Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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The Essay Project: Workshop Rules and Pastiche

When I lived with Julie at the Kelton house in LA, Julie started taking fiction writing classes out of the home of writer John Rechy. She took two or three of them as I recall and would always come home with funny stories about things he said. Back then, she passed along a few of his online essays to me and I just re-read them.

One is a very funny pastiche of famous writers if they had been tasked with rewriting the famous introduction “it was a dark and story night.” It’s very funny and well worth reading in its entirely.

The other essay was called “On Writing: The Terrible Three Rules”  and the essay reconsiders the biggest cliches writing students are given: (1) show, don’t tell, (2) write about what you know and (3) always have a sympathetic character for the reader to relate to.

He calls the first point “major nonsense” and makes a very good case for exposition in some of our most famous works of literature. The rule “disallows setting” and without it would “obfuscate situation.” After all, we don’t call it story-showing, he says.

He then provides some tips on how to handle exposition so it doesn’t overwhelm a story.

I’m actually very glad he makes the point about “write what you know” because so many of us write into what we don’t know in a kind of effort to find something to know.

Who wants to discover what they already know? Granted, there are plenty of writers writing to show off to the rest of us what they already think they know, but I would argue those aren’t the best ones.

Writers write in many cases to get into the heads of characters they don’t understand and that’s where the humanity is half the time. This reminds me of seeing Werner Herzog speak before a screening of his movie Grizzly Man and admitting he hated the outdoors, absolutely hated nature. So his interviewer asked him why he picked a very flawed outdoorsman as his subject? And I’ll never forget what he said: to try to understand where someone so different from himself was coming from. That’s what he was interested in exploring.

Honestly, these are precarious times for this kind of project. We’re admonished all the time for not staying in our lane, especially our gender, sexual-orientation and racial lane. And we’re unintentionally self-segregating when we do this. And I don’t think this well-intentioned but short-sighted self-segregating will end well.

Anyway, I personally wouldn’t want to bother with fiction if I had to stick to writing characters who were mousy, straight, white, suburban females. But if we proceed to “write about what we don’t or barely know” we need to be open to (1) getting it wrong as writers and (2) extending more forgiveness as readers. Or else we will cease to have conversations and revert back to the eternal us v. them.

John Rechy lists all the writers who wrote about experiences they never had, experiences of war, crime, writing about other genders and a famous spinster who wrote one of our most indelible love stories.

And like...The Wizard of Oz. Fiction is “verisimilitude,” Rechy says, not reality.

For the last point Rechy lists all the unsympathetic characters we’ve loved to read, starting with Hamlet and Willy Loman, “Catharine and Heathcliff are horrors (and still manage—at times—to tear our hearts out),” Rechy says. They don’t have to be sympathetic, just fascinating.

Which is not to say any of this is easy, to create fascinating characters with artful exposition and verisimilitude. Which, I guess, is why Rechy was offering those fiction writing classes.

Short and sweet. I’m actually hanging on to these.

Music & Poems & Music Poems

Some follow-up on this topic. While I was doing my long haul on Philip Levine, I came across some of his jazz poems in an essay called “Detroit Jazz In the Late Forties and Early Fifties,” the best of which was this one:

I Remember Clifford

Wakening in a small room,
the walls high and blue, one high window
through which the morning enters,
I turn to the table beside me
painted a thick white. There instead
of a clock is a tumbler of water,
clear and cold, that wasn’t there
last night. Someone quietly entered,
and now I see the white door
slightly ajar and around three sides
the light on fire. I remember once
twenty-seven years ago walking
the darkened streets
of my home town when up ahead
on Joy Road at the Blue Bird of Happiness
I heard over the rumble of my own head
for the first time the high clear trumpet
of Clifford Brown calling us all
to the dance he shared with us
such a short time. My heart quickened
and in my long coat, breathless
and stumbling, I ran
through the swirling snow
to the familiar sequined door
knowing it would open on something new.

