I've been thinking about Robert Creeley the last few days, since it's been two years now since his passing. Reading his work is so meditative and instructive. I'm glad I got to see him read at the University of Chicago when I did.
THE MIRROR
Seeing is believing. Whatever was thought or said,
these persistent, inexorable deaths make faith as such absent,
our humanness a question, a disgust for what we are.
Whatever the hope, here it is lost.
Because we coveted our difference, here is the cost.
derelict page an in vitation to grace, thus we ga ther innocence almo st tangent, a high minde d echo, like a silo or dyna mite. the eye must be a salesperson to marry these hours, their signifiers
The poet is prone to circumnavigate the globe, but it’s only a coffee table. poor Orpheus.
This poet is a rare starfish on a barbecue. that poet is a neon sign flashing "yes."
My body goes when I want it to. I’m not afraid of snakes.
Let us defend Social Security. let us be nice to strangers, and tourists.
Hollywood is a trendy drug, or a bright red car, divinely silly.
I will come to your rescue with handfuls of hope.
Hello.
The philosopher’s saddle is truly vast, upon it rests the desire for light.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
John Ashbery is watching you.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Wystan Hugh Auden on creative writing. This is worth reading only because of the line "Happy the lot of the pure mathematician." How does that line scan? Auden has at various times been a favorite windbag of mine, only because you have to know what not to aspire to as well.
Write sky poems in an empty room about psychological pneumonia. Friends come and friends go singular dance of the seasons, remain.
What common emotions, individual struggles of beads and oceans and secret rivers. My theme is perfect and without center its beauty is its movement, glistening.
What music and pictures, of rocks my approach is crumbling, splashes and rites beneath shark harmony your shoulders are a thin mystery.
Swimming in facts, afternoons flexible exaggerations gallop as religious as Rome. Hear them whisper, cats know— musculature of the present flexing.
Inbetween our faith incontinent wheezes like a newly invented instrument upon which we play the hills from here to there. Pretty tombstones like teeth and not like teeth chew the moon looking down upon this mess, humans racing to and fro without alibis. Capsized in the desert they will find us crouching in the gutters of time explorers of the inner side of nowhere.
He discovered onyx, pendulum, basilisk (one or two) and composed jingles on the tops of frogs, until the sun descended in a stereo sky. But still, he could not answer the ultimate question why.
He gathered sticks and stones and a few harpoons, astrolabes, a few, and wrapped them loudly in a velvet robe, (continents and oceans flew) and at the moment of death, there in the clearing he carefully, miraculously knew what was it he was supposed to.
We’ll go on living despite the intrusion. Appreciative of your glance in my direction, the chiaroscuro of moments, cast me in the role of son, to the patriotic television is most painful, I am now able to sit and calmly watch the screen, let’s not forget that intellectual fever, fetish of distances bewildering silks.
Flambé vigilante, try the surface disconfidence of illumination: Culture wears shades.
And all at once, vultures arose, jellyfish reality completely dismantled. Visit my outer space and I’ll visit your self-preoccupied garden.
Feminine machines, themselves like a fragrance, she said and the table again strayed from its place and moved about the room with such lightness and laughter and why are you reading as her hands so absolute in a good way, the precise manners of New Englanders, like pillows, filled with famine. Good luck there, because love is a secret factory manufacturing doubt and the employees blow smoke rings on their lunch breaks the size of Manhattan. Scores of dahlias feed him morning and, like green sleep, right now is the time.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
I woke up this morning and thought of Cid Corman, so I picked up the Origin anthology and it fell open to this page because of the postcard.
The Overlord of the North Sea said: "A frog living in a well cannot be told of the ocean, for its habitat limits it; nor can an insect flourishing in summer be told of winter's ice, for the season sways it; an opinionated fool cannot be told of Tao, for he is bound by one doctrine or another. Now that you have moved beyond the shores and reaches of the River to be graced with sight of the Great Sea and are abashed, you can be told of the Great Verities.
—Chuang Tzu, Autumn Flood (ch. 17)
I went to see the film, Venus, yesterday which will probably be Peter O'Toole's last and the scene in the film when he recites the famous lines from Hamlet while standing in an empty ampitheatre swept by the wind and falling leaves, remembering the triumphs and tragedies of his long life, had me thinking again about economy of words. Venus is good by the way. At the very least it served as the impetus for this random blog entry. And thinking of Chuang Tzu has me thinking of Lao Tzu.
