Me: “Not quite.  Too many differences, one being that I consider that otherstream poets are the one-percent—the less-than-one-percent, actually–and that they are superior to mainstream poets whereas I consider the political occupiers inferior to the “one-percent” they are concerned with.  Another is that I believe in attacking groups I have differences with, with arguments, not crowds: it’s who has the better thinking that counts for me, not who has the most votes, or the equivalent.”

Me: “I’ve been thinking along those lines the past few days, too—because of a current project of mine, writing analyses of each of my poems.  A lawyer friend giving me extremely helpful layman feed-back seems to like my analyses but wondered if a poet analyzing his own poems might not be a tad narcissistic.  I do think I’m more self-involved than many, but in this case involved with my vocation, not really my self.  One defense I used was that no one else was analyzing my poems.  They seem to need it, too, because of their unusualness.  Also, I analyze lots of poems by others , too.  Later, I realized that all poets must analyze their own poems to some degree, even if they don’t necessarily do so formally, or even write out their analyses.  All writers—even lawyers writing position papers—must analyze their own writings. 

“Immediately I questioned that: I have trouble imagining a writer simply composing something without looking it over to see what he’s done and if there’s any way he can make it better, but I suppose there must be some who do.  A more interesting question is to what degree various poets analyze their own poems.  I doubt that many analyze them anywhere near as much as I analyze mine.  Is that good or bad?  Or neither: a matter of to each his own?  My own compulsion to analyze makes it hard for me not to believe those significantly less analytical than I deficient as students of poetry, and that their poems suffer a lack of depth due to it.  Not that the over-analyticals’ poems don’t likely suffer from an excess of Important Meaning.”

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It’s at Anthony Robinson’s blog here.

Here’s what I said:

“Inaccessible writing” as writing not like I do, yes–and the related “incomprehensible poetry” without a hint that others may find it comprehensible–even the critic himself if he really tried. I try never to label any poem inaccessible although I will confess I can’t figure out a poem when that’s the case.

Good words on the so-called “principal aim”–but I would add that I would like to know why a poetry for the few should be denigrated. Should no one compose operas because, in Crews’s words, “most audiences will have trouble wrestling (them) into meaning?” Or cook really far-out gourmet dishes? Crews should have said he couldn’t say anything intelligent about Miller’s book, and ended his “review.”

Can’t say I think much of Crews’s example of Miller, when he’s good. Wind does have a sound, it seems to me, since–as I understand it–sound is what happens when something causes the air to vibrate which in turn causes mechanisms in the ear to vibrate. The wind, being air, would do this directly. Or, in the poem, indirectly, by causing trees to vibrate which causes the air to vibrate which causes the auditory mechanisms to vibrate. But maybe I’m wrong. In any case, all the poet seems to me to be saying is that the room is silent except for the sound of the wind in the trees.

Good question, whose ear does it appeal to. Seems to me a competent critic would say what the lines do auditorily that will tend to seem musical to most people, such as repeat words and syllables, which this passage does; but it doesn’t seem to me to do much else. The critic need not point out what I call a poem’s “melodations” as good, just point them out, since some readers may miss them–or hear them but not fully appreciate them.

I do agree with Crews that a poem needs some kind of point of stability–what I call a unifying principle–to deviate interestingly from. I’m big on titles, too, but certainly don’t think lack of one can spoil a poem. I’m not confident that Crews can recognize the most interesting unifying principles, some of them quite delayed.

Like all critics with readerships (as I believe Crews may have, for I think I’ve heard of him), he seems not to say much about poetic technique–subject matter and points of view seem to be for him all that matters in a poem.

I think you captured him quite well, young Anthony. Thanks for a report that got me involved enough for all this.

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A number of years back, I did what I thought was a superior examination of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.”  Yesterday, thinking again about it–because I had the sudden idea that maybe I’d written enough little essays like it for a book-length collection of essays (later finding out I was wrong)–a simple explication of it occurred to  me: “so much depends upon (the fact that the everyday world can contain such beauty as) a (simple) red wheel barrow, glazed with rain water, beside white chickens.”  After writing that, I wonder if I didn’t already have it in my original essay.  I certainly said that’s what the poem most simply said, but I don’t think I then so concisely got its meaning (for me–always remember that, kids; but also remember that some engagents’ meanings are much better than everyone else’s).

Yes, it has many further meanings.  But that’s its core meaning.

In any case, after coming up with the explication just given, I thought a while about how much I enjoy explicating and otherwise critically dealing with poems, and–for the millionth time–about my belief that a good critique is as valuable as the poem it critiques.  Is, in fact, a conceptual variation on the poem it critiques, almost as enrichingly like/unlike it as a musical composition like Scheherazade is enrichingly like/unlike the literary work that inspired it.  It “spoils” the poem only the way scientific knowledge of the moon robs nullosophers of its magic.