I also came across this arresting line by James Harms in The Long Embrace, Contemporary Poets on the Poetry of Philip Levine. He’s talking about the great utility of expression in the Sonnet:

“Fourteen lines and a volta (along with meter and rhyme, etc.) might seem a confining set of logistics for exploring the intersection of the inner life and the lived moment, but aside from the three-minute pop song, what formal convention has proven more productive and flexible in addressing the lyric realities of our lives?”

Finding Poems by Themes

Months ago I finished The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present edited by David Lehman. I’m not going to review the book. I’m just going to post a photo of my dog-eared copy.

But this anthology did drive home to me the idea for me that anthologies are often good for surprising reasons. For example, the Seriously Funny anthology of humorous poems was full of some very unfunny poems. But there it had some of the best music poems I’d ever read in there, poems not found in the Everyman’s Library Music’s Spell anthology.

And likewise there were some surprisingly stellar love poems in the Erotic anthology. Not the same thing and I don’t know why this is that anthologies may have a kind of subconscious ordering principle.

My only complaint about Lehman’s Erotic anthology were his claims to not be able to include all the poems he wanted and then devote a third of the book to contributors’ sometimes very long comments regarding their favorite erotic texts. Although these comments led me to some interesting things, it made me question the point of even having author bios in anthologies anyway. Because like…the Internet. Save the room for more poems and if readers want to look up author bios, provide them on a link or let users do their own Google search.

Speaking of the Internet, Twitter has gone through many instabilities since I’ve been using it but I still maintain it’s the best spot to mingle with strangers. That isn’t always a pleasant adventure and there’s been a lot of melodrama on Twitter in all the usual places, but once in a while something quite amazing and miraculous happens there. Like good people sharing good poems.

Joseph Fasano has an account where he posts a thematic poem daily and people crowd-source response poems on the same theme. It can be quite moving, like today’s thread on Soulmates. Themes can be on topics like coping (a day or so ago) or joy or alienation or whatever. And it’s a brilliant way to start compiling lists of poems around topics of interest.

Many, many people post their favorite poems of the day on Twitter and once you start following a few readers, poems will start falling into your lap in the most amazing way. One thing I’ve noticed is that most of the poems people are gravitating to, collecting and sharing tend to be significantly emotional. And this makes me think that as a collective of humans who read poems, we’re ready for that again after the long trek we just made with “modernism” and “post-modernism” and the experiments of “contemporary” poems and I hope we start naming our eras with less dated word choices please.

The Essay Project: Articles from The Atlantic

Organizing my stack of essays last year I found a group of Atlantic essays in various locations. The first one was “The Mad Poets Society” by Alex Beam from the July/August 2001 issue which was basically a review of all the poets who had been through the McLean Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, “for years America’s most literary mental institution,” the hospital having touched (no pun intended) such poets as Ralph Waldo Emerson (his brothers were there), William James (maybe he was there), Sylvia Plath (was a patient), Robert Lowell (was a patient) and Anne Sexton (was both a patient and a seminar teacher).

Beam says, “Madness came out of the closet in their writings and even acquired a certain cachet.” In fact, “McClean chic” culminated when the memoir and movie Girl, Interrupted referred to it in the 1990s.

Beam gathers up poems of Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton dealing with the hospital and  their experiences there as covered in the books The Bell Jar, Life Studies and The Awful Rowing Toward God.

In light of that article, it was interesting to also find this Atlantic piece from January 1965 by Peter Davidson called “The Madness of New Poetry,” a piece that traced trendy madness in poetry back to the French Revolution’s “roster of mad poets” and the madness inherent in Modernism.

“Poetry has suffered long from the preponderance of the idea that it exists to scratch the poet’s itch. When madness enters in, the poet may try to cure himself upon the page, or to drive himself on to further intoxications of madness. If madness damages poetry, poetry must be defended. The poet as poet bears responsibility for the excellence and wholeness of his poem more than for the self’s wholeness, no matter how mad he happens to be. In examining some of the books of verse published in the last year, I have kept in mind poetry before madness. Let us watch the outcome of each struggle.”

And so the article turns into an interesting first impression of some of our most famously mad books of contemporary poetry: John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, now known as The Dream Songs, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, William Meredith’s The Wreck of the Thresher and Other Poems and Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field.

