Welcome Back to Elegant Thorn Review

Elegant Thorn Review has returned to the Blogger platform with the old URL: http://elegantthorn.blogspot.com.

Over the coming weeks, I will be moving the most recent work posted at the Polysemy site back to this platform.

Hang in there and ETR will be back soon.

Tags: announcements

Elizabeth Alexander - Praise Song for the Day, A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

Here is the complete text of Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem, to be published by Graywolf Press, courtesy of Hill Sheperd.

Praise Song for the Day, A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.

praise song for walking forward in that light.
Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved.

Tags: Elizabeth Alexander, Praise Song for the Day, A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration, poetry, Graywolf Press

The Inaugural Poet - Q & A with Elizabeth Alexander

Having an "official" poet for the Obama Inaugural brings poetry front and center in American culture, at least for a day . . . back where it belongs.

From The Root:

The Inaugural Poet - Q & A with Elizabeth Alexander

The selection of Yale professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander to write and deliver a poem at the inauguration of Barack Obama marks not only the return of poetry to a place of prominence in presidential history (she is only the fourth to read at a presidential swearing-in), but represents a true mind-meld between the president-elect and his chosen bard. Professor Alexander is a virtuosic writer and a shrewd analyst of American letters, a polyglot who moves fluently from essay to sonnet, from free verse to drama—and in her teaching, traces equally diverse themes. As the big day approaches, it’s hard to tell who will serve as muse to whom—Alexander and Obama share ties to Chicago and to the classroom, and a demonstrated commitment to the power of words and of community institutions.

I recently caught up with my former teacher to discuss her work and the now-finished poem she will deliver at Tuesday’s ceremony.

The Root: Congratulations! How were you chosen for the honor? Who called who?

Elizabeth Alexander: I actually don’t know! You’d have to ask the inaugural committee what happened. I just got a phone call saying that they were asking me to write a poem and deliver it. It was a tremendous thrill. Kind of like Sarah Palin, I didn’t even think about saying no.

I think one of the really exciting things about the Obama campaign and his election is that so many more people than in the past have felt called to serve, have felt that they needed to step up their game, do what they could. You know, not much has been asked of us in the last eight years—now is the time. So I thought that this question was a continuation of the same mission we heard expressed on the campaign trail.

TR: Have you read the president-elect’s college-era poetry? It’s pretty bad. How can you trust his judgment on you? What kind of poetry does he enjoy? (I think that he must have loved your “Stravinsky in L.A.”)

EA: Well, most 19-year old poetry is pretty bad! As to what poetry he favors now, that’s a question better left for him. I do know that when he was photographed a few days after the election, he was holding a copy of Derek Walcott’s collected poems. And let me tell you, an audible collective whoop rose up from the poetry world. It was so wonderful to see that three days after he was elected leader of the free world that he would literally model for us a book of poetry, show the value of taking a moment to see what wisdom could be found in a poem. And with a great poet like Walcott, who, of course, doesn’t shy away from politics and serious sociological thinking.

TR: Who have you been reading for inspiration, and how is that different from what you teach at Yale?

EA: I did a lot of rereading—and then I stopped. Because it was important that I remind myself what it was possible to do in poetry, but at the same time to create a space to listen to what I had to say. I have learned that the greats inspire, but they can also daunt. So to know when to put them aside is a key calibration. I certainly returned to Walt Whitman, thinking of his lines about “I hear America singing; the varied carols I hear,” and that vision of a multivocal, loud America, speaking in many different voices and different registers. Conveying a sense of expansiveness in America was important to me.

And Gwendolyn Brooks, as usual, provides me with her intensity, her fierce intensity of language, the way that she begins simply with the lives she might see outside her window on the South Side of Chicago. I thought particularly about Brooks because, were she living she would absolutely be the one giving the inaugural poem. She’s the bard of the South Side and one of the unheralded geniuses of the last century. And I’ve been thinking, of course, about her connection to Obama’s stomping grounds and what it means to be from Chicago, but also her sense of occasion—her sense of what it means to be a community and to hear it all in the tiniest things.

