Midterms Hangover

 

It was a wonderful, joyous, and hopeful experience viewing the election map this morning after. I watched the election for a solid four hours last night, switching between the various news channels, and as they called one seat after another for the Democrats and the amount of blue increased on the various election maps on the channels, it became obvious that America wanted America to be America again, to paraphrase the Langston Hughes poem. We have been a great nation that has done great things for the benefit of its people and for the world . I'm not blind to our part in the worst situations both domestically and internationally, but it seems to me that we've righted ourselves and got on the beam again, willing, and able to do the right thing. But Trump was a horror both in his first term and a worse debacle in his second; he is what happens if you let a cut-rate banana republic strongman take charge of the power being President brings you. God willing and the creek don't rise, the Democrat will take on the long task of setting things right and bringing Trump and his sycophants to an accounting for their sins against the nation. Remember that their wasn't much ticket splitting in the various results: voters rejected Republican slates throughout the night and put Democrats in their place, in the House, the Senate, and in the Governor's offices. I hope this shows the national change of mood and that our better angels can now guide us to a new time of justice, peace and good deeds in general. But has been said, there is much work to be done. But I am hopeful, for a change, and that's not nothing.

on Jack Spicer

 Ron Silliman commemorated the anniversary of September 11 on his blog with a gruesome photograph of Ground Zero, over which he superimposed two poems by Jack Spicer. The collage understandably provoked a minor tempest among readers who felt that we had endured enough fetishism of the attacks, and that Spicer himself might not have approved of such a use of his work. I found the combination both compelling and appropriate. Spicer equated God with a kind of Big Radio, imagining poetic inspiration as a series of transmissions from distant places, carrying the voices of dead poets whose metaphors might, in turn, become apt descriptions of contemporary circumstances.

The question raised by Silliman’s collage is whether a poem belongs to its author’s original intentions or to the historical circumstances in which subsequent readers encounter it. By the time the hidden essence or secret nuance of a poem catches up with a culture’s experience, the poet’s original intent, while interesting, is no longer necessarily decisive. What matters is how the words make our lives comprehensible, even if only on a visceral level. One could argue that the suggestive correspondences between older poems and contemporary events amount to little more than coincidental irony. Yet there comes a saturation point at which lines originally intended to suggest something hushed, elusive, and only vaguely graspable become precisely the phrases we need to articulate what otherwise escapes us. Tragedies and unexpected windfalls alike can intervene in our lives, leaving us searching for language adequate to the experience. Sometimes a poem written for an entirely different occasion supplies the words we cannot find for ourselves.

The poet eventually loses control of what his work is supposed to mean as history adds new associations to its syntactical skin. Spicer, I suspect, might well have objected to the use of his poems in Silliman’s collage. Nevertheless, there is a savage bluntness in the ways poets attempt to extract greater resonance from the obscenity of violence, and that bluntness speaks powerfully to what we remember on September 11. What Spicer intended becomes, in this instance, a secondary concern. Today was the day everything changed, as the overused phrase goes, and the event forced people to examine who they were, who they claimed to be, and why those distinctions mattered in the face of such incomprehensible destruction. Spicer, no less than anyone else, would likely have considered the implications at length. There is something compelling about the notion that words spoken in one context can be repeated against seemingly opposing backgrounds, acquiring meanings their speakers could never have anticipated. The voices transmitted through the air, through the radio of memory, are activated by extraordinary events that transform our ordinary lives, which are never as static as we might imagine. Silliman’s collage is an inspired combination of histories, demonstrating that the past and the present are no longer mutually exclusive.

This capacity for unexpected resonance is one of the reasons Jack Spicer deserves a more prominent place in the American poetic canon. I am just finishing what may be the must-read poetry volume of the year, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian and published by Wesleyan University Press. The collection has temporarily overcome my prejudice against poems about poetry and poets. Spicer’s third-rail wit, his willingness to interrogate the premises of his own art, has a way of knocking the reader off balance.

A singular figure who fit comfortably neither among the Beats nor in the New York School or the San Francisco Renaissance, Spicer wrote at the margins of the principal debates about what poetry was and ought to be. Yet his counterarguments, asides, and declarations often possess a self-contained clarity and vision that surpass those of many writers whose work he regarded with suspicion. He was an outsider even within the literary communities in which he moved, and his poems reflect a persistent distrust of the conventions through which poets establish their reputations and defend their artistic territory.

Interrogating received notions was Spicer’s abiding concern. The practice of making literary practice the unifying metaphor for an entire body of work can seal poetry off from the very readership that might benefit from its skewed perspective. Unlocking a door only to discover another locked door, or a brick wall, ceases to be amusing when one begins reading poems for something other than the status they confer upon their authors. Spicer, however, positions poetry and the profession surrounding it among the many activities through which individuals attempt to make their daily lives cohere around some faint sense of purpose.