Then there was a March 1999 article by David Barber called “What Makes Poetry ‘Poetic” about how poetry isn’t what it used to be since (blah blah blah)… the talkies….and it’s all now just secret societies…and then he goes into a review of then-Poet-Laureate Robert Pinksky’s book The Sounds of Poetry, which he says, “emerges as an invigorating session of talking shop. Why are poems written in lines, and why do the lines break when they do? How do the mechanics of English meter operate and why is it that artful verse measure is seldom strictly regular. How can a reader acquire a reliable feel for the qualities of rhythm, tempo, and cadence that give a memorable poem its visceral appeal and expressive resonance? Is ‘free verse’ really free – and if so what has it been liberated from?”

Then in April 2000 there was an article about poets celebrating these newfangled things called audio files, “High-Performance Poets” by Wen Stephenson.  This was an interesting review of how poets read their poems as Stephenson judged from the newly-released audio recordings on err…cassette tapes from The Voice of the Poet series put out by Random House. It bears repeating this was the year 2000. Compact discs were still a thing, as were CD-Roms and the Internets were still young. Stephenson says, “such a conspicuously low-tech approach might seem quaint, populist, or retro depending upon one’s inclination.”

Last year I just bought a small stack of poet recordings of their readings on vinyl. So I can’t say anything. I was trying to imagine a character for a story who would only have sex to recordings of poets reading their poems on vinyl. I think this needs testing out.

Stephenson reviews some Dylan Thomas recordings and Thomas’ thoughts about reading poems aloud. He also reviews W. H. Auden recordings which he describes as “studious flatness and semi-detachment.” He compares an early and late readings, Auden’s 1939 reading of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” and a later reading of “As I Walked Out one Evening.”

He then covers Sylvia Plath’s 1962 readings where “she does not exaggerate or melodramatize—she lives the poems, and the intensity is almost unbearable.” Sounds fun. This particular recording might have damaged him because at the end Stephenson decides the authorial reading “can become the ‘authoritative’ reading” and that can become “a tyranny” so he felt he had to read poems aloud again to himself to break the spell.

My copy of the article links to many recordings but the now-archived online version of the piece dispenses with maintaining those links because like…YouTube.

Next was the April 1996 article “The Matter of Poetry” also by Wen Stephenson. This article was meant to mark the first annual National Poetry Month, initiated by the Academy of American Poets and the poet laureate at the time, Robert Hass. The Atlantic resurrected the discussion in Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?“ and Joseph Epstein’s screed “Who Killed Poetry?” and determined that “Like priests in a town of agnostics, [poets] still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.” Stephenson quotes W.H. Auden who famously said “poetry makes nothing happen” but then maintains in the end that “nevertheless [it’s] also true that individuals do make things happen and surely poetry makes something happen within individuals.” Fair enough.

And finally a few months ago, I received an email from someone stating they hated poetry and were looking for other people hated it too. So I suggested a book called The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner which I found out about in this October 2016 Atlantic article “Why Some People Hate Poetry” by Adam Kirsch.

This article also references the Dana Gioia article but also Mark Edmundson’s “Poetry Slam: Or, the Decline of American Verse.” Kirsch (based on Lerner’s book) determines that “poetry is a gauge of our mutual connection. If we can’t speak the language of poetry, it is a sign that human communication has been blocked in a fundamental way. This feeling of failure is what explains why people tend to hate poetry, rather than simply being indifferent to it. Poetry is the site and source of disappointed hope….not just individual and spiritual, but collective and political.”

Ben Lerner, in The Hatred of Poetry, since we’re talking about it, traces his experiences with poetry back to an uncomfortable incident with poetry in his 9th grade English class in 1967.

By the way, one of the best parts of the book are the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” inspired sign-post notes sardonically dotting the outer margins.

Lerner places the problem with our high expectations that poems will be transcendent and yet they remain so earth-bound. “The poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure.”

