New Review

Pardon the sparse updates. It’s been busy on this front, but more long-form content is coming. There will also be some more podcasts. In the meantime, my review of Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me can be found in today’s Los Angeles Times.

2008 National Book Awards Podcast #4: Mark Doty

(This podcast is part of our 2008 National Book Awards coverage. Keep checking this category for details.)

Who is the Correspondent Talking With? Mark Doty

What’s Going On? So here’s the deal. Mr. Doty here has arranged a considerable amount of poetry together. But have you ever stopped to consider just how it was put together. Furthermore, there is a good deal of talk here about Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and the degree to which poets should revere Mr. Whitman. Mr. Doty was a good sport during this interview, and we hope to revisit his work at some less rushed point in the future.

National Book Awards Podcast #4: Mark Doty (Download MP3)

This text will be replaced

Gosh Golly, Godot

I am very honored to have been included in this quite important poetry collection. It appears, however, that Bat Segundo, responding in the For Godot comments, was none too happy about the controversial prosodic pilfering. What is perhaps funnier than the experiment itself is how so many egos have taken offense at this Situationist tomfoolery (more sustained horrific reactions can be found at The National Poetry Foundation blog). Danny Pitt Stoller writes:

If someone published an article containing false information about me, I would want it removed from the Web; it is no different for you to claim I wrote a certain poem when I did not. It is my basic right to protect my name and reputation, and I find it really tasteless that some people would laugh this off as some kind of avant-garde experiment.

It is worth observing that Danny Pitt Stoller’s name has been frequently used as a mark. Despite being married, Mr. Stoller has slept with a mere 2.2 people in the past eleven years, and hopes that he will yield 2.2 children in the next eleven years. He once ran for treasurer, losing to Esmerelda Muttmuffins by a 72-28 margin. Ms. Muttmuffins still holds the coveted position. There was a six month period in 1997 in which Mr. Stoller’s telephone bills were about $300 monthly, the result of too many 1-900 telephone calls. Mr. Stoller is a legally ordained minister and has officiated over many weddings. That woman who married a dolphin some years ago? It was Mr. Stoller who presided over the ceremony. Mr. Stoller has written 210 letters to the editor, but none of them have been published in Newsday. He wears pink socks in his bedroom, but never in public. He genuinely believes that Michael Bay is one of the most important film directors of our time, and has watched every episode of The Beverly Hillbillies twice.

And, yes, Mr. Stoller is dour and humorless. (Well, not quite dour and humorless. Contact with him in 2010 has revealed a sense of humor and elicited a slight modification to this entry.)

Invisible Rag

To live, embrace the neck melts into noose
To die, slow sauce traverses present goose
Bill folds thin fi’e flecking dire embers
Soap queen gags this taste, Marilyn Ch’mbers
Syntax slumming thrumming, meets combustion
Gas lay rising, fumes of dyin’ fustian

Holdout absent letters, turn redux
Wait and drink Lethe’s mug will wear a tux
Lobes probe further heights
Emolument
But at unknown escarpment

Is There Any Purpose?

The Guardian’s James Buchan has asked the question, in all seriousness, “Is there any purpose in translating poetry?” Which is akin to asking the following questions:

Is there any purpose in listening to someone outside my socioeconomic strata?
Is there any purpose in venturing outside Manhattan? After all, New York is the center of the universe.
Is there any purpose in sampling different food when I am comfortable with the bland meals I eat at home?
Is there any purpose in trying out another sexual position besides missionary?

(In case it wasn’t clear, the answer to all these questions is a resounding YES!)

(via Bookninja)

Two Guys Reading Gregory Corso

And here’s a report of the evening from Richard Grayson. As Mr. Grayson notes, someone did indeed leave in a huff midway through the reading. Many thanks to Levi Asher for inviting me.

(Mad props to Caryn)

Thursday Poetry Reading

A gentleman by the name of Levi Asher has recruited me to read a poem on Thursday. Said reading involves a bongo drum and assorted experimental hijinks. I’m not sure how I got involved in this exactly. I think I said yes and Mr. Asher, knowing that I was a man of my word, ran with the ball faster than Herschel Walker ever did. Let this be a lesson to all, or perhaps this is merely a warning to me.

Nevertheless, I will have more details soon, but it goes down this Thursday. At 8:00 PM. Somewhere. More specifics to come.