We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is in the spaces between spokes where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends. —Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
So thinking of Cid's economical poems had me thinking of the master of the economical, Emily Dickinson, and her antithesis, Walt Whitman.
Between Dickinson and Whitman there's such a huge gulf. It seems like the impulse to write anything using a long line has disappeared for this writer. Here's a funny negative review of Dickinson's work that was published soon after her death in 1886.
"It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson....But the incoherence and formlessness of her— versicles are fatal...[A]n eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar."
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Atlantic Monthly
Whitman, however, was an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated lover of crowds who walked the streets of Manhattan enthralled by the humanity there—he had necessary moments of solitude but he required the thrum of the crowd to function.
As Frank O'Hara said
"And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies."
To that I'd have to add Dickinson because
THE DUTIES of the Wind are few— To cast the Ships at sea, Establish March, The Floods escort, And usher Liberty.
And then to take it farther out, watch this Monk video. That's another master of economy, Count Basie, watching Monk from across the piano. Thelonious Monk's off-kilter solos have more in common with Dickinson's work than one might expect.
Travellers have experienced Nicaragua's beauty once again, since the 1980s when the Sandinistas were ousted from power via a series of successful elections. Let's go.
_____________
"We turn outward, attracted by the beauty we see in created things without realizing that they are only a reflection of the real beauty. And the real beauty is within us."
- Ernesto Cardenal
Literacy and poetry workshops established throughout the "nation of poets," as it has been known since the early twentieth century, are well-attended by people whose concerns had been previously unheard. Most workshops are led by government-paid instructors in cultural centers, while others convene in police stations, army barracks, and workplaces such as sugar mills, Valle reports. In these sessions, Romantic and Modern poetry is considered below standard; Ernesto Cardenal denigrates socialist realism, which he says "comes from the Stalinist times that required that art be purely political propaganda." The "greatest virtue" of Cardenal's own poems, says a Times Literary Supplement reviewer, "is the indirectness of Cardenal's social criticism, which keeps stridency consistently at bay." In addition, says the reviewer, Cardenal's poems "are memorable and important both for their innovations in technique and for their attitudes." In this way they are like the works of Ezra Pound, whose aesthetic standards Cardenal promotes.
Review contributor Isabel Fraire demonstrates that there are many similarities between Cardenal's poetry and Pound's. Like Pound, Cardenal borrows the short, epigrammatic form from the masters of Latin poetry Catullus and Martial, whose works he has translated. Cardenal also borrows the canto form invented by Pound to bring "history into poetry" in a manner that preserves the flavor of the original sources — a technique Pablo Neruda employed with success. Cardenal's use of the canto form "is much more cantable" than Pound's Cantos, says Fraire. "We get passages of a sustained, descriptive lyricism … where the intense beauty and harmony of nature or of a certain social order or life style are presented." Pound and Cardenal develop similar themes: "the corrupting effect of moneymaking as the overriding value in a society; the importance of precision and truthfulness in language; the degradation of human values in the world which surrounds us; [and] the search through the past (or, in Cardenal's poetry, in more 'primitive' societies, a kind of contemporary past) for better world-models."
Following his conversion to Christianity in 1956, Cardenal studied to become a priest in Gethsemani, Kentucky, with Thomas Merton, the scholar, poet, and Trappist monk. While studying with Merton, Cardenal committed himself to the practice of nonviolence.
-Bishop Geoffrey Rowell, The London Times, Times Literary Review
Arnie says it's good politics and good business to get green. Daley here in Chicago has been focused on green planning and technology for years now. It's good to see that Schwarzenegger is getting a clue.
Arthur Lee's birthday came and went unnoticed this year, usually I listen to Forever Changes on that day. Sorry AL. I'll listen to it in its entirety this weekend.
T.E. Hulme, who died in WWI, was credited by Ezra Pound as author of the earliest poem that could be called "imagist." The Imagists were said to be in "revolt against...careless thinking and Romantic optimism." They attempted to "use the language of common speech... employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word." Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, H.D., and T.E. Hulme sought to strip away the florid language used in poetry at the time and expose the core image, so that the reader was left with something solid and memorable, a poem object. Imagist poems were meant to be experienced on a more visceral level. The group was against the moralizing of poetry that used platitudes and sentimentality to convey meaning. Recently I was reading about "Chicago" Imagism. Having never heard that term, but having seen paintings by Ed Paschke, I dug up what info. I could on the movement. Here's a snippet from a fairly recent issue of the Sun Times.