Whether writing about money, sexuality, religion, or poetry itself, Spicer returns to the tidy arrangements by which language organizes our most unruly ideas. He distrusts the easy adjectives, similes, and conclusions that allow us to move through the hours without confronting the inadequacy of our explanations. Language makes the world manageable, but it can also obscure the very things it claims to reveal. The poet's task, in Spicer's view, is not simply to manufacture elegant descriptions but to remain alert to the distance between the world and the words we use to describe it.

His poem “Thing Language” offers a particularly concise expression of this suspicion:

Thing Language

By Jack Spicer

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.

No one listens to poetry. The ocean

Does not mean to be listened to. A drop

Or crash of water. It means

Nothing.

It

Is bread and butter

Pepper and salt. The death

That young men hope for. Aimlessly

It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No

One listens to poetry.

The ocean here resists the elaborate meanings poets would impose upon it. It is neither a convenient symbol nor a willing participant in the human search for significance. It simply exists, indifferent to the interpretive machinery brought to bear upon it. The poem’s repetitions and abrupt turns seem to mock the assumption that language can secure a final understanding of the world. Even as Spicer describes the ocean, he insists upon its refusal to be described adequately. The result is a paradox: poetry declares its own inadequacy while demonstrating how much can be communicated through that very admission.

There is a reserved antagonism running through Spicer’s work, a subtle and ironic derision of the language arts as he saw them practiced. He recognized how easily poetry could become entangled in matters of status, property, and the ownership of ideas, as writers mistook their own cleverness for genius and their reputations for evidence of genuine achievement. The external world, which we can never know except through descriptions that themselves require continual revision, remains something else altogether. Nature and reality have no need for the elaborate vocabularies with which poets compare them to everything else they encounter.

What does this prove? Perhaps, as Spicer suggests, that we know far less about the material we attempt to distill into verse than we would like to believe. Even our language is borrowed, divided among other speakers and other conversations. The poet does not possess words so much as receive and rearrange them, hoping to discover combinations that reveal something not previously available to consciousness.

This brings us to Spicer’s most distinctive conception of the poet as a radio. In his poetics, inspiration is less an expression of individual genius than a form of dictation. The poet becomes a living instrument capable of intercepting transmissions from an otherwise invisible world of sharper, bolder, more original combinations of sound, rhythm, and form. The artist is an antenna, not necessarily the originator of the message. The task is to receive it accurately, even when the transmission is obscure or unwelcome.

Spicer’s poem “The Sporting Life” develops this idea through a deliberately bruising analogy:

The Sporting Life

By Jack Spicer

The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios

don't develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a

transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram

burns out replacable or not replacable, but not like that

punchdrunk fighter in a bar. The poet

Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him

in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with

a champion.

Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the

scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the

invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of

them.

The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a

counterpunching radio.

And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even

know they are champions.

The metaphor of the radio becomes more complicated here. The poet is not simply a passive receiver of beautiful transmissions from beyond the self. He is also a damaged combatant, someone who has taken too many blows and accumulated too much scar tissue. Messages arrive with a physical and psychological cost. The poet may become unreliable, even a liar, as he attempts to account for what he has received. Yet he continues to counterpunch, responding to forces he cannot fully understand or control.

The poem also complicates the idea of divine inspiration. The messages may be powerful, but they are not necessarily aware of their own power. Their significance does not depend upon their recognition of it, any more than a champion needs to know who has been defeated by his blows. Spicer's radio is thus both a vehicle for inspiration and an emblem of the poet's vulnerability. The poet receives what he cannot claim to have created, and he must somehow transform it into language without pretending to possess its ultimate meaning.

Spicer was an unusual and often troubled figure: an alcoholic, a contrarian, and a man frequently at odds with the literary community in which he lived. Yet he was also a serious, sometimes brilliant poet whose work offered propositions rather than easy conclusions, whose questions were thornier and less comforting than the sweetened verse celebrated by literary fashion. His poems repeatedly challenge us to reconsider the relationship between language and experience, between the individual voice and the forces that speak through it.

In this respect, I would place him alongside Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, both of whom subjected the elaborate infrastructure of our descriptions to relentless scrutiny. Like Stevens, Spicer was interested in the ways imagination constructs a version of reality that can sustain us without ever entirely containing the world. Like Williams, he understood that the particularities of ordinary life could resist the abstractions through which poetry seeks to organize them. And in his lyric brilliance, his ear for conversational turns and sudden reversals, he can be compared with Frank O’Hara, a poet he famously disliked, and who seems to have returned the sentiment.

Spicer's distinctiveness lies in the way he makes the contradictions, competing desires, and unexpected conundrums of verbal experience comprehensible to the senses. His poems are often funny, abrasive, and resistant to the consolations of conventional lyricism. They reward close attention because they do not resolve their tensions prematurely. Instead, they allow a thought to develop until its own complications become the subject of the poem.