Poetry is one of those things. You love it or hate it. I read plenty of poems that take the top of my head off. And I hear that sentence, “It took the top of my head off” from a plethora of other poetry readers. But I get what Lerner is saying. We’re sort of trained to all the subtle epiphanies, as longtime readers. The general reader might find disappointment right where I’m searching the shag rug for the top of my head.

“I am convinced,” Lerner says, “that the embarrassment, or suspicion, or anger that is often palpable…derives from this sense of poetry’s tremendous social stakes (combined with a sense of its tremendous social marginalization)…’poetry’ denotes an impossible demand.” This explains why it is often “periodically denounced as opposed to simply dismissed.”

In light of the lack of fame to be found as a poet, (“no poets are famous among the general public”), he talks about the baffling need for some aspiring poets to see their work in print at any cost and the imploring letters editors receive declaring things like, “I don’t know how long I have to live.” He questions their attempts to “secure and preserve their personhood in a magazine that no one they know will see. It is as though the actual poem and publication do not matter; what matters is that the poet will know and can report to others that she is a published poet [yea, he goes with a ‘she’ there], a distinction that nobody–not Death, not the social death of exclusion from the Law–can take from her. Poetry makes you famous without an audience.”

He’s describing the narcissistic contemporary thirst of our time, at least among aspiring poets.

Lerner goes on to talk about Plato’s belief in the nefarious power of poetry and poetry under totalitarian regimes. He covers Sir Philip Sidney’s belief that poetry can move us, “put us in touch with what’s divine in us.” Lerner admits John Keats has never taken him into a trancelike state like for so many other readers, but then he admits he prefers the dissonant sound of Emily Dickinson. He talks about the avant guardes and how manifestos are more widely read than actual poems. And then he also laments “poetry’s failure to achieve any real political effects” either.  “The avant-garde is a military metaphor that forgets it is a metaphor.”

Lerner laments the lack of oratory in caucasion poetry (poets are general where they should be specific and specific where they should be general) but then later comes back to the fact of marginalized poets and their performances. By the end, he takes aim at some of the very critics who make claims such as his. He identifies that somehow, Robert Lowell speaks for everyone but Sylvia Plath speaks only for women. These “readings lead us to suspect [their author’s] believe that white men will fail better.”

He reviews Claudia Rankine’s work to show what lyric poetry can do in our time and quotes her  to say “If we continue to think of the ‘universal’ as better-than, as the pinnacle, we will always discount writing that doesn’t look universal because it accounts for race or some other demeaned category. The universal is a fantasy.”

Philip Levine Is Not My Poet

Young Philip LevineOk, this will be a long, long ride. But there’s some bling at the end so hang in there.

So, it turns out Philip Levine is not my poet. Over the last few decades I’ve kept re-evaluating him occasionally in an attempt to get him to be my poet, the poet for whom I will feel compelled to be a completist. But although I appreciate his working-class poetics, his steely anger, his metal stanzas, his bloody, gut-riddled feels, his down-to-earthiness and his having the courage of his convictions (as my grandfather used to say… and I would like to think about how happy my socialist grandfather would be to know Levine was my socialist working-class poet), he is not my poet.

In light of that, what follows might seem like a surprising elegy, considering he is not my poet. But even though I appreciate many things about Levine, most of the poems can can be a bit…dry. And I’m not one to normally agree with Helen Vendler and Robert Pinsky, but I have to admit there was a watered-down feeling in much of what I read and I would often drift off in the middle of his poems.

But make no mistake, he has many, many defenders who appreciate just this kind of straight-spoken delivery, what I would call blandness. Maybe it’s his commitment to certain set of words or his syllabic lines that determine some arbitrary-seeming line breaks. More on all that later.

Over the last year I’ve four books of poems, two books of essays by Levine, one book of interviews, a book of essays from former mentees and students and a book explicating his long(ish) poems.

Coming Close, Phlip LevineI connected with him most as a poet-person, as do many of his former students. Although the book of essays about him as a teacher, Coming Close, Forty Essays on Philip Levine (2013), was of little use to anyone beyond a kind of insiders roster of his friends and students. Although he was seemingly an amazing and life-changing teacher, the essays were very repetitive and a few could have stood in for the main points. There’s little to no commentary on his writing although many of his students do talk about their first encounter with his poems and how that led to them to pursue him as a teacher.

