It is time to interrupt this program of "The Best of" to pen something new. And having dwelt more on affective disorders than art in this string of posts, I feel impelled to write something about my favorite art, poetry.
Last night I was up until 4 AM reading Celan and all of Rilke's Duino Elegies. I know enough German to follow the translations and occasionally quibble with the translators, but Rilke's verse is difficult, even in German, because of his vast diction and complicated syntax, stumbling blocks for any translator. Yet the ineffable nature of Rilke's poetry shines through translation.
It's been said that poetry is what can't be translated, but I disagree, and put forth Shakespeare as an example, whose poetry has rivaled the Bible in the adaptation of his work to every major language.
Rilke is considered a Victorian/Edwardian poet by some, but I think his Duino Elegies put him squarely in the modern camp, for several reasons. First, the psychological depth of this, his later work; second, the almost conversational tenor of the Elegies; and third, the changing point of view that he manages so seamlessly. Sometimes he addresses an angel, sometimes a woman, sometimes the reader and often himself. There is also a deep honesty to his struggles, as if he tries to pull the last veil from his masks and find the essential being within. Yet even as he does this, he pulls away from the intimacy of being and calls upon the angels to save him, though he somewhat comically contends that the angels are most interested in "Things"--the details of a carnival for instance, while eschewing the temple.
I have never seen a work that so dovetails with Eliot's "Four Quartets" as the Elegies do, and the genesis of the majority of these ten master works occurred after a long fallow period, in a burst of inspiration in 1922 (he wrote the first three in 1912). In this Rilke observes a poetic silence much like Eliot's between "Ash Wednesday," written in 1927, and "Four Quartets" begun in 1936. Similar themes of time, mortality, spiritual illumination and being in the present also dominate the Elegies, though they bear the signature of a more consistent voice than Eliot's Quartets do. Yet note these comparisons:
"But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it in one's heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible." (Rilke, ending of the third Elegy)
"You can receive this: 'on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death'--that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others." (Eliot, Dry Salvages III, near the end)
Notice how the voice in each passage avoids lecturing, yet there is a certainty to the poet's arguments that is hard to resist, because each poet truly believes in what he is saying.
Here are another two passages:
"And you, dear women
who must have loved me for my small beginning
of love towards you, which I always turned away from
because the space in your features grew, changed,
even while I loved it, into cosmic space,
where you no longer were--" (fourth Elegy, near the middle)
"Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left the station...
You shall not think "the past is finished"
Or "the future is before us." (Dry Salvages III, middle passage)
How time transforms us into different people; how a human face changes with time until the person is no longer there. And both poets have a tenuous and mistrustful relationship with the body, best typified in Eliot's "Prufrock" but still present in 4Q:
Again, from the fourth Elegy:
"I won't endure these half-filled human masks;
better, the puppet. It at least is full.
I'll put up with the stuffed skin, the wire, the face
that is nothing but appearance."
From "Burnt Norton III":
"Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies empty of meaning."
So there are great similarities in substance between the Elegies and Four Quartets, although the pleading voice of Rilke is more Romantic and the more distant voice of Eliot more Classical.
Rilke's central theme is of a failed ascendancy; like the panther in the cage, he paces the world yet feels caged by it, hoping for the deliverance of angels, of some final epiphany, only to be returned to his body and the problems of human love and human boundaries that ultimately prevent a true earthly union between lovers, as in the famous passage at the end of the Fifth Elegy, so difficult to translate:
"If there were a place that we didn't know of, and there
on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
what they could never bring to mastery here--
Would... [the soundless dead] throw down their final, forever saved-up
forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
coins of happiness before the at last
genuinely smiling pair on the gratified
carpet?"
Difficult to say, but would those who never experienced ideal love throw their horded idealization of it at the feet of those who achieved it in some other world? That it must happen in some other world is testimony to the fact that Rilke could not achieve it in this one; he is more identified with the soundless dead. Indeed, in his upbringing and personal relationships he fled from intimacy and perhaps his own femininity, having been raised as a girl by his mother until-shock of shocks!--his father put him in military school.
Naturally these speculations deserve a fuller treatment, and no doubt these thoughts will develop into a more fully-formed essay. But for now, let me but speak of the unadulterated joy of staying up late to bathe in greatness, of having my attention riveted by a poet whom I've read before before but never truly embraced. And to mention Celan in passing is a disservice, though I urge you to read him as well. The joy of poetry, when it descends upon you, exceeds any other intellectual joy that I know, not to mention the emotional engagement and sheer adventure of great verse.
Here ends the break from "The Best of."
At 2 Kilobunnies,
CE
Showing posts with label literary comment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary comment. Show all posts
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Finally, an acceptance; David Schubert, neglected poet?--toxic narcissist
I am happy to announce that my long string of rejections has been broken by a paying magazine, Byline.
It should be out in July. I first sent five poems which the editor found "too edgy," but she took the time to say some nice things, even suggesting another venue (that's the kind of editor I sought to be at Melic). So I immediately re-read the guidelines and examples from the magazine, tuned my voice down to some milder pieces, and she took one.
In other words, if you get your foot in the door, try to keep it propped open.
Does this give me hope? Enough to go on for now.
The other day I bought an old issue of QLR devoted to David Schubert, a man who did little but write poetry, succumbing to insanity and institutionalization by age 30, and subsequently dying of TB at 32. What's interesting about the issue is how many prominent literary lights praise him, and how many personal reminiscences paint him as an extreme narcissist. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, I suspect he was rather bipolar, but he also may have had a narcissistic personality order. BTW, his later poetry ain't bad. Here's a sample, the opening stanza from "Predicament":
"Their love is exhausted in
Family," you told me. It is true
to my experience; what can one do?
To be left with the cinders of recrimination
For what cannot be returned. No,
To live without expectation of
Love. That is like a toothache,
Chronic and infectious. To mock
Your feelings, as someone I know,
Laughing at us all as sexual
Maniacs, is but self-mockery.
In googling "David Schubert" + poetry I found no less than 817 references listed, which surprised me.
Here's a comment from John Ashbery: "I don't think it's demeaning to call Schubert a "poet's poet"--a poet whom poets in particular treasure for the knowledge of the craft of poetry he can give to a practitioner of it, but also one whose work is open and available to everyone."
David Ignatow strongly identified with him. James Wright called him "A Master of Silence" and "inadvertently neglected." Schubert's one slim volume of poems was published in 1960, 15 years after his death. As a transitional poet between the suprarationalism of Eliot and the rationalism of Auden to the stark confessionalism of the 60s, he is an interesting writer, but one I consider more a historical footnote than a major voice. What's interesting about him is his inability to express what he wants to express, how he elliptically misses it and acknowledges the frustration in the same way. His later poems are more direct. His most ambitious, and one of his most successful poems, is "The Voyage."
Many influential literary friends strove to have his only volume, Initial A, published during his lifetime, but failed. Some of them sought this purely out of friendship and pity, truly--which gives us an insight into what may go on at the top tier of editorial discussion. Remember Eliot went to great lengths to have his mother's undeserving poems published and succeeded. (Don't forget Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Stewart, Hugh Prather, Jewel, and Leonard Nimoy.)
As for his private life, Schubert had a bizarre marriage in which he was supported by his wife and which included physical and verbal abuse on his part, though his wife remained inexplicably devoted to him.
Most telling of Schubert's inner life is a quote by his good friend, Theodore Weiss, in a letter to Renee Karol dated April 29, 1941: "It's amazing, the proportions of David's ego. Sitting alone with him, he busy carrying the burden of his 'greatness,' I realise how terribly much the image of his 'genius' has taken hold of him. Thus he's walking me to the subway and suddenly asks me, 'How is it Ted, I feel, I am! such a genius?'"
In reading the verse and life of this relatively (and deservedly so) obscure poet, there is perhaps hope for all poets striving for some sort of recognition in their lifetimes. More important is that we not be deceived or swallowed up by our own narcissism at the cost of reality. It is a good thing this man never became a father, for instance. Then serious poets rarely make good fathers; their egos leave little development for the individuation of their children, unless an understanding spouse ameliorates their toxic self-absorption. (I realize this claim is an exaggeration, but I could cite many examples, such as Stevens and Frost.)
Enough for today. To the tomb of the the unknown poet!
CE
It should be out in July. I first sent five poems which the editor found "too edgy," but she took the time to say some nice things, even suggesting another venue (that's the kind of editor I sought to be at Melic). So I immediately re-read the guidelines and examples from the magazine, tuned my voice down to some milder pieces, and she took one.
In other words, if you get your foot in the door, try to keep it propped open.
Does this give me hope? Enough to go on for now.
The other day I bought an old issue of QLR devoted to David Schubert, a man who did little but write poetry, succumbing to insanity and institutionalization by age 30, and subsequently dying of TB at 32. What's interesting about the issue is how many prominent literary lights praise him, and how many personal reminiscences paint him as an extreme narcissist. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, I suspect he was rather bipolar, but he also may have had a narcissistic personality order. BTW, his later poetry ain't bad. Here's a sample, the opening stanza from "Predicament":
"Their love is exhausted in
Family," you told me. It is true
to my experience; what can one do?
To be left with the cinders of recrimination
For what cannot be returned. No,
To live without expectation of
Love. That is like a toothache,
Chronic and infectious. To mock
Your feelings, as someone I know,
Laughing at us all as sexual
Maniacs, is but self-mockery.
In googling "David Schubert" + poetry I found no less than 817 references listed, which surprised me.
Here's a comment from John Ashbery: "I don't think it's demeaning to call Schubert a "poet's poet"--a poet whom poets in particular treasure for the knowledge of the craft of poetry he can give to a practitioner of it, but also one whose work is open and available to everyone."
David Ignatow strongly identified with him. James Wright called him "A Master of Silence" and "inadvertently neglected." Schubert's one slim volume of poems was published in 1960, 15 years after his death. As a transitional poet between the suprarationalism of Eliot and the rationalism of Auden to the stark confessionalism of the 60s, he is an interesting writer, but one I consider more a historical footnote than a major voice. What's interesting about him is his inability to express what he wants to express, how he elliptically misses it and acknowledges the frustration in the same way. His later poems are more direct. His most ambitious, and one of his most successful poems, is "The Voyage."
Many influential literary friends strove to have his only volume, Initial A, published during his lifetime, but failed. Some of them sought this purely out of friendship and pity, truly--which gives us an insight into what may go on at the top tier of editorial discussion. Remember Eliot went to great lengths to have his mother's undeserving poems published and succeeded. (Don't forget Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Stewart, Hugh Prather, Jewel, and Leonard Nimoy.)
As for his private life, Schubert had a bizarre marriage in which he was supported by his wife and which included physical and verbal abuse on his part, though his wife remained inexplicably devoted to him.
Most telling of Schubert's inner life is a quote by his good friend, Theodore Weiss, in a letter to Renee Karol dated April 29, 1941: "It's amazing, the proportions of David's ego. Sitting alone with him, he busy carrying the burden of his 'greatness,' I realise how terribly much the image of his 'genius' has taken hold of him. Thus he's walking me to the subway and suddenly asks me, 'How is it Ted, I feel, I am! such a genius?'"
In reading the verse and life of this relatively (and deservedly so) obscure poet, there is perhaps hope for all poets striving for some sort of recognition in their lifetimes. More important is that we not be deceived or swallowed up by our own narcissism at the cost of reality. It is a good thing this man never became a father, for instance. Then serious poets rarely make good fathers; their egos leave little development for the individuation of their children, unless an understanding spouse ameliorates their toxic self-absorption. (I realize this claim is an exaggeration, but I could cite many examples, such as Stevens and Frost.)
Enough for today. To the tomb of the the unknown poet!
CE
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Plantwatching vs. Birdwatching and Jane Hirschfield's "After"
I'm sitting here after a day of my brother-in-law's birdwatching while I plantwatched. He saw a Hutton's Vireo today. I saw Thrift and Blue-eyed Grass. In our parallel pursuits I praised him for his level of difficulty. Birds move but plant's don't. Richard has to wait on birds but plants wait on me.
I have often thought I may like plants better than animals or humans. (I suppose man's inplantimity to man has spurred me to it.) And animals you can groom, but you just can't prune. You can have a bigger impact on a plant's life than anything else I know. Feed it, prune it, shape it, make a topiary of it, hybridize, create a new cultivar with your name on a subspecies's tag--I mean, it would take much longer for me to breed a "Craig's Hound" than graft a fruting branch on a rootstock. And thinking of my doctoring years, I can't tell you how much easier plants are than patients. Plants can't disobey your orders.
I've been reading through Jane Hirschfield's After, a lovely book in which her diction becomes simpler with no loss of substance. I highly recommend it. Her "Assays" poems are particularly good, like "Envy: An Assay," "Termites: An Assay," and especially "Ah: An Assay."
Ah: An Assay
When the Greek gods would dip into the clothing and bodies of humans, it was not always as it appeared--not always, that is, for seduction, nor to test the warmth of welcome given to strangers. The sex--like the sudden unveiling and recognition--was not without pleasure. But later, they would remember: "The barley soup offered one night in the village of _____, its wild marjoram, scent of scorched iron, and carrots." "Ah!, and the ones who turned away from us, how their eyes would narrow and wrinkle the tops of their noses." "The barnyard odors." "And afterward, sleep in that salt-scent, close by their manure hoards and feathers." "Sleep itself!" "Ah!"
For this soft "ah!", immortals entered the world of bodies.
Such a great idea, walking in the shoes of gods. I'm not a fan of prose poems but I'm slowly being won over--about two decades after they became permanently accepted as a genre.
For those of you who think I'm just spinning my wheels, I presently have twenty poetry submissions pending to magazines that pay something. Some are big names (beyond my wildest dreams) but hey, just mail the stuff. Persistence is more important than talent. No one will discover you if you don't promote yourself. The world is not a merit system; it's connections, promotion, persistence, and a little talent that counts--not a lot. Just think Robert Creeley and Britney Spears. (I can't decide who of the two is less talented.)
I'm happy the NBA playoffs have begun, especially watching our local Warriors beat the number one team, Dallas, in their first game. For Christmas I got a subscription to NBA TV, so I don't have to miss anything. Tonight its the Lakers vs. the Suns and the Warriors vs. the Mavs. And don't miss Charles Barkley on TNT, truly the funniest Hall-of-Famer in the history of basketball, a gifted clown who can laugh at himself as much as he criticizes others. A national treasure (despite his ascending the stands in his playing days to spit on a fan, or his numerous bar brawls which he invariably won). He has displaced Ted Turner as "The Mouth of the South."
I will leave you here. Do stay in touch.
Thine in Truth and Art,
CE
unrated
I have often thought I may like plants better than animals or humans. (I suppose man's inplantimity to man has spurred me to it.) And animals you can groom, but you just can't prune. You can have a bigger impact on a plant's life than anything else I know. Feed it, prune it, shape it, make a topiary of it, hybridize, create a new cultivar with your name on a subspecies's tag--I mean, it would take much longer for me to breed a "Craig's Hound" than graft a fruting branch on a rootstock. And thinking of my doctoring years, I can't tell you how much easier plants are than patients. Plants can't disobey your orders.
