Here again is the John M. Bennett poem from yesterday’s entry:
eapt
flooded haphtic duu
stt’s yr nodte nude
)label streaming( to )ss
ed( cash an )slo
shshed( where the
moumouthless lungch
“lost’s tea cher” )fol
ded yellp(
sot ,dusty
My liking this poem started with its title. I hope to write more about it before too long, but right now I’m too far away from my appreciation zone to want to do anything here but quote from my diary entry for today, and from a continuation of that in an e.mail to Richard Kostelanetz, which I got going on after leaving John’s poem, and taking a caffeine tablet.
From my diary entry: “Each of mine days seems to be abandoning me more than the previous one did, and—lo—I feel almost nowhere in today (locution intended). I just took a caffeine tablet, after lying in bed very worn-out for a while, after spending three-and-a-half hours going to, at, or coming from, Dr. Galliano, whom I was seeing to find out if it was time for him to perform another colonoscopy on me. He spent five minutes with me after I’d waited over an hour to see him and decided I was indeed due for another one. My appointment for it is 27 December. My trip back took an extra half-hour or so because I got a flat rear tire halfway home. Amazingly, I found I had two tubes to replace the flat one with, but then found the tire itself was bald, remarkably so considering how short a time I’ve had it, and–naturally–I don’t have a replacement. The front tire seemed fine. The bald tire should get me to the bike shop for two new tires and back tomorrow.
“I’ve been getting a lot of little ideas about experimentation in poetry, punctuation, the flaws of the Princeton encyclopedia. I have a great yen to start a book called The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Poetry & Poetics that would provide superior entries on everything of value in it, except its entries on the poetry of various countries, assuming they are of value, which I doubt. My book would be devoted exclusively to poetry in English. I consider poems in other languages of no significant concern unless they do something of note that no poems in English do, and I have no reason to believe they do.
“I must be at least slightly energized to have written as much of this entry as I have, flowingly, except for more typos than even I usually make. But I don’t feel ready to try to compose an appreciation of the Bennett poem in my blog entry for yesterday that I said I would discuss today. Nor do I feel like starting the guide I just spoke of, I just feel like thinking about doing it. One thing that is holding me back is getting a better title. I want a confrontational one like An Anti-Academic’s Guide to Poetry and Poetics. I don’t like “Ánti-Academic,” though. I think because one can be stupidly anti-academic. Also, I would not be anti-academic but anti-acadumbotic; although I would also be mildly against those scholars, including many good ones, who just restate the received understanding of some field more clearly and/or completely and/or intelligently-organized. My book would hope to outdo the best of such scholars at what they do but, much more importantly, state the best understanding of the field as it currently is.”
* * *
From my e.mail to Richard: “I just skimmed the Princeton’s entries on “poetry” and “poems.” Amazing, an encyclopedia about poetry that doesn’t know what it is! Another discovery, just flipping pages, is an entry on “Autonomy.” At slightly more than five columns in length, it’s about twice as long as the entry on “Assonance,” one of the few essential entries the thing seems to have. An entry on Lesbian Poetry is there, too, probably not the first time in an edition of the Encyclopedia.
(Interesting topic for an essay or book, a history of the four editions of the Princeton, showing how what seems important in poetry and poetics has changed over the years, among other things. I don’t have the first edition; may get it, just for the heck of it. There is probably a cheap one available, used. I suspect it’s the best of the four editions.)
If an entry on lesbian poets, why not one on baseball player poets? (not just major leaguers who write poetry, and there are some, but anybody who has played baseball, loves it, and write poems having to do with it–more, I bet than lesbian poets). Cowboy poets, for sure! Gosh, I’m retrograde. I guess I’d put up with an entry on Ethno-poetry, but barely. Actually, an entry that covered ethno-poetry, homosexual poetry, prison poetry, cowboy poetry, etc. would be okay with me, but in my book I think I’d cover all that in an entry on Poetic Content. With sub-categories? I’d have to see.
What I may do, is write something about the Princeton daily in my blog; that way, I would not be losing time from other pursuits because writing a blog entry daily is a duty I’ve assigned myself—until I can’t any longer write. (With a few time-outs for surgery or travel allowed—but discouraged since one can make entries in advance for the days one will be away from the blog.)
Note: I’ve just decided to put the Princeton Encyclopedia on my list of enemies of poetry (in the Categories section to the right).
