Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Poetic Closure

Thinking about closure, I waver, I vacillate.

I like the ends of poems that assert, that point or nudge, that leave me with one chunk of thought or image I can feel in my head and stomach, yet I also find pleasing poems that don’t end but rather simply stop. Thus my attraction to much visual poetry (e.g. Spencer Selby's Problem Picture), poems with multiple entry and exit points, eye not tugged by beginning-middle-end, but invited into simultaneity.

I like the artificiality of closure -- we have no such thing in our real lives so why not in our art -- as well as the absence of closure, the drift of our lives documented but not stilled.

Crossover "Confession"

Forgive the recycling but the following 8-17-02 post to the Poetics List (http://listserv.buffalo.edu/archives/poetics.html) elaborates on yesterday's blog. My students don't live by, don't heed, could give a flying f____ about the boundaries, the barbed walls flung up by far too many schools of poetry from San Francisco to Iowa City to New York. I, too, love to read poetry -- it saved my life -- I don't want to take up arms.

Poetics Folks:
If to "crossover" means to read work outside the mainstream of this list (Poetics List), I
recommend the practice. It's like truly listening to a conservative point of
view while you're biting your liberal tongue off.

I am a "crossover" reader. I read widely. As a high school teacher in a
small Idaho college town, I have to. The writing that interests and
challenges me -- that I hope will eventually interest and challenge my
students as readers and writers -- does not filter into Moscow, Idaho (or
Peoria) on its own (or, alas, on the skinny wings of small press poetry
distributors). And I don't just read for myself. I've crossed over and read
many poets excoriated on this list: Collins, Oliver, Stafford, Bly, Kinnell,
and perhaps too many others. I confess, despite the strength of my biases, I
have liked some of the poems I have encountered as a teacher-reader. I have
even re-read some of them when I put my teacher hat away.

As a teacher, I'm always looking for the "gateway drug" for young readers of
poetry. I have read all of Billy Collins work this summer, finding a dozen
poems that may turn on one of my 17 year-old readers much as Robert Frost
turned me on at 15. (Then I met Howl, yow!)

Ginsberg, Whalen, Snyder, Waldman, Koch, O'Hara, Levertov, Niedecker, Plath,
Kerouac and Silliman (his Tjanting blows my readers away, both content and
fibonacci form) have been "gateway drugs" for some young readers who -- put
yourself back in those hard, narrow desks -- need immediate returns. Once
they have had that first buzz, I find them to be greater risk-takers (not
necessarily future heroin addicts), willing to work at reading poetry, able
to tangle with concrete/visual poetry, to listen to Coolidge, Basinski,
Bennett, Perelman, or poets that I might have read the night before (they
rarely read these poets on their own, "unsupervised," nor would they ever
consider riding in a car without a designated driver after hearing Eigner or
Creeley or even Lee Ann Brown).

In fact, to continue the confessional (without invoking Robert Lowell or
Sylvia Plath), this crossingover has me conflicted. I want to create
life-long readers of poetry -- through my teaching, my writing, my
publishing activities -- but I am often underwhelmed by the poetry that gets
my students high (the same doesn't happen with prose -- I still get drunk on
Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Morrison, Twain, Alice Walker, O'Brien, Vonnegut,
Salinger, Julia Alvarez), so sometimes poetry gets short-shrifted. It was a
hell of a lot easier when, teaching at Berkeley High School in the early
1990s, I could bring a range of poets into class -- from Spencer Selby to
students from June Jordan's classes. That contact high might do more for
creating new readers of poetry than books or websites (thus I choke on my
bias against poetry slams and such).

Skanky Possum "Dialogue"

If you haven't caught the latest brouhaha in the poetry turf wars, check out the Skanky Possum blog: http://www.skankypossum.com/pouch/

If only I had a sailboat with sails unfurled, I could reach the nearest blackhole faster. Now that would be interesting.

The point Dale Smith was making seemed to be missed by many on both sides (poor Bill Knotts was outnumbered, what, thirty to one?): let's deal with the poem, each poem, every poem, on its own terms, regardless of the poet's affiliations. Context, lines of development, of course enhance the readings of each poem, but this "discussion" reeks of petty pedigree squabbles -- our breed is better than yours.