I've been reading through Jane Hirschfield's After, a lovely book in which her diction becomes simpler with no loss of substance. I highly recommend it. Her "Assays" poems are particularly good, like "Envy: An Assay," "Termites: An Assay," and especially "Ah: An Assay."
Ah: An Assay
When the Greek gods would dip into the clothing and bodies of humans, it was not always as it appeared--not always, that is, for seduction, nor to test the warmth of welcome given to strangers. The sex--like the sudden unveiling and recognition--was not without pleasure. But later, they would remember: "The barley soup offered one night in the village of _____, its wild marjoram, scent of scorched iron, and carrots." "Ah!, and the ones who turned away from us, how their eyes would narrow and wrinkle the tops of their noses." "The barnyard odors." "And afterward, sleep in that salt-scent, close by their manure hoards and feathers." "Sleep itself!" "Ah!"
For this soft "ah!", immortals entered the world of bodies.
Such a great idea, walking in the shoes of gods. I'm not a fan of prose poems but I'm slowly being won over--about two decades after they became permanently accepted as a genre.
For those of you who think I'm just spinning my wheels, I presently have twenty poetry submissions pending to magazines that pay something. Some are big names (beyond my wildest dreams) but hey, just mail the stuff. Persistence is more important than talent. No one will discover you if you don't promote yourself. The world is not a merit system; it's connections, promotion, persistence, and a little talent that counts--not a lot. Just think Robert Creeley and Britney Spears. (I can't decide who of the two is less talented.)
I'm happy the NBA playoffs have begun, especially watching our local Warriors beat the number one team, Dallas, in their first game. For Christmas I got a subscription to NBA TV, so I don't have to miss anything. Tonight its the Lakers vs. the Suns and the Warriors vs. the Mavs. And don't miss Charles Barkley on TNT, truly the funniest Hall-of-Famer in the history of basketball, a gifted clown who can laugh at himself as much as he criticizes others. A national treasure (despite his ascending the stands in his playing days to spit on a fan, or his numerous bar brawls which he invariably won). He has displaced Ted Turner as "The Mouth of the South."
I will leave you here. Do stay in touch.
Thine in Truth and Art,
CE
unrated
Monday, April 16, 2007
Ducks, Submissions and Heaney
My neighbor discovered one duck on his roof between the TV and wireless satellites. I don't know if the duck had a Blackberry and was wired in, but he soon disappeared from that roost as well. The bowl of feed and hard-boiled egg the duck lady assured me he loved to eat went untouched. The duck has not returned; his brother never did.
Live and learn, but I won't be raising ducks anytime soon again here.
The story of the Good Friday Elephant that LKD posted in yesterday's comments was much worse.
I've noticed that since my depression improved, fewer and fewer folks seem to be coming to the site. Mental illness is much more interesting than poetry, I suppose, though often the two are not very far apart. Or maybe there are people out there who actually care about me, so when I'm doing well they are less likely to stop by.
Right now I'm in a holding pattern emotionally. I almost cried yesterday afternoon while fishing, but I think there was a reason--Kathleen was sad over her son's birthday, he being in Mexico; I was sad at being rejected by Pedestal Magazine (again), though they have published me in the past, and I was also sad that my youngest daughter (18) doesn't communicate with me, despite the fact I opened up a My Space site just to message her (she doesn't return my calls.) Teenagers. Kathleen says I should be angry about it but I can't be angry with my baby. Just sad she doesn't call.
But on another day when my mood was more upbeat these things would not have brought me near tears. It's the soil, not the seeds.
Today I may have to testify against our former neighbors about their thievery, as I saw the stolen items in their house and told a detective about it when questioned. It's a long drive on treacherous roads to the county courthouse, but I'll do my duty if they call me. I'm on hold. They hoped to choose a jury this morning and begin with testimony this afternoon. Fat chance, I say. Then I'm from LA. Maybe small towns get it done more quickly?
I really have not have good luck with my poetry submissions of late. In fact, I've never had worse luck. I think the main issue is style, not skill. Editors seem to favor open, inductive poems, and I write more deductive poems, some of them closed. To increase my publication rate, which used to be quite high, I think I'm going to have to change my style to suit the times: regurgitate an actual experience with as many particulars as possible in as short a space as possible, cut it into lines, and add a feeling or two for spice and authenticity.
I can't do it. I mean, I can do it, I find it rather easy--but it is not my idea of what is best. I've been reading Seamus Heaney, and although he is not my favorite poet, I admire his skill, and he writes many deductive poems and his intellectual content is usually satisfying. He is not dominated by recounting unfettered experience. I don't know how he'd ever get into the New Yorker if he weren't a Nobel Laureate. His style is all wrong for them. But everyone knows the NY is a "label whore."
I wanted to post another poem on ordinariness today, but I have so few and could not find another that qualified--I mean, in poetry, we usually seek the exceptional. Even if the experience seems ordinary, we tend to focus on the exceptional part. Instead I offer an apostrophe to editors who pass over my poetry. The poets who browse these pages should readily identify.
To the Giants
I see you in the exalted journals,
astonished by your concrete subjects,
startling imagery and veiled conclusions.
Only you can do this. Others try
to cage what has to soar. You tie
one-pound-test to it and set it free
When the line breaks you have a poem.
I’ve seen you write four hundred lines
on roasted meat, a hundred on zucchinis.
You can make poetry out of a dishcloth.
I sent my work to one of you once.
Your secretary wrote me: "Mr. S-
no longer comments on others' work
because of his busy schedule."
I thought your next book sucked.
I swear the two events were not related.
Maybe you remember
how it was before you "made it?"
I thought if I could slide one poem
beneath your discriminating nose
I'd have a chance. Instead I drop
rectangular white prayers in mailboxes
and change commemoratives for luck.
When the rejection slips arrive
I file them under "What the editors missed."
They read the same. say, invariably:
"We regret your work does not suit
our publication’s needs at this time."
As if! As if they had needs!
As if it were a matter of timing!
I dream of an editor
in a blue paisley suit who likes martinis
rummaging through the slush pile.
She finds my poem about the possum.
Her cat-eye glasses slip her bridge,
eyes squint like commas. Another martini
and she thinks "Why not?" until the Glucks,
Merwins and Ashberys start levitating
from her in-box to divide
the sorcerers from the apprentices.
"I have so little time," she thinks,
"and this is not the time for risks—
subscriptions are static, the board is short
of funds, besides, even angstrom-thin pages
could not accommodate all the deserving.
Prides already war over my bleached savannas.
If another craves entrance, let him
bring rains like Elijah, make the ink run."
(Published in Afternoon, Tintern Abbey, and Poetry Superhighway)
At Two Kilobats,
CE
Live and learn, but I won't be raising ducks anytime soon again here.
The story of the Good Friday Elephant that LKD posted in yesterday's comments was much worse.
I've noticed that since my depression improved, fewer and fewer folks seem to be coming to the site. Mental illness is much more interesting than poetry, I suppose, though often the two are not very far apart. Or maybe there are people out there who actually care about me, so when I'm doing well they are less likely to stop by.
Right now I'm in a holding pattern emotionally. I almost cried yesterday afternoon while fishing, but I think there was a reason--Kathleen was sad over her son's birthday, he being in Mexico; I was sad at being rejected by Pedestal Magazine (again), though they have published me in the past, and I was also sad that my youngest daughter (18) doesn't communicate with me, despite the fact I opened up a My Space site just to message her (she doesn't return my calls.) Teenagers. Kathleen says I should be angry about it but I can't be angry with my baby. Just sad she doesn't call.
But on another day when my mood was more upbeat these things would not have brought me near tears. It's the soil, not the seeds.
Today I may have to testify against our former neighbors about their thievery, as I saw the stolen items in their house and told a detective about it when questioned. It's a long drive on treacherous roads to the county courthouse, but I'll do my duty if they call me. I'm on hold. They hoped to choose a jury this morning and begin with testimony this afternoon. Fat chance, I say. Then I'm from LA. Maybe small towns get it done more quickly?
I really have not have good luck with my poetry submissions of late. In fact, I've never had worse luck. I think the main issue is style, not skill. Editors seem to favor open, inductive poems, and I write more deductive poems, some of them closed. To increase my publication rate, which used to be quite high, I think I'm going to have to change my style to suit the times: regurgitate an actual experience with as many particulars as possible in as short a space as possible, cut it into lines, and add a feeling or two for spice and authenticity.
I can't do it. I mean, I can do it, I find it rather easy--but it is not my idea of what is best. I've been reading Seamus Heaney, and although he is not my favorite poet, I admire his skill, and he writes many deductive poems and his intellectual content is usually satisfying. He is not dominated by recounting unfettered experience. I don't know how he'd ever get into the New Yorker if he weren't a Nobel Laureate. His style is all wrong for them. But everyone knows the NY is a "label whore."
I wanted to post another poem on ordinariness today, but I have so few and could not find another that qualified--I mean, in poetry, we usually seek the exceptional. Even if the experience seems ordinary, we tend to focus on the exceptional part. Instead I offer an apostrophe to editors who pass over my poetry. The poets who browse these pages should readily identify.
To the Giants
I see you in the exalted journals,
astonished by your concrete subjects,
startling imagery and veiled conclusions.
Only you can do this. Others try
to cage what has to soar. You tie
one-pound-test to it and set it free
When the line breaks you have a poem.
I’ve seen you write four hundred lines
on roasted meat, a hundred on zucchinis.
You can make poetry out of a dishcloth.
I sent my work to one of you once.
Your secretary wrote me: "Mr. S-
no longer comments on others' work
because of his busy schedule."
I thought your next book sucked.
I swear the two events were not related.
Maybe you remember
how it was before you "made it?"
I thought if I could slide one poem
beneath your discriminating nose
I'd have a chance. Instead I drop
rectangular white prayers in mailboxes
and change commemoratives for luck.
When the rejection slips arrive
I file them under "What the editors missed."
They read the same. say, invariably:
"We regret your work does not suit
our publication’s needs at this time."
As if! As if they had needs!
As if it were a matter of timing!
I dream of an editor
in a blue paisley suit who likes martinis
rummaging through the slush pile.
She finds my poem about the possum.
Her cat-eye glasses slip her bridge,
eyes squint like commas. Another martini
and she thinks "Why not?" until the Glucks,
Merwins and Ashberys start levitating
from her in-box to divide
the sorcerers from the apprentices.
"I have so little time," she thinks,
"and this is not the time for risks—
subscriptions are static, the board is short
of funds, besides, even angstrom-thin pages
could not accommodate all the deserving.
Prides already war over my bleached savannas.
If another craves entrance, let him
bring rains like Elijah, make the ink run."
(Published in Afternoon, Tintern Abbey, and Poetry Superhighway)
At Two Kilobats,
CE
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Richard Ford's "Existence Period"
After the slew of comments provoked by my last post, I am once again free of public opinion. My private opinion of myself, it goes without saying, is too private to publicize. Suffice it to say that the less I think about myself the better I feel. Thus to have an opinion of myself is dangerous and can be a symptom of depression.
Speaking of mental illness, I was happy to read that 39% of Americans admit to hearing voices--mainly inside their heads, I assume, the article wasn't clear--it brings my past psychoses and present mind closer to the middle of the Bell curve.
I just read Richard Ford's "Independence Day" for the first time and admired his concept of "The Existence Period," though I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the book, both its substance and style, just as I was by the culture and credo of the mid-nineties when it was published, when we became preoccupied as a nation with a stain on a blue dress. I remember a quote from one of Clinton's staffers back then: "Did she have big hair? Big tits? Oh no!" The whole country seemed a part of the Seinfeld Show back then.
As for Don Imus and his "nappy-headed hos," The real obscenity is our Captain Ahab's belief in pursuing the white whale of a feudal society with high tech weapons. It would take half a million troops to govern Iraq, and that would be an uneasy peace at best. Bosnia may be the only example of a war mainly quelled by air power. Ground troops are what are always needed. What I find hard to believe is that with our volunteer army we can't even deploy 500,000 troops--roughly the number of Americans who died in WW II. In any case, a "surge" is a ridiculous obscenity. Forget Imus. The real obscenities come from the administration's mouth. What I can't fathom is how John McCain can be so craven now, torpedoing any chance of a nomination, hoping for the Bush core support. "Toadies for president"--kiss up to the money. Obama raised 25 million by not kissing up, though he is extremely gracious. But I digress--what a blog is for, of course.
I find myself sometimes going to other literary blogs and bagging on poems by the famous, getting angry about nothing, as in the case of Adrienne Rich at Sam Rasnake's blog. Afterwards I have regrets, but I'm too ashamed to return to my post and try to erase it, especially if the blogger has already commented on it. Mea culpa. I know better than to go with my first gut response, but sometimes I lose that caution and wade in with mortars. I attack before I bethink. I want to be more reasonable and circumspect, but I fear it is my nature to jump on the horse before offering it an apple.
One line repeated twice in "Independence Day": "It was like a metaphor that stood for something else."
Back to that book. Having recently been reading Chekhov and Bellow and O'Connor, the superficial, Seinfeld-like self involvement of Frank Bascombe is so hard to imagine deserving of 400+ pages when compared to things that really matter. Sure, there is the dark background of a son who died and a painful divorce, but the real answer for Frank is not in these things but in the mild discipline of real estate. He is not lost; he is satisfied to tread water. The birth of new passion implied at the book's ending is not sufficient to overcome the ennui of the first 400 pages. But this is what passes for importance nowadays, for realism, for relevance. And I found his prose style at times sloppy and certainly choppy.
One of those books I got through because it was considered important, when in fact its importance is that it glorifies what is not important.
Here's to poor Frank Bascombe; I'm glad there's passion in my life, of which my disdain for the Bush administration is but a part.
As to mood, I'm still fragile, but not fragile enough to belabor it. Still, struggling with depression is not an "Existence Period;" it is a life-and-death battle, trying to come out of what Coleridge called "life-in-death and death-in-life." No one wants to be a ghost suspended between pole and tropic.
Thine,
CE
Speaking of mental illness, I was happy to read that 39% of Americans admit to hearing voices--mainly inside their heads, I assume, the article wasn't clear--it brings my past psychoses and present mind closer to the middle of the Bell curve.
I just read Richard Ford's "Independence Day" for the first time and admired his concept of "The Existence Period," though I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the book, both its substance and style, just as I was by the culture and credo of the mid-nineties when it was published, when we became preoccupied as a nation with a stain on a blue dress. I remember a quote from one of Clinton's staffers back then: "Did she have big hair? Big tits? Oh no!" The whole country seemed a part of the Seinfeld Show back then.
As for Don Imus and his "nappy-headed hos," The real obscenity is our Captain Ahab's belief in pursuing the white whale of a feudal society with high tech weapons. It would take half a million troops to govern Iraq, and that would be an uneasy peace at best. Bosnia may be the only example of a war mainly quelled by air power. Ground troops are what are always needed. What I find hard to believe is that with our volunteer army we can't even deploy 500,000 troops--roughly the number of Americans who died in WW II. In any case, a "surge" is a ridiculous obscenity. Forget Imus. The real obscenities come from the administration's mouth. What I can't fathom is how John McCain can be so craven now, torpedoing any chance of a nomination, hoping for the Bush core support. "Toadies for president"--kiss up to the money. Obama raised 25 million by not kissing up, though he is extremely gracious. But I digress--what a blog is for, of course.