Some highlights:

Aaron Belz says, “Levine is an authentic skeptic, one who sees good things as bonuses and doesn’t take himself or other people too seriously. Failures and successes are to be expected in equal measure along the way.”

Xochiquetzal Candelaria mentions two poems, “The Simple Truth” and “In the Dark,” as particular poems that reflect the spirit of Philip Levine and goes on to say, “a great teacher can imbue an experience with something sacred, something mutual, so that you check your identity at the door, if you know what’s good for you.”

A Levine quote toward the end of the same essay talks about humor in poetry (which we will get back to at the end of this):

“Of course art is about sustaining contradiction. Of course you’re angry and laughing at the same time. Of course you come to language, history, and love with a skeptical heart. Poems should embody negative capability.”

Ishion Hutchinson captures Levine directly talking about humor, “You know Ishion, humor is one of the great universal conditions your work could benefit from.” Hutchinson goes on to quote Henri Bergson saying, “laugher always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity.”

Michael Collier identifies Levine with this paraphrase of Muriel Rukeyser from William Meredith, “that her life and art were seamless, ‘you couldn’t get a knife between those two things.’”

Mark Levine quotes Philip Levine as saying, “There’s only one reason to write poetry. To change the world.”

~ ~ ~

Don't Ask, Philip LevineThe interviews, Don’t Ask (1981), were bewilderingly crusty. “Who cares what I think,” he keeps asking. “I’ve changed my mind so many times about so many things that all that seems certain is that I’ll change it again.” His interviews are full of contradictions and stubbornness. Most people who comment on Levine mention how funny he was in person, but you couldn’t tell from these early interviews.

But one interviewer here does mentions that Levine is not all that serious despite the desolation in his poems. He quotes Levine as saying, “at times you must be prepared not to take me seriously.”

That said, there are a litter of ‘nos’ sprinkled in every interview. One interviewer picks up on this tendency in his poems and says, “There’s a resounding no in some of your poems. They don’t agree, of course, with anything. They disagree with everything.” Levine’s answer is predictably disagreeable, “I don’t feel that way about them.”

And he insists he’s not a philosopher. “My poems are not answers.” But sometimes his grouchiness feels really nice, like in this little screed:

“If you give prizes and you know how careless that awarding is and how accidental it is, it seems to me that when you get one and confuse it with genuine merit you’re just an idiot—you’re just a person who wants to be deluded. I’ve gotten a lot of awards and I take the money and I spend it. I have a car. I have this house…I have all this hair. But I don’t confuse that with a literary success that has any significance. I’m glad all those things happened, but I don’t confuse it with writing well.”

He’s also got the occasional wisdom to hurl out, like “I don’t think anyone ever found his own voice, it found him.”

Another one about writing the poem “Salami:” “It was one of those times you know you’re going to write a poem and it’s going to be a poem that’s going to carry a lot of yourself.”

He does, in fact, sound like he was an exceptionally good teacher. “I’m a different guy. I have to find the way in which I can write best and pursue it, and encourage other people to find their way, and not belabor them with my way.”

~ ~ ~

Bread of Time, Philip LevineI loved best the two personal collections of essays, The Bread of Time, Toward an Autobiography (1993) and My Lost Poets, a Life in Poetry (2016). They are both funny and friendly, self-deprecating yet rock-sold with an underlying confidence.

The essay “Entering Poetry” is indicative of what kind of poet Levine was as he describes discovering the power of words at age 13. This is not a poet of fancy architecture and whirligig words. Levine describes the power of his early incantations (“transformative power” as Peter Everwine puts it). Poetry is a power-source, the whole thing, (reading, writing, honoring). The experience of it is as crucial to Levine as the craft or exploration of its mechanisms. One of the most famous essays in the book is “Mine Own John Berryman” (about his days as Berryman’s student at the Iowa Writing Workshop), but his “Holy Cities” essay and the one about the Yvor Winters years at Stanford were equally interesting.

