was ready to read one poem by Walt Whitman and absorb a slight ration of cracker barrel spiritualism as an afterward, but such readers weren't inclined to pick up Leaves of Grass and do their thinking. Housden's audience is one that wants to be told what things mean. Housden's brilliance isn't what he says about the poems but rather in recognizing an area of mild interest to big audiences that hadn't been adequately exploited and denuded of any possibility of inspiring even a minor itch.

It was enough to make one wants to give up the game entirely and watch DVD reissues instead, but there is a blast of fresh air coming through the room, Camille Paglia's Break , Blow, Burn, a collection of forty-three poems brought together for a close reading by the author. Paglia is a humanities professor at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and made her entrance on the national stage with the publication of her bulging, bombastic and usually brilliant book Sexual Personae, a sprawling study of sexual identity, its profound effect on art and culture, and the endless way that it's been disguised and altered. Personae was maddening in all its phases and investigations, with theories and declarations worthy of full dissertations popping up every few pages, yet no matter how one read her breathless , in-your-face explications that every proverbial pore of existence, society, and culture was dripped with sexuality (repressed or blatant), you couldn't dismiss with the usual brush-off .

Paglia's basic thesis about the best way to appreciate poems is to stop worshiping reputations and the sordid prestige that comes and begin instead to read and think about particular poems. Hers isn't a sensibility to bow to fashion or some one's deeply intoned name; fame and a gimmick will not acquaint the poet under review any slack. As she says in the preface, what she believes in are great poems, of themselves, separate from larger bodies of work. What we get in the forty-one essays in Break, Blow, Burn are her intense, close readings of what she regards as the best poems in English; the selection and the arrangement of what these "best" poems come to be won't satisfy every taste or notion of what honestly comprises the best work, but Paglia didn't write these missives to cosign every lazy idea we've had about poets and their work.These are her favorites, using her criteria, and quite unlike many skimpy or corpulent collections slapped between covers to satisfy a fleeting fashion, she will lay her arguments in solid, comprehensible and far-flung terms, returning again, again and yet again to the respective poems she's reviewing. Less a medium to make us feel warm and secure, her poems have to do with an extreme engagement with life on life's terms. Whether finding whole worlds of secular metaphysics contained in the few lines of Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of a Jar," sweetly limning the edgy and cavalierly erotic voyeurism of Paul Blackburn's "The Once Over" or marveling at the triple tiered city speak of Frank O'Hara's fantasy "A Mexican Guitar," Paglia discusses each of the poet's work as points in which spiritual certainty and intellectual pragmatism come into conflict, war with one another, and emerge by poem's conclusion with some third perception larger than the opposing inclinations which reveal a finer, more complex, less fixed situation for the human condition. In each case, Paglia follows the poet in the process of bringing together the poem, their process of perception, beginning with what was observed, the associations the image conjures or suggests, and delicately observing how the poet controls their associations, no less careful than a great composer, giving play to the various senses and associations each phrase and delicious reference appeals to.Paglia's genius , if that's it to be called, is her ability to recreate the poet's thinking at the moment of composition. This makes her discussions intimate, vital, a whirlwind of excited speculation.

Flux, change, destruction, growth, all the things that make the up the endlessly repeated cycles of death and birth, are what connect these poems, and Paglia , in these vividly studied pieces, isn't about to let any of us slide by with only a nodding acquaintance with what a poem can mean as well as be. Her view of art is that it increases our awareness of life's enormity, not reduces it to some meager paragraphs of ego massage, and it's a good thing that she was willing to put her notoriety on the line in introducing some rigor into the general chat. Finally, what is especially inspiring in Paglia's fierce arguments is her refusal to grant the readers slack. None of this material is over your head, she seems to insist, Get on the ladder and see what's out there.