Also, I thought a lot about the poet Robert Hayden, and poems of his such as “American Journal,” where he meditates on “this variegated people” and a poem like “Frederick Douglass,” when he tries to define freedom, to define this concept that we all know, we say we want it—but what is it? And Frederick Douglass is in the poem and tries to make sense of freedom. Those are actually all poets that I teach—at one point or another I try to make it a point to teach what I love.

Read the whole interview.

Tags: The Inaugural Poet, Q & A, Elizabeth Alexander, Root, interviews

Poet and President-elect Obama

From NPR's Weekend America:

Poet and President-elect Obama
Larissa Anderson
JANUARY 3, 2009

President-elect Barack Obama has a lot of writers excited about the next four years. He'll have a poet at his inauguration. He's said he's going to have more poetry readings at the White House. He's even quoted poetry on the campaign trail. In the speech he gave on Super Tuesday, Obama said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." That line is from June Jordan's "Poem for South African Women." Nobel laureate Derek Walcott has been thinking about what it means to have a president who reads poetry. He talked with Weekend America's Larissa Anderson.

You can read the article at their page. Or listen, too, for that matter.

Tags: Poet and President-elect Obama, NPR, Larissa Anderson, essays

Thanksgiving Poems

I promise to get back to regular posting soon. Until then, here are some "thanksgiving" poems in honor of the holiday, courtesy of The Academy of American Poets.

* * *

Thanks
by W. S. Merwin
Listen...

The Thanksgivings
by Harriet Maxwell Converse
We who are here present thank the Great Spirit...

Around Us
by Marvin Bell
We need some pines to assuage the darkness...

A List of Praises
by Anne Porter
Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing...

Dusting
by Marilyn Nelson
Thank you for these tiny...

For the Fallen
by Laurence Binyon
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children...

Starfish
by Eleanor Lerman
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to...

What Was Told, That
by Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks
What was said to the rose that made it open was said...

Lift Every Voice and Sing
by James Weldon Johnson
Lift ev'ry voice and sing...

Rabbi Ben Ezra
by Robert Browning
Grow old along with me...

For the Twentieth Century
by Frank Bidart
Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand...

Slow Waltz Through Inflatable Landscape
by Christian Hawkey
At the time of his seeing a hole opened—a pocket opened...

The Routine Things Around the House
by Stephen Dunn
When Mother died...

The Teacher
by Hilarie Jones
I was twenty-six the first time I held...

The Triumph of Time
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Before our lives divide for ever...

Two Countries
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Skin remembers how long the years grow...

Visiting Pai-an Pavilion
by Hsieh Ling-yun
translated by Sam Hamill
Beside this dike, I shake off the world's dust...

Tags: Thanksgiving Poems, poetry, The Academy of American Poets

Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia

A very interesting and somewhat controversial article by Paglia on her selection process for Break, Blow, Burn. She disses some "canonic" poems and poets, which is sure to provoke some anger in professors.

Posted at Arion.

Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn

CAMILLE PAGLIA

(click here to view the pdf version)

BREAK, BLOW, BURN, my collection of close readings of fortythree poems, took five years to write. The first year was devoted to a search for material in public and academic libraries as well as bookstores. I was looking for poems in English from the last four centuries that I could wholeheartedly recommend to general readers, especially those who may not have read a poem since college. For decades, poetry has been a losing proposition for major trade publishers. I was convinced that there was still a potentially large audience for poetry who had drifted away for unclear reasons. That such an audience does in fact exist seemed proved by the success of Break, Blow, Burn, which may be the only book of poetry criticism that has ever reached the national bestseller list in the United States.

On my two book tours (for the Pantheon hardback in 2005and the Vintage paperback in 2006), I was constantly asked by readers or interviewers why this or that famous poet was not included in Break, Blow, Burn, which begins with Shakespeare and ends with Joni Mitchell. At the prospectus stage of the project, I had assumed that most of the principal modern and contemporary poets would be well represented. But once launched on the task of gathering possible entries, I was shocked and disappointed by what I found. Poem after poem, when approached from the perspective of the general audience rather than that of academic criticism, shrank into inconsequence or pretension. Or poets whom I fondly remembered from my college and graduate school studies turned out to have produced impressive bodies of serious work but no single poem that could stand up as an artifact to the classic poems elsewhere in the book. The ultimate standard that I applied in my selection process was based on William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” a masterpiece of sinewy modern English.