I find myself sometimes going to other literary blogs and bagging on poems by the famous, getting angry about nothing, as in the case of Adrienne Rich at Sam Rasnake's blog. Afterwards I have regrets, but I'm too ashamed to return to my post and try to erase it, especially if the blogger has already commented on it. Mea culpa. I know better than to go with my first gut response, but sometimes I lose that caution and wade in with mortars. I attack before I bethink. I want to be more reasonable and circumspect, but I fear it is my nature to jump on the horse before offering it an apple.
One line repeated twice in "Independence Day": "It was like a metaphor that stood for something else."
Back to that book. Having recently been reading Chekhov and Bellow and O'Connor, the superficial, Seinfeld-like self involvement of Frank Bascombe is so hard to imagine deserving of 400+ pages when compared to things that really matter. Sure, there is the dark background of a son who died and a painful divorce, but the real answer for Frank is not in these things but in the mild discipline of real estate. He is not lost; he is satisfied to tread water. The birth of new passion implied at the book's ending is not sufficient to overcome the ennui of the first 400 pages. But this is what passes for importance nowadays, for realism, for relevance. And I found his prose style at times sloppy and certainly choppy.
One of those books I got through because it was considered important, when in fact its importance is that it glorifies what is not important.
Here's to poor Frank Bascombe; I'm glad there's passion in my life, of which my disdain for the Bush administration is but a part.
As to mood, I'm still fragile, but not fragile enough to belabor it. Still, struggling with depression is not an "Existence Period;" it is a life-and-death battle, trying to come out of what Coleridge called "life-in-death and death-in-life." No one wants to be a ghost suspended between pole and tropic.
Thine,
CE
Monday, March 12, 2007
Channeling Dostoevsky
(Just for fun.)
You, you, how dare you look down on me! My coat may be shabby and missing buttons; it does a better job of keeping out the rain than your fine silk umbrella, I assure you. I notice how you avert your eyes from me on the sidewalk, on the bridge, in cafés. It is easy to see how your feigned politeness only masks disgust. It would not become you to engage in conversation with such a shabby personage as myself, not that it would shame you, or damage your pride, but because it is not proper. I am a scrounging artist with an insolent servant I cannot afford in straitened quarters; you no doubt have a house on the hill or on the river and at least four servants. Perhaps you are having relations with one; perhaps you have dismissed two for becoming pregnant, handing them a little sack of rubles as compensation, knowing full well none will believe their tales— because on their one night out a week they must have been with sailors, or drunks, or others of the serving class with no self-control.
Your pocket watch chain may be gold, it may only be gilded. Your felt hat looks of good quality but is a little questionable around the edges. Your cravat? Ostentatious red silk. Cravats are cheap, of course. Your waistcoat looks in fine repair although your belly strains against it, a prosperous appearance if not refined. Your coat appears to be English tweed, certainly some sort of continental affectation, especially with those crude elbow patches. And the coat is not right for the cravat, which is certain. Which demands the question: Do you pick out your clothes or does your man? Obviously you do. Valets have better taste.
That you eschew boots in this thawing spring also proclaims your vanity; someone else will have to polish your brogues, but boots would not suit the gabardine slacks you affect. And is that an alligator belt? Again, your mismatched ensemble says more about you than fashion. You are bourgeois, an upper functionary perhaps, perhaps the last in a line of dwindling minor aristocrats with an income taken from the flesh of your serfs. You are not in the arts; doubtful in business, either, or you would have the sense to dress more tastefully. Had I your money I would certainly dress better than you; but I would rather have this ragged coat than your inelegant ensemble, however rich the material. You remind me of the “Emperor with No Clothes,” except it would be “The Emperor with Bad Clothes.”
As you smoke your cigarillo from an ivory holder, and gesture, world-weary to your better-dressed friends over a glass of vodka, you appear in command, a man among men, a man above the shabbiness I endure. But who’s to say how shabby you are inside? “One thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside,” Lennoninsky wrote. Indeed, your subterfuges don’t fool me.
Your face is more indulgent than cruel, your cheeks soft and full, your moustache thick but not overweening, no need to hide your worsening teeth with a larger brush just yet; an early wattle on your neck that will come to swing with the years; the pomade on your thinning hair, the sensuous Mediterranean lips, the broad nose and the thin almond eyes recalling some Mongol ancestor, like your clothes, these features seem not to belong together, belying your outward, superficial, self-satisfied confidence!
I am wearing leather boots, the heels worn down but no holes as of yet; they manage to keep the rain out, though I am frequently footsore. No fancy shoes to hand waterlogged and scuffed over to a fawning servant. And though I have worn this, one of my two good shirts, for three days prior to this occasion tonight, and its cuffs are a little frayed, it is of good quality, a very fine wool, most likely a better quality once than you are wearing now. My stained beret, impractical for this weather, hangs on the rack. I took my hat off as I came in, a tradition you jauntily disrespect. And is the beret an affectation? No! By no means. It is a symbol by which I mock myself as an artist with little utility in this suffocating society of bores. I mock myself intentionally.
Have you ever mocked yourself? Have you ever looked in the mirror and beheld the essential evil behind your ingratiating smile? I doubt there has ever been a time in your life when you looked upon your reflection with anything save self-congratulation; such insight would be beyond you.
And yet you might represent a publishing house, a magazine, someone for whom I must scrape and bow to to eke out a living as an artist, someone not worth the last five thoughts from my brain. And if I met you in that relation, with these, my best clothes, you would certainly think to get the better of me and negotiate some scandalous payment for the sweat of my brain. You would not think me someone capable of bargaining over the quality of a piece; no, you would try to steal it from me, steal my thoughts and hope it improves your circulation, like some bug collector charging admission to his museum while adding a new bug. I am that bug, aren’t I?
How I despise you! How I despise the falsity of your pose, of everything it represents, half-measures, nods to liberalism, even Marxism, perhaps— no; that would be too daring and might make you slightly suspect even among those whom you call “friends,” no doubt old chums from the university who would abandon you if you fell out of society for your debts. I had to leave the university because of debts and become this creature you naturally avoid.
What if I were to walk up to your circle, right now, and begin talking as if I had been invited? I might talk of the recent architectural changes to Petersburg, or the price of pork rising above the peasant’s means, or the eternal illusion of freeing and reforming the serfs. I could nod and listen with the best of you, and for your sake pretend you were of equal intellectual standing as I, yes, I could pretend to humility among your overfed circle of bourgeoisie functionaries, minor aristocrats, businessmen, liberal-minded poseurs and the lot. And would you forgive my appearance? This three days’ beard? This ragged and thinning hair creeping over my ears like a bad fungus? Perhaps. Perhaps there is in you, or one of your circle, the ability to see beyond a man’s shell, to see into the heart and the mind—but what is the purpose of all your desultory and condescending conversation and polite niceties and slight bows toward your betters? To avoid this very thing, to lose humanity in inane politeness.
I pity you, Sir, I pray when your last breath comes it will be breathed with the sudden and horrifying realization of the triviality of your entire life. Only this will save you. Or should you lose a daughter or son or a beloved wife or friend you loved before that last deathbed revelation I doubt will ever overtake you, I pray the tragedy might be enough to make you kneel in church and confess, “Be merciful to me, O God, for I am a sinner,” and mean it. But you cannot do that now; church is for the best pews and the satisfaction that you are only a formal sinner, not in the real sense. You have not been unfaithful toward your wife in a long while, despite the opportunities your club regularly affords, and the last time meant nothing. The dismissed servants asked for your attentions, hardly your fault. You don’t cheat at cards and you return invitations for invitations; surely you are good, and insulated from common evil. Surely you are above the degradation God visits on the vast majority of humans, with their dirt floors and thatched roofs and drunken Saturdays, burying half their infants in graves whose markings disappear with the rains; surely you will never see how this might be your salvation, no, you must precede them into heaven! Surely you are the grasshopper with others to play the ant for you, while we, the hard working ants, suffer the fate of grasshoppers in the winter, that which you deserve--hungry and piled with blankets around a few coals. Have you earned anything in your life? You will know if that which has only been given is likewise taken away.
I'm a big fan of Fyodor, he vies with Eliot as my favorite author. Eliot is harder to imitate, and though it can be done, it usually ends in parody. Imitating Dostoevsky I find easier to do without degenerating into parody, but let the reader judge--that inveterate reader who will actually put up with 1400 words in one day's blog.
Thine at 1 Kilorat (feeling irritable and caged up),
CE
You, you, how dare you look down on me! My coat may be shabby and missing buttons; it does a better job of keeping out the rain than your fine silk umbrella, I assure you. I notice how you avert your eyes from me on the sidewalk, on the bridge, in cafés. It is easy to see how your feigned politeness only masks disgust. It would not become you to engage in conversation with such a shabby personage as myself, not that it would shame you, or damage your pride, but because it is not proper. I am a scrounging artist with an insolent servant I cannot afford in straitened quarters; you no doubt have a house on the hill or on the river and at least four servants. Perhaps you are having relations with one; perhaps you have dismissed two for becoming pregnant, handing them a little sack of rubles as compensation, knowing full well none will believe their tales— because on their one night out a week they must have been with sailors, or drunks, or others of the serving class with no self-control.
Your pocket watch chain may be gold, it may only be gilded. Your felt hat looks of good quality but is a little questionable around the edges. Your cravat? Ostentatious red silk. Cravats are cheap, of course. Your waistcoat looks in fine repair although your belly strains against it, a prosperous appearance if not refined. Your coat appears to be English tweed, certainly some sort of continental affectation, especially with those crude elbow patches. And the coat is not right for the cravat, which is certain. Which demands the question: Do you pick out your clothes or does your man? Obviously you do. Valets have better taste.
That you eschew boots in this thawing spring also proclaims your vanity; someone else will have to polish your brogues, but boots would not suit the gabardine slacks you affect. And is that an alligator belt? Again, your mismatched ensemble says more about you than fashion. You are bourgeois, an upper functionary perhaps, perhaps the last in a line of dwindling minor aristocrats with an income taken from the flesh of your serfs. You are not in the arts; doubtful in business, either, or you would have the sense to dress more tastefully. Had I your money I would certainly dress better than you; but I would rather have this ragged coat than your inelegant ensemble, however rich the material. You remind me of the “Emperor with No Clothes,” except it would be “The Emperor with Bad Clothes.”
As you smoke your cigarillo from an ivory holder, and gesture, world-weary to your better-dressed friends over a glass of vodka, you appear in command, a man among men, a man above the shabbiness I endure. But who’s to say how shabby you are inside? “One thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside,” Lennoninsky wrote. Indeed, your subterfuges don’t fool me.
Your face is more indulgent than cruel, your cheeks soft and full, your moustache thick but not overweening, no need to hide your worsening teeth with a larger brush just yet; an early wattle on your neck that will come to swing with the years; the pomade on your thinning hair, the sensuous Mediterranean lips, the broad nose and the thin almond eyes recalling some Mongol ancestor, like your clothes, these features seem not to belong together, belying your outward, superficial, self-satisfied confidence!
I am wearing leather boots, the heels worn down but no holes as of yet; they manage to keep the rain out, though I am frequently footsore. No fancy shoes to hand waterlogged and scuffed over to a fawning servant. And though I have worn this, one of my two good shirts, for three days prior to this occasion tonight, and its cuffs are a little frayed, it is of good quality, a very fine wool, most likely a better quality once than you are wearing now. My stained beret, impractical for this weather, hangs on the rack. I took my hat off as I came in, a tradition you jauntily disrespect. And is the beret an affectation? No! By no means. It is a symbol by which I mock myself as an artist with little utility in this suffocating society of bores. I mock myself intentionally.
Have you ever mocked yourself? Have you ever looked in the mirror and beheld the essential evil behind your ingratiating smile? I doubt there has ever been a time in your life when you looked upon your reflection with anything save self-congratulation; such insight would be beyond you.
And yet you might represent a publishing house, a magazine, someone for whom I must scrape and bow to to eke out a living as an artist, someone not worth the last five thoughts from my brain. And if I met you in that relation, with these, my best clothes, you would certainly think to get the better of me and negotiate some scandalous payment for the sweat of my brain. You would not think me someone capable of bargaining over the quality of a piece; no, you would try to steal it from me, steal my thoughts and hope it improves your circulation, like some bug collector charging admission to his museum while adding a new bug. I am that bug, aren’t I?
How I despise you! How I despise the falsity of your pose, of everything it represents, half-measures, nods to liberalism, even Marxism, perhaps— no; that would be too daring and might make you slightly suspect even among those whom you call “friends,” no doubt old chums from the university who would abandon you if you fell out of society for your debts. I had to leave the university because of debts and become this creature you naturally avoid.
What if I were to walk up to your circle, right now, and begin talking as if I had been invited? I might talk of the recent architectural changes to Petersburg, or the price of pork rising above the peasant’s means, or the eternal illusion of freeing and reforming the serfs. I could nod and listen with the best of you, and for your sake pretend you were of equal intellectual standing as I, yes, I could pretend to humility among your overfed circle of bourgeoisie functionaries, minor aristocrats, businessmen, liberal-minded poseurs and the lot. And would you forgive my appearance? This three days’ beard? This ragged and thinning hair creeping over my ears like a bad fungus? Perhaps. Perhaps there is in you, or one of your circle, the ability to see beyond a man’s shell, to see into the heart and the mind—but what is the purpose of all your desultory and condescending conversation and polite niceties and slight bows toward your betters? To avoid this very thing, to lose humanity in inane politeness.
I pity you, Sir, I pray when your last breath comes it will be breathed with the sudden and horrifying realization of the triviality of your entire life. Only this will save you. Or should you lose a daughter or son or a beloved wife or friend you loved before that last deathbed revelation I doubt will ever overtake you, I pray the tragedy might be enough to make you kneel in church and confess, “Be merciful to me, O God, for I am a sinner,” and mean it. But you cannot do that now; church is for the best pews and the satisfaction that you are only a formal sinner, not in the real sense. You have not been unfaithful toward your wife in a long while, despite the opportunities your club regularly affords, and the last time meant nothing. The dismissed servants asked for your attentions, hardly your fault. You don’t cheat at cards and you return invitations for invitations; surely you are good, and insulated from common evil. Surely you are above the degradation God visits on the vast majority of humans, with their dirt floors and thatched roofs and drunken Saturdays, burying half their infants in graves whose markings disappear with the rains; surely you will never see how this might be your salvation, no, you must precede them into heaven! Surely you are the grasshopper with others to play the ant for you, while we, the hard working ants, suffer the fate of grasshoppers in the winter, that which you deserve--hungry and piled with blankets around a few coals. Have you earned anything in your life? You will know if that which has only been given is likewise taken away.
