Column041 — November/December 1999
The Coming of The New Millennium, Part Two
Small Press Review,
Volume 31, Number 11/12, November/December 1999
Koja, #2, Fall 1998;
edited by Mikhail Magazinnik. 60 pp;
7314 21st Ave., Brooklyn NY 11204.
Website: http://www.monkeyfish.com/koja. $12/2 issues.
In my last column I spoke of going “completely off-column . . . to write whatever I wantz to”–except to mention something having to do with experioddica–“and call the mess an end-of-the-millennium round-up”. The idea, successful for that column (which I knocked out in less than two hours), was to break me out of the partial writer’s block I’ve been in and out of for the past few years. I say, “partial,” because I’m generally able to force out something when a deadline is on me. The trouble is getting anything written reasonably well in advance of a deadline, or without a deadline.
I’ve decided this happens to writers for two basic reasons: their writing’s having come to seem a chore, and fear that what they write will be crap. Yeah, not the most original analysis, but still valid, I think. In any event, it leads to a sure-fire solution: just write for fun and not care whether it’s any good or not. My age helps take care of the fun part for me, for it’s responsible for my having a lot of opinions to air, and a large repertoire of word-games to play. So all I need to do is spout off on any subject that takes my fancy, and/or spin my output through some word-game or other (e.g., use slang, use one part of speech for another, work a metaphor, invent a new word). Naturally, the funnest thing to do is say something enduringly right in some way, and there’s always a chance of that, too. I just have to avoid making it my exclusive, or even major, aim, and risk succumbing to worry about the value of what I’m writing.
Avoiding the latter is easier said than done for most of us, but one way to accomplish it is to focus on quantity–keep in mind how much you’ve written, not what you’ve written. This has helped me quite a bit in the past, and still does, but I now have something even better to focus on: the certainty that too few people read me, or ever will read me, for it to matter what I say. The latter, of course, is a ridiculous lie in my case, but it still works for me, as I’m highly susceptible to self-doubts, no matter how irrational.
There: over four hundred words, I’ve had a ball sapiencing, and I’ve blasted through my writer’s block for the second day in a row. Now all I have to do to finish my column is be mass mediatric and come up with some kind of millennial list of best or importantest whatevers of this century, or millennium. Generally speaking, I’m contemptuous of such lists on the grounds that it’s way too early to judge either time-period. Saner would be to consider the nineteenth-century or, at worst, the first half of this one. But in my main field, American Poetry, who have you got from the nineteenth century to list besides Poe, Whitman, Dickinson and Emerson? The first fifty years of this century had a lot of good names in it (Cummings, Roethke and Stevens are tied at the top of my list of best American Poets of the period), but I have to admit that I’d much rather rattle a list of current poets around than bother with long-dead poets. Moreover, no matter how much I try exclusively for fun in this column, I ought not forget that it is about contemporary poets–unless I can’t enjoy writing about them, and that will never be the case so long as I don’t have to say anything of substance about them.
So, off the top of my head, here is a list of poets that ought to be on any list of the best American poets of the past fifty years but won’t be mentioned on any such list published by a commercial or academic press until 2050 at the earliest–and probably nowhere else in the small press but here: Guy Beining, with whom I start because I was just writing about him yesterday; John M. Bennett, who does more of technical interest in any one of the poems in Mailer Leaves Ham, his latest book, than all the poets in American Poetry Review or Poetry have done in all their poetry (except maybe two or three accidentally and briefly in one of those publications); Karl Kempton, who’s done the same but with a greater emphasis on visual devices; Karl Young, ditto; Will Inman, a traditionalist but a champion in the mystico-bardic line; Richard Kostelanetz, the most widely-innovative poet around but also the period’s top all-around man-of-letters–and top all-around man-of-arts; John Byrum, another major visual poet; Jake Berry, Whitmanesquely all-embracive without the slush; Bill Keith, the first visio-jivist; Harry Polkinhorn, super-translator, publisher and critic as well as poet (and novelist and who knows what else); Marilyn Rosenberg, Mike Basinski, Stephen-Pau–uhn, I’ve run out of descriptive phrases, and I just remembered that I did a list like this not too long ago for this magazine, and I probably shouldn’t repeat myself, no matter how much fun it is.
Anyway, I don’t need to, for it looks like I’ve gotten another column done (in no time at all)! If I can just keep concen- trating on quantity and fun instead of quality, I could get all my columns for the 21st-century done by 2002! Before starting on my next, though, I need to plug two new Kostelanetz collections. There’s a new magazine called Koja that features visual poetry and other conceptually-appealing work that’s worth a mention, too–but, Jesus, C. Mulrooney has something in it! What’s going on?! Never mind; it and the Kostelanetz books are still worth looking into. I’ll tell you why in my next column (if Editor Fulton hasn’t dumped me by then).