Ezra Pound, because of his generous mentoring of and vast influence on other poets (such as T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams), should have been automatically included in Break, Blow, Burn. But to my dismay, I could not find a single usable Pound poem—just a monotonous series of showy, pointless, arcane allusions to prior literature. The equally influential W. H. Auden was high on my original list. But after reviewing Auden’s collected poetry, I was stunned to discover how few of his poems can stand on their own in today’s mediasaturated cultural climate. Auden’s most anthologized poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” inspired by a Breughel painting, felt dated in its portentous mannerisms. A homoerotic love poem by Auden that I had always planned to include begins, “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.” But when I returned to it, I found the poem perilously topheavy with that single fine sentence. Everything afterward dissolves into vague blather. It was perhaps the most painful example that I encountered of great openings not being sustained.

Surely the lucid and vivacious Marianne Moore, so hugely popular in her day, would have produced many poems to appeal to the general reader. However, while I was charmed by Moore’s ingenious variety of formats, I became uncomfortable and impatient with her reflex jokiness, which began to seem like an avoidance of emotion. Nothing went very deep. Because I was so eager to get a good sports poem into Break, Blow, Burn (I never found one), I had high hopes for Moore’s beloved odes to baseball. Alas, compared to today’s highimpact, aroundtheclock sports talk on radio and TV, Moore’s baseball lingo came across as fussy and corny.

Elizabeth Bishop presented an opposite problem. Bishop is truly a poet’s poet, a refined craftsman whose discreet, shapely poems carry a potent emotional charge beneath their transparent surface. I had expected a wealth of Bishop poems to choose from. With my eye on the general reader, I was keenly anticipating a cascade of sensuous tropical imagery drawn from Bishop’s life in Brazil. But when I returned to her collected poems, the observed details to my surprise seemed oppressively clouded with sentimental selfprojection. For example, I found Bishop’s muchanthologized poem “The Fish” nearly unbearable due to her obtrusively simmering selfpity. (Wounded animal poems, typifying the anthropomorphic fallacy, have become an exasperating cliché over the past sixty years.) Even splendid, monumental Brazil evidently couldn’t break into Bishop’s weary bubble, which traveled with her wherever she went. It may be time to jettison depressiveness as a fashionable badge of creativity.

Charles Bukowski was another poet slated from the start to be prominently featured in Break, Blow, Burn. (Indeed, he proved to be the writer I was most asked about on my book tours.) I had planned to make the dissolute Bukowski a crown jewel, demonstrating the scornful rejection by my rowdy, raucous 1960s generation of the genteel proprieties of 1950s literary criticism, still faithfully practiced by the erudite but terminally prim Helen Vendler. I was looking for a funny, squalid street or barroom poem, preferably with boorish knockdown brawling and halfclad shady ladies. But as with Elizabeth Bishop, I could not find a single poem to endorse in good faith for the general reader. And Bukowski was staggeringly prolific: I ransacked shelf upon shelf of his work. But he obviously had little interest in disciplining or consolidating his garrulous, meandering poems. Frustrated, I fantasized about scissoring out juicy excerpts and taping together my own ideal Platonic form of a Bukowski poem. The missing Bukowski may be the surly Banquo’s ghost of Break, Blow, Burn.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Final Cut, The Selection Process, Break Blow Burn, Camille Paglia, Arion, essays

In praise of the praise of poetry

A nice article from Slate to get things moving again over here. Sorry for the long delay in posting - life got in the way.

New Literary Art Form Discovered!In praise of the praise of poetry

By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, at 5:48 PM ET

I believe I've discovered a previously unrecognized genre of contemporary writing that deserves commendation for its distinctiveness and frequent excellence. It's practiced mainly by contemporary poets, but it's not poetry. In fact—at least for me—it's much better than most contemporary poetry, in the sense that it's much more readable, much better crafted, and often beautifully compressed in a dazzling haikulike way.

It's something that gives people like me who don't find themselves drawn to much contemporary poetry a sense of the verbal facility of contemporary poets—and contemporary poetry critics—when they're writing prose about contemporary poetry.