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What’s better: to know a lot of poems by others reasonably well, or know just a few extremely well?  Probably neither, but I certainly hope that the few poems by others I know, I know extremely well.  Some of them, I’m sure I do.  And by “extremely well,” I mean as well as anyone.   It bothers me that I keep returning to them so often.  But every once in a while, I tackle a new poem or two.

]]> http://poeticks.com/2011/03/25/entry-407/feed/ 0 http://poeticks.com/2011/02/23/entry-387/ http://poeticks.com/2011/02/23/entry-387/#comments Wed, 23 Feb 2011 05:00:14 +0000 Bob Grumman http://poeticks.com/?p=4142 Recently, I’ve been going through the files with the graphics but not the texts of entries I made to my previous blog in search of mathemaku of mine.  I want to number them all, so need a complete list of them.  I think I posted just about all of them to my blog.  In any event, yesterday I brought up a file for an entry (Blog959) whose visits was recorded as close to 200.  Rarely did my old entries get more than 20 visits.   Curious to see what was in the blog, I then brought up the file that had its text, which I think worth quoting here:

17 September 2006: Among the many intriguing items at Crag Hill’s Poetry Scorecard is this found poem of Crag’s that he posted 3 September:

From Index of First Lines Selected Poems Charles Olson

.     I come back to the geography of it,
.     I don’t mean, just like that, to put down
.     I have been an ability–a machine–up to
.     I have had to learn the simplest things

.     I live underneath
.     I looked up and saw
.     Imbued / with the light
.     I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s

.     In cold hell, in thicket, how
.     In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–
.     is a monstrance,
.     I sing the tree is a heron

.     I sit here on a Sunday
.     It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death
.     it was the west wind caught her up, as

Amazing poem, this. I’m not a big fan of Olson’s, though I believe he is a major poet, and that some of his poems are A-1. Surely, these lines could only have been from a poet, though. I recognize one or two, but in this discussion will not look up any of them. (Oops, I realize I couldn’t look up very many of them; I do have The Maximus Poems, and several of my anthologies have poems by Olson, but I don’t have the Selected Poems.)

“I come back to the geography of it,”

Anyway, what a beginning, this return to some geography. Olson was probably only returning to a genuine geography, of the locale I feel he jabbered too much about, but here–dislocated by the line-break–”geography” can wing us to the terrain of all kinds of things, including the memory of a breakfast, banking procedures, 3 A.M., everything having a geography. Less surlogically, the word brings us to fundamentals, to the earth, to reality seen large, solid, inanimate . . .

What, I suddenly wonder, would the geography of geography be? Poems like this– effective jump-cut poems, that is–can flip us into such questions. Questions that resonate for the person flipped into them, I mean–as this one will surely not for everyone.

“I don’t mean, just like that, to put down”

Now a jump-cut leaving “geography” to simmer unconnected to any specific, and making the poem’s narrator more than a pronoun through his attempt to explain himself better. His explanation is broken off before getting anywhere, which effectually explains all the better his state of being at loose ends. A main interest is in whether he has just dropped one activity to return to the geography of whatever he’s involved in, and/or inadvertantly “put down” whatever he was doing because superficial or the like compared to geographical questions. “I have been an ability–a machine–up to”

The narrator continues trying to explain himself without finishing any of his ventures into self-analysis. I take this line to mean he’s not been personally/emotionally involved in whatever it is he’s talking about, “up to (now).” Note, by the way, how this line, with its pronounced metaphor, disturbs the quotidian tone of the previous (which, in turn, had demotically countered the academic tone of the first line).

“I have had to learn the simplest things”

Wow, no longer able (I guess) to let his machinery run his life without his involvement, the narrator has to concentrate, start from a sort of zero.

“I live underneath”

We’ve come to a new stanza. That the narrator says he lives underneath, which the lineation compels us to consider, rather than underneath something, opens a world for me. Certainly, we’re with a narrator deepening through himself (as we would expect from the poem’s consisting entirely of lines in the “i” section of an index).

“I looked up and saw”

This line seems planned to follow the one before it. This sudden strong logic out of the chaos of existence as if to reassure us that life does make sense is one of the virtues of found poetry. Again, a line-break re-locates us, in this case keeping us from a transitive verb’s object, compelling us to consider “saw” as an intransitive verb. The narrator has experienced illumination, not just seen some detail of ordinary life. No big deal if the context set us up for this sort of heightened seeing, but something of a (good) jolt in this zone of reduced context.

