Saturday notes

The kinds of poets I like.

Every critic has his or her biases. Prejudices: blind spots. What I mean by this is the following. Everyone has their guilty pleasures, stuff they know is not great art, but they still like to slack a little and indulge in it. For example, sometimes I kick back and listen to Led Zeppelin. Or I turn up “Sweet Emotion” on the radio of me and Jenni’s lil’ car (a smurf-colored domestic). Now, is Aerosmith really as good as Beethoven, say, his late piano works? Perhaps not. (but then again ?? I believe hip hop is the best current music. Tupac is amazing for example. Can I legitimately compare 'pac and Bach? Why not? I like them both). The difficulties of critical-cultural relativity in this respect, are dizzying. I love Thelonious Monk, solo piano. I like John Coltrane. But I’ll listen to Magnetic Fields, that one album of theirs about roads, until Jenni tells me to stop, and she goes and puts on some R&B, Alicia Keys. So. . . likewise, you might as well have fair warning as to the kinds of poems that I like and that I don’t like. So then you will better be able to identify the parameters of my taste and be able to tell me, “Jack, you are missing it. Rita Dove is awesome” or “Jack -- Grenier is The Bomb.” “Jack, Billy Collins’ clarity is a valuable tool.” “Jack, Jorie is not too pretentious.” “Jack, Anne Carson is not an old fuddy duddy.” “Jack, Kim Addonizio is not too self-indulgent” etc. Understand: at the same time that I make fun of these heavy hitters sometimes, I also enjoy poems by every writer I just now listed. I have a Dove book I bought years back. She once said a quote I love: “If you can’t be free be a mystery.” Grenier has some cool experimentations I learned of on Silliman’s blog. Collins I have read in depth, to try to learn his clarity. Jorie has seductive metaphysical power in poems such as “San Sepolcro.” Anne Carson did a cool Sappho translation. Kim A is strong along the lines of (to me) a (matri)lineage inclusive of others such as Olds and Sapphire, and running all the way to Sappho . . . BUT, I have also at times dissed these poets with negative critique, as well -- because face it, my friends, when it comes to the question, “what poetry do you love, in your heart, right now?” -- surely a little fickleness is permitted in the response to this interrogation? Now, I do not believe it is good to get as all-out negative as stuff like the Poetry Snark blog, or Foetry . . . though I do like negative critiquers like William Logan over at the New Criterion. But I think too much negative critique, without any positive, stifles one's own creativity. I worry that someone with a lot of critical rigor and negative severity in his or her head will lack the ability to be open, spontaneous, naïve even, innocent even, potentially foolish even, in their quest for poetry . . . And those qualities seem sometimes to be necessary. For example, Jarrell had a reputation as the biting-est critic of his time. I think his poetry is weak. Likewise, Logan is to me a good critic but a bad poet. (By corollary, a pure spirit creative freak like Franz Wright is a damn good poet but a crazy-weird critic, as indicated by his meanie e-mails recently to Logan, and to the estimable little mag "Poetry"). So, here are some examples of some bits of poems I dig right now, these days, from which you may be able to decide for yourselves what the limits of my literary taste are:

So, come to bed and pretend
you were here all along.

(Laurel). I often find interesting poems about love and sex and relationship problems. The problem injects a dramatic element. I believe today is a great time for woman poets, more than ever before. There are certainly more women writing than ever before. I think most of the good poems being written today are by women. I think there is just more fresh ground for women to explore, precisely because they were historically suppressed. So it makes common sense that now they have more to say than the white males, since back in 1860 a white male like Thomas Wentworth Higginson held a position of literary power -- he was a tastemaker, a belles lettres guy, big editor -- his claim to fame is that he went to visit Emily Dickinson. Did he recognize her genius when he visited her? Only thru a glass darkly. He did not immediately go and publicize her or help to get her published. He thought she was too radical. Even in his memoir of her written years later after she started to become known, he made a point to mention how when he visited her she was plain looking. So often, mediocrity of perception is tied into a cliched approach to sexual beauty and love areas. So, it is no wonder that Dickinson had the woozy craziness of her weird “Master” letters. . . And no wonder that you have these good poems on sexual and love areas being written by folks like Olds. In the past I have given Laurel negative critique based on my perception that she was too willfully dark, too much thrown along a predictable Plath fate-path. However, would Plath really include a detail like this:

as my green-eyed cat looked on

? No. It is a cool departure from Plathdom. I get chills sometimes getting off on how good some of the work by some board poets I have known a long time, is. (But at the same time, everyone drops a stinker from time to time, too!). Lynze, Noverili, Scott, Paul, Jim L, Jim Z, Treeza, Dj . . . they are all morphing into internet heavy hitters before my eyes! The only thing they don't have is big time recognition. Someday I hope they are all represented by the Steven Barclay Agency, like Jane Hirshfield (who I like too). I hope this board/blog will help me learn of some more good poets. Anyway, I look at Laurel, as well as Kim A, Olds, Plath, Sexton, Treeza, Jenni, as basically representing a strong area that it really helps to be a woman to write about. And I am not limiting that by gender-preference or sexual preference. You could just as well be a dyke or bi or whatever and fit in here. Consider the difference between their tone and gay male poets such as Mark Doty, Mark Wunderlich (I’m assuming he’s gay), Ashbery, Merrill, Schuyler, O’Hara -- there is a difference I think. But I could be wrong. Before you accuse me of being dumb, think of Nietzsche’s insight that our sexuality goes to the peak of our overall style as a thinker, as a mind. (He should know, for all we know he died a virgin). Think of how Keats’ virginal then virginal/tortured sexual position affected his late poems, the loss of tonal control in the late Fanny Brawne poems, then the somewhat cold mystery-clarity of “Bright Star.” Sexuality and love interests relate to poems very much so.

Now, an example of where my taste fails:

He laments the loss of his ocean
and friends to hunt with when nights are cool.

(Pris). This quoted patch disturbs me because, how can we know what a whale really feels? Even if the whale-figure is merely metaphorical, I still have this worry. I worry about the pathetic fallacy here -- I.e., is the poet ascribing to the Other feelings and beliefs which circumscribe that freedom we would afford to the Other? But then again, how to let the Other have its otherness, without somehow humanizing it, so as to connect?

To me, one thing that interests, in Pris’ poem, however, is:

Wadi Hitan

What is that coinage? What does that phrase mean? I like it when poetry brings me language I have not yet known. We wish for freshness, introduction of the previously unknown, the unexpected, as we read poetry -- for this counterbalances the sad knowledge that at the same time as we learn new things, we are forgetting old things. Pound said, make it new. (Of course, Pound also said, Vote for Il Duce, but that’s another story).

I like graphical experimentation. Like what ms. finch is doing. She has developed ways to use devices such as the { / } graphical mark, as a new sort of punctuation, halfway between a linebreak and a comma. She represents a mystical primitivism related to the heart of pure, rough being. Being-as-such.

I have a thing for poets with tough, sad aspects to their lives. Joe Bolton. Holderlin. Rimbaud. Chidiock Tichborne. Robert Creeley getting into a fight with Paul Blackburn on some overseas island. Faulkner with his booze. Celan walking into the black Seine. Something about the fame-cult blood-offering, draws me in, sometimes, alas. Then again, I also love the poetry of extreme old age, for those who make it, survivors: Milosz’ last book “Second Space;” Levertov’s last book “Great Unknowing,” Wallace Stevens’ poems in “Opus Posthumous” that were said to have been forgotten by him toward the end of his life. I think Kunitz got better as he aged.

Rimbaud in “A Season in Hell” described how he liked the poetry of old circus posters, vulgar jokes, graffiti, dumb sales catalogues, seedy tarot packs. Ashbery, in his wonderful early poem “The Instruction Manual,” demonstrates how to co-opt post-industrial mediaspeak and corporative language into the poetic text. I like experimentation with such effects. Which I detect here:

Six beautiful South Asian girls, happy, gossip and click their heels on the floor. Mr. Obuso, traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Accra, you are delaying the flight. We are proceeding to off load your luggage.

(chucklev). See how the use of “beautiful,” for example, may or may not be exquisitely ironic. Like the effect of a voiceover on an airplane, the recitation prior to takeoff -- how much of it is believed (probably none), how much of it is rote (most), how much is incised by a delicate, scrupulous, playful irony -- the irony of the working class, the bored, roll-eyes flight stewardess? (that splay of irony is the poetic, is the finial of the lyric wing).

On that note, let us close this modest preliminary excursion with the following:

. . . as I sat behind the wheel of a silky Asian automobile
drove past open bars and gravel arteries smokestack finials seagull adorned
and crumbling onto industrial hotbeds contracted men sporting laptops waiting
for buses in the morning greenback chill—as I drove past incomplete children
in ill-lit windows indentured to keyboards war-whooping fantasies bits
of propaganda disguised as the mono patriotism of Mr. Consumer . . .

(H W Alexy). Now we’re playing with words !

One other note: Poetry is an unusual art because the media used to write it as an artist is the same media used to critique it as a critic. By contrast, you would never confuse a sports reporter for a pro basketball player, or a ballet critic for a ballet dancer. But in poetry, the critic is operating much closer discursively to the artist himself, so, with any critic, you must ask yourself, do they write poems too, and how does their critical writing relate with their creative writing? Some critics don’t ever write poems. Example: Harold Bloom (except for a noisome Blake-kitsch outing, “The Flight to Lucifer”). So fair warning: I also write poems, so my take on things as a writer of critical prose is certainly assisted or damaged by my writing of poems. So, please forgive me for my faults and limitations, as a critic. All you can do is the best you can.