“Book of Music” provides a striking example of this method. Where many poems about love attempt to preserve its intensity by transforming it into an image of eternity, Spicer approaches the subject with a skepticism that gradually dismantles the romantic metaphor.

Book of Music

By Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers

Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where

Did it end? There is no telling. No love is

Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries

From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye

Like death.

Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length

Of coiled rope

Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths

Its endings.

But, you will say, we loved

And some parts of us loved

And the rest of us will remain

Two persons. Yes,

Poetry ends like a rope.

The opening image suggests the exhaustion that follows an immense emotional undertaking. The lovers resemble swimmers emerging from an ocean, their experience so encompassing that it becomes difficult to locate the point at which it ended. Yet Spicer immediately begins dismantling the comparison. Love is not an ocean whose waves blur the boundaries between beginning and end, nor is its conclusion necessarily a deathlike disappearance. It is, instead, like a length of coiled rope, whose twists cannot conceal the fact that it has two ends.

The shift is devastating in its simplicity. The circle of romantic fulfillment gives way to an object with a finite length, an object that may be knotted, twisted, and coiled but cannot escape its termination. The lovers may insist that they loved, and Spicer grants that some parts of them did. But the rest of them remain two separate people, each with an existence beyond the relationship. The final assertion, “Poetry ends like a rope,” extends the argument beyond love itself. Neither emotion nor art can claim exemption from the limits that govern ordinary things.

This is a cynic's view, perhaps, but not an entirely unfeeling one. Spicer understands the appeal of the original romantic image, the dizzying promise of a love that seems as boundless as the world itself. His refusal to preserve that illusion is not merely an exercise in disenchantment. It is a way of acknowledging the distance between what we feel and what we can honestly say about it. The twists and turns of experience do not necessarily restore what has been lost. Rapture gives way to memory, and memory may eventually soften into the skepticism of someone fortunate enough to witness his own foolish expectations about people, places, and things—including the earnest declarations he once made about poetry in classrooms, dorm rooms, and cafés where the intelligent and underpaid gathered for a cheap drink and some company.

The same skepticism that informs Spicer’s treatment of love animates his understanding of poetry. Both are human endeavors through which we attempt to impose coherence on experiences that resist it. Both invite us to believe in meanings that may prove temporary, and both leave us confronting the limits of our own descriptions. Yet Spicer's skepticism does not make his work nihilistic. On the contrary, it creates the conditions for a more alert and demanding engagement with language. If words cannot guarantee the truths we want them to express, they may still reveal unexpected connections, expose our evasions, and give shape to experiences that would otherwise remain inarticulate.

This is what makes Spicer's work so compelling, and why Silliman's September 11 collage seems to me more than a provocative juxtaposition. The collage demonstrates that a poem does not remain sealed within the circumstances of its composition. Once released into the world, it becomes available to histories and experiences that its author could neither anticipate nor control. The words may return to us through the radio of memory, carrying messages that seem newly urgent because the world has changed around them.

Spicer might have resisted such an interpretation. Indeed, his suspicion of poetic ownership and his insistence on the autonomy of language might have led him to object to the very idea that his work could be recruited to explain a historical catastrophe. But that possibility does not invalidate the collage. It underscores the paradox at the heart of his poetics: the poet transmits messages without owning them, and the words acquire meanings beyond the poet's authority.

No one wrote quite like Jack Spicer. His poetry remains a singular achievement because it exposes the instability of language while demonstrating its extraordinary capacity for resonance. Peter Gizzi, Kevin Killian, and Wesleyan University Press deserve our gratitude for restoring this major American voice to the shared canon. My Vocabulary Did This to Me makes clear that Spicer's work is not merely a set of arguments about poetry, nor a collection of historical curiosities from an eccentric literary outsider. It is a sustained inquiry into how words reach us, how they fail us, and how they sometimes become indispensable precisely when our own experience has left us speechless.

The poet is a radio, a liar, a counterpunching radio. The world sends its signals, often without explanation, and history supplies the circumstances in which we finally hear them. What matters is not whether the poet intended every subsequent meaning, but whether the words continue to make contact with the lives we are trying to understand. Spicer's poems do. They arrive from elsewhere, bearing the marks of their own contradictions, and remind us that language, like love, like history, and like the coiled rope, is always moving toward an end even as it opens onto meanings we cannot yet foresee.