I'm a big fan of Fyodor, he vies with Eliot as my favorite author. Eliot is harder to imitate, and though it can be done, it usually ends in parody. Imitating Dostoevsky I find easier to do without degenerating into parody, but let the reader judge--that inveterate reader who will actually put up with 1400 words in one day's blog.
Thine at 1 Kilorat (feeling irritable and caged up),
CE
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Ten Questions on Poetry Today
Nic Sebastian posed these at his blog, so I thought I'd answer them:
The Ten Questions
1. In this 2003 interview, Canadian poet George Bowering quotes Shelley: “The poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world.” Do you think the poet has a specific role to play in human affairs in this century? If so, what is it?
1) No role. Or nearly none. Poetry is a cultural vestigial organ, like lawn bowling. Only a few aficionados appreciate it. “What poetry most lacks is an audience worthy of it.” “Poetry was always for the elite.”
2. Talk about the importance of poetry workshops to you as a poet - now and in your earlier development. Do you differentiate between in-person and on-line workshops?
2) I took only one poetry workshop in person, and it wasn’t helpful. All the other participants were callow, unfledged, unfamiliar with the history or distinctions in the art. Online workshops? The old Zeugma listserv helped me; boards rarely influenced me; publication in a decent journal was my general measure.
3. Comment on this passage by former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall in his 1983 essay Poetry and Ambition: “Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don’t let them go, don’t publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right. […] When Pope wrote An Essay on Criticism seventeen hundred years after Horace, he cut the waiting time in half, suggesting that poets keep their poems for five years before publication. […] By this time, I would be grateful - and published poetry would be better - if people kept their poems home for eighteen months.”
3) Absolutely agree. I tell students not to revise a first draft for a month, not to edit that for six months, and not to submit for a year. Donald Hall is not a favorite of mine; his wife was much the better poet.
4. Comment on this passage from Why Poetry Criticism Sucks, an article by Kristin Prevallet in the April 2000 issue of Jacket magazine: “It is very difficult to write poetry criticism and not have poets feel personally maimed […]. For some reason poetry criticism does not advance the formal, intellectual, or contextual parameters of poetry. It always gets confused with the personal.”
4) Not in my essays. Search “Logopoetry” for instance; more theoretical than personal; my essays on Eliot inform without degrading; only my essay on Bukowski could be considered perjorative. Fundamental poetry criticism is interesting for its own sake. A friend of mine reads it more than poetry itself just for fun.
5. Do you have an internet presence? If so, describe it and comment on the state of the poetry blogsphere. If not, why not?
5) Yes. Edited The Melic Review for eight years. Published in journals voraciously. Many folks, I’m told, have heard of me. There’s some article on the net entitled “A Presence on the Net” KayDay wrote about me without ever contacting me. As for today, my presence has diminished in proportion to my growth; I don’t need boards for growth or criticism; my wife acts as my editor, a poet in her own right, and she’s better than any I’ve ever met on a board. She founded Zeugma in its infancy and glory, not the Zeugma that now exists.
6. To what degree have you been published and to what degree has that helped or hindered your development as a poet?
6) Publishing: 1 book of poetry, edited an anthology; upwards of five hundred poems, columns, essays and some fiction. Unfortunately, at least half of these have been lost to failed electronic magazines who no longer maintain archives. Being published in a good journal is always a tonic to my self-esteem, as I believe all poets suffer from lifelong doubts about the value of their work.
7. Comment on today’s huge numbers of on-line poetry publications.
7) Most are at best mediocre, one sign of which is publishing their own staff. Some are good; many good ones have failed. Usually I hear of a new, promising one through contacts and I send them something. Also, that The New Yorker and Ploughshares, for example, now accept online submissions brings two worlds together for the better.
8. Self-publishing has become inexpensive and relatively painless. What are your thoughts on self-publishing?
8) I’m old school. I don’t self-publish, except my old essays in Melic. Poets tell me I’m stupid to cling to such a value; I know 85% of all books in the USA are self-published; but then there’s the question of marketing–after you run out of friends and relatives, where do you go? Arrange a book tour out of the back of your van? I’ve read at major bookstores, and most audiences are poets themselves wondering why you’re at the podium and they’re not. I haven’t had a book of poems published in ten years; then I haven’t been aggressive in promoting later mss., of which I have three, to small presses, because I have little confidence that they are much better than self-publishing. And the major publishers are closed to newbies, like Copper Canyon Press. Why publish if no one reads your books? A successful book of poetry should sell 1000 copies. I estimate less than 1% do.
9. What do you see as the biggest opportunity facing a poet today, as compared to 50 years ago?
9) By diluting the talent pool into bedlam, by dumbing down the curriculum, etc., nearly every poet can obtain some public exposure, when it used to be much harder without true talent and hard work. The democratization of poetry allows many more to participate. Unfortunately, it muddies all the distinctions, at the common level, between the bad, the mediocre, the good and the great. Anyone can get published today; that’s the opportunity and that’s the curse.
10. What do you see as the biggest challenge to a poet today, as compared to 50 years ago?
10) Striving to be as knowlegeable, literate and skilled as a poet from 50 years ago. Nowadays every uneducated slob thinks his doodlings are poetry. There are very few truly skilled poets practicing. I’ve had students who could never actually fulfill the assignment to write a sonnet; where would they have been 100 years ago? I think you should master formal verse before indulging in free verse. The one bleeds into the other. You can hear formal rhythms in the best free verse poets. Most poets today are simply unskilled in the basic tenets of poetic history and form, and it shows particularly in their sloppy line breaks and little difference from prose; it’s just chopped prose.
I hope I don’t come off as too much of a curmudgeon, but I’m 52 and have been publishing since the age of 18, while fitting in a medical career, a musical career, and raising a family–besides trying to manage my manic-depressive illness. So I’ve seen a lot come and go. Why someone like Robert Creeley garnered so much acclaim puzzles me; success often has little to do with quality; sometimes they seem absolutely divorced. Put Ted Hughes in that queue, too.
The Ten Questions
1. In this 2003 interview, Canadian poet George Bowering quotes Shelley: “The poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world.” Do you think the poet has a specific role to play in human affairs in this century? If so, what is it?
1) No role. Or nearly none. Poetry is a cultural vestigial organ, like lawn bowling. Only a few aficionados appreciate it. “What poetry most lacks is an audience worthy of it.” “Poetry was always for the elite.”
2. Talk about the importance of poetry workshops to you as a poet - now and in your earlier development. Do you differentiate between in-person and on-line workshops?
2) I took only one poetry workshop in person, and it wasn’t helpful. All the other participants were callow, unfledged, unfamiliar with the history or distinctions in the art. Online workshops? The old Zeugma listserv helped me; boards rarely influenced me; publication in a decent journal was my general measure.
3. Comment on this passage by former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall in his 1983 essay Poetry and Ambition: “Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don’t let them go, don’t publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right. […] When Pope wrote An Essay on Criticism seventeen hundred years after Horace, he cut the waiting time in half, suggesting that poets keep their poems for five years before publication. […] By this time, I would be grateful - and published poetry would be better - if people kept their poems home for eighteen months.”
3) Absolutely agree. I tell students not to revise a first draft for a month, not to edit that for six months, and not to submit for a year. Donald Hall is not a favorite of mine; his wife was much the better poet.
4. Comment on this passage from Why Poetry Criticism Sucks, an article by Kristin Prevallet in the April 2000 issue of Jacket magazine: “It is very difficult to write poetry criticism and not have poets feel personally maimed […]. For some reason poetry criticism does not advance the formal, intellectual, or contextual parameters of poetry. It always gets confused with the personal.”
4) Not in my essays. Search “Logopoetry” for instance; more theoretical than personal; my essays on Eliot inform without degrading; only my essay on Bukowski could be considered perjorative. Fundamental poetry criticism is interesting for its own sake. A friend of mine reads it more than poetry itself just for fun.
5. Do you have an internet presence? If so, describe it and comment on the state of the poetry blogsphere. If not, why not?
5) Yes. Edited The Melic Review for eight years. Published in journals voraciously. Many folks, I’m told, have heard of me. There’s some article on the net entitled “A Presence on the Net” KayDay wrote about me without ever contacting me. As for today, my presence has diminished in proportion to my growth; I don’t need boards for growth or criticism; my wife acts as my editor, a poet in her own right, and she’s better than any I’ve ever met on a board. She founded Zeugma in its infancy and glory, not the Zeugma that now exists.
6. To what degree have you been published and to what degree has that helped or hindered your development as a poet?
6) Publishing: 1 book of poetry, edited an anthology; upwards of five hundred poems, columns, essays and some fiction. Unfortunately, at least half of these have been lost to failed electronic magazines who no longer maintain archives. Being published in a good journal is always a tonic to my self-esteem, as I believe all poets suffer from lifelong doubts about the value of their work.
7. Comment on today’s huge numbers of on-line poetry publications.
7) Most are at best mediocre, one sign of which is publishing their own staff. Some are good; many good ones have failed. Usually I hear of a new, promising one through contacts and I send them something. Also, that The New Yorker and Ploughshares, for example, now accept online submissions brings two worlds together for the better.
8. Self-publishing has become inexpensive and relatively painless. What are your thoughts on self-publishing?
8) I’m old school. I don’t self-publish, except my old essays in Melic. Poets tell me I’m stupid to cling to such a value; I know 85% of all books in the USA are self-published; but then there’s the question of marketing–after you run out of friends and relatives, where do you go? Arrange a book tour out of the back of your van? I’ve read at major bookstores, and most audiences are poets themselves wondering why you’re at the podium and they’re not. I haven’t had a book of poems published in ten years; then I haven’t been aggressive in promoting later mss., of which I have three, to small presses, because I have little confidence that they are much better than self-publishing. And the major publishers are closed to newbies, like Copper Canyon Press. Why publish if no one reads your books? A successful book of poetry should sell 1000 copies. I estimate less than 1% do.
9. What do you see as the biggest opportunity facing a poet today, as compared to 50 years ago?
9) By diluting the talent pool into bedlam, by dumbing down the curriculum, etc., nearly every poet can obtain some public exposure, when it used to be much harder without true talent and hard work. The democratization of poetry allows many more to participate. Unfortunately, it muddies all the distinctions, at the common level, between the bad, the mediocre, the good and the great. Anyone can get published today; that’s the opportunity and that’s the curse.
10. What do you see as the biggest challenge to a poet today, as compared to 50 years ago?
10) Striving to be as knowlegeable, literate and skilled as a poet from 50 years ago. Nowadays every uneducated slob thinks his doodlings are poetry. There are very few truly skilled poets practicing. I’ve had students who could never actually fulfill the assignment to write a sonnet; where would they have been 100 years ago? I think you should master formal verse before indulging in free verse. The one bleeds into the other. You can hear formal rhythms in the best free verse poets. Most poets today are simply unskilled in the basic tenets of poetic history and form, and it shows particularly in their sloppy line breaks and little difference from prose; it’s just chopped prose.
I hope I don’t come off as too much of a curmudgeon, but I’m 52 and have been publishing since the age of 18, while fitting in a medical career, a musical career, and raising a family–besides trying to manage my manic-depressive illness. So I’ve seen a lot come and go. Why someone like Robert Creeley garnered so much acclaim puzzles me; success often has little to do with quality; sometimes they seem absolutely divorced. Put Ted Hughes in that queue, too.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Dostoevsky and Thoreau
Today's quotes; which is which?
"I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer."
"The best definition of man is the ungrateful biped."
It has occurred to me that since I've been feeling better, there has been no sufficient account of my interior workings, which is natural when one is no longer depressed, as one's attention turns to things other than oneself. Nevertheless, I think it only fair that I try, perhaps tomorrow, to write about my new experience of consciousness with at least half the avidity with which I described the dark side of my illness. More anon.
Thine,
CE
"I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer."
"The best definition of man is the ungrateful biped."
It has occurred to me that since I've been feeling better, there has been no sufficient account of my interior workings, which is natural when one is no longer depressed, as one's attention turns to things other than oneself. Nevertheless, I think it only fair that I try, perhaps tomorrow, to write about my new experience of consciousness with at least half the avidity with which I described the dark side of my illness. More anon.
Thine,
CE
Monday, March 05, 2007
Thoreau and Dostoevsky
It has occurred to me, that though dissimilar in tone, Thoreau's "Walden" and Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" bear certain similarities (though no doubt more differences). I thought it would be entertaining to juxtapose quotes from each. Who proves wiser in today's example? And which is which?
"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save one tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of consequence."
"Perhaps the only goal on earth toward which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained."
Two Kilobunnies,
CE
"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save one tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of consequence."
"Perhaps the only goal on earth toward which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained."
Two Kilobunnies,
CE
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Faux Fame; See No Evil
You, too, can be famous! Click here!
Or here!
Or even here!
Here's my two brothers and I posing long ago for "Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil":
And here's the three of us again, years later, stuck on the same morality play:
Notice the effect this stern moral stance has exacted from our scalps.
Off to chowder and wine tasting in a celebration of Mendocino's winning war to save the whales, started thirty years ago. By the way, we won.
Thine at one kilobunny though still ill,
CE
Or here!
Or even here!
Here's my two brothers and I posing long ago for "Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil":
And here's the three of us again, years later, stuck on the same morality play:
Notice the effect this stern moral stance has exacted from our scalps.
Off to chowder and wine tasting in a celebration of Mendocino's winning war to save the whales, started thirty years ago. By the way, we won.
Thine at one kilobunny though still ill,
CE
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Literary Conversation Revealed...
I have an ongoing literary dialogue with a friend I cannot name, although he posts comments here frequently, though he has forbidden me to quote him. I reason therefore that if I quote him without attribution I am not quoting him.
It also occurs to me that when I am blogging about literary matters, I am likely not depressed--which makes many disinterested, and though I thank you all for your support during my depression, you should take my new ability to write about things other than myself as a sign of relative health.
I have cared about poetry since a very early age; perhaps it's being the second born son that makes me feel unappreciated; perhaps it's my very lack of talent; perhaps it's the current culture; but I can't get the monkey of poetry off my back at this late stage of my life. I want to flush it, return to medicine and be "a useful engine" as Thomas the Tank advises; on the other hand, Shelley said "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe." I think in this regard that philosophy, from Plato to Marx, has been much more important in legislating the universe, that Shelley obviously overestimated the importance of poets because he, too, was a manic-depressive in a fairly manic state when he wrote his essay, "In Defence of Poetry" [Poesy].
Without further ado, then, I give you a dialogue between me and one persistent literary correspondent:
Anon: The Newtonian world of Rube Goldberg contraptions, self-contained
well-oiled machines is gone, so too the closed deductive approach.
CE: I would disagree. From quantum mechanics to Ptolemy the level at which truth is perceived is not invalidated by another level; there is no more truth in quantum theory than Newton; it is just a finer representation of physics. In fact, to the average reader of poetry, there is more truth in Newton.
Anon: Every observer is a creator. After all, there is no world absent the
observer. Therefore every reader must be invited to co-create --or co-write-- the poem. If you wish to evoke a universe, you must invite
others along. The age of teachers-and-pupils is gone.