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Posted in Autobiographica, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Pronouncements & Blither | No Comments »
Friday, December 16th, 2011
The following is another apparently unpublished review of Poetry I did for Small Press Review, this one earlier than the one I posted yesterday.
Poetry
Volume CXCVII, Number 5, February 2011. 90 pp.
Edited by Christian Wiman
published monthly except bimonthly July/August
444 n. Michigan Avenue, Ste 1850
Chicago IL 60611. $3.75, $35/year.
Critic David Orr has a review in this issue of Poetry that typifies what makes it, in my view, the largest obstacle facing superior American poets. It is the belief that poetry “has been all but entirely absorbed by institutions of higher education,” as he quotes Mark McGurl as having put it. Only someone oblivious to all the poetry happening outside academia, most notably, visual poetry, language poetry, sound poetry, cyber poetry and mathematical poetry, can believe this.
True, Poetry once let a few so-so specimens of visual poems into an issue and some language poems into another. But these were token gestures. The proof of the pudding is that it has never devoted space to articles about either. Of course, it will fairly soon give language poetry more pages now that many of the chief language poets have become established–chiefly by virtue of being professors.
What’s depressing about this is that Poetry is wealthy, influential, often-appearing and claims to want to represent the full continuum of contemporary poetry, so could do so much to help the impoverished R&D department of the poetry enterprise.
As for what poetry is in this issue, suffice it to say that Carolyn Forche is one of the two poets named on the front cover as a contributor.
Diary Entry
Thursday, 15 December 2011, 7 P.M. A bad day. It started with my tennis team losing two of three matches including the one I played in–horribly. I got just about nothing done until a little while ago, after taking a couple of APCs. My accomplishment for the day, another blog entry, and a press release for the exhibition. I have now gotten just about all the work for the exhibition done that I need to. I just have a couple of pieces I want to get re-framed by a professional.
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Posted in David Orr, Enemies of Poetry, Poetry Magazine | No Comments »
Thursday, December 15th, 2011
Today I’m posting a short review I did for Small Press Review that as far as I know did not get published:
Poetry
Volume CXCVIII, Number 4, July/August 2011. 110 pp.
Edited by Christian Wiman
published monthly except bimonthly July/August
444 N. Michigan Avenue, Ste 1850,
Chicago IL 60611. $3.75, $35/year.
Poetry, during its first few years, was a literary miracle: a publication devoted to poetry that was strongly under the influence of a world-class poet. Now, eighty years or so later it features poems by knownstreamers like David Ferry, to whom the organization funding it recently gave $100,000. One begins:
The five or six of them, sitting on the rocks,
Out at Lanesville, near Gloucester; it is like
Listening to music. Several of them are teachers,
One is a psychologist, one is reading a book,
The page glares white in the summer sunlight;
Standard free verse, standard trivially “authentic” geographical details, a certain standard conversational randomness, a standard imagistic detail. I thought it was going to be a very standard Iowa State meditation on an old family photograph. Not so, not that that made any difference. I can’t say there was anything wrong with it. The problem is that Poetry rarely publishes anything much different from it, except when briefly pretending to cover the entire contemporary American poetry continuum by publishing some token language or visual poems. It certainly never encourages superior poetry.
Diary Entry
Wednesday, 14 December 2011, 7 P.M. A busy day. I saw my cardiologist who said I was doing fine. In fact, he took me off one of my two blood pressure pills. I did some marketing after leaving the doctor’s. Later, I spent an hour or so at the Arts and Humanities Council offices for a get-together. I chatted with a few people. I knew no one but Judy so didn’t circulate. I’m still no good with people I don’t know, unless sitting with them, as I did with John and Howard, two guys I actually had good conversations with. Howard went to where my Christmas poem was on display for a look. He said he liked it. Previous to that, one of the women I’d talked a bit with, describing my long division poems, had gone to look at it, and returned to tell me, and two friends of hers, that she liked it. That, and the food I had, made the event a success for me!
Once home, I babbled a bit about how nice it’d be to live to the age of 500 to take care of my blog entry for the day. My public relations visit to the A&H fesitivities qualifies as another piece of work done for my exhibition. I did actually take care of a major chore today: this year’s Christmas cards. I included a two-paragraph year-end letter with most of them. I spent over two hours taking care of that. I estimate I have three or four more cards to send.
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Posted in David Ferry, Enemies of Poetry, Poetry Magazine | No Comments »
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