"It's true that as a Chicago art movement, Imagism is essentially dead... not because its exemplars have all passed away (they haven't) or because their work is neglected (Ed Paschke had a major retrospective last year; Wirsum and Nutt are soon to follow), but because the local art scene has moved on. It's hard to find young or even middle-aged Chicago painters who owe much visible debt to Paschke and Co., largely because they've chosen different models or abandoned painting for conceptual and new-media art. "
It's always been interesting to me how the ebb and flow of artistic trends reach a high water mark and then the waters recede and something else entirely new takes its place, even if whiffs of previous artistic currents are somewhat evident. Maybe nothing is new under the sun, but I like to see how iconoclasts cause these ripples.
Lorine Niedecker's poem, "My Life by Water" is practically glistening in its simplicity and unpretentiousness. Its economy of words makes it fall down the page with a surefooted momentum. It doesn't falter and there isn't a sense that there is anything missing or any extraneous words. It's like an engine starting up, or the sight of a single bird in the sky. A simple moment transcribed without overexplanation.
My life by water-- Hear
spring's first frog or board
out on the cold ground giving
Muskrats gnawing doors
to wild green arts and letters Rabbits
raided my lettuce One boat
two-- pointed toward my shore
thru birdstart wingdrip weed-drift
of the soft and serious-- Water
I can't say that this all I require from reading a poem, but I appreciate it's severity and minimal qualities. To take us from there to Whitman's expansive lines takes a long leap into another kind of aesthetic entirely. Not that two camps exist, each keeping to one or the other methodology. But there are two impulses that exist in poets I think. One to include everything and one to strip away to essence. Think about Whitman's catalogs in Leaves of Grass where no detail that crossed his mind, sights, sounds, and smells escaped his description. He tried to capture the entire panoramic vista of American life. Neither is any more correct or true. An entire life's experience could be summed up in a few lines. The tendency to write epigrammatic poems, image heavy poems may be a more effective strategy. Inbetween these two stolid trees of thought is strung the musty hammock of American literature. Realist description, when combined with the influence of more irrational or fantastic imagery from surrealist and dada currents of thought have chopped up language into something really remarkable. I'd like to know what to call it. Any suggestions about what's happening right now?
Reading the work included in the new anthology, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, is a great starting point for anyone interested in contemporary poetry, especially poetry being written by mostly younger poets. Jennifer Scappettone, Suzanne Buffam, Srikanth Reddy, John Tipton, Eric Elshtain, David Pavelich, Peter O’Leary, William Fuller, Michael O’Leary, Mark Tardi, Erica Bernheim, Michael Antonucci, Chris Glomski, Garin Cycholl, Luis Urrea, Kristy Odelius, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Simone Muench, Lea Graham, Ed Roberson, Arielle Greenberg, Tony Trigilio, Shin Yu Pai, Dan Beachy-Quick, Maxine Chernoff, Kerri Sonnenberg, Jesse Seldess, Paul Hoover, Michelle Taransky, Robert Archambeau, Bill Marsh, Larry Sawyer, Cecilia Pinto, Johanny Vázquez Paz, Ela Kotkowska, Jorge Sanchez, Joel Craig, Daniel Borzutzky, Joel Felix, Raymond Bianchi, Cynthia Bond, William Allegrezza, Jennifer Karmin, Tim Yu, Laura Sims, Roberto Harrison, Brenda Cárdenas, Stacy Szymaszek, and Chuck Stebelton are for the most part poets who have either grown up in the city of Chicago or were drawn to this literary nexus from elsewhere. Calling Chicago a literary nexus at first sounded strange to me, but it has become so. Bob Archambeau, one of the poets in the anthology, has written on his blog about the benefits and pitfalls of contextualizing groups of writers based on geographic location. It's interesting to see all this gel.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Chaung Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and upon waking realized that he may actually be a butterfly dreaming of being a man.
If I dreamt I was Chaung Tzu dreaming of a butterfly dreaming of being a man, would that man ever realize that life itself is the dream from which we’ll never awaken?