ABSTRACTION AND CLARITY

 

Experimental poetry used to be the kind of stuff that broke with established forms of verse writing, both in form and aesthetic. A good survey course in Western poetry will pretty much be the history of one school of poetry arising in response and/or rebellion against forms that had long been dominant, with the more daring and expansive poetry influencing younger poets to the degree that the experimenters over time become the old guard. This goes on and on, exceptions to rules becoming rules until another generation of impatient experimenters comes along with their contrarian notions of what verse should be, usurping fusty older poets and becoming the dominant ones themselves—fat, complacent, and ripe for overturning. I don’t know if that’s a working dialectic, but it is something that has continued since literate men and women sought to express grand and vague inspirations in language that did more than merely describe or paraphrase existence. It’s my feeling that experimentation has become the norm and that what we have these days is a recycling of previous avant-garde ideas and gestures, with the names of theories and practices changed ever so much.

But not so much. It's gotten to the point that the school of poets referred to as the New Formalists—poets who’ve tired of free verse and variable feet and the several generations of “open forms” in poetry, and who compose poems that rhyme and employ traditional meter—have become controversial in that they threaten to usurp the hegemony of the experimental tradition.

To each their own as to what they prefer to put in front of their eyes, and to each their own for developing a critical rationale for what sorts of peculiar phrase deformations give them pause to stroke their chin, scratch their head, and laugh or cry as the case may be. Emotional responses reconstituted and subjected to the marginalia that make even recipes for stone soup resemble nothing less than unappetizing exercises in gratuitous brain power are, to an extent, another sort of poetry. It's a condition that admits, tacitly, that we're unable to get to the actual heart of our states of being, fluid as they are, but we are capable of conducting our recollections through a lexicon that most closely resembles whatever idealized paradigm momentarily fits the fleet-footedness of perception. It's guesswork of a kind, never on the money, never finalizing the dissension among the talkers who wait their turn to speak their world into existence, but still, something that brings a quality we cannot live without. A love of process, of trying to come up with means, methods, and ideas of using language that is as fluid and predictable as the experience itself.

Myself, I am attracted to any kind of poetic writing that has that rare quality of being fresh and unique; I am less intrigued by the theory behind a poem, experimental or traditional, than I am by how it reads, by whether it works. If it produces a reader’s satisfaction, then it becomes useful to investigate what a writer has done as an artist in this odd medium, bringing skill and on-the-fly inspiration to bear in the writing. This is the case with Ron Silliman and John Ashbery, two poets who have arrested my attention with their creation of indirect address of the living expression, and it is the case with Thomas Lux and Dorianne Laux, two other poets who are not averse to letting you follow their line of thinking and who still lead you to results that are unexpected and extraordinary.

TOUCHING GRASS

Some would-be verse writers seem to  express a  contempt of poetry by continuing to write poems about poetry. This isn't the garden variety poetaster at an open reading who furiously scribbles breathless, broken-lined manifestos about the responsibilities and burden of being a poet in a blind and cruel world; this is poetry as Priesthood, a habit of thinking many who have lapsed from their own religions and seek to imprint their inadequate sense of how the universe functions behind the veil on the entirety of poetry itself. Those blessed (and burdened) with the gift of seeing things as they really are become the cliche's greatest promoter. There is no ridding the world of these good folks.It's the serious poets, the ones with books and reviews of their work, who work teaching poetry survey courses and conduct workshops. 

During my time as member of Slate's belated Poems Fray discussion board, where a good many bright discussants would parse, yay or nay, poetry editor Robert Pinsky's choice for Slate's Poem of the week, I noticed a rash of poems that could not back away from the urge to invoke of some sort; the rationalizations in the critical jargon was rich and insightful in how many of us argue for something without telling anyone how any of it is any good for us, but it never seemed to me to be more than a go-to move for a poet who is stumped at any ironic turning point.

A poet begins the poem talking about being a poet wrestling with reality by poetic means and at the end of linking associations, one after the other, in that essaying forth of getting a peek beyond the mere appearances of the world, some goes awry in the speculation and dreamy thinking that contradicts everything and lo!, the poet finds out that he or she has been relying upon a literary form that will not reveal the thing-ness of things no matter how effervescent the poetry is. We cannot escape the prison house of language, the poet finds, the music swells, the sun sets on the poet as he or she grows cold and melancholy in their realization that their craft is useless for anything other than reminding themselves that the senses are fallible.  The end.    Every defense has been given within the confines of the poem itself, not in any discussion happening in the room, at a table, filled with people who’ve read and seek to discover what is they felt, what they thought, what the thought about how they felt.  The written is written to short circuit our emotional with the verses that have been read—our discussions are guided along a primrose path and little spontaneity of response, no honestly felt and strongly argued exclamation of “this sucks phallic verbs “.  What it all means not longer matters, not on a group level, not as a pastiche  of  responses culled from a brainstorming of interpretations, not from  a sudden image of a time formerly locked away in the deeper recesses of memory that now emerges again to haunt you and further stain your expectations of some kind of renewal through right living and solemn vows. Worse, we discover that may none of it mattered anyway. 