Highlights:

“Walt Whitman, who over a hundred years ago created not only their own gigantic works but the beginnings of something worthy enough to be American poetry, and they did it out of their imaginations and their private studies and nothing more. But, then, they had the advantage of being geniuses.” (“Mine Own John Berryman”)

“I had hoped to make clear that our obsessions and concerns came to us and not we to them, and that whatever poets are given to write should be accepted as a gift they can only regard with awe and modesty.” (“The Holy Cities”)

“I am pleased I did not fulfill the expectations of my class…my years in the working class were merely a means of supporting my own. My life in the working class was intolerable only when I considered the future and what would become of me if nothing were to come of my writing. In once sense I was never working-class, for I owned the means of production, since what I hoped to produce were poems and fictions. In spite of my finances I believe I was then freer than anyone else in this chronicle.

In order to marry and plunder a beautiful and wealthy woman I did not have to deny I was a Jew; for the sake of my self-esteem I did not have to reign like a chancellor over my family and my servants; in order to maintain my empire I did not have to fuel it with years of stifling work; in order to insure my legacy I did not have to drive my sons into the hopelessness of imitating my life.

Of course it meant years of living badly, without security or certainty, what I have called elsewhere ‘living in the wind,’ but it also meant I could take my time, I could take what Sterling Brown called my ‘blessed time,’ because after all, along with myself, it was the only thing I had.” (from “Class with No Class”)

“He [John Keats] knew something that I wouldn’t learn for years: that beauty mattered, that it could transform our experience into something worthy, that like love it could redeem our lives. I wanted fire and I wanted gunfire, I wanted to burn down Chevrolet and waste the government of the United States of America.” (from “The Poet in New York in Detroit”)

“Not believing in the power of prayer, I had only one alternative: to learn what work is.” (from “The Bread of Time Revisited”)

My Lost Poets, Philip LevineThe second book of essays is more of a mishmash of pieces Levine was working on before he died (in 2015) and found lectures and articles to fill in the gaps. Levine talks about his early experiences among poets in Detroit, a tribute to his favorite literary journal, kayak, and the power of finding compatriots. He talks about Detroit as a place and the idea of a city loving you back. There are essays about his love of William Carlos Williams, Roberta Spear, William Wordsworth, John Keats and Larry Levis. There’s an essay revisiting John Berryman later in his life, one about his love for Detroit jazz and the poems inspired by it.

His first essay connects his love of war poetry with his meeting of Detroit’s World War II vets at a monthly gathering at Wayne State University. These were some of the first, living poetry readers he had ever encountered. He gives us a primer in some of his favorite war poems:

Levine defends these poems as not “simply reportage” but pieces that required both nerve and craft. There’s a whole essay on the Spanish Civil War poets he loved and helped to translate  including “How Much for Spain?” by Michael Quinn, (a poem he found in Cary Nelson’s anthology rediscovering socialist and Spanish Civil War poems, Revolutionary Memory).  Another good poem in the essay was his own “The Return: Orihuela, 1965.”

Some other highlights:

“There are those rare times in my life when I know that what I’ve living is in a poem I’ve still to write. As we sat, I took in as much of the scene as I could until my eyes were filled with so much seeing I finally had to close them.” (from “Nobody’s Detroit”)

He talks about a Detroit motto, “We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes” and how it connects to his own sensibilities: “…we Detroiters created self-destructs, while the trees…head straight skyward. I like to imagine the delicate leaves of those birch trees, each one bearing a poem to the heavens, an original poem, wise and stoic, from a sensibility that has seen it all.”

Some key Levine words there: stoic, seen it all.

In the essay on Keats and Wordworth, Levine talks about the lost opportunities of Wordsworth who tried to “revise the greatest work of his past,” namely “The Prelude.” Levine says, “The failure on Wordsworth’s part has become for me an emblem of how we lose what is most precious in the act of saving oneself from the expenditure of feeling and the uncertainty involved in the risking the self.” (from “Getting and Spending”)

~ ~ ~

The Long EmbraceSome good explication on Levine’s technique can be found in the book The Long Embrace, Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine (2020) edited by Christopher Buckley.

