Entry 515 — The Null Zone: Still Dominant « POETICKS-

Entry 515 — The Null Zone: Still Dominant « POETICKS

Entry 515 — The Null Zone: Still Dominant

I actually got two-and-a-half brief reviews done yesterday. None even started yet today although it’s a little after three in the afternoon. Forty minutes ago I took two APCs, so maybe I’ll get going now.

I have nothing much to write about today, just some old thoughts about world cultural peaks. I think about them fairly often, mostly when comparing my country against others, with the low evaluation of it of so many liberals in mind. While I do believe America is the greatest nation in the world right now, and has been for over a century, I feel it has only achieved one cultural peak, the period from around 1910 until 1960 in poetry. Well, maybe also a technological one I’d call the Edison Era. Getting back to the poetic period, it required many more people than England from around 1810 until 1840 had when England had its one great period of poetry. (Elizabethan England achieved maximal greatness in the drama, not poetry, in my view.) I don’t know of any other nations’ comparable poetic peaks but I’m not dumb enough to imagine that isn’t almost entirely due to my ignorance.

Actually, I don’t really think of the recent peaking of anglophonic poetry in America as belonging culturally to America, but to the British Empire. In any event, I always wonder in conjunction with my admiration of that period, how my period compares. I don’t think anything much was going on in anglophonic poetry between 1960 and 1990, although the next period of superior poetry was shaping up then. From 1990 til now, anglophonic poetry has been sizzling, I’m sure of that. It’s been at least an orderof magnitude better than the poetry of the preceding 30 years. Whether it has gotten or will get to the level or the early twentieth centure period, I can’t say. Don’t know enough about it, and am too close to it to be as objective as I should be. Certainly its poetry has been by far the most varied, the most valuably varied, poetry ever. If it’s a lesser period, it will be because most of its best poets have been too esoteric. It lacks its Yeatses and Frosts, although I hold Richard Wilbur in high esteem. And the sonnets of Michael Snider. In fact, there are probably many excellent “Frosts” out there I’ve been too busy with my own poetry to know much about. And many of our most unconventional poets have composed first-rate, accessible (or reasonably accessible) conventional poetry, too. The first name that occurs to me is Sheila Murphy. Karl Kempton and Geof Huth, as well. Who knows, too, how “accessible” posterity will find the now seemingly difficult work of others. I must remember to live to the age of 130 to find out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Autobiographica, Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 566 — Vendler on Dove « POETICKS

Entry 566 — Vendler on Dove

I got hold of a copy of Vendler’s review of Dove’s Penguin anthology and have now read it. So far I just have random impressions of it. One is that Vendler is not nearly as cruel as some posts I’ve read at New-Poetry make her seem. Certainly she gives much more than just her side on many issues. For instance, she merely suggests the value of a more exclusive anthology, but gives reasons for other kinds. She even voices my belief that we already can find canonized works, so don’t need them repeated in an anthology, and I was wrong to take an out-of-context quotation to indicate she herself would rather read an anthology with many more Stevens poems in it and fewer by lessers in it; actually she opined that for a young new-comer- to-poetry would enjoy the anthology more if that were the case. Basically, she uses the anthology as an excuse to correct Dove about Stevens and other poets. She takes pains to show that Stevens could be a “tragic poet,” too, not just the aesthete that Dove described him as. The usual standard nonsense that no work of art is of the highest value unless death is in it.

Vendler didn’t seem as arrogant as I thought she might be. But opinionated, that’s for sure. Doesn’t think much of Dove as an essayist. But supports the contention with examples of her flaws, and why they are flaws—like an English teacher with a student’s paper. The worst thing she did in my view was claim a dead passage by Baraka “turns sentimental, in the manner of E. E. Cummings,” which is crap. Cummings seems to me too sentimental at times, but his sentimentality was far superior in expression and much different from Baraka’s. But I’m as sensitive to remarks about Cummings as Vendler is to remarks about Stevens. Needless to say, I didn’t change my mind about how narrow Vendler’s taste is.