BARAKA, AMIRI

Amiri Baraka, née  Le Roi Jones, is a primary influence in my decision to be a poet; his earlier works were an odd and rhythmic mix of black speech, violent surrealism and slow-burning rage that would erupt, sure enough, into a vicious pyrotechnical beauty. It was the perfect voice for a white kid living in Detroit who was growing up surrounded by Motown, free-jazz saxophone improvisation and the MC5. Something more severe and actual had to supplant to Dylan's scintillating but apolitical surrealism or the  West Coast counter culture's belief in a spontaneous Utopia. Jones could set dual-isms against each other, reveal the clashes of political hegemony and emasculation, reach into the tradition of blues and jazz and reveal the music and the accompanying vernacular as idioms, political and spiritual, that black Americans needed to love and harness as  an expression of what made them uniquely American and permanently Other.

His vision was the surface of the barriers black men came up against, social and psychic, his poetry was the conversion of his anger into a stylized voice that could improvise perception and strip away cracking veneers on institutionalized lies. He had his problems, yes, but he was an impressive force, a majestic presence of the lyric and the abrasive. Anomie was the key element here that got me, the crushing self-consciousness that one's life measures up to exactly nothing and that suicide were a perfectly sane answer. Jones, always angry, was indebted to Franz Fanon's text The Wretched of the Earth, arguing (in a cramped nutshell) about the psychological effects of the colonization of their cultures. Fanon didn't argue for suicide as a solution but rather supported liberation movements across the globe to overturn the oppression. Jones is taken with the notion of one being made to feel listless and without worth sans real evidence--the source of the decrepit psychology comes from without, not within, he would later argue--and here isolates the malaise in snapshots, images, everyday activities that become brittle and poorly constructed. He feels enfeebled, quite unable to change his circumstances. Jones would evolve into Amiri Baraka as he broke with the Beats and embraced various forms of Black Nationalism, writing poems and plays and essays that were deliberately problematic for white critics--he refused to be defined and contained by a white culture's linguistic agenda. But he did write some brutally beautiful and stark poems early on, and this is one of them.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
(For Kellie Jones, Born 16 May 1959)
By LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)


Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelops me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad-edged silly music the win
Makes when I run for the bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands.

Nicely phrased here, a wonderful inversion of a horrible cliche: And now, each night I count the stars,/ And each night I get the same number/And when they will not come to be counted,/I count the holes they leave.  What would make us normally expect the poet to finally declare his awe at the thought that the infinitude of the cosmos makes his woes trivial in perspective, Jones' narrator counts only what's missing. The stars are not far-flung suns with their own solar systems and probably life forms on many of them. The light is instead of being an invading illumination seeping through pinpricks in a tarp that covers this man's sense of himself in the world. Everywhere he looks he sees only more things missing. We read this and marvel at Jones' skill at bringing a lyric beauty from such an accumulated woe, but we remember as we read on that the white culture's tradition of depressed and suicidal romanticism was soon to be renounced by the emergent persona form of Amiri Barka, who would deny the death culture and turn his despair into a motivating anger. Think about how you will, but he is a poet who acted to get out his funk, to counteract the thinking that was killing him.

WALK ON BY

 Yet another poem about poetry, a category Slate poetry editor Robert Pinsky shows a personal powerlessness to leave alone. And once again the self-reflective twitch proves to be an ideal way to fill a page, a monitor, a notebook with a series of eccentric line breaks. In this instance, Campbell McGrath's"Lincoln Road" offers a twist and merely uses the meta poetry index as a means to jump start a verse:

Browsing, before dinner, at Books & Books,
checking out the new poems
in the new journals, the vast glass panes thrust against
by shoppers and gawkers on Lincoln Road
emit a particular cautionary hum
as they insist upon delimiting inside from out,
tongued and grimed by the fingerless
gloves of the homeless,...

Irritation is the mood here, a man of ideas focused on the latest missives from the competition, seeking either pleasure or taking notes on what

the hot first lines are, when the bustle and commotion of the rude public interrupts him. Damn, I hear him think, now I have to slip into my flâneur costume and observe the cursed details of things in the city and the population who negotiate the hard corners of sales counters and intersections! Damn it all! The descriptions, following suit, are fussy, crabby,too full of small digs and diminutions of character to seem at spontaneous. There isn't, of course, any further mentioning nor obvious dwelling on the entwined poetry or being a poet, but the tone and pace of the poem, the leaden use of "literary" words to describe banal circumstances, bespeaks a boredom. This doesn't have the virtue of the boredom become genuine ennui, a variant of despair, a quality that at least might inspire sharper language that bypasses the rote literacy of McGrath's ode to his prowess as an observer.

...the splash

of modest fountains

in common space, a baby

in green hip-harness

staring back at me goggle-eyed, recording it all

like the tourists with digital camcorders

pre-editing their memories

and the ringing of cellphones broadcasting

a panegyric of need

with whichever hooks and trembles

we have chosen in the darkness to answer.