Perfection, of a Kind, Was What They They Were After

I somehow missed this article on Sunday, but the Philly Inquirer has a nice overview of poetry podcasts.

Poetry Mashup

T.S. Eliot vs. Portishead. (via MeFi)

The Impotence of Proofreading

ALSO FROM TAYLOR MALI: “What Teachers Make” and “Like You Know.” Here’s the guy’s website. He also has podcasts.

I Taste a Gender Never Brewed

Ruth Padel’s Top Ten Women Poets (via Bookninja)

Throw Michiko Into the Waste Land

New York Times: “In his new book, ‘T. S. Eliot,’ the British poet Craig Raine gives us a new, more accessible Eliot, an Eliot he describes as a virtuosic fox in terms of style, and a single-minded hedgehog when it came to themes.”

Let me count the ways in which this sentence is stupid. For one thing, why the fuck should “The Waste Land” be “accessible?” It’s not as if Eliot’s masterpiece is a building that needs a fucking handicapped ramp. It’s an epic poem that requires you to take the damn thing apart and find out why it hits you in the gut. “After the torchlit red on sweaty faces?” Come on. It’s pretty fucking clear we’re not reading a Carl Hiassen thriller. It’s pretty fucking clear that we’re not talking about some bullshit dichotomy (Complex style! Simplistic themes! You see! No gray areas! Here’s a helpful bulleted list for you to bring to your book club after you bifurcate the fresh fruit!).

Single-minded hedgehog? Try looking at yourself in the mirror, Michiko.

“The Waste Land” is a poem that requires you to read other poems, that requires you to understand why so many other writers feel compelled to reference it. And poetry itself is a form that requires rereading and note taking and many other things that an active reader engages in (SURE AS FUCKING NOT MICHIKO, who has earned the Pulitzer Prize for the flaccid, worthless and, above, all abso-fucking-lutely bitter “reviews” she regularly files for that bulimic broadsheet).

Second, is Michiko such a reclusive and illiterate dunderhead that her review here is a matter of telling us what the fuck Craig Raine (who Michiko helpfully reminds us is “a poet himself”) is telling us? Are there absolutely no fucking brain cells she can access within her head? Nothing in all her years of reading that she can ruminate upon to give us some concept of what SHE MIGHT FUCKING THINK of T.S. Eliot? Can she not even offer one fucking sentence limning (to momentarily use that dreaded book review verb) Eliot’s prosody? Or is she hopelessly locked in this self-imposed literary menopause and just too damn absinthian to feel anything anymore?

If this is the case (and I suspect it is), then what we have here is a critic who approximates the living embodiment of Cliff’s Notes: dictatorial, synthesizing a process that has never been about a verbal heartbeat, and emitting generalizations in a way that discourages the next generation from literature. Because in this review, it’s not about the poetry, dammit. It’s about Eliot’s “buttoned-up banker’s mien.” It’s about personality. It’s about what Eliot had for breakfast or who he fucked or whether he ate a tuna fish sandwich before penning a canto. But it sure as fuck isn’t about “torchlit red on sweaty faces.” Because Michiko has no desire to sweat. She has no desire to feel. She has no desire to see what’s so fantastic about these five words. She has no desire to throw herself into anything approximating emotion. For Michiko, it’s all about how she can tear someone who’s struggled for years to produce something beautiful a new one in a matter of 1,000 words.

I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough. Why does the New York Fucking Times, the alleged vanguard newspaper that has the temerity to declare itself the cultural fucking gatekeeper, employ so many fucking people who could not give two solid shits about fiction? Who feel the need to stifle this fantastic art form with idiotic banter? Who feel the need to constantly shit upon it without expressing a glimmer of literary interest? And who treat the people who read these reviews like dark and dusty troglodytes who hole up under bridges with books rather than active thinkers who are part of our population?

Birnbaum Alert

Robert Birnbaum talks with Donald Hall.

Why The Spoken Word Grammies Are Useless

I could truly care less about Mary J. Blige’s nomination sweep of the Grammies. What does interest me is the Spoken Word aspect. Alas, this year’s Spoken Word set of nominees are about as far as one can get from genuine poets. Bob Newhart? Bill Maher? Sure, these folks are somewhat effective comedians in their own right, but they are hardly poets. Al Franken? Well, if whiny mainstream “comedians” who take no chances and tell liberals what they already want to hear are indicative of “storytelling,” then let the Two Buck Chuck flow.