“Imbued / with the light”

Yikes, this sentence carries on trouble-free from the previous one.

“I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s”

The grammar now shatters the logic we seemed for a while to be in, just as “Death” shatters the text’s positive bright ambiance. I can’t help, by the way, thinking of Emily at this point. Death, however, is an absurd, trivial figure, some guy pursuing some conventional sport at some named who-cares-where.

“In cold hell, in thicket, how”

After the intrusion of a line with something of the effect of the famous porter scene in Macbeth, a new stanza, and high rhetoric electrifyingly bleakening the scene. Fascinating how “Cole” quickly colors into “cold hell,” by the way. “In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–”

Another weird shift–to the cold, densely thicketted geography of poetics (in English). “Furniture.” Something inanimate, stupid–but comfortable, for our convenience, to be used. . . . I don’t know the meaning of “meubles” but assume it’s some kind of furniture. Somehow, we are now in a man trying to explain himself in a geography/text trying to explain itself. At least, according to my way of appreciating language poems of this sort, which is partially to take them as exposures of mental states.

“is a monstrance,”

I guess we aren’t meant to sit on the chairs or put anything on the tables in the poem. We are definitely in a darkness and a confusion. “I sing the tree is a heron”

But the narrator can sing. He sings (presumably) of a tree’s resemblance to a heron. In other words, something dark (probably) and solid and motionless, like furniture, has something undark and capable of flight in it. Thus, the stanza ends hopefully, to set up the final one, which begins:

“I sit here on a Sunday”

The tone has gone quiet, conventional–but implicitly celebratory, Sunday being generally a day-off, and devoted to (generally happy) religious services. “It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death”

The chaos of the poem is resolved with this line. The fragments we’ve been stumbling through, dark and light, are life–which is beautiful in spite of the presence of death.

“it was the west wind caught her up, as”

Because of the line before this one, I’m prepared to read this to be about a woman turned magically into a weightless angel the pleasant west wind is going to give a ride to. Chagall, at his undrippiest. I also read the awe of a man beholding a beautiful woman into the line. An image illustrating the climactic previous statement.

Okay, that was a preliminary once-through I hope some reader will get something out of. I did! Don’t know if I’ll return to it. Probably, so I can use it in a book. Don’t know if I’ll have anything better to say about it then, though.

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I’m not ready to say more about the poem now–except that I wondered when I looked at my entry whether I’d mentioned the importance of Crag’s poem’s foundness when I discussed it.  I saw I hadn’t.  In my megalomaniacal opinion, I think I may be the only critic who has ever discussed the full aesthetic value of foundness.  I did this in my discussion, possible two decades ago by now, of Doris Cross’s work–wonderful visual poems brought into being by painting or otherwise defacing, deleting, meddling with dictionary paintings.  (I love Nietzsche not only for all he said, brilliantly, that I agree with, but for the megalomaniacal boasts he made about his accomplishments that have turned out to be valid.)

What I said in my Cross piece isn’t handy, so my comments now will probably be a bit incomplete and not as sharply expressed as what I said in it.   First off, as anyone would agree and as many I’m sure have said, the quotations from Olson, add his life and writings to Crag’s poem. This is important.  But what I think effective appropriation of found materials most importantly does is celebrate the essential logic of the universe.  It reminds us that God is in his heaven allowing accidents to make affirmations–even for someone like I who doesn’t believe in God, and understands that accidents don’t really make affirmations, only happen so often that some of them, especially when a keen discoverer has an eye out for them, are bound to do what Crag’s collection does.  Another, better way of putting it, is that we are reminded of who wonderfully well the human brain finds ways to give existence meanings, meanings that suggest Meaning.

Okay, not a view you’d think anyone would feel like a demigod for having, but it’s more than anyone else has said about foundness that I know of.  And I can’t see how anyone could say it’s wrong.
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.            Poem Consults the Vseineur
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.            However seldom the vseineur
.            said “universe” in Poem’s hearing,
.            he accepted it,
.            however clear it always was
.            that it had misspoken.

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I think his attitude probably a good one for a poet to have.  Analysis can take up energy that could be used creatively.  On the other hand, it’s . . . inconsiderate.  Sometimes a hint about what an artist is up to in a work can make the difference between an engagent of the work’s taking away a lifetime’s appreciation from it and getting nothing out of it.  The hint may even open the engagent to a whole kind of art he never would otherwise have enjoyed.

I’ve always felt, too, that when an artist seriously tries to explain his work, the explanation may constitute a second work perhaps as valuable as the first.  Why should a poetic description of the moon necessarily be more valuable that a critical description of a poetic description of a moon?

I’ve said all this before.  But it was on my mind again.