The past century has taught us that good writing can appear in unexpected forms: film scripts, Sopranos-type series, the storytelling of R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman, for instance. And writing about poetry, particularly praising contemporary poetry, is a fine but extremely difficult art. It has to distill the presumed poetic genius of the writer being praised in a way that at the very least equals the supposed brilliance of the work itself. So in a way it's more elevated than prose; it's prose-poetry (remember that?) about poetry.

Recently, British poet* James Fenton cited something that the mandarin of poetic modernism, T.S. Eliot, wrote about the supremely difficult and delicate art of blurbing poetry:

"Everyone engaged in publishing," Eliot wrote when he was an editor at the august London house Faber & Faber, "knows what a difficult art blurb-writing is; every publisher who is also an author considers this form of composition more arduous than any other that he practises. But nobody knows the utmost difficulty until he has to write blurbs for poetry: especially when some are to appear in the same catalogue. If you praise highly, the reviewer may devote a paragraph to ridiculing the publisher's pretensions; if you try understatement, the reviewer may remark that even the publisher doesn't seem to think much of this book: I have had both experiences."

Let me explain the roundabout way it came to me, the discovery that the praise of contemporary poetry, either in blurbs or reviews, is itself a neglected form of poetry, meta-poetry. Even if it comes from the most corrupt and sordid favor-trading, grant-grubbing, academic back-scratching sources, it's clear that those who are good at it are so very good at it that their work rises above its origins and deserves special recognition. It is not some degraded adjunct of contemporary poetry but perhaps its very apotheosis. It would be a tragedy to lose the poetry, of course, but to lose the even more brilliant blurbs! Sometimes I wonder whether in fact the poetry being praised even exists or has been dreamed up to provide the rationale for the praise.

In any case, my recognition of this underappreciated genre began with my attempt to find a proper way to praise Keats' ode "To Autumn." A poem whose melancholy perfections I've had a lifelong obsession with.

With autumn—and specifically Sept. 19—coming upon us, I wanted to commemorate Sept. 19, the day in 1819 when a tubercular, slowly dying young Keats took a walk on the hills outside Winchester overlooking the just-harvested stubble fields and watched

... barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.

as he would put it in the poem he wrote in the aftermath.

I wanted to write about the way I felt inextricably linked to the poem, even before I made a kind of pilgrimage to that very hill, overlooking those very stubble fields, and beheld the phenomenon of the "barred clouds" as the crimson sunset light that lit them turned those stubble fields a rosy, almost blood-red hue.

Being there made a difference: I felt I understood the shadow of death and dying, of death's final harvest and its grim reaper, a shadow that lies behind the poem's beautiful bucolic scene. And gives it its aura of approaching mortality.

I wanted to revisit a point of dispute I had with the great Helen Vendler, Harvard's poetry goddess (author of the incomparable study, The Odes of John Keats) over the sex of Autumn in the poem. I wanted to take issue with Jack Stillinger, editor of an important edition of Keats' works, who appears to believe that (despite "hinting of death") the ode is "unambiguously affirmative"—which I believe is unambiguously wrong.

But there was one problem: I wanted to find a way to praise the poem that would do justice to it after so many others had praised it to the point of exhaustion. I wanted to convey to others why I thought "To Autumn" was probably the greatest lyric poem in the language. I know others will leap to defend other poems' claims to that honor, and there are times when other poems come to my mind. ("Lycidas"? "Upon Appleton House"? "Winsdor Forest"? "At Melville's Tomb"? Do "Pale Fire" and "Venus and Adonis" qualify?)

So I was worrying over the problem of praise, realizing how difficult it is to breathe life into the exhausted form, when I happened to land on the bookmark of one of my favorite Web sites, The Page. No, political junkies, I'm not talking about Mark Halperin's site of the same name. This Page contains nothing but two-line excerpts from reviews of poetry. It was while reading The Page that I came across a link to James Fenton's piece in the Guardian that contained the Eliot quote about the difficulty of blurbing poetry.

And it was on The Page that I came across a thoughtful essay by one of my favorite critics, Adam Kirsch, which centered around an unusual new book of reflections on Keats, Posthumous Keats by poet Stanley Plumly. I got hold of the book and found that—though nothing compares with Helen Vendler's 50-page ode to the ode—Plumly does a pretty good job of describing what is remarkable about "Autumn," its burnished bucolic surface, and the Modernist shadows it harbors.