This leaves us with Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee reading their autobiography and Jimmy Carter, who actually has written some poetry, although his nomination is for Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, about as “poetic” in nature as Franken’s schtick.

Granted, the Grammies, like most awards ceremonies, are pretty pointless. And there’s no reason to expect them to honor the rich and eclectic millieu of audio books. But if the category in question “includes Poetry, Audio Books & Storytelling,” why doesn’t a single nomination feature poetry? If the celebrities are getting greater recognition, why not create a new category dedicated exclusively to literature?

Well, we can’t have that. Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, and Donald Hall aren’t nearly as sexy as Blige strutting her stuff. Gonna breakthrough? Not on your life.

Can I Be Laureate Now?

The blog 3×3x3 sets the following criteria:

Pick 3 stories from Google News. Using only words that occur in the first few paragraphs of each story, make a poem with 3 stanzas, 3 lines each, no more than 60 characters per line. The 3-word title should use a word from each story. Be sure to include links to your 3 stories after the poem.

Okay, I’m game.

Prohibiting Crocodile Sex

Freshening up, young man snacking on a crocodile penis, protracted
Spiders and locusts, belching
Bite on his ear

Influence the first brasserie, artery-clogging
Unanimously approved the ban
An additional 12 months because it may take more time

Any sex between is a felony
Consensual? The first time with two, prosecuted under the law
Preferential treatment? Indicted

Sources:

Guardian: Where to next after a light snack of crocodile penis?
USA Today: New York becomes first city to ban trans fats.
Boston Herald: Correction officers indicted on charges they had sex with inmates.

They’re Blaming Ted Hughes For the Delay of This One Too

Washington Post: “An unpublished sonnet that Sylvia Plath wrote in college while pondering themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ will appear Wednesday in a Virginia online literary journal.”

Guerilla Poetry Marketing?

Scribbling Woman reports on interesting developments in St. John. Apparently, a poetry blogger is tagging sidewalks with URLs and lines of poetry to attract readers.

Vancouver Sun, Do You Regret the Error?

George Murray is not, repeat NOT a Newfoundland poet. If there is any justice in the world, Sun columnist Cheri Hanson will be chewed out by her editor and sent on the road to distinguish between Newfoundland poets and Saskatchewan poets. Poets get enough slack as it is. And if we’re going to be provincial about it, it would behoove the media to get it right!

Perhaps Because Andrew Marvell Wasn’t Likely to Be a Gap Connoisseur

Guardian: “In the time I’ve been paying serious attention – the past 15 or so years – there’s been a steadily increasing anxiety over the marketing of poetry.”

Dietrich Poem Found

A long lost love poem from Marlene Dietrich to Ronald Reagan has been found. Even more interestingly, the poem was typed on Noel Coward’s typewriter. The poem reads:

Gipper skipper
You’ve never been a big tipper
But Adolf’s hair
And yours compare
I type this
After a night of drinks

archy rocks

Holy frijole! An enormous Don Marquis resource online! (via MeFi)

David Harsent: Mountain Man in the Making?

Independent: “‘I write poems slowly, not usually on the back of an envelope in a hurry,’ says Harsent. ‘Being a poet is wonderfully isolated. I am fantastically sequestered from the world.’”

And You Thought Those North of the 49th Parallel Were Lacking on the Spenserian Front

Sonnet Central (via Books, Words, and Writing)

There are even Canadian sonnets!

Putting a Little Faith in Percy

BBC: “An unknown poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley has been discovered nearly 200 years after it was written. The 172-line poem was included in Shelley’s pamphlet Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, which was printed in Oxford in 1811.”

In Praise of David Orr

While the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch may be discontinued, Levi Asher has picked up the slack with his “Reviewing the Review” blog posts. This week, Mr. Asher made the claim that “The Book Review continues to prove that it has no capability at all to review poetry.” While I can certainly agree that its poetry coverage leaves little to be desired, in large part because of the self-described “vulgarian” whims of its editor, I felt the need to leave a comment noting that there has been one critic during Tanenhaus’s run that has done a competent job at reviewing poetry: David Orr.