Oh, like so many members of an establishment, she sneers at the idea that such a thing as an Establishment exists in the world of poetry. Thinking about the absurdity of that, I realized that I, believe it or not, am a member of a literary establishment, the visual poetry establishment. A tiny, uninfluential establishment, to be sure, but one, nonetheless. With factions, me fairly high in one, Kenny Goldsmith probably similar high in the other main one. With people in both factions, others in neither. Kind of interesting. In any case, I think it insane to poo poo the idea of a poetry establishment. No field exists—unless less than a few years old—that lacks an establishment. Which doesn’t mean they are formal or conscious or conspiracies. They are just there, almost always with more power than they should have.

Diary for 16 November 2011, 2 P.M.: today, as usual, I felt sluggish all morning. Generally the skin on my face feels slightly swollen, my eyes tired. After luch, though, I finally did some work on my book. A difficult section I’m resting from right now. It’s going well, but it started confusing me again. My one previous good bit of work today was mostly mental, most of it carrying on from late last night after I’d gone to bed, and just about all of it due to excellent comments I got at the writer’s group meeting I went to. It had to do with the hand-out I’d done for the Arts & Humanities Council Exhibition (the “A&H Show”). I thought I’d written something clear and easy to follow but found out I had not. I’ve got most of the graphics done that I’ll be using, but none of the revised text although I know pretty fully what I’ll be saying.

8 P.M. I did a little more work on the book. I’d jump in and get three or four sentences done, then find I didn’t know what I was talking about. I’d take a break, realize I’d left out preliminary information, and gone back to type a paragraph on that–only to have the same thing happen again. I suppose that only happened three times but it didn’t make me feel I was making progress, and I still have to explain the process I began the day hoping to explain. Should go easier tomorrow, but my tennis team has a match, and who knows what that will do to me. I won’t mind losing, but I will mind playing lousy, and I’ve been playing exceptionally lousy lately. Even though my new hip seems fine.

Bloomingdale’s Coupons

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 1087 — P&B, Series . . . Call It 5 « POETICKS

Entry 1087 — P&B, Series . . . Call It 5

P&B is short for “pronouncements and blither.”

At some point in a long Internet discussion with Richard Kostelanetz about the Establishment, I remarked that, “Academic and commercial presses ARE the establishment, or essentially if many time implicitly told what to publish by it. Actually, on reflection (gee, I had that word ready to use then lost it for a full two minutes, except for the “re”), I see that it might make sense to divide the Establishment in two, although they overlap: the academic/commercial establishment that rules contemporary literature, and the one that rules the art of the past. You’ve built your reputation, it seems to me, in the latter (which is where academia is at its best, and often splendid), but not so much in the former–not because of lack of support but because the morons in charge of the former are thirty to fifty years behind what’s going on where most of the best art is coming into existence.

In another discussion, this one at New-Poetry, with a number of participants, Sam Gwynn disagreed with me that “if a poet wants maximal musicality, formal poetry is for him,” with the claim that Whitman achieved maximal musicality in his free verse.

You know, Sam, after really really thinking this over, which is uncharacteristic of me, I concluded that I disagree. It seems to me that if I were a composer, and wanted to achieve maximal musical beauty, I would write for a symphony orchestra, not a quartet–or for a piano, not a flute. Someone will throw Beethoven’s quartets at me, or some glorious melody for a flute, but my point is that a formal poet has all possible auditory devices know to poetry (I think) to work with, a free verser doesn’t. A free verser, or composer for quartet or flute, may still achieve things some subjectively find better than anything else (Hey, I think Thomas Wolfe was wonderfully musical–although that was when I was under 25), but what can he do to achieve what, say, Frost does with rhyme in his Snowy Evening poem? I suppose it’s subjective, although I believe it will not too long from now be objectively provable by comparing what happens in the brain listening to Whitman versus listen to Frost, that nothing in poetry can surpass the music of Frost’s rhymes. I further claim they do what chords do in real music, a rhyme causes you to hear two related notes together in a way nothing else does–and in Frost’s poem, you get THREE together.

Did I show that in my knowlecular poetics discussion of the rhyme? I can’t recall. . . .

Okay, maybe my gush above is due my bias in favor of Frost, who seems to me to do just about everything word-only poets do better than Whitman, however admirable in so many ways that Whitman may be.

I note now that I’ve quoted myself, that I forgot that, for me, Whitman is a formal poet, albeit a borderline one, due to his use of Psalmic parallelism.