The problem is tone, of course, and none of this convinces me that what was described was actually seen . Suspension of disbelief comes into play here, since this particular list attempts to get across what was observed in a hurry, while browsing, on the fly, it needs to suggest something fast, mercurial.

You'd think, really, that this sort of matter should catch the rhythm of things that are fleeting, and are fluid. The people, places and things should be made to seem that they have lives or conditions of existence apart from the frame Campbell places around them.The effect in the poem, though, is static, like butterflies ethered and pinned some eccentric's collection. There is a surface beauty to the poem, but all these people, those who've interrupted our narrator's browsing, are stick figures all. Campbell's descriptions are worked over, padded with overly precise detail that sounds mechanical, unnatural. Attitude as well ruins the mood, with the asides about tourists with their cell phones and cameras seeking an unnatural process of memory preservation belonging more in a reckless, full tilt rant rather than a poem that at best would claim to be a skillfully rendered sketch. We have a here a poem that at the least offensive sounds like lines that have been saved and taken out of a drawer.It satisfies as nothing at all, and the material is so dry that these lines could be used as kindling.

Linda Pastan and Carol Frost

 Linda Pastan has a short and punchy poem in a 2008 issue of Slate , “Acorns”, a streaming rhythm of associations, a fast rush like the sudden gush of water of a faucet suddenly turned off in the middle of the night. One may complain that she doesn't do a sleep-over on any of the points that she tap dances across on her way to the end, but I think that is this poem's strength. As much contemporary verse remains dedicated to the capturing of sensation and perception quickly, accurately, without a rhetorical padding often enough applied in most mainstream poems to make a poem seem more important--bigger, denser, more profound--Pasta succeeds, I think, in giving us a piece suggesting the alacrity of thought. It's a full and active world, this yard, once one starts to closely observe the small things happening under the broad scope radar.

Many of us, me included, insist much of the time that poems be an argument of a rarefied sort about issues, emotional, spiritual or outright political, where a bottom line is delivered in a grand language whose elegance and power of phrase and evoking phrase defy refutation. We do this at the sacrifice of the smaller poem, like Linda Pastan's "Acorns", where the content and concerns are smaller; the volume is turned down, the language contained to a parsable idiom, but with smoothly, if subtly drawn connections to larger issues that I can only admire the economy of the effort.

The element I enjoy in this poem and which I think makes it a success is that Pastan smartly deals almost solely with sight and sound here, with the inferences about gunfire, bullet casings artillery and rookie ball players practicing their respective batting styles restricted, that is to say fused

to what the senses receive from the environment and the figurative associations the commotion triggers.

"Acorns" gives the feeling of sudden revelation, a moment of stunning perception that will make one pause in their task and cause one to ponder consequences, the meaning of opposites linked together. What is key here is the implied dualism, succinctly illustrated, that there is a world of violence, clamor, noise that is not outside this idyllic locale, but which exists inside it, in the conflations the mind will pass under our radar as we rest, reflect, lay about, unfocused in tasks in duties. Interesting indeed that the falling acorns and the sound they make on the tin roof brings up images of gunfire, bullet casings.

Economy here works splendidly in Pastan's instinct for containing the larger themes in smaller subsets; it gives the reader the tension and the anxiety that no matter what our habits of remaining calm and gathering our wits in the city (or the country, for what the poem provides us), war, death, carnage are never far from our thoughts. This is a swift and effective use of binary opposition, things, and situations being defined by the things they are a contradiction of. Although this is a wholly coherent poem, one which we may read and discern the logic of how imagery from the material plain inspires recollections from the murky archive of memory, it has that quality of the daydream, the abrupt transition; this is a poem that can contradict itself, a daydream that the narrator can interrogate and wonder is missing in the picture that has unfolded in front of her:

where are the squirrels?
the gardeners
with rakes?
the farmgirls
their aprons brimming
with acorns to grind
into meal?
the dog cowers
beside the house
the cat hides
under the car
afraid of
the clattering hooves
of acorns
later big oaks
will grow, a forest
of oak trees their roots
will strangle
this house
listen, listen
all from a single
tree...

Suitably, the matters of the squirrels, farm girls and hiding cats evaporate altogether, and the last lines listen, listen/ all from a single /tree leaving us where we had started from, at the tree, as if we were the ones who'd been lost in thought and are startled back into a sobering present tense. Suitable, to, that the poem ends without a period (assuming this is purposeful and not a typo). It begins in mid thought, with sound effects, a rat-tat-tat, and ends in an image that's unadorned, undecorated. This suggests to me an imagination that had been adrift and is now obligated to accept what is actually in front of them and finishes their tasks, to get back into the day before it's gone.