"Autumn" presents itself on the surface as a simple pastoral ode, reminiscent of Virgil's Georgics. And yet there is that "soft dying" in it, and it has a kind of completeness—the self-containment of a private universe—in the way it really resembles only itself. Hard to explain, but Plumly gives it a go:

Can a lyric poem of thirty-three lines achieve the awe and spaciousness of the sublime? "To Autumn" is ... a twilit symbolist masterpiece realized independently—it seems—of its implied author, as if it were an object, self-created. …

An object self-created. I don't like the anachronistic "symbolist" reference here, but there is something ineffably "self-created" about the poem, a melancholy Grecian urn of the psyche (in ode-speak) set down like the monolith* in 2001 and leaving us little to do but gather round and gibber at its flawless alien perfection.

He's onto something, Plumly, but his essay illustrates the difficulty of being precise in a realm of imprecision. It drew my attention to the current contents of The Page. Especially that essay by James Fenton that references Eliot on blurbs. Reminded me how difficult praise was to pull off, made me realize praise is underpraised. After so many centuries of poems and poets, it's difficult to be persuasive about some contemporary poet's place in the pantheon.

On the home page of The Page, there are about a hundred two-line entries, each linked to a longer review.

But if you forget about the review they link to and just read each two-liner as a kind of haiku, you can apprehend each as a beautifully distilled "object, self-created."

So many are so well-written! Almost all of them! They undertook what Eliot called the task of poetry, a "raid on the inarticulate," and came back with pure gold. Much have I traveled in realms of gold, in the Keatsian sense, and this was the real thing, almost every one of them a gem. (Credit here goes not only to the poets and critics doing the praising but to the editors of The Page for distilling them into two-line epigrams. Modestly, they only identify themselves at the very bottom of the page, this way: "The Page is edited by Andrew Johnston with occasional contributions by Stephen Burt.")

I became greedy for the felicity of the two-liners—Twitters of poetic genius—and found myself just reading them sequentially for the pleasure they gave. So many of the quotes were so thought-provoking and original, often offering what I usually fail to find in contemporary poetry. They seem to be suggesting seductively something I must be missing, something that I now will look for more attentively.

And so I'd like to present some of the best two-liners to you and hope you can find the same pleasure I do in them, the pleasure of heightened language well-used. The pleasure of poets blurbing each other. And the excellence of some of the critics specializing in a genre not widely read or appreciated.

What's remarkable is how variegated the pleasures offered by the two-line quotes are, some particularity felicitous turns of phrase, some epigrammatic nuggets of wisdom, some unexpected prospects and vantage points on words and the world.

Some are ingeniously inventive descriptions:

"James K. Baxter can be crabby, difficult, bombastic, tortuous and tricky. He is, in nearly equal measure, astonishing and heartbreaking."—Rebecca Porte, Contemporary Poetry Review

"Juan Felipe Herrera's worst poems seem disorganized, excessive, frantic; his best seem disheveled, excited, uncommonly free."—Stephen Burt, the New York Times

"Matthea Harvey has Stevie Smith's knack for writing throwaway lines that in the end seem less like Post-it notes than ransom letters."—David Orr, the New York Times

"Their giddiness in the face of despair, their animal pleasure in gossip, their false bravado, their frantic posturing and guilelessness and petty snobberies—and these were O'Hara's virtues—give us as much of a life as poetry can."—William Logan, the New York Times

Some are intriguing, mysterious:

"Sometimes we live as if we know more about the experiences we don't have than about the experiences we do."—Adam Phillips on Larkin, The Threepenny Review,

"These poems have a permanence about them that belies their fragility. Some of them even approach that supposed impossibility: The tautology that contains knowledge."—Laurie Duggan on Gael Turnbull, blurb on book jacket

Some are witty and contrarian:

"If there is one lesson to be drawn from Shelley's life and work, it is that you can't trust a man who believes he is an angel."—Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker

"If one were forced to select a single word to exemplify Bishop's peculiar charm and power, it might well be 'No.' "—Brad Leithauser, the Wall Street Journal

"To test oneself, Oppen recognized, is to know failure. Oppen's victories are no less great for being small."—James Longenbach, The Nation

Some are casually thought-provoking:

"Hass's latest poems remind us that to be fully human is itself an act of political subversion."—Cynthia Haven, San Francisco magazine

"If we can give up on consolation, there may be room for something more promising."—Adam Phillips on John Burnside (and Henry Reed), the Observer

Some of them helped with capturing why I felt the way I did about Keats' "Autumn":

"In any poem of value there seems to be some poetic element, some inner intensity, which is separable from the language it is embodied in."—Clive Wilmer on Ted Hughes' translations, TLS

And I must admit I admired some of them, however over-the-top, for witnessing how much they cared about contemporary poetry:

"Only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack." —David Orr, the New York Times

Since I've gone out on a limb and suggested Keats' "Autumn" is the greatest lyric poem in the language, I invite readers to post their choice—just one!—for this honor in "The Fray." Perhaps along with an approximately two-line description. Let's say, a Twitter-like 140-character limit. After all, almost prophetically, the last line of "To Autumn" somewhat ominously observed:

And gathering swallows twitter in the sky.

Correction, Sept. 14, 2008: This piece originally said James Fenton is the British poet laureate. He is not. It also said the central object in the film 2001 is an "obelisk." In fact, it is a monolith. (Return to the corrected sentences.)

Tags: New Literary Art Form Discovered!, In praise of the praise of poetry, poetry, Slate, Essays, Ron Rosenbaum

Poem: Nick Masesso Jr.

Iconoclast Direct from Hollywood Heaven

Robert Altman is dead,
but Francis Coppola is still alive.
“They hit him with six shots
and he’s still alive.
Well that’s bad luck for me,
and bad luck for you,
If you don’t make that deal
with Sonny”.

Marty Scorsese is running down Mulberry Street
with a knife in his back. Death is chasing him
like a freight train
and he’s still dreaming of Italian Cinema.

Stanley Kubrick is floating in a space odyssey
with naked women like Norman Mailer’s somnambulist.
He sports an orange clock around his neck,
Public Enemy style.

Sam Pekinpaugh is riddling
Alfred Hitchcock’s bloated corpse
with silver bullets
while Sam whistles over
John Ford’s grave.

Robert Altman is dead
He’s hunting deer
with Michael Cimino and Dino de Laurentis,
unconventionally subverting the genre.

Robert Altman is dead.
He’s whispering
“suicide is painless”
while Arthur Penn
Is turning the crank
of a vintage Model-T
for Clyde Barrow.

Robert Altman is dead.
He’s stopping the bleeding in Korea,
singing on stage in Nashville
and slowing slipping away
chest deep in the western snows.

He deconstructs and demythologizes
our romantic visions
in non-heroic, breathtaking, masterpiece
while Leonard Cohen wails.

He watches as Oliver Stone
shows Jack Kennedy
what happened in Vietnam,
how the bullet
made his head
go back
and to the right,
made us all go back
and to the right.

* * *

~ Born August 12, 1948, Nick Masesso Jr. grew up in the 1950's of suburban Chicago. In the late 1960's he co-founded a commune. He traveled throughout North America in the 1970's and made treks to South America, Southern and South Central Africa also in the 1970's. His Book “Walking the Midway in Purgatory, a Journal” is available on-line and through bookstore.

Tags: Iconoclast Direct from Hollywood Heaven, Nick Masesso Jr., poetry

Ron Silliman on the History of Poetry

While education tends to stress the great works, Ron Silliman feels that the real history of poetry is in the unpolished, not-perfect works.

I know I’m repeating myself, but this seems to be a point that a lot of people get stuck on. Plus this is my 2,000^th post to the blog, and I’m feeling feisty. The history of poetry, like the history of any art form, is not a procession of its “best works.” Indeed, the well-wrought urn is, if anything, the deservedly forgotten one. Having codified and smoothed out the rough edges of any given tendency in poetry, such works are monuments to triviality and soon ignored.

In the 1960s, there were dozens of young poets who wrote “just like” Robert Creeley or any of a number of other, first-generation Projectivists. John Sinclair was a terrific approximation of Charles Olson transplanted to Detroit. Ross Feld had Jack Spicer down cold. More than a few poets during that same period “did” John Ashbery almost better than Ashbery himself. And there quite a few Allen Ginsbergs & Gary Snyders as well. Where are they now? Those that persevered – many did not – have changed, sometimes quite radically. There were a hundred Ted Berrigans, but it is worth noting that Alice Notley has not been one of them. Last I heard, John Sinclair was a DJ down in New Orleans – his great magazine Work has had its title appropriated by some folks out in Oakland – I wonder if they even know the literary heritage of that name.