While I’ve had my quibbles with Mr. Orr in the past, Mr. Asher challenged me to limn just what it was about Orr that made him “very good.” It’s a fair enough question, seeing as how Asher has called Orr “hopelessly square.”

First off, if the NYTBR’s purpose is to profile smart and well-informed reviews that straddle the fence somewhere between layperson and elitist New York Review of Books subscriber, then any decent poetry critic must divagate within this territory. And I feel that Orr has done this quite well, daring to challenge icons, introducing poetry to a readership without making it dull, and shifting the focus away from a poet’s public perception to the words that the poet has written with a deft and playful touch. Take, for example, this recent review of an Elizabeth Bishop collection. It introduces Bishop to the uninformed and subtly guides the reader into contact with her poetry instead of Bishop’s reputation, establishing and comparing such qualifiers as “difficulty” and “subtlety,” and using these terms to segue into the text of “Vague Poem.” He playfully suggests that more people know the lyrics to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” than Bishop’s poetry, which suggests someone attuned to pop culture (certainly a lot more than a closet fetishist like Leon Wieseltier or Dave Itzkoff, who has only recently discovered that chicks write speculative fiction too).

Then there is this review from November 2004, which challenges the qualifiers behind The Best American Poetry series, clearly outlining the history of these compilations, while suggesting that the bar may be set too low and imputing that “poetry isn’t really an open system; it’s a combination of odd institutions, personal networks, hoary traditions, talent and blind luck” to the NYTBR’s democratic reading base.

Hopelessly square? Even Mr. Asher had to applaud Mr. Orr when he took Jorie Graham to task. What we have is a poetry critic with a mischevious streak that is far from Pat Boone. I’m under no obligation to acknowledge the positive, but Orr’s poetic review of Billy Collins’ The Trouble with Poetry was one of the few interesting reviews under Sammy Boy’s tenure. One does not expect such exuberance from a lawyer, much less from a publication whose editor cannot appreciate a brownie or an intelligent woman. But, alas, there it is.

I have no idea what’s made Orr’s work sparse in the NYTBR these days. Perhaps it’s Sammy T’s tone-deaf editorialship. But Orr was a welcome presence within a hopelessly corrupt publication. And I contend that if there was one thing Sammy Baby did do right, it was hiring David Orr.

Prosody in a Ha-Ha Way?

Is poetry funny? (via ReadySteadyBlog)

I’m a Novelist, Not A _______

While we’re on the subject of what authors are up, I should note that Mark Haddon has a small chapbook of poetry coming out in April (already out in the UK). Proving to the world that Haddon will likely specialize in extremely long titles until the critical interest grows inflexible, this one’s called The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea. But the consensus indicates that it’s not so hot. Ranjit Bolt says, “[N]othing could prepare us for the tendentiousness, the unjustified formlessness, the ghastliness, of Haddon’s verse.” Neel Mukherjee of the Times is more encouraging: “If only his muse didn’t fall into the jerky stop-start motion of a nightmarish traffic jam on the M23, and he loosened his lines to let them breathe more.”

Dialing for Dactyls

Now this is a fantastic idea. Coudal Partners is asking folks to phone in, leave a message with a poem, and they’ll be posting the best to their site. Already, there’s some Wallace Stevens, Bukowski and Thomas Hardy. (via Pete Lit)

Bad Poetry Unearthed While Cleaning

The following poem was found while reorganizing some papers. It was written by me circa 2002, it is bad and silly, clearly a desperate effort to imitate Ginsberg, and, most importantly, it saves me from actually having to compose a blog entry. As more bad poetry crops up, I will be post it here. However, to get the full effect of its awfulness, I have recorded an audio version (MP3).

Crystal droplets collide beneath interminable recesses
Ruby flowing ‘gainst untouched crack vials
Amphetamine fury dappling touching his hard physique
Fortified by the Almighty Dollar, corrupt Christian sentiments
The narcotic sting of empathy abandoned
His soul left in a shoebox, his heart sutured sewn sayonara

Bleeding after thirty he an’t be trusted
Encapsulated Capulet, entranced traitor
Sense of the commons, house whored away by ambition
He weeps, reaching for a sole bottle of Walker
Enmeshed engorged obliterated mirrored by the declivity
Corroding his bedside manner

He hopes his character will migrate to a milk carton
Lost in a cubicle farm, loved solely by cardboard
Cunctating coasting before the fllint struck forty

Then She entered. He didn’t ask for a save
Her etioliated skin sucked moonlight like second hand smoke
He asked her questions long short tricky
But her ghostly lips stayed crisp sounding invitations
Beckoning him to a graveyard of lust pulses
The Juliet abandoned held his dainty hand

[NOTE: Thankfully, at this point, it appears that I abandoned the poem, perhaps because of the ridiculous deus ex machina at the end.]