New Mexico Singles

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 28th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts, Pronouncements & Blither. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 1204 — The Exerioddicist, July 1993, P.1 « POETICKS

Entry 1204 — The Exerioddicist, July 1993, P.1

While looking for a poem for use in my Scientific American blog, I came across the following, an issue of Jake Berry’s 4-page The Experioddicist from July 1993 that was entirely devoted to Me:

I think it pretty danged fine, and not entirely self-centered, for it has criticism of material by others. I hope that by holding down the control button and clicking the + button, you can get an enlargement you can read. My next three blog entries will have the other three pages–and give me extra time to work on other things.
.

Sport Chalet

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 5th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Linguexpressive Poetry Specimen, Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts, Visual Poetry Specimen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 506 — Random Comments « POETICKS

Entry 506 — Random Comments

A few trivial recent comments of mine just to let the curious know I’m still alive. It looks, though, like I won’t be posting much for a while, for I’ll be out of town each of the next two week-ends.

Back to Wilshberia

Here’s another definition of “Wilshberia.” I think it probably the most accurate one. All the kinds of poetry between the formal verse of Wilbur and what I consider the jump-cut poetry of Ashbery taught by more than a few English professors. So you’d have to survey English departments to pin it down, which I now believe is why I haven’t been able to define it perfectly. That and the fact that I use it without much thought–in threads where no one else is using much thought. A really good brief but not perfect definition would be simply the kinds of poetry William Logan discusses in the New Criterion.

Williphobia

Next, something from the essay on Williphobia (psychotic hatred os Shakespeare of Stratford) I’ve been trying to get done (deleted because outside the scope of the essay, but here because I don’t want to forget it): I hypothesize that mature knowleplexes, healthy or flawed, do not come into being until puberty. Before that a person’s charactation, or normal level of mental energy, is not high enough to discriminate to any extent among knowlecules (bits of data) arriving, haphazardly organized, accompanied sometimes with contradictions not recognized or dealt with when recognized. That is, everyone tends to be a Milyoop before puberty–excessively, uncritically, open to the environment. Children can and do form knowleplexes (full-scale understandings of various unified subjects), but they will be limited to daily (pre-sexual) life, and consist, understandably, mainly of early, simple knowlecules. No child will form a rigidniplex (near-insanely clung-to irrational understanding) except a rare, highly screwed-up one (such as an autistic child). Children’s main intellectual flaw is generally ignorance, not irrationality–they haven’t the charactration to be seriously irrational. (Although they are prey to enthusiplexes.)

A Visit to an Establishment Website

Now from Contemporary Poetry Review, followed by my responses to it, followed by my second thought about my response:

Five Lessons from AWP: Or, Why We Hate Poetry Readings

1)      You should recite your poetry, not read it.

2)      If you can’t recite your poetry, then you can’t remember your poetry. And if you can’t remember your poetry, why would anyone else?

3)      A poetry recital should be a performance. Most poets read their poems in front of an audience as if they were lecturing to a group of college students. This betrays two illusions. The first is that the poetry audience is the same as a classroom of captives. The second is that the audience must indulge the poet, rather than the poet showing sufficient respect for the audience to entertain it.

4)      A poem should be recited to an audience before it is ever published. This should be a part of the poet’s method of composition and revision. Our modern practice is exactly the reverse: to publish a book of poems and then read them aloud, generally for the first time, to an audience. Is it any wonder that so many poets are so dreadful?

5)      Never be boring. (Many poets are boring – their poetry too.)

Response #1

1. Only a grind remembers poems in any detail. A lover of poetry’s only important concern is remembering who wrote each good one he encounters, and perhaps enough besides that to help him find it later.

2. If one can sufficiently understand a recited poem one has never encountered before fully to appreciate it,it’s unlikely to be very good.

3. Don’t be boring? What a revolutionary idea! Up there with don’t be stupid.

Response #2

Okay, said my smarter self, one good way to appreciate a poem IS to take in its spoken surface so well you can remember it (assuming, as too many do, that all poems are words only). But there are a lot of just-as-good other ways of appreciating a poem, without remembering hardly nothin’ about it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts, Nothing Much. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

POETICKS

Category: Miscellaneous Literary Thoughts