CE: Subject-object is unavoidable, despite Eliot's argument, which you endorse above, from "Tradition and the Individual Talent." But Auden threw this to the wind, as did Richard Wilbur and many others, with a narrator speaking to an audience. I would opine that no matter how much fusion is sought, a fundamental gap exists between author and reader, that the reader cannot help trying to understand what the artist intends, even if the artist claims he intends nothing. From "The Waste Land," even: "Give, sympathize, control."
Anon: If you want to 'people' your universe and seek some kind of endorsement or public imprimatur, you must attract people. To attract people, you must offer a
participatory environment. This is not currying as you say, or even laziness.
CE: All great poetry invites participation, even Milton, whose epic I will never like. When we see Eve in the garden, for instance, our sexuality is aroused, despite his Puritan profession.
Anon: By the way, you can't quote me.
CE: LOL! You have no power over this other than honor. Can I post this conversation at my blog (without attribution)?
And so I have.
Until later,
CE
It also occurs to me that when I am blogging about literary matters, I am likely not depressed--which makes many disinterested, and though I thank you all for your support during my depression, you should take my new ability to write about things other than myself as a sign of relative health.
I have cared about poetry since a very early age; perhaps it's being the second born son that makes me feel unappreciated; perhaps it's my very lack of talent; perhaps it's the current culture; but I can't get the monkey of poetry off my back at this late stage of my life. I want to flush it, return to medicine and be "a useful engine" as Thomas the Tank advises; on the other hand, Shelley said "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe." I think in this regard that philosophy, from Plato to Marx, has been much more important in legislating the universe, that Shelley obviously overestimated the importance of poets because he, too, was a manic-depressive in a fairly manic state when he wrote his essay, "In Defence of Poetry" [Poesy].
Without further ado, then, I give you a dialogue between me and one persistent literary correspondent:
Anon: The Newtonian world of Rube Goldberg contraptions, self-contained
well-oiled machines is gone, so too the closed deductive approach.
CE: I would disagree. From quantum mechanics to Ptolemy the level at which truth is perceived is not invalidated by another level; there is no more truth in quantum theory than Newton; it is just a finer representation of physics. In fact, to the average reader of poetry, there is more truth in Newton.
Anon: Every observer is a creator. After all, there is no world absent the
observer. Therefore every reader must be invited to co-create --or co-write-- the poem. If you wish to evoke a universe, you must invite
others along. The age of teachers-and-pupils is gone.
CE: Subject-object is unavoidable, despite Eliot's argument, which you endorse above, from "Tradition and the Individual Talent." But Auden threw this to the wind, as did Richard Wilbur and many others, with a narrator speaking to an audience. I would opine that no matter how much fusion is sought, a fundamental gap exists between author and reader, that the reader cannot help trying to understand what the artist intends, even if the artist claims he intends nothing. From "The Waste Land," even: "Give, sympathize, control."
Anon: If you want to 'people' your universe and seek some kind of endorsement or public imprimatur, you must attract people. To attract people, you must offer a
participatory environment. This is not currying as you say, or even laziness.
CE: All great poetry invites participation, even Milton, whose epic I will never like. When we see Eve in the garden, for instance, our sexuality is aroused, despite his Puritan profession.
Anon: By the way, you can't quote me.
CE: LOL! You have no power over this other than honor. Can I post this conversation at my blog (without attribution)?
And so I have.
Until later,
CE
Friday, February 23, 2007
Inducitve, Deductive, Open and Closed Poetics
I can't believe it's been almost a week since I last posted. If I cared about stats, it would not doubt show a great drop-off in readership. Computer difficulties and other project have intervened. But now, for those interested, I publish my unpublished essay on the title above. Any editor interested in pubishing the essay officially is hereby invited to query me. That's role change, yes?
Inductive and Deductive Poetry
Upon recent reflection, I have discovered another analytic Mandala for poetry. Previously, in my Logopoetry essays, I made the following mandala, to introduce how the Logos (unattainable artistic ideal) might best be approximated through language, represented by logos, the means by which we interpret an experience of language.
To quote “Logopoetry III”: “One can readily see from this construction that my idea of logos as reason is not some mummified reductionism but a dynamic balance between complimentary qualities — the Aristotelian mean, in other words . . .
“The mandala is in the form of a quincunx, the Logos/logos duality being the center, where logos is the interpreting principle that connects the ideal (Logos) with the real (Art). For each of the four poles there exists an opposite quality — but not the quality it faces. Apathy, not meaning, is the opposite of feeling. And nonsense, not feeling, is the opposite of meaning. Form is not the opposite of substance. The opposite of form is formlessness or chaos. And the opposite of substance is lack of substance, or superficiality and confusion. All four qualities can be both competitive and complimentary, depending on the poem. Each of the four poles embodies a positive value and logos symbolizes the dynamic mean between these values, the balance that should best succeed at realizing the Logos, or artistic ideal.
“The danger inherent in this schema is . . . not opposition but imbalance: music at the expense of substance; feeling at the expense of meaning; meaning at the expense of feeling; substance at the expense of form, and so forth. Good poetry should more often come near the cross-hairs than not. And I don't mean by this optimal intersection of qualities some homogenized mixture with exactly 25% of each. Good poetry journeys from pole to pole in the course of a narrative but without losing its balance — just as Eliot can be by turns pedantic or lyrical in his “Four Quartets.” Furthermore, there are poems that succeed with imbalance, but in such cases the dominant pole is supported by the other qualities: it does not abandon them. I don't want to argue for an orthodox requirement of balance or anything else; my theories are meant only to be a general guide and should be discarded if ever they stand in the way of good writing. But good writing is more often balanced than not.”
My chief aim in my essays on Logopoetry was to elucidate the obvious and unavoidable truth that poetry imposes a meaning on us because of the brain’s long habit of trying to make sense of words. As I put it in the conclusion of “Logopoetry II”:
“Intelligibility, the acknowledged cooperation of the brain's hemispheres, man's need for meaning, and the idea that language is first a vehicle for communication — these constitute the introductory principles of logopoetry.”
Sometimes it strikes me as superfluous to have made these points, but for the 20th and 21st centuries I found it a necessity in understanding why I found some poetry enjoyable and some inscrutable. Of the latter I decided it was not a question of my intelligence but often intentional obscurity on the poet’s part, as if he were writing only for himself. Although the whole misdirection may have been started by Eliot, he later abandoned his allusive method in the interests of communication, as in “The Hollow Men” and “Four Quartets.” I don’t think he could have foreseen Olson’s “Maximus” poems or Deconstructionism when he penned “The Waste Land” in a sanatorium, working through his depression by way of a disconnected psychological epic, made worse by its allusions, adding pretension to its sin of obscurity.
This is all old news. But it recently came to me that there was a very simple way to classify how poems are constructed, not only in this age but in all ages. If that boast seems excessive, allow me to explain the simplicity of this approach, which does not conflict with Logopoetry at all, since the two are concerned with different types of knowledge.
Simply put, poems can be either deductive or inductive and open or closed.
Deductive poems use figures of speech to support their assertions and observations, however far-fetched. In other words, the writer does not start in a real experience but uses experiences to advance the poem and its theme. Therefore he does not begin with, “The desert wind came up and scorched the rocks”—an actual scene—rather uses the scene to elaborate something else: “Her voice was like a desert wind that scorched the rocks.” The former line implies an inductive poem, the latter a deductive poem. Inductive poems spring from an actual experience that generates elaboration. Deductive poems mold experience for their own purposes.
In addition, deductive and inductive poems can be either open or closed. Open poems invite the reader to join the author in his journey, avoiding easy conclusions, while in a closed poem the author does most of the work for us. Open poems often end in ambiguity, not certainty. They tease more than inform the reader. Closed poems usually end with a summarizing statement, however disguised by technique. In closed poems the poet tries to make his own sense of the narrative, usually near the end, with little room for negotiation with the reader.
In all ages, and I suspect, all languages, these four constructions have been extant: open, inductive poems; closed, inductive poems; open, deductive poems, and closed, deductive poems. Our present age seems to favor inductive poems in general, while the Elizabethans favored deductive poems. One need only read Shakespeare’s sonnets to be assured of this. Each one strives for a resolution (often the weakest part of the poem) because he felt compelled by both the form and the culture to reach an accessible conclusion. In his early work, Wordsworth is likely the most famous practitioner of inductive poems, signaling a departure from the past—but even he, in his dotage, returned to deductive poems, such as the rightly maligned “Ecclesiastical Sonnets.”
Here is my Mandala for these concepts, unfortunately unaided by the artists who refined my mandala for Logopoetry, so it will appear linear on this page:
Inductive
Closed X Open
Deductive
It is much easier to provide examples than persist in explanations. So let’s have a look at a poem by Robinson Jeffers. Overall he prefers deductive poems, but we can easily find all four types in his work.
October Evening
Male-throated under the shallow sea-fog
Moaned a ship's horn quivering the shorelong granite.
Coyotes toward the valley made answer,
Their little wolf-pads in the dead grass by the stream
Wet with the young season's first rain,
Their jagged wail trespassing among the steep stars.
What stars? Aldebaran under the dove-leash
Pleiades. I thought, in an hour Orion will be risen,
Be glad for summer is dead and the sky
Turns over to darkness, good storms, few guests, glad rivers.
Here is an open, inductive poem. Notice how it builds from actual experience, from the ship’s horn to the coyote’s wail. Next comes a description of October stars, and finally two lines of lingering thought about the experience, but inconclusive. They do not tell us what to think about the experience nor do they say exactly what the author thought. We learn that “summer is dead” and the days will be shorter, with “good storms, few guests, glad rivers.” Thus we think about the change in weather, the reduction in social activity, the rain that swells the rivers—but not about what we ought to feel or what this should mean to us. The ending is loose and invitational and invites further reverie.
Now let’s turn to a closed, inductive poem by Frost:
Once By The Pacific
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last “Put out the Light” was spoken.
Notice that the first six lines are inductive; he is describing a scene. Lines seven to 12 elaborate on the natural scene, with the introduction of apocalyptic overtones. The last couplet nicely summarizes this dark sentiment, telling us that we should be prepared for even more darkness and havoc before the end of the world. The ending is a prophecy, and provokes wonder at a future imagined by the poet, but the ending is also an epitaph, emphasized by the strong, feminine, trochaic rhyme. It does not leave much wiggling room. The prophet has spoken. Inductive but closed.
My next example is an open, deductive poem. Nearly all of Yeats’ poems are deductive, not all of them are open. He had a gift for ending deductive poems with a question, a choice, an ambiguity. Although this example is longer than I’d like, it pains me to eliminate any stanzas, so here is the thing entire:
Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
The essence of this poem does not differ greatly from many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, where he endorses the tradition of striving for eternity not through the vicissitudes of human love, but through his art. The difference here is that Yeats does not ask for his poetry to be a claim on the everlasting, rather a gateway to eternal perfection, “Into the artifice of eternity.” So much is obvious. And that the poem is deductive also is obvious, since the first line is an assertion not based on immediate experience: “That is no country for old men.” In spite of the artifice of the poem, its beauty and philosophical implications, the ending nevertheless remains open: “Or [if I am] set upon a golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
In the context of the poem, a seeking after the eternal artifice of art, is it not ironic that the artificial bird set upon a golden bough sings of “what is past, or passing, or to come”? Certainly the temporal preoccupations implied make a nice foil to eternity; on the other hand, the bird is burdened with informing the ageless emperor and his retinue about the changing influence of time. In other words, someone needs to read the daily paper to God, even if he knows what it contains. The ending thus leaves the poem open, not only by its irony, but by the implication that despite the deliverance provided by perfect artifice, part of that artifice must continue to sing about the past, present, and future—things that should not concern the beings of Byzantium, who are beyond the strictures of time.
Lastly there are a plethora of examples in the history of closed, deductive poems. In contrast to most of her work, it pleases me to select one by Emily Dickinson, whose open poems far outnumber the closed, though nearly all her poems are deductive.
288
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
Here, uncharacteristically, Dickinson closes a deductive poem with comic derision. And given her anonymity during her lifetime (and today’s preoccupation with celebrity, which is not new but only amplified by the instantaneous media), it is heartening to find such a cheerful antidote to ambition. For her to tell us outright how dreary it is to be a “Somebody” is hardly the norm for her verse; but it supports my earlier contention that most poets use all four constructions, though many favor a particular one.
Most of the poetry written before 1920 was closed and deductive. Even Keats concludes his inductive “Ode to a Grecian Urn” with a conclusion, “Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty”—something that would be out of style today. In surveying the journals that supposedly carry quality poetry nowadays, I think the reader will agree with me that editors’ favoritism extends to open, inductive poems. In the most recent issue of The New Yorker (February 19/26) there are two open, inductive poems (Sharon Olds and W. D. Snodgrass) and one deductive poem mixed with inductive elements—with a more direct conclusion (and certainly more depth) (Charles Wright). Except in the hands of the Classical Chinese poets, open, inductive poems tend to be superficial, more fleetingly impressionistic, rather than having that property of depth which makes us return to poems repeatedly. A poem we never return to is not a great poem. It is only dust on a hieroglyph, a barnacle on a sea-carved rock. What I seek in poetry is the hieroglyph and the rock, the art with staying power, alluded to by Yeats’ in his “Sailing to Byzantium,” with this difference: it is not lifeless.
Inductive poems simulate life more particularly and therefore may deceive us into thinking that they possess more life than deductive poems, but this is only a passing illusion. There have been far more deductive poems of quality written in the history of English than other types of poems, even if it was once tradition to end poems with rather neat pronouncements. This was only a requirement of current culture, however, and does not speak to their quality.
The post-modern tendency toward open, inductive poems may be a shift toward a restless audience with a reduced attention span who want their poems like films, revealing themselves in immediate scenes. Perhaps readers no longer want to have to think their way into a poem without a palpable, visual introduction. Maybe this is an advancement in art, but I don’t think so; I think it is evidence of laziness in readers and an eagerness in the more popular poets to please their diminishing audience. This latter strategy is a mistake, as the more the audience shrinks, the more poets in search of an audience will reflect whatever is vulgar enough to retain a shrinking audience. The open inductive poem may resemble a reality show in this regard, particularly if it is also confessional. Such an appeal to present cultural sensibilities is almost guaranteed to relegate a presently popular poet to future obscurity. The term “artistic whore” comes to mind—not to imply by any means that popular poetry cannot be excellent poetry. The greatest poetry is unique and universal.
Certainly William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara must be considered lions of the open, inductive poem. “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a perfect example of the genre, and indeed, a very fine poem. But in embracing the immediate as a basis for poems there is a great risk: first in trying to attach profundity to common experience where it may not be warranted and second, to deliver no more than the experience. Poetry has always been about what is derived from experience, not just experience itself, though this never need be stated didactically within a work. But such a view is unpopular nowadays, especially if one includes the impact of performance poetry on the craft of written poetry, an interbreeding that subverts the written form by too much conversational diction.