The Sticky Stigma of Poetry

The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear chats briefly with war poet Brian Turner. Turner was a one-time Army sergeant with an MFA, but he kept this secret amongst his PFCs because he didn’t want them to know that he was writing about “flowers and stuff like that.” While I certainly understand that a sergeant must keep his recruits disciplined, I still can’t understand why the writing poems and the appreciation of poetry is considered somehow to be flowery or a debilitating feminine trait, much less derided as a sissy’s labor.

Indeed, the notion of “poetry is for sissies” has a long stigma:

Javon Jackson: “I thought only brokenhearted girls and sissies wrote poems, but then she gave me works of other poets.”

Daniela Gioseffi: “There was this pressure, upon young men, to be baseball, football or track stars, and on the girls to be cheerleaders or baton twirling majorettes– and to feel like they were sissies, nerds or geeks if they cared about things like poetry.”

Jacques Prevert: “If I had a pound every time I heard someone say ‘I don’t like poetry’ I would not be writing this from the cold climes of Camden Town. Invariably, the same person sings along to the lyrics of pop songs apparently unaware that they constitute the stuff of poetry. Like me, such people were reared to believe poetry is for sissies.”

This notion is preposterous when one considers that, as Modern Poetry in Translation pointed out, in Turkey, men can write poetry without fearing being labeled a “sissy.” (The article goes into another fascinating issue: the lack of women poets in Turkey. And this does not discount the more serious problem of violence and enslavement of Turkish women. But I digress.) It is interesting to see that even within a nation that might be considered to be male-centric, poetry is considered to be neither particularly feminine nor particularly sissy-like.

So why the American stigma? Why does Turner continue to perpetuate the notion of poetry as “flowers and stuff like that” after he has left the Army?

I suspect that the problem runs much deeper, even among so-called champions of literature.

Academic Louie Crew wrote an essay where he noted that he got into trouble because he allowed one of his students to have a look at his colleagues’ personal libraries and the student noted that poetry books were severely lacking in the stacks. What was interesting is that, instead of trying to understand why poetry received no love from these academics, the head of Crew’s department attacked Crew, suggesting, “This kind of assignment undermines student trust of the faculty.” There were no efforts by the department to create poetry awareness, nor presumably any suggestions

Further, poetry has remained largely unmentioned on many of the litblogs (just some of the so-called alternative media outlets) you may read on a regular basis (to be fair, this blog has also been egregious on this score). When was the last time, for example, that you saw a poet mentioned at Maud’s, Jessa’s or Mark’s? And I’m not talking about mere news items (such as this helpful link about translated Korean poems from Mark), but the same long-form discussion and commentary we often see devoted to novels, the publishing industry, or Ayelet Waldman’s latest hysterical outburst. Why are there no lengthy posts about the Spenserian stanza? Or poetic metaphors? Or even the influence of alcohol on Dylan Thomas’s work?

What we have here is a problem goes well beyond exposing scandals. Outside of the hip venues of slam sessions that are doing a great job of keeping poetry alive, the poetry medium itself is still trapped in a secondary position, often subjected to silence among those who should be its champions. A poet is regarded less than a novelist. And that’s saying a lot, considering how little a novelist is regarded among your average Joe.

So what can we do to make Kenneth Koch as hep as Jonathan Lethem? Why aren’t poets given the kind of author tours afforded to midlisters? Who says poetry can’t sell?

Most importantly, what can we do to make poetry a medium that transcends gender and the fallacious association with so-called sissies?

edrants

Books To Jump Up and Down Over

Girl Power by Marisa Meltzer

Beauty Myth

Reality Hunger by David Shields

The Guardian

is no longer available online

Psycho Too by Will Self

Psychogeography

New Statesman columns

a widely syndicated Alexandra Fuller review

The New York Times Book Review

People

dérive