The book clearly states how Levine is a specific kind of writer.  Peter Everwine mentions that poet Yvor Winters taught Levine: “First, do not write in ‘the language of princes;’ second, a hope that no one would ever read one of his poems and say, ‘Wow! What a vocabulary!’ Words were meant to be transparent, a clarity through which the importance of the poem could be reached; if anything, to disappear rather than draw attention to themselves. Syllabics provided Phil with a ‘voice’ and a rhythm of speech…”

Glover Davis talks about the importance for Levine to “be a witness and a speaker, despite the inevitable failure to be heard” and this I think is where Levine was drawing power, not from the magic of the words and sentences. Like for other activist writers, for Levine clarity trumped glitter, “poems were ethical and moral teaching…one must never lie.”

These prescriptive “must” statements always try to set such small limits on what poetry should and can be and they inevitably fail to account for the motivations of all poets.

Glover expands on the idea of Levine’s syllabics. “In syllabic meter, no stresses would be counted as they are in accentual meter, no metrical accents…Levine would soon begin his transition to free verse with enumeration, phrasal repetitions and anaphora.”

Christopher Howell talks about Levine’s “great economy and tonal precision.”

Mark Jarman agrees, that “his style…tends toward minimalism” and he describes Levine’s style as one that “serves to create the tone of anger that runs through [his] poetry. Levine once said in an interview that he loves anger…so much of the anger of his poetry is occasioned by a sense of outrage at injustice…”

Kevin Clark calls it “an articulate, rhythmic, melodic snarl.”

It’s possible the simplified clarity is meant to offset the danger of his anger spinning-out his verse.

Jarman also says that “critics have complained that there is little or no ambiguity in Levine’s work, nothing of the imagination to nurture…such criticism comes from literal-minded readers who cannot fathom the complexities Levine creates with a few strokes.”

One thing to notice is how defensive Levine’s defenders are. I wonder if some of the nuances in Levine’s poetry are missed by certain readers (such as me) because we miss certain verbal cues. And so what reads as blandness springs open for other readers who understand these clues.

Like Kate Daniels, for example, who admits “his thematic content…resonated with my own background…feisty, working class, and occasionally profanely angry…tales of the ‘unpoetic’ lives of the underclass had been liberated at last into poetry. Reading him, I felt exultant and epic.”

My age might also be an issue here. By the 1990s, Sarah Lawrence was full of poets trying to capture the feisty working class, especially since New York City was allegedly full of feisty characters. This was no longer a novel subject by that time. In fact, it had become an affectation for every suburban writer to try to get into the head of more gritty subjects.

Daniels says she tried to emulate his “down-to-earth subject matter, plain-style diction and accessibility.” Later she says she didn’t want her writers to “gussie it up with extraneous language…stick to the meat and potatoes…why put fancy sauces on top of the good stuff?”

This is a great depiction of the differences in taste for both poems and suppers. Full disclosure, I am a sauce guy. You should see my potatoes? You should find my potatoes! All the things. And I like bling. So this is exactly where I find the toast of Levine a bit dry and in need of jam. But that’s just me.

I also wonder if you look for poets who reflect your peer and social group, just as most people select their music. This would explain my preference for more flamboyant poets, relatively speaking.

Kevin Clark calls what Levine does “psychological naturalism…deceptively complex.” Clark says, “critics have a mistaken tendency to find his oeuvre anti-modernist and thin on depth and originality” but that his poems are “both formally inventive and emotionally resonant.”

I agree that Levine’s poems are sometimes emotionally resonant but my feelings of blandness are not to do with any love of modernism, which can be just as academically and cerebrally bland.

Clark also takes issue with Helen Vendler’s “once infamous and erroneously asserted” review of Levine that stated she was “not convinced that Levine’s observations and reminiscences belong in lyric poems, since he seems so inept at what he thinks of as the obligatory hearts-and-flowers endings…”

Crusty Vendler, yes. But, to be honest, Levine doesn’t traffic in this kind of poetry and he is not one to cater to the magic trick of the big finish. He’s not wrong in that, but Vendler is probably suggesting there’s a vanishing point for poetry, where polemics and memoir cease to become poetry. I get her point.