The distinctions I put forth in this essay are serendipitous. I did not spend any time dreaming them up; they descended on me of their own. But I have since had difficulty recalling a poem that does not easily lend itself to one of the aforementioned categories.
What help are these distinctions, then? At the least they will help poets to be more conscious of how they write; at the most, when the history of poetry is scrutinized, they will expose our anachronistic prejudices.
Inductive and Deductive Poetry
Upon recent reflection, I have discovered another analytic Mandala for poetry. Previously, in my Logopoetry essays, I made the following mandala, to introduce how the Logos (unattainable artistic ideal) might best be approximated through language, represented by logos, the means by which we interpret an experience of language.
To quote “Logopoetry III”: “One can readily see from this construction that my idea of logos as reason is not some mummified reductionism but a dynamic balance between complimentary qualities — the Aristotelian mean, in other words . . .
“The mandala is in the form of a quincunx, the Logos/logos duality being the center, where logos is the interpreting principle that connects the ideal (Logos) with the real (Art). For each of the four poles there exists an opposite quality — but not the quality it faces. Apathy, not meaning, is the opposite of feeling. And nonsense, not feeling, is the opposite of meaning. Form is not the opposite of substance. The opposite of form is formlessness or chaos. And the opposite of substance is lack of substance, or superficiality and confusion. All four qualities can be both competitive and complimentary, depending on the poem. Each of the four poles embodies a positive value and logos symbolizes the dynamic mean between these values, the balance that should best succeed at realizing the Logos, or artistic ideal.
“The danger inherent in this schema is . . . not opposition but imbalance: music at the expense of substance; feeling at the expense of meaning; meaning at the expense of feeling; substance at the expense of form, and so forth. Good poetry should more often come near the cross-hairs than not. And I don't mean by this optimal intersection of qualities some homogenized mixture with exactly 25% of each. Good poetry journeys from pole to pole in the course of a narrative but without losing its balance — just as Eliot can be by turns pedantic or lyrical in his “Four Quartets.” Furthermore, there are poems that succeed with imbalance, but in such cases the dominant pole is supported by the other qualities: it does not abandon them. I don't want to argue for an orthodox requirement of balance or anything else; my theories are meant only to be a general guide and should be discarded if ever they stand in the way of good writing. But good writing is more often balanced than not.”
My chief aim in my essays on Logopoetry was to elucidate the obvious and unavoidable truth that poetry imposes a meaning on us because of the brain’s long habit of trying to make sense of words. As I put it in the conclusion of “Logopoetry II”:
“Intelligibility, the acknowledged cooperation of the brain's hemispheres, man's need for meaning, and the idea that language is first a vehicle for communication — these constitute the introductory principles of logopoetry.”
Sometimes it strikes me as superfluous to have made these points, but for the 20th and 21st centuries I found it a necessity in understanding why I found some poetry enjoyable and some inscrutable. Of the latter I decided it was not a question of my intelligence but often intentional obscurity on the poet’s part, as if he were writing only for himself. Although the whole misdirection may have been started by Eliot, he later abandoned his allusive method in the interests of communication, as in “The Hollow Men” and “Four Quartets.” I don’t think he could have foreseen Olson’s “Maximus” poems or Deconstructionism when he penned “The Waste Land” in a sanatorium, working through his depression by way of a disconnected psychological epic, made worse by its allusions, adding pretension to its sin of obscurity.
This is all old news. But it recently came to me that there was a very simple way to classify how poems are constructed, not only in this age but in all ages. If that boast seems excessive, allow me to explain the simplicity of this approach, which does not conflict with Logopoetry at all, since the two are concerned with different types of knowledge.
Simply put, poems can be either deductive or inductive and open or closed.
Deductive poems use figures of speech to support their assertions and observations, however far-fetched. In other words, the writer does not start in a real experience but uses experiences to advance the poem and its theme. Therefore he does not begin with, “The desert wind came up and scorched the rocks”—an actual scene—rather uses the scene to elaborate something else: “Her voice was like a desert wind that scorched the rocks.” The former line implies an inductive poem, the latter a deductive poem. Inductive poems spring from an actual experience that generates elaboration. Deductive poems mold experience for their own purposes.
In addition, deductive and inductive poems can be either open or closed. Open poems invite the reader to join the author in his journey, avoiding easy conclusions, while in a closed poem the author does most of the work for us. Open poems often end in ambiguity, not certainty. They tease more than inform the reader. Closed poems usually end with a summarizing statement, however disguised by technique. In closed poems the poet tries to make his own sense of the narrative, usually near the end, with little room for negotiation with the reader.
In all ages, and I suspect, all languages, these four constructions have been extant: open, inductive poems; closed, inductive poems; open, deductive poems, and closed, deductive poems. Our present age seems to favor inductive poems in general, while the Elizabethans favored deductive poems. One need only read Shakespeare’s sonnets to be assured of this. Each one strives for a resolution (often the weakest part of the poem) because he felt compelled by both the form and the culture to reach an accessible conclusion. In his early work, Wordsworth is likely the most famous practitioner of inductive poems, signaling a departure from the past—but even he, in his dotage, returned to deductive poems, such as the rightly maligned “Ecclesiastical Sonnets.”
Here is my Mandala for these concepts, unfortunately unaided by the artists who refined my mandala for Logopoetry, so it will appear linear on this page:
Inductive
Closed X Open
Deductive
It is much easier to provide examples than persist in explanations. So let’s have a look at a poem by Robinson Jeffers. Overall he prefers deductive poems, but we can easily find all four types in his work.
October Evening
Male-throated under the shallow sea-fog
Moaned a ship's horn quivering the shorelong granite.
Coyotes toward the valley made answer,
Their little wolf-pads in the dead grass by the stream
Wet with the young season's first rain,
Their jagged wail trespassing among the steep stars.
What stars? Aldebaran under the dove-leash
Pleiades. I thought, in an hour Orion will be risen,
Be glad for summer is dead and the sky
Turns over to darkness, good storms, few guests, glad rivers.
Here is an open, inductive poem. Notice how it builds from actual experience, from the ship’s horn to the coyote’s wail. Next comes a description of October stars, and finally two lines of lingering thought about the experience, but inconclusive. They do not tell us what to think about the experience nor do they say exactly what the author thought. We learn that “summer is dead” and the days will be shorter, with “good storms, few guests, glad rivers.” Thus we think about the change in weather, the reduction in social activity, the rain that swells the rivers—but not about what we ought to feel or what this should mean to us. The ending is loose and invitational and invites further reverie.
Now let’s turn to a closed, inductive poem by Frost:
Once By The Pacific
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last “Put out the Light” was spoken.
Notice that the first six lines are inductive; he is describing a scene. Lines seven to 12 elaborate on the natural scene, with the introduction of apocalyptic overtones. The last couplet nicely summarizes this dark sentiment, telling us that we should be prepared for even more darkness and havoc before the end of the world. The ending is a prophecy, and provokes wonder at a future imagined by the poet, but the ending is also an epitaph, emphasized by the strong, feminine, trochaic rhyme. It does not leave much wiggling room. The prophet has spoken. Inductive but closed.
My next example is an open, deductive poem. Nearly all of Yeats’ poems are deductive, not all of them are open. He had a gift for ending deductive poems with a question, a choice, an ambiguity. Although this example is longer than I’d like, it pains me to eliminate any stanzas, so here is the thing entire:
Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
The essence of this poem does not differ greatly from many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, where he endorses the tradition of striving for eternity not through the vicissitudes of human love, but through his art. The difference here is that Yeats does not ask for his poetry to be a claim on the everlasting, rather a gateway to eternal perfection, “Into the artifice of eternity.” So much is obvious. And that the poem is deductive also is obvious, since the first line is an assertion not based on immediate experience: “That is no country for old men.” In spite of the artifice of the poem, its beauty and philosophical implications, the ending nevertheless remains open: “Or [if I am] set upon a golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
In the context of the poem, a seeking after the eternal artifice of art, is it not ironic that the artificial bird set upon a golden bough sings of “what is past, or passing, or to come”? Certainly the temporal preoccupations implied make a nice foil to eternity; on the other hand, the bird is burdened with informing the ageless emperor and his retinue about the changing influence of time. In other words, someone needs to read the daily paper to God, even if he knows what it contains. The ending thus leaves the poem open, not only by its irony, but by the implication that despite the deliverance provided by perfect artifice, part of that artifice must continue to sing about the past, present, and future—things that should not concern the beings of Byzantium, who are beyond the strictures of time.
Lastly there are a plethora of examples in the history of closed, deductive poems. In contrast to most of her work, it pleases me to select one by Emily Dickinson, whose open poems far outnumber the closed, though nearly all her poems are deductive.
288
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
Here, uncharacteristically, Dickinson closes a deductive poem with comic derision. And given her anonymity during her lifetime (and today’s preoccupation with celebrity, which is not new but only amplified by the instantaneous media), it is heartening to find such a cheerful antidote to ambition. For her to tell us outright how dreary it is to be a “Somebody” is hardly the norm for her verse; but it supports my earlier contention that most poets use all four constructions, though many favor a particular one.
Most of the poetry written before 1920 was closed and deductive. Even Keats concludes his inductive “Ode to a Grecian Urn” with a conclusion, “Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty”—something that would be out of style today. In surveying the journals that supposedly carry quality poetry nowadays, I think the reader will agree with me that editors’ favoritism extends to open, inductive poems. In the most recent issue of The New Yorker (February 19/26) there are two open, inductive poems (Sharon Olds and W. D. Snodgrass) and one deductive poem mixed with inductive elements—with a more direct conclusion (and certainly more depth) (Charles Wright). Except in the hands of the Classical Chinese poets, open, inductive poems tend to be superficial, more fleetingly impressionistic, rather than having that property of depth which makes us return to poems repeatedly. A poem we never return to is not a great poem. It is only dust on a hieroglyph, a barnacle on a sea-carved rock. What I seek in poetry is the hieroglyph and the rock, the art with staying power, alluded to by Yeats’ in his “Sailing to Byzantium,” with this difference: it is not lifeless.
Inductive poems simulate life more particularly and therefore may deceive us into thinking that they possess more life than deductive poems, but this is only a passing illusion. There have been far more deductive poems of quality written in the history of English than other types of poems, even if it was once tradition to end poems with rather neat pronouncements. This was only a requirement of current culture, however, and does not speak to their quality.
The post-modern tendency toward open, inductive poems may be a shift toward a restless audience with a reduced attention span who want their poems like films, revealing themselves in immediate scenes. Perhaps readers no longer want to have to think their way into a poem without a palpable, visual introduction. Maybe this is an advancement in art, but I don’t think so; I think it is evidence of laziness in readers and an eagerness in the more popular poets to please their diminishing audience. This latter strategy is a mistake, as the more the audience shrinks, the more poets in search of an audience will reflect whatever is vulgar enough to retain a shrinking audience. The open inductive poem may resemble a reality show in this regard, particularly if it is also confessional. Such an appeal to present cultural sensibilities is almost guaranteed to relegate a presently popular poet to future obscurity. The term “artistic whore” comes to mind—not to imply by any means that popular poetry cannot be excellent poetry. The greatest poetry is unique and universal.
Certainly William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara must be considered lions of the open, inductive poem. “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a perfect example of the genre, and indeed, a very fine poem. But in embracing the immediate as a basis for poems there is a great risk: first in trying to attach profundity to common experience where it may not be warranted and second, to deliver no more than the experience. Poetry has always been about what is derived from experience, not just experience itself, though this never need be stated didactically within a work. But such a view is unpopular nowadays, especially if one includes the impact of performance poetry on the craft of written poetry, an interbreeding that subverts the written form by too much conversational diction.
The distinctions I put forth in this essay are serendipitous. I did not spend any time dreaming them up; they descended on me of their own. But I have since had difficulty recalling a poem that does not easily lend itself to one of the aforementioned categories.
What help are these distinctions, then? At the least they will help poets to be more conscious of how they write; at the most, when the history of poetry is scrutinized, they will expose our anachronistic prejudices.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
A New Mandala for Poetry....
In my Logopoetry essays I divided poetry into a Mandala of Form, Substance, Meaning, and Feeling--with the intersection of the four being the center of artistic excellence. Now I have been visited with a second Mandala, whose four corners are Inductive, Deductive, Open, and Closed.
I don't know how to reproduce it here in the blog, but just imagine that the following five elements are spread at 90 degrees from each other with 'X' in the middle for the intersection of the Mandala.
Deductive
Closed
X
Open
Inductive
Deductive poems use figures of speech to support their assertions, however surreal.
Inductive poems spring from an actual experience that generates elaboration.
Open poems invite the reader to join the author in his journey, avoiding easy conclusions.
Closed poems end with a summarizing statement, however disguised by technique, wrapping the work in a nice red bow. Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is proof that closed poems can be great and ought not to be despised, even in our present relativistic culture.
Yeats writes many closed poems, like "Byzantium."
There is likely no poet more open in English than Emily Dickinson, whose insights are so subtle and stuttering you feel like you're dancing with a shy wallflower--until you see her great heart and intelligence.
Eliot's early work, like "Prufrock," is more open, though certainly deductive. His later work is more closed, especially "Four Quartets."
Shakespeare's sonnets are almost entirely deductive, using figures of speech instead of surrendering to the experience of the moment, and mainly closed as well. And Spenser and Johnson are in the same club, while Donne can be more inductive, as in "The Flea." Closed and deductive were the expectation of those times.
Wordsworth could be inductive or deductive, though his early work strives to be inductive, as in "Tintern Abbey," and especially "The Prelude," while the Lucy poems, for instance, are deductive.
Coleridge was more deductive, even in natural settings as in "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison."
Elizabeth Bishop was best when inductive, as in "The Moose," or "Fish Houses," or "The Fish."
Strand is mainly deductive, though often disguised. But his settings are mainly created like stage scenery.
Wallace Stevens is mainly deductive as well. But is he open or closed? I think more open in his uncertainty.
Matthew Arnold is closed and deductive, a combination that puts his poetry out of favor in this age. Same for Pope, Dryden and Johnson. Same for Milton.
Shelley often transformed the inductive into the deductive, by exalting an experience, especially of nature, into an epiphany that exceeds the experience ("Ode to the West Wind.")
Blake is almost purely deductive. But is he closed? I think his childlikeness makes him open even when a poem, like "The Sick Rose," tells us the entire story. We want to leap into childhood with him and his diction. Despite his rhetoric, he is more open than closed; he wants us to believe in his world, and it shows.
Zymborska is mainly open, though she can be inductive and deductive, like most poets, though I think if we analyzed all poets, most would tilt towards one quality or the other.
Rilke was mainly deductive in his "Sonnets for Orpheus," but more inductive in his "Duino Elegies."
Neruda, without reviewing him in detail, strikes me as beyond these classifications in general, but later in his career, as a dogmatic Communist, he wrote more closed and deductive poems. His best work is open.
I will stop here. Perhaps I'll write an essay about these four corners, perhaps not. If an editor wants it, I'll likely do it. But that requires a query letter, which I find tedious and am loathe to write. Any editor who visits these pages need only drop me a note and I will flesh out my theories for her pleasure.