In The New American Poetry, Ron Loewinsohn – just 23 when the book was first published – demonstrated an uncanny ability to channel the style of William Carlos Williams. A look at his professor emeritus page at UC Berkeley shows no publication of new poetry since 1976, no new writing of any kind in over twenty years. Yet Against the Silences to Come, Loewinsohn’s 1965 chapbook from Four Seasons Foundation, arguably is the best work ever written “in the Williams mode” of stepped free verse. Who (but me) celebrates that?

That’s the phenomenon in micro- form. It has a macro- variation as well. Articulating the possibilities of the prose poem, say, or dramatic monologue, or free verse – the three great formal innovations of the 19^th century – has meant dramatically transforming what those genre mean. Charles Olson’s Maximus is possibly the only innovation in dramatic monolog in the 20^th century even worth discussing. But look at how Pessoa’s heteronyms carry the underlying dynamics of dissociating author from speaker in a completely different direction. Now, a few decades hence, heteronyms are a dime a dozen as well.

The history of poetry is the history of change in poetry, an account not of best works, but of shifts in direction, new devices, new forms, as Williams once put it, “as additions to nature.” The cruder writing & rougher edges of the first to do X, whatever it might be, invariably are preferable. Better Spicer than Ross Feld. Better Howl than _________ – you can fill in that blank yourself.

There are of course poets and readers who hate change, sometimes hate it intensely. There are, for example, those who claim that Pound’s “good” writing stops basically at “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” avant The Cantos. Pound in those years was something of a stylistic gigolo, plagiarizing all that was interesting in Victorian poetics. Had he stopped there, he would have been the Ron Loewinsohn of his generation. And you would never have read him.

This may be why, actually, the School of Quietude generally does such a poor job of celebrating, preserving and carrying forward the work of its own stalwarts. Does anyone think you could fill up an auditorium at Columbia for a weekend, for example, to celebrate the centenary of Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, Robert Francis or Richard Eberhart, the SoQ poets closest in age to Louis Zukofsky? Why is it that the London Review of Books still thinks it necessary to order a hit piece of Zukofsky when all these contemporaries of his have long since disappeared from view? Or that Charlie Simic does the same to Robert Creeley (or William Logan ditto to Frank O’Hara)? It’s not that the SoQ poets, then and now, were bad writers – I think you can demonstrate that it’s objectively not the case. But they didn’t create change for poetry in their poetry (and, indeed, the most interesting of that earlier quartet are the two who helped to create institutional change in the academy through their critical writing, tho they did so precisely to thwart a modernism that was already threatening our shores). The assaults on Zukofsky, Creeley & O’Hara are little more than tantrums on the part of writers who understand that they’re the Robert Francises & Richard Eberharts of today, and are doomed to be just as widely read. They’d love to be able to curb the influence Zukofsky et al are having and will continue to have on younger writers, but they know already that this is impossible. Their pain is real.

Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change.

Go read the rest of the article -- and if you have some thoughts, please come back and share them here.

Tags: Ron Silliman, History of Poetry, essays, poetry

Denis Darzacq - The Fall (2006) - Photos

In 2006, Denis Darzacq asked dancers and athletes to perform jumps against background that he had found and prepared. Wearing ordinary clothes chosen in agreement with the photographer, the performers executed their leaps in these precisely defined settings.

Everything had been prepared in advance. Everything was ready. The models launched themselves into space. There is nothing false in these scenes . These moments really occurred. There is no fiction, no retouching or special effects. Photographed in the courtyards of buildings or in streets in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, in Nanterre and in Biarritz, these young people were just being themselves, simply performing jumps in a modern urban setting. And the photographer shot the images, intervening only to give a few guidelines as to their movement. However, at the moment of the leap, chance and gravity also intervened. (Text by Virginie Chardin)

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The Fall

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Tags: Denis Darzacq, The Fall, 2006, Photos, photography