Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Finding Poetry

In "The Secret of Poetry," Charles Wright writes "The second Chinese said, all that you need to find poetry/Is to look for it with a lantern. The closing poem of "Millennium Blues," one of five sections in Wright's A Short History of Shadow, goes on to assert "It's hard to find,/Despite what the Chinese said./It's hard to find despite what the moonlight jukes and joins."

I disagree.

It's easy to find, lantern lit, hard to see.
It's in the light, at its edge, its penumbra.
It's in the lantern, its light, its shadow, shutter, shudder.
It's within the grasp of the person possessing the lantern. It's possessing the lantern.
It's easily heard, lantern swinging.
(I hear Kerouac, Neal Cassady, working the railroad, miners underground, Melville peering out to sea.)
It's hard to express.
It's in language; it's outside language; it's without language. It's its own language.

A thought about the section title: "Millennium Blues" misfits the ten poems in the section. The poems reflective, erudite, long lines, lack the rhythm, the color, the blues of blues. Misnomered perhaps, but the strongest section of the book so far, each poem insisting on re-readings, rewarding the effort, the glow of the lantern intensifying with each read.

Problem Pictures by Spencer Selby

First thoughts on Problem Pictures by Spencer Selby:

Such attentiveness to arrangement, to juxtaposition of pages, rhythmic shuffling of images superimposed by typed text, of images superimposed by hand-written text (with cross-outs), abstract images without text, variation of type size, line work, degenerated half-tones... the range of visual/verbal textual imagery that marks a visual poem as Spencer Selby... that the book works not so much as a "collection" as a narrative, a graphic novel that creates, defines, confuses, and demands consciousness.

"You Must Face the World You Created." This world I must face, as I see the book during and after reading, as I turn the pages of my consciousness (losing the consciousness of pages), this world is crisp, black and white (and not George Bush black-and-white) with startling contrast.

Re: Billy Collins

One of the first things I said of Billy Collins’ Picnic, Lightning: “This is facile.” I stand by that. These poems are, lightweight, easy. But that might not be such a negative; that might be the poems’ genius.
These poems aren’t deep yet they push the reader to look more closely at the world, and what else do I want from poetry, from art?
These poems are facile, but now I mean it in the sense of facility, of fluidity – they are incredibly smooth, wide, steady rivers flowing through straight banks.
When at first I chafe at the topics he writes about – who cares what he learned today from reading a single-volume encyclopedia? – but now I acknowledge his courage and deft skill writing about subjects such as a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, or undressing Emily Dickinson, or the contents of his journal.
***
A second helping of Collins -- an earlier collection of poems, Questions About Angels (published in 1991, reprinted by Pitt in 1999) -- was bland, unfulfilling. What smelled fresh now smells stale, empty. Or does it? Collin’s style seems painfully plain; he creates poems so mundane they hardly register on my aesthetic conscious. (Yet when I step back, inside this parentheses, I admire the clarity of the poems. Hell, anybody, with or without a degree in poetics, can see the world mirrored clearly in the poems.Isn't there some value in that?)
Did I not experience the same pleasure because I was not startled by the simplicity, not surprised by the topics Collins chose to write about (“Weighing the Dog,” “Going Out for Cigarettes,” “The Willies”)? Picnic, Lightning stimulated? Questions About Angels numbed. But hedonist that I am, I will go back to Collins for one more shot, maybe. Maybe I can get at least a contact high from his selected poems; maybe he has something to say to the young readers I hope will read throughout their lives... Maybe I should keep re-thinking this notion of teacher as poetry-pusher...

A Good Riot

I like the idea of a good riot. The idea.
I’d like to riot over the notion of sides,
one pit pitted against another.
Here’s a Molotov cocktail on that one.

Here’s a broken bottle,
a fire extinguisher, a god damned trash bin
rolled down the hill at that so-called other side.
Here’s an epic epithet, a stone, a bushel of stones,

a lifetime of stones, a hell of rubber bullets.
It makes no difference.
I’ll get you some numbers on that one,
the only mathematics I’ll believe in:

no one, in that state, knows what they’re rioting about.
No one. Zero. No one on either side
of the non-existent equation. No sum.
For most of us feeling = reality.

Opener

I'm disappointed. That's the motivator. (I'm ______ and I vote.)

I work with teenagers. We read, we write, we read, we talk, we argue, we scream, we laugh, we talk, we ravel and unravel the world up and down, inside and out. (Who the hell knows the actual orientation?)

I started with Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, Richard Hugo, Merwin, Plath, Rich, Frost, Kerouac, Whalen, Snyder, McClure... before stumbling into Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Clark Coolidge, Larry Eigner, Hansjorg Mayer, Bob Cobbing... and so many other forward-thinking writers who make my cortex tingle, throb, and, when the time is right, explode.

Many of the teenagers I work with love these poets, too, when they find them (I point; they go where they want to go I'm so happy to say) and Bly, Collins, and slam poets, and hip-hop artists, and prose writers Palahniuk and Chabot and... Does there have to be an end to these lists?

I'm disappointed because some poets cut-down other poets (e.g. Lowell, Collins...). Remember where you started. Isn't the the first step the first step? Does it make a difference what color running shoe you wear when you're running?

I urge poets who want readers today and tomorrow to skip the turf battles. The roots are deeper.