Anyway, I wanted to share this alternative approach in understanding poetry which is complimentary to my Logopoetry essays, still available in the Melic Archives
Food for thought. I'd like to hear your thoughts!
CE
I don't know how to reproduce it here in the blog, but just imagine that the following five elements are spread at 90 degrees from each other with 'X' in the middle for the intersection of the Mandala.
Deductive
Closed
X
Open
Inductive
Deductive poems use figures of speech to support their assertions, however surreal.
Inductive poems spring from an actual experience that generates elaboration.
Open poems invite the reader to join the author in his journey, avoiding easy conclusions.
Closed poems end with a summarizing statement, however disguised by technique, wrapping the work in a nice red bow. Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is proof that closed poems can be great and ought not to be despised, even in our present relativistic culture.
Yeats writes many closed poems, like "Byzantium."
There is likely no poet more open in English than Emily Dickinson, whose insights are so subtle and stuttering you feel like you're dancing with a shy wallflower--until you see her great heart and intelligence.
Eliot's early work, like "Prufrock," is more open, though certainly deductive. His later work is more closed, especially "Four Quartets."
Shakespeare's sonnets are almost entirely deductive, using figures of speech instead of surrendering to the experience of the moment, and mainly closed as well. And Spenser and Johnson are in the same club, while Donne can be more inductive, as in "The Flea." Closed and deductive were the expectation of those times.
Wordsworth could be inductive or deductive, though his early work strives to be inductive, as in "Tintern Abbey," and especially "The Prelude," while the Lucy poems, for instance, are deductive.
Coleridge was more deductive, even in natural settings as in "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison."
Elizabeth Bishop was best when inductive, as in "The Moose," or "Fish Houses," or "The Fish."
Strand is mainly deductive, though often disguised. But his settings are mainly created like stage scenery.
Wallace Stevens is mainly deductive as well. But is he open or closed? I think more open in his uncertainty.
Matthew Arnold is closed and deductive, a combination that puts his poetry out of favor in this age. Same for Pope, Dryden and Johnson. Same for Milton.
Shelley often transformed the inductive into the deductive, by exalting an experience, especially of nature, into an epiphany that exceeds the experience ("Ode to the West Wind.")
Blake is almost purely deductive. But is he closed? I think his childlikeness makes him open even when a poem, like "The Sick Rose," tells us the entire story. We want to leap into childhood with him and his diction. Despite his rhetoric, he is more open than closed; he wants us to believe in his world, and it shows.
Zymborska is mainly open, though she can be inductive and deductive, like most poets, though I think if we analyzed all poets, most would tilt towards one quality or the other.
Rilke was mainly deductive in his "Sonnets for Orpheus," but more inductive in his "Duino Elegies."
Neruda, without reviewing him in detail, strikes me as beyond these classifications in general, but later in his career, as a dogmatic Communist, he wrote more closed and deductive poems. His best work is open.
I will stop here. Perhaps I'll write an essay about these four corners, perhaps not. If an editor wants it, I'll likely do it. But that requires a query letter, which I find tedious and am loathe to write. Any editor who visits these pages need only drop me a note and I will flesh out my theories for her pleasure.
Anyway, I wanted to share this alternative approach in understanding poetry which is complimentary to my Logopoetry essays, still available in the Melic Archives
Food for thought. I'd like to hear your thoughts!
CE
Friday, February 16, 2007
Is My Poetry Too Inhuman?
After my rant on literary narcissism, I feel impelled to follow my own dictum: suspect yourself first.
Regarding the defects of my poetry, I have had critics say it was "inhuman" or unapproachable, had it compared to "stainless steal." After my last post a good friend wrote me with some insightful comments I would like to excerpt:
"If you're trafficking in authentic mysteries, truly the sublime,
then the intellect can only pretend a sort of false-mastery. So there is
perhaps a tendency towards smugness that you should perennially be on
guard against.
"A challenge for you I would think is how to strike a communion with your
audience that is earnest and authentic without lapsing into condescension.
[I'm sure you] grasp.. the perils of cerebral poetry in this subjective age."
I went through some poems trying to find one that exhibited more room for "communion" with the audience, an "open" poem if you will, as opposed to a "closed" or internally completed poem. It took me some time to settle on one I thought would qualify. Here it is:
Jacob
My grandson’s cry tonight
is a buzz saw on aluminum,
a kickstand scraping concrete—
Reminding me of Beckett’s last play,
where a heap of post-apocalyptic trash appears,
then a baby’s cry, then darkness.
I can’t rid these prickles from my heart,
resentment at his shrieking intransigence—
the fuse of a child abuser?
Holding him is best because
I feel as if I’m doing something.
He is mine and I can’t stand it.
(unpublished)
Mood holding, thanks be to God and medications and an understanding wife,
CE
Regarding the defects of my poetry, I have had critics say it was "inhuman" or unapproachable, had it compared to "stainless steal." After my last post a good friend wrote me with some insightful comments I would like to excerpt:
"If you're trafficking in authentic mysteries, truly the sublime,
then the intellect can only pretend a sort of false-mastery. So there is
perhaps a tendency towards smugness that you should perennially be on
guard against.
"A challenge for you I would think is how to strike a communion with your
audience that is earnest and authentic without lapsing into condescension.
[I'm sure you] grasp.. the perils of cerebral poetry in this subjective age."
I went through some poems trying to find one that exhibited more room for "communion" with the audience, an "open" poem if you will, as opposed to a "closed" or internally completed poem. It took me some time to settle on one I thought would qualify. Here it is:
Jacob
My grandson’s cry tonight
is a buzz saw on aluminum,
a kickstand scraping concrete—
Reminding me of Beckett’s last play,
where a heap of post-apocalyptic trash appears,
then a baby’s cry, then darkness.
I can’t rid these prickles from my heart,
resentment at his shrieking intransigence—
the fuse of a child abuser?
Holding him is best because
I feel as if I’m doing something.
He is mine and I can’t stand it.
(unpublished)
Mood holding, thanks be to God and medications and an understanding wife,
CE
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
My Struggle with Literary Narcissism, Revised
I revised my spontaneous post of the 12th. But first another poem from my archives:
Marigolds
These giant marigolds are orange torches,
heavy with radiance.
A breeze touches them,
the whole bush quivers
beneath the weight of blooms.
They are a short, furious life:
They call to the sun and cry to the stars,
flame forward and decay,
spit dry seeds like ash and vanish.
We bloom on the stems of our ancestors,
wishing to explode like these marigolds
but fear if we flower too brightly
someone might snap our necks,
or worse, the central stem collapse
from the weight of insane glory.
So we run from our own immolation
and the peppery smell of death.
(published and now de-published in Free Cuisenart)
My Struggle with Literary Narcissism, Revised
"Jealousy is the essence of narcissism."
The tenth commandment forbids coveting; that's the point where the follower must realize morality is more than an outward observance (though the Pharisees later forgot that point). Coveting is not far from jealousy. One covets things; one is jealous of persons. And the three most famous tales of brothers in the Bible involve jealousy. You know them: Cain killed Abel because he was jealous of God’s preference for Abel’s offering. Jacob coveted Esau’s birthright and stole it through subterfuge and afterwards fled out of fear. He was jealous of Esau’s standing as the firstborn. Joseph's brothers left him for dead because of their jealousy; he was their father's favorite and spoke of his dreams of greatness (which later came true). In all these cases one thing stands out: God plays favorites. He did not not love Cain, but it seems Cain had good reason to believe Abel’s sacrifice was preferred, which was purely unfair— unless you get into Christological excuses that Abel’s offering of a lamb was prophetic—but theological hindsight doesn’t help Cain much. So he murdered Abel out of jealousy. And deep down, with all defenses stripped, isn’t that what we would all do if we could get away with it? To murder the person we think is unfairly preferred above us, to rid the world of an inferior writer who won a Pulitzer and give ourselves the prize? Because it just isn’t fair, is it? It’s quite a cautionary tale, this first murder in the Bible. The motive is “the green-eyed monster.”
It was prophesied of Jacob and Esau that the older should serve the younger. And despite Jacob's scheming and hardly admirable nature, so it came to pass. "Jacob I loved but Esau I hated," Jehovah says. Can you imagine anything so patently unfair? What did Esau do to deserve such treatment? Contrary to God, Isaac seemed to favor Esau because he was a hunter who would bring home wild game. And though we know Esau was hairy, a hunter, and impulsive, Jacob was a liar and a cheat. One can again take refuge in theology, that the promised one, whether David or Christ, needed to come through a specific genetic line. Again, such hindsight does little to help Esau’s despite.
Joseph was favored by his father and by God. Why? Was there something in his nature that more recommended him? Who's to know? His father rubbed it in by giving him “a coat of many colors.” Given this favoritism, weren't his brothers justified in their jealousy, if not their deed? They left him in a pit in the desert to die, but enjoying God’s favor, he was rescued by some camel traders. Later he became the salvation of Egypt and his family, but such utilitarian reasons as these later results won’t wash in the name of an almighty God. He could have saved Joseph’s family and Egypt by any number of other means—he’s God, after all.
All this is ancient history, but here's my point: Some people are luckier, indeed seem to be more favored, than others. As has been well said, it's better to be lucky than good. So here's my dilemma: my success as a writer, commercially speaking, and from the point of public reputation, has been dismal. I have myriad publications in obscure magazines with less than a thousand dollars earned; I am a ghost in the machine of the Net (where several of my former students enjoy more success than I).
Now I cannot be trusted with an opinion of myself, but I honestly think I'm a better poet than the late Robert Creeley, and he received a Pulitzer as well as the $100,000 Lenore Marshall prize. My feelings for him (for other reasons as well) go beyond jealousy to a prideful condescension. I think sometimes that if I truly humble myself, perhaps I can see more value in his work. So far I’ve not succeeded. As it is, though he walks among the dead, I still feel a sense of injustice when I think of him as his acclaim. (I could say the same the same about a number of other poets both living and dead.)
Why should I be jealous of other writers? Why should I torture myself with the unfounded belief that the universe is fair when even the Bible confirms cosmic favoritism? My mother preached success through merit, and the academic system does the same, but these illusions, bestowed by a controlled environment, have nothing to do with the real world in any field of endeavor.
To be jealous of another is to be cruel to myself. It makes me the self-appointed center of the universe. Since this isn’t true, it warps me and eats at my self-esteem. I tell myself I should not be jealous. Yet my frustration with successful artists whom I believe (and some others agree) are my inferiors, itches like sand under the skin of a rhinoceros.
I know success has a lot to do with connections; I have virtually none. I sometimes think I should have gone to an MFA program to rub shoulders with poets of reputation who teach because they can’t otherwise make a living. They in turn have to justify their teaching by promoting their students.
Success also has to do with persistence, and I know I don’t submit to the quality journals enough. In trying I have recently received a string of seven rejections, my longest string of bad luck in a long time, though it can mainly be ascribed to the quality of journals I chose, all top flight, paying journals. Strangely, after I receive a rejection I suddenly, in a flash of insight, notice everything that’s wrong with my poems and usually agree with the editors. Yet it is often hard to distinguish between bad luck and mediocrity. I try not to send mediocre work out, but who am I to judge?
Should I admit to myself I am a journeyman, destined only to entertain myself and a few others with my poetry, condemned to the underworld of "I could have been a contender?" Should I turn critic like William Logan and macerate the anointed in vengeful sweetness? Should I blow off poetry altogether and concentrate on paying non-fiction?
Here's the problem re-stated: I feel I ought to be more recognized as a poet, given the competition extant. But I suppose I should face reality;: it’s simply not true. It could be my work is slightly anachronistic, so style works against me, but that’s no excuse; I should change my style if I want to be successful, even at this late date.
Acceptance is what I need. Sometimes by reading other poets of current renown I can see their virtues and better accept my place, but when I read a poem in the New Yorker that simply sucks, it does irritate me. Then who am I to judge? They don't want my poems and often publish good ones.
How many of my fellow writers experience this dilemma? How do they solve it? I always tell my students that the only reason to write a poem is for its own sake. But that admonition sometimes sound hollow to one with hundreds of publications and little to show for it.
I suppose my mantra should be: "Work harder and don't worry about the other guy. Follow your own vision, and if it does not find favor in the world, at least comfort yourself with artistic integrity."
This is a noble and Parnassian view, but in my flawed humanity I cannot embrace it. On the other hand, jealousy won’t help my art. What I wish is to be delivered from the feeling that I deserve better. I should think more on Cain, Esau, and Joseph’s brothers. Yet how does one wait in peace hoping to get lucky? How would Yeats have felt if he were completely ignored?
Old, unlucky poets should not give in to bitterness. Their curse must certainly be that they can’t give up writing. Whoever discovered Emily Dickinson gave us false reason to hope. The best reason to hope is to assume one’s art has yet to mature to the point where it will be recognized, avoiding comparisons in the interest of improvement. The best antidote to jealousy, or if you wish, a sense of unfairness, is to lose yourself in the poetry of others. Yet at 50, with a few glaring exceptions, most poets’ best work is behind them. Still, let the band play on. The soloist is not always the best player.
Marigolds
These giant marigolds are orange torches,
heavy with radiance.
A breeze touches them,
the whole bush quivers
beneath the weight of blooms.
They are a short, furious life:
They call to the sun and cry to the stars,
flame forward and decay,
spit dry seeds like ash and vanish.
We bloom on the stems of our ancestors,
wishing to explode like these marigolds
but fear if we flower too brightly
someone might snap our necks,
or worse, the central stem collapse
from the weight of insane glory.
So we run from our own immolation
and the peppery smell of death.
(published and now de-published in Free Cuisenart)
My Struggle with Literary Narcissism, Revised
"Jealousy is the essence of narcissism."
The tenth commandment forbids coveting; that's the point where the follower must realize morality is more than an outward observance (though the Pharisees later forgot that point). Coveting is not far from jealousy. One covets things; one is jealous of persons. And the three most famous tales of brothers in the Bible involve jealousy. You know them: Cain killed Abel because he was jealous of God’s preference for Abel’s offering. Jacob coveted Esau’s birthright and stole it through subterfuge and afterwards fled out of fear. He was jealous of Esau’s standing as the firstborn. Joseph's brothers left him for dead because of their jealousy; he was their father's favorite and spoke of his dreams of greatness (which later came true). In all these cases one thing stands out: God plays favorites. He did not not love Cain, but it seems Cain had good reason to believe Abel’s sacrifice was preferred, which was purely unfair— unless you get into Christological excuses that Abel’s offering of a lamb was prophetic—but theological hindsight doesn’t help Cain much. So he murdered Abel out of jealousy. And deep down, with all defenses stripped, isn’t that what we would all do if we could get away with it? To murder the person we think is unfairly preferred above us, to rid the world of an inferior writer who won a Pulitzer and give ourselves the prize? Because it just isn’t fair, is it? It’s quite a cautionary tale, this first murder in the Bible. The motive is “the green-eyed monster.”