What I wonder is when this concern for pedigree sets itself in poets. I have known many a 16-18 year old poet who can hold the opposing forces of Billy Collins and Silliman's Tjanting in their minds at the same time. Without losing balance, they can hold in their minds Dickinson, Plath, Bob Cobbing, Niedecker, Robert Frost, Japanese and American haiku, O' Hara, Emmett Williams, James Wright, John M. Bennett, Gary Snyder, B. P. Nichol, slam poet winners Taylor Mali and Sherman Alexie, and so many others you might actually think that poetry has the possibility to survive beyond the current generation.

Developing writers delight in language. Language is foregrounded, though they know nothing of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Language, shaped, created, in its many possible manifestations. They do not fracture those vital, delicate fibers. Language matters. They know it. They show it with the way they attack what they read, the way they attach, the way they tackle what they write. Language is alive. They do not recognize -- nor do I want them to at this point in their experience as writers and readers -- schools of poetry. Lineage is important but it is not essential. To insist on it kills off potential readers. That's suicide.

Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn’t There

Where to start re-viewing Mark Wallace’s Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn’t There? I thoroughly enjoyed it. So what?
I find compelling works like this that show awareness of their limitations (“The stanza breaks in this poem are arbitrary/and without significance...” or “...Why do so many poems/fail to be convincing in their last line?), self-reflexive, self-critical tongue-in-cheek (“A more profound poem than this would say that creative acts/emerge from the dissatisfaction that makes us human.”).
Works like this demystify art. They’re honest, humble, artistic but not artsy-fartsy, absolutely open.
Yet comprised of autonomous sentences, revamped cliches, inside-out aphorisms and maxims, this long poem interspersed with ineffectual collage/headline poems reads like third-rate Ron Silliman.
Wallace realizes that sentences like “The pizza was lousy so they shot the delivery guy./Why don’t you love me when I talk about Stalin?...I wrote the last sentence with a cramp in my foot... Burn baby burn, disco inferno/gets you a rebate in Fresno” “lack anything resembling the poetic,” but they also lack just about anything else.
So why the hell did I thoroughly enjoy reading every line of the damn book? It was easy reading. Not mindless, not fluff, but full of ease, effortless. Now how did he do that?

Writers Deserving of More Readers

I hesitate to begin this list of under-read writers. Lists at the same time they include, they exclude. At the same time they bring those listed to the foreground, into attention, they nudge others perhaps even farther into the background. Lists are inherently finite propositions.

Yet I begin this list as a note to myself: read more from these writers and write more about them. I have not encountered any “weak” works from the writers I list below (my primary criteria, subjective as it is). They deserve more readers.

Yet again I hesitate because who the hell can say if a writer is unappreciated or not? How many readers does a writer need to be appreciated? One simple reader whose sense of language has been transformed, whose perception of the world enhanced? Thousands? How can anyone count readers anyway? (But this list implies that readers count.)

Yet here goes, now, with or without hesitation, a short list of writers deserving more readers:

Tom Beckett
Susan Smith Nash
John Perlman
Elizabeth Willis
George Albon
John Byrum
Kathy Ernst
Steven Farmer
Beth Joselow
Miekal And
Aldon Nielsen
Karl Kempton
Spencer Selby (especially his visual works – see Problem Pictures)
Nico Vassilakis
Daniel Davidson
William Bronk
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

A poem/I dive in (live in)

A poem
I dive in (live in)
to stop (it)
hitting the bottom

Jake Berry's Abandoned Light

Re-reading Jake Berry’s Species of Abadoned Light enlightened, abandoned light and all. A poetry of ecstasy, a poetry of freedom (Hank Lazer calls him “William Blake living in Florence, Alabama”), you’re dead as a reader if you don’t find pleasure in this book.
I’ve found many of Berry’s individual works intriguing – few poets, not P. Inman, Bruce Andrews, or Jackson MacLow, can do what Berry does with the vast English vocabulary (I can only think of Clark Coolidge as someone who surpasses Berry in this ability) -- each syllable, phoneme, particle, worth the weight of a page, of larger discourse units such as the paragraph, stanza, the poem itself, but I’ve not found his earlier collections to be fully satisfying. I felt they showed up his weakness (and the weakness of many other contemporary poets): linguistic pyrotechnics, nothing to say. Species of Abandoned Light speaks: you have to have a liberated sense of language to have a liberated life, and there’s no ecstacy without liberation.
It took me several weeks to get beyond the first page in the book, a perfect poem, in command of the space of the page, impossible perfect connections of words – “laughing/amnesiac/rhythm,” “serpent orchids,” “hard drive/gris gris/convulsing/grave robber” – depicting a kind of hell:

“caterwauling zenith

BREAK

bottomless innocence of despondency

her sex hung
in the next room
grotesquely”

I would have to quote the whole page, so inseperable its parts, yet another strength of Berry's -- his language can hold space, can co-exist with it -- is beyond my blog technology.

Reading and writing John Ashbery:

Dear Ghost,
Just when you admire the craft, he throws in a wrench. The perfect line breaks seem sloppy, the perfect choice of language now too casual. Just when you admire the wrench, he rights the craft. Or he never lost control.

I have had so many identity crises
in the last fifty words you wouldn’t believe it.
Nothing can take their place.
Soon it was sliding out to sea.

Tonight the party will be better than ever. So many mystery guests arriving between every phrase. Is this just a phase adjuster? Or are these poems peopled by multitudes, phantom agents, that we collaborate in making? Other poets have come and gone and wrought no damage.
He stirs that tiresome debate, poetry versus prose. What are the distinctions, what do they share? How is this work poetry? How isn’t it prose?
How is the closure?
The longer poems are a great challenge to the reader: bear down, make it all cohere, or allow it to cohere, or co-exist with it in the here and now.

Get something out of these notations that arrive
every day, like letters, O not in the empty house.

One can only read so much at a time. The work explodes the quaint self-contained cubicle of most poems. What’s raveling is also unraveling. It’s so easy, so deceptively easy. One passes along a line, or a verse, or an entire poem--one passes through it. Ashbery’s been accused of being opaque, but quite the contrary, dear ghost, the transparencies abound. It is the reader who’s opaque.
“Indeed he is the naked forager.”
How does he know what his readers are thinking when they’re thinking it? His lines often carry on a dialogue with our minds.
In another time, on an exact page, he asks as I ask of his work now, “Who knows what it’s going to be?”

Not syntactic but synaptic poetry

Readers are particular.
All poetry is not sound.

The life of poetry does not survive the poetry of life.
A good knock on wood is good.

Some poems don’t show it: the factories of poetry are flooding.
Strategic syntax on the warpath.

The look of the book is part of how it is read. The book of the look.
The grasp of poetics is not concomitant with the grasp of poetry.

It touched off a frightening night of fire and rhyme.
Not all great poetry survives.

There can be poetry in poetics.
No one line in the American tradition has one source.

Open readings are primaries?
Syntactic synapse.

The poetics of eclipse.
The clocks tick in the poem, ARIVES QUICKER THAN USUAL.

Politics of synapse, gaps of poetics.
More poets, less poetry.

A magazine is explosive or periodical.
Theory into practice is a quantum leap.

Poetry and the page have an uneasy truce. Or truth.
Does a diminishing audience suggest a diminishing poetry?

The world of the book is still a parallel universe in which one can die.
The gasp of poetics.

Not all survival is great poetry.

Re-reading Eigner's Things Stirring Together or Far Away

Re-reading Eigner: Things Stirring Together Or Far Away. Struck most by “A Turn,” a prose poem perhaps from Larry’s point of view, his way of seeing as he waits in the back seat of the car for his family to return. He sees how a passerby’s clothes move, how dogs respond to him (he recalls barking at another dog at an earlier age). The piece more fully places us in Larry’s place (his poems do more than that, do more than show how Larry sees--they see on their own terms too, or how language sees).

The prose shows that his choice to leave things out of his poems was a conscious one, not that he couldn't develop full pictures of the world, but that he can get more space and speed, more depth, by leaving out. His spaces, his spacings, mean something.

The prose has less space. The reader is more readily absorbed.

The book, published in 1974 by Black Sparrow (if it isn't still in print, it's a sin), contains ninety pages of poems, then's capped off by five prose pieces (oddly, one, "yard beside house," doesn't make it into the table of contents).

Now I've got to stop this, brief as it is, and read the poems.