Poet Carol Frost , in a past issue of Ploughshares, gives us another poem called "Acorns", finely writ and distinct from Pastan's work. I find it interesting that the fruit, as it were, is presented as an item born of nature that constitutes an interruption on human thinking; in both poems the falling acorn the fallen nut acts as an intervention in the stream of thought that seeks to assimilate the given world and reintroduces the narrators to some kind of reality principle. And certainly both disturbances offer up their chains of association, given us in different styles, Frost, a worthy lyric poet, addresses her experience in reflection after the small event;

Last night some acrons fell
and woke me as they struck
the roof. Each acorn rolled,
a die cast down the shakes,
to tell my chances in
the sun and in the snow
to come. What might have been
a grief, I didn’t go
to look for in the night.

A sweetly singing opening for the poem, and one that tells us that her stanzas are neatly framed, artfully arranged, careful as to tone and color. Something about this reminds of an Impressionist painting, where the ambiguity is sheathed in a soft , muted hue which makes what one is confronted with more mysterious and alluring than threatening. It seems like a description of the things in the yard assuming their natural subtle relations.Pastan's poem is all about the rush of sensation, I think, the dramatic influx of detail and the rapid unfolding of  associations of a mind negotiating the changes. A more collected memory will perhaps form later, but the appeal for me of Pastan's piece was her success in capturing the sheer speed with which the imagination can create contexts and associations , and the speed with which those fresh metaphors can be altered, changed, transformed.

SLAMMING THE SLAM

 

Slam poetry gets tedious quickly, the reason for which is that it's a style that knows one style, one attack, one speed, which is staccato, in your face, and angry. This isn't to say that there isn't a good slam poet here and there, but so much of what gets called poetry in these settings (that I've seen anyway) is an unfocused rant declaring independence in what sounds little more than a string of bumper sticker and T shirt slogans focused on a particular audience who are in the early stages of developing their poetry taste. It's the conformity of non-conforming, rebels gathered together in the same room, aggressively agreeing with each other. The in-your-face style and anger dominate, yes, and serve the purpose of drawing attention and making the speaker's agitation obvious, but with respect to the crucial matters slammers say they're dealing with, whether social justice, racism, rape, the performance style wearies the observer who isn't part of the mosh pit mentality that makes up a slam community. The injustices one tries to expose and address and the humanity they try to reclaim is more than obscured by the fidgeting exclamations coming from performers uttering their slogans at unnaturally high levels of throat stripping volume. The issues you bring up are reduced to an equivalent selection of talking points the RNC fashions when they sick their attacks on Democrats. At any point, the central theme of slam poetry is me and my anger and my right to express myself and you're not going to tell me what to do , man... It's a kiddie thing.

Would you not agree that poetry to supposed to motivate emotions?

First, I would say that poetry is not supposed to do anything other than be a poem, to paraphrase Archibald MacLeish. You can't write a poem with it in mind that your successfully living up to a strict set of requirements; not and remain an interesting poet.I would say that emotions are what motivates the writing of poems in many instances, not the other way around as you perhaps mistakenly phrased it. An emotion, a mood, a thought comes prior to the writing, which is the poet's attempt to frame their experience , their perception. Some might argue that slam poets take the emotional subjects and seek to make the audience feel something beyond the page and podium from where the poet recites, but often as not the feeling is like getting hit by a car over and over again.

Emotions are fluid , mercurial, gracing and cursing us with an infinite stream of sensation sublime, miserable and limitless variations in between, and the poet who seeks to do justice to the nuance of the feeling and their perception of it would attempt to find a language and the phrases that would get that fleet sensation across to an empathetic reader. In your face is fine if that's what is called for, but the constant barrage of anger, drum line pieces of rage, anger and pain makes one assume that perhaps some writers are cultivating their pain , refusing to allow their wounds to heal in some productive way, or that they pursue new miserable experiences for the sake of having something else to fit into their templates.

Anger dominates the idiom, and even it doesn't the pace has one speed, rapid, frenzied. It becomes monotonous; the real test of how good individual poems are is how they survive committed to the page, where the rhythms , cadences, pauses and euphonious effects resound in some idiosyncratic way in the reader's private sense of music. It should be, I dare say, something akin to a composition from which there are firm cues and structures that survive as literary art separate from the the author's / reader's projectile recitation. Even in the gentler, kinder, more ecstatic moods slammers might attempt, there is a feeling of wanting the experience to be over with. Rather than do justice to an experience, an idea, an emotional complex, too many slammers sound as if they prefer the crowd pleasing line, the cutting analogy than the sustained mood, which makes me think that the concern is less art than it is acquiring bragging rights. It's a tradition related to toasting, hip hop and such, and while it's a tradition of its own making and standards, it's cursed with a monolithic ally monotonous style that seems more like the way Detroit used to think about the way they made and sold cars; the packaging was more important than what was under the hood.