It was prophesied of Jacob and Esau that the older should serve the younger. And despite Jacob's scheming and hardly admirable nature, so it came to pass. "Jacob I loved but Esau I hated," Jehovah says. Can you imagine anything so patently unfair? What did Esau do to deserve such treatment? Contrary to God, Isaac seemed to favor Esau because he was a hunter who would bring home wild game. And though we know Esau was hairy, a hunter, and impulsive, Jacob was a liar and a cheat. One can again take refuge in theology, that the promised one, whether David or Christ, needed to come through a specific genetic line. Again, such hindsight does little to help Esau’s despite.
Joseph was favored by his father and by God. Why? Was there something in his nature that more recommended him? Who's to know? His father rubbed it in by giving him “a coat of many colors.” Given this favoritism, weren't his brothers justified in their jealousy, if not their deed? They left him in a pit in the desert to die, but enjoying God’s favor, he was rescued by some camel traders. Later he became the salvation of Egypt and his family, but such utilitarian reasons as these later results won’t wash in the name of an almighty God. He could have saved Joseph’s family and Egypt by any number of other means—he’s God, after all.
All this is ancient history, but here's my point: Some people are luckier, indeed seem to be more favored, than others. As has been well said, it's better to be lucky than good. So here's my dilemma: my success as a writer, commercially speaking, and from the point of public reputation, has been dismal. I have myriad publications in obscure magazines with less than a thousand dollars earned; I am a ghost in the machine of the Net (where several of my former students enjoy more success than I).
Now I cannot be trusted with an opinion of myself, but I honestly think I'm a better poet than the late Robert Creeley, and he received a Pulitzer as well as the $100,000 Lenore Marshall prize. My feelings for him (for other reasons as well) go beyond jealousy to a prideful condescension. I think sometimes that if I truly humble myself, perhaps I can see more value in his work. So far I’ve not succeeded. As it is, though he walks among the dead, I still feel a sense of injustice when I think of him as his acclaim. (I could say the same the same about a number of other poets both living and dead.)
Why should I be jealous of other writers? Why should I torture myself with the unfounded belief that the universe is fair when even the Bible confirms cosmic favoritism? My mother preached success through merit, and the academic system does the same, but these illusions, bestowed by a controlled environment, have nothing to do with the real world in any field of endeavor.
To be jealous of another is to be cruel to myself. It makes me the self-appointed center of the universe. Since this isn’t true, it warps me and eats at my self-esteem. I tell myself I should not be jealous. Yet my frustration with successful artists whom I believe (and some others agree) are my inferiors, itches like sand under the skin of a rhinoceros.
I know success has a lot to do with connections; I have virtually none. I sometimes think I should have gone to an MFA program to rub shoulders with poets of reputation who teach because they can’t otherwise make a living. They in turn have to justify their teaching by promoting their students.
Success also has to do with persistence, and I know I don’t submit to the quality journals enough. In trying I have recently received a string of seven rejections, my longest string of bad luck in a long time, though it can mainly be ascribed to the quality of journals I chose, all top flight, paying journals. Strangely, after I receive a rejection I suddenly, in a flash of insight, notice everything that’s wrong with my poems and usually agree with the editors. Yet it is often hard to distinguish between bad luck and mediocrity. I try not to send mediocre work out, but who am I to judge?
Should I admit to myself I am a journeyman, destined only to entertain myself and a few others with my poetry, condemned to the underworld of "I could have been a contender?" Should I turn critic like William Logan and macerate the anointed in vengeful sweetness? Should I blow off poetry altogether and concentrate on paying non-fiction?
Here's the problem re-stated: I feel I ought to be more recognized as a poet, given the competition extant. But I suppose I should face reality;: it’s simply not true. It could be my work is slightly anachronistic, so style works against me, but that’s no excuse; I should change my style if I want to be successful, even at this late date.
Acceptance is what I need. Sometimes by reading other poets of current renown I can see their virtues and better accept my place, but when I read a poem in the New Yorker that simply sucks, it does irritate me. Then who am I to judge? They don't want my poems and often publish good ones.
How many of my fellow writers experience this dilemma? How do they solve it? I always tell my students that the only reason to write a poem is for its own sake. But that admonition sometimes sound hollow to one with hundreds of publications and little to show for it.
I suppose my mantra should be: "Work harder and don't worry about the other guy. Follow your own vision, and if it does not find favor in the world, at least comfort yourself with artistic integrity."
This is a noble and Parnassian view, but in my flawed humanity I cannot embrace it. On the other hand, jealousy won’t help my art. What I wish is to be delivered from the feeling that I deserve better. I should think more on Cain, Esau, and Joseph’s brothers. Yet how does one wait in peace hoping to get lucky? How would Yeats have felt if he were completely ignored?
Old, unlucky poets should not give in to bitterness. Their curse must certainly be that they can’t give up writing. Whoever discovered Emily Dickinson gave us false reason to hope. The best reason to hope is to assume one’s art has yet to mature to the point where it will be recognized, avoiding comparisons in the interest of improvement. The best antidote to jealousy, or if you wish, a sense of unfairness, is to lose yourself in the poetry of others. Yet at 50, with a few glaring exceptions, most poets’ best work is behind them. Still, let the band play on. The soloist is not always the best player.
Monday, February 12, 2007
My Struggle with Literary Narcissism
I thought that by writing about each circular obsession that afflicts me during depression I might get some closure for my own protection.
I have before written that "jealousy is the essence of narcissism."
The tenth commandment forbids coveting; that's the point where the follower must realize morality is more than an outward observance, though the Pharisees forgot that point. And the three most famous tales of brothers in the Bible involve jealousy. You know them: Cain killed Abel because he was jealous of his offering, which God preferred. Jacob stole Esau's birthright through subterfuge and afterwards fled out of fear. Joseph's brothers left him for dead because of their jealousy; he was their father's favorite and suffered from delusions of grandeur (which later came true).
In all these cases one thing stands out: God plays favorites. He did not not love Cain, but it seems Cain had reason to believe that Abel was preferred, which was purely unfair.
It was prophesied of Jacob and Esau that the older should serve the younger. And despite Jacob's scheming nature, so it came to pass. "Jacob I loved but Esau I hated." What did Esau ever do to deserve such treatment? Contrary to God, Isaac seemed to favor Esau because he was a hunter who would bring home wild game.
Joseph was favored by his father and by God. Why? Was there something in his nature that more recommended him? Who's to know? But weren't his brothers justified in their jealousy, if not their deeds?
This is all ancient history, but here's my point: Some people are luckier, indeed seem to be more favored, than others. As has been well said, it's better to be lucky than good. So here's my dilemma: my success as a writer, commercially speaking, and from the point of public reputation, has been dismal. I have myriad publications in obscure magazines with less than a thousand dollars earned; I am a ghost in the machine of the Net (where several of my former students enjoy more success than I).
Now I cannot be trusted with an opinion of myself, but I honestly think I'm a better poet than the late Robert Creeley, by any standard, and he received a Pulitzer as well as the $100,000 Lenore Marshall prize before his death. Is he lucky or is he better? I'm jealous of him. He also had three poems and two essays taken out of a magazine he was to appear in because he disliked my essays and poems. I had never met him, but the editors of the Cortland Review admitted to me privately that they capitulated to his demands, so I was de-published, a fate that often afflicts me simply by the attrition of literary journals on the net.
I've published close to 100 columns on the Net, but three of the four magazines I wrote for went bust with no archives. Is this my fault? I don't post my best poems in this blog, most of which have been published, since I've been on a formalist tear for my mental health. I need the structure when I'm depressed. But I would offer proof to any interested with some of my best work, if requested in this space or by e-mail.
The question that dogs me: Why should I be jealous of other writers? Why should I torture myself with the unfounded belief that the universe is fair when even the Bible confirms cosmic favoritism?
To be jealous of another is to be cruel to myself. It eats at my self-esteem. Yet the frustration with "successful" artists whom, at least some besides myself agree are my inferiors, gets irritating.
I know success has a lot to do with connections; I have virtually none. I should have gone to an MFA program. It also has to do with persistence; I don't submit enough to the quality journals to generate a buzz, indeed have had seven rejections in a row recently, my longest string of "bad luck" to date. The hard part is distinguishing between luck and mediocre work.
Should I admit to myself I am a journeyman, destined only to entertain himself and a few others with his poetry, condemned to the underworld of the "could have been contenders?" Should I turn critic like William Logan and macerate the anointed to my heart's content?
Here's the problem re-stated: I feel I ought to be recognized more, given the competition extant. But I suppose I should face reality; that's simply not true. It could be my work is slightly anachronistic, so style works against me; well tough, I should change my style if I want to be successful (at 52!).
Acceptance is what I need, but when I read a poem in the New Yorker that simply sucks (and Kathleen agrees), it does irritate me. Then who am I to judge? They won't take my poems, and they have published good ones.
How many of you fellow writers experience this dilemma? How do you solve it? I always tell my students that the only reason to write a poem is to try to achieve excellence, to strive for a good poem. But that sometimes sounds hollow to someone with hundreds of publications and no reputation.
I suppose this should be my mantra: "Work harder and don't worry about the other guy. Follow your own vision, and if it does not find favor in the world, at least comfort yourself with your integrity."
I wish I could actually embrace this mantra. I suffer from writer's envy, pure and simple, and I am not proud of it.
Mood is mixed; irritable and bored.
CE
p.s. Here's a poem that was published and is now open for publication because it was afterwards de-published. I think it may be a good poem. How terrifying it is to try to back up one's boast!
Leaf Sermon
I have been spiritually poisoned
by the unclean, in ignorance
blessed their springs.
In consequence I withered
and drifted down
from green crown to brown humus,
thinned to a fishbone pattern
of cellulose threads.
I washed into a stream
past stones squirming
with black question marks
of dragonfly larvae,
slid through reeds
into eddying pools
where I stalled until the rains
delivered me to the sea.
My last proteins fed the plankton
the humpback swallowed,
whose song woke me,
the ghost of a ghost of a leaf,
to the shocking green astral body
from which I speak:
You who seek
thrill without sustenance,
love without burden,
light without heat—
hollow, hollow men,
Tom O’ Bedlam slim:
Your greatest feat
each workaday morning
is to pull the sheet
from your own faces
to avoid being wheeled
to the refrigerated cases.
I have before written that "jealousy is the essence of narcissism."
The tenth commandment forbids coveting; that's the point where the follower must realize morality is more than an outward observance, though the Pharisees forgot that point. And the three most famous tales of brothers in the Bible involve jealousy. You know them: Cain killed Abel because he was jealous of his offering, which God preferred. Jacob stole Esau's birthright through subterfuge and afterwards fled out of fear. Joseph's brothers left him for dead because of their jealousy; he was their father's favorite and suffered from delusions of grandeur (which later came true).
In all these cases one thing stands out: God plays favorites. He did not not love Cain, but it seems Cain had reason to believe that Abel was preferred, which was purely unfair.
It was prophesied of Jacob and Esau that the older should serve the younger. And despite Jacob's scheming nature, so it came to pass. "Jacob I loved but Esau I hated." What did Esau ever do to deserve such treatment? Contrary to God, Isaac seemed to favor Esau because he was a hunter who would bring home wild game.
Joseph was favored by his father and by God. Why? Was there something in his nature that more recommended him? Who's to know? But weren't his brothers justified in their jealousy, if not their deeds?
This is all ancient history, but here's my point: Some people are luckier, indeed seem to be more favored, than others. As has been well said, it's better to be lucky than good. So here's my dilemma: my success as a writer, commercially speaking, and from the point of public reputation, has been dismal. I have myriad publications in obscure magazines with less than a thousand dollars earned; I am a ghost in the machine of the Net (where several of my former students enjoy more success than I).
Now I cannot be trusted with an opinion of myself, but I honestly think I'm a better poet than the late Robert Creeley, by any standard, and he received a Pulitzer as well as the $100,000 Lenore Marshall prize before his death. Is he lucky or is he better? I'm jealous of him. He also had three poems and two essays taken out of a magazine he was to appear in because he disliked my essays and poems. I had never met him, but the editors of the Cortland Review admitted to me privately that they capitulated to his demands, so I was de-published, a fate that often afflicts me simply by the attrition of literary journals on the net.
I've published close to 100 columns on the Net, but three of the four magazines I wrote for went bust with no archives. Is this my fault? I don't post my best poems in this blog, most of which have been published, since I've been on a formalist tear for my mental health. I need the structure when I'm depressed. But I would offer proof to any interested with some of my best work, if requested in this space or by e-mail.
The question that dogs me: Why should I be jealous of other writers? Why should I torture myself with the unfounded belief that the universe is fair when even the Bible confirms cosmic favoritism?
To be jealous of another is to be cruel to myself. It eats at my self-esteem. Yet the frustration with "successful" artists whom, at least some besides myself agree are my inferiors, gets irritating.
I know success has a lot to do with connections; I have virtually none. I should have gone to an MFA program. It also has to do with persistence; I don't submit enough to the quality journals to generate a buzz, indeed have had seven rejections in a row recently, my longest string of "bad luck" to date. The hard part is distinguishing between luck and mediocre work.
Should I admit to myself I am a journeyman, destined only to entertain himself and a few others with his poetry, condemned to the underworld of the "could have been contenders?" Should I turn critic like William Logan and macerate the anointed to my heart's content?
Here's the problem re-stated: I feel I ought to be recognized more, given the competition extant. But I suppose I should face reality; that's simply not true. It could be my work is slightly anachronistic, so style works against me; well tough, I should change my style if I want to be successful (at 52!).
Acceptance is what I need, but when I read a poem in the New Yorker that simply sucks (and Kathleen agrees), it does irritate me. Then who am I to judge? They won't take my poems, and they have published good ones.
How many of you fellow writers experience this dilemma? How do you solve it? I always tell my students that the only reason to write a poem is to try to achieve excellence, to strive for a good poem. But that sometimes sounds hollow to someone with hundreds of publications and no reputation.
I suppose this should be my mantra: "Work harder and don't worry about the other guy. Follow your own vision, and if it does not find favor in the world, at least comfort yourself with your integrity."
I wish I could actually embrace this mantra. I suffer from writer's envy, pure and simple, and I am not proud of it.
Mood is mixed; irritable and bored.
CE
p.s. Here's a poem that was published and is now open for publication because it was afterwards de-published. I think it may be a good poem. How terrifying it is to try to back up one's boast!
Leaf Sermon
I have been spiritually poisoned
by the unclean, in ignorance
blessed their springs.
In consequence I withered
and drifted down
from green crown to brown humus,
thinned to a fishbone pattern
of cellulose threads.
I washed into a stream
past stones squirming
with black question marks
of dragonfly larvae,
slid through reeds
into eddying pools
where I stalled until the rains
delivered me to the sea.
My last proteins fed the plankton
the humpback swallowed,
whose song woke me,
the ghost of a ghost of a leaf,
to the shocking green astral body
from which I speak:
You who seek
thrill without sustenance,
love without burden,
light without heat—
hollow, hollow men,
Tom O’ Bedlam slim:
Your greatest feat
each workaday morning
is to pull the sheet
from your own faces
to avoid being wheeled
to the refrigerated cases.
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