INNOCENCE IS NOT A CHOICE

Innocence, it seems, is a nice way of saying ignorance, which would imply that the gaining of wisdom is a hard process, full of rude awakenings, startling revelations, melodramatic shifts in cosmology as one continually learns that the neat scenario one had while younger , with their neat and simple relationships predicated on convenient cause and effect, is grossly inadequate.

God gave us senses so we may learn from our experience and cobble together, as we go along, a practical philosophy of everyday life. Wisdom, if you like. It appears that one is likely to realize that they are a victim whether they like it or not, and that the blissful sleep of ignorance of one's state of being exploited and abused is illusory at best.  I think  stupidity is a choice people make  because it is the closest they will get to absolution for the results of their choices, and ignorance, likewise, often enough seems a willful defense mechanism that relieves one of their obligation to use their senses to grow and work within the world as an active, creative agent. This is the crucial issue for Blake, to believe in a God will intercede and make everything okay with a kiss and a feather or a promise of endless bounty on the other side of this life, or that one is here with the senses a Creator gave him or her, with a brain that can process and organize experience into a framework, narrative perhaps, the keeps the world that is both fluid and coherent.

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." --Wallace Stevens

The belief in a fiction, I assume, is that one believes less in the fiction's generic outline of the relationships between personality and the delicate details of the atmosphere , and more that the fiction works as a means that enables individual and collective imaginations to commit themselves creatively to what otherwise would raw, unknowable data. We are the authors of our book, so to speak, we are all writers of a particular fiction that enthralls us, and the key to a belief in an operative narrative form is to realize that we can change, alter and modify the fiction as needed. Not that it's an easy thing to toss off, as an afterthought. But we make our narratives from the things we do , and this reminds me of the oft-quoted line from Vico, paraphrased here: Only that which man makes can man know.

 Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, was a pivotal influence in my decision to pursue poetry. His early works combined an unusual rhythm with elements of black vernacular, violent surrealism, and a simmering rage that inevitably burst into a fierce, pyrotechnic beauty. This voice resonated with me, a white kid from Detroit, who grew up amidst Motown, free-jazz sax improvisations, and the MC5. It was a necessary shift from Dylan's dazzling yet apolitical surrealism and the West Coast counterculture's dream of an impromptu Utopia. Jones masterfully juxtaposed dualities, exposing the conflicts of political dominance and emasculation, delving into the blues and jazz traditions, and unveiling the music and its vernacular as idioms—political and spiritual—for black Americans to embrace and wield as an articulation of their unique American identity and enduring Otherness.

His vision was the surface of the barriers black men came up against, social and psychic, his poetry was the conversion of his anger into a stylized voice that could improvise perception and strip away cracking veneers on institutionalized lies. He had his problems, yes, but he was an impressive force, a majestic presence of the lyric and the abrasive. Anomie was the key element here that got me, the crushing self-consciousness that one's life measures up to exactly nothing and that suicide were a perfectly sane answer. Jones, always angry, was indebted to Franz Fanon's text The Wretched of the Earth, arguing (in a cramped nutshell) about the psychological effects of the colonization of their cultures. Fanon didn't argue for suicide as a solution but rather supported liberation movements across the globe to overturn the oppression. Jones is taken with the notion of one being made to feel listless and without worth sans real evidence--the source of the decrepit psychology comes from without, not within, he would later argue--and here isolates the malaise in snapshots, images, everyday activities that become brittle and poorly constructed. He feels enfeebled, quite unable to change his circumstances. Jones would evolve into Amiri Baraka as he broke with the Beats and embraced various forms of Black Nationalism, writing poems and plays and essays that were deliberately problematic for white critics--he refused to be defined and contained by a white culture's linguistic agenda. But he did write some brutally beautiful and stark poems early on, and this is one of them.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
(For Kellie Jones, Born 16 May 1959)
By LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)


Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelops me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad-edged silly music the win
Makes when I run for the bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands.

Nicely phrased here, a wonderful inversion of a horrible cliche: And now, each night I count the stars,/ And each night I get the same number/And when they will not come to be counted,/I count the holes they leave.  What would make us normally expect the poet to finally declare his awe at the thought that the infinitude of the cosmos makes his woes trivial in perspective, Jones' narrator counts only what's missing. The stars are not far-flung suns with their own solar systems and probably life forms on many of them. The light is instead of being an invading illumination seeping through pinpricks in a tarp that covers this man's sense of himself in the world. Everywhere he looks he sees only more things missing. We read this and marvel at Jones' skill at bringing a lyric beauty from such an accumulated woe, but we remember as we read on that the white culture's tradition of depressed and suicidal romanticism was soon to be renounced by the emergent persona form of Amiri Barka, who would deny the death culture and turn his despair into a motivating anger. Think about how you will, but he is a poet who acted to get out his funk, to counteract the thinking that was killing him.