Clark states that “Vendler’s assumption is a misguided as believing that Levine’s men and women are too simple to be of interest…I would guess that a critic like Vendler, who famously praises the intellectually dense constructions of poets such as [Wallace] Stevens and Jorie Graham, would find so much feeling suspect—and would fail to recognize Levine’s artfulness in the face of his passions. She’d also fail to see the very complexities of those passions. Modernism (and post-modernism) has always favored experiment over the everyday poles of human emotion.”

Really though?

It seems this is more an argument about genre than craft. Vendler may be a classist, but there are plenty of working-class poets who take working-class subjects and write very experimentally about them and with great fanfare. It’s a mix-and-match bag, subject and style.

And so the bitch-fight between activism and experimentalism continues, both sides feeling personally threatened by the other.

Clark insists that Levine is a “serious poet who captures the daily agonies of working life.”

Kathy Fagan takes aim at Robert Pinsky whom she says claimed that Levine “displayed a deficiency of thought” (her words) and a “monotony of feeling and repetitiousness of method, [producing] a dark, sleepy air.”

Well…I did drift off a little.

Christine Kitano has an interesting theory about how Levine uses autobiography to “elevate the personal to the level of mythic significance” and she quotes his poem “Late Night:”

….My father told
me this, he told me it ran
downtown and pilled into
the river, which in tern
emptied finally into the sea.
He said this only once
while I sat on the arm
of his chair and stared out
at the banks of gray snow.

(Levine’s father died in 1933 when Philip was 5 years old.)

“…All the rest
of that day passed on
into childhood, into nothing,
or perhaps some portion hung
on in a tiny corner of thought.
Perhaps a clot of cinders
that peppered the front yard
clung to a spar of old weed
or the concrete lip of the curb
and worked its way back under
the new growth spring brought
and is a part of that yard
still.”

Richard Jackson explains Levine’s humility, “a kind…that is rare in contemporary poetry.” I think he’s on to something there, too. James Harms may agree when he notes Levine’s poetry is a “return to this notion of a poetry that resists direct engagement, that strives for a little less.” Later in the essay he says, “the beauty of artifice, when it’s successful, is transparency.”

Harms also talks about the tension in the poems between “pushing back against the poetic traditions of the day” and how Levine also “learned at the knee of poets deeply schooled in that formalist tradition.” He references Levine’s classic poem about brotherhood, “You Can Have It” and it’s worth a stop here to read the poem in full.

The ending:

“Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.”

~ ~ ~

And then there are the poems themselves, the core of the machine as it were, some of which are undoubtedly classics of 1960s, 70s and 80s poetry, fully deserving of the literary canon, poems in Not This Pig, What Work Is, They Feed They Lion and The Names of the Lost.

Not This Pig, Philip LevineThe Publishers Weekly review for Not This Pig (1968) explains Levine well: “Here you will get no avant-garde pyrotechnics.”

In these early poems, Levine is already touching on his beloved cities: Detroit, Frescno and Barcelona. There are his moments of moving bleakness, like in “A New Day”

“And what we get is what we bring:
A grey light coming on at dawn,
No fresh start and no bird song
And no sea and no shore
That someone hasn’t seen before.”

Similarly bleak is the line in “The Everlasting Sunday” where Levine “bowed my head/into the cold grey.”

And from “Above it All:”

“where nothing moved, nothing breathed
except one lone steam engine
pulling nothing, and the waves
which came at the shore as though
they mattered, row after row.”

He writes from Spain in “The Cartridges”

“First you, my little American, you bring
reports of everything I left behind,
and you, the hope of middle age, the game
I play with when sleep is everything.

And you, stupid, are a black hole in the air
and nothing more. I refuse to explain.
And you, all of whose names are simply Spain,
are every pure act I don’t dare.

This one has no name and no nation
and has been with me from the start. And you,
finally, you have a name I will not name, a face
I cannot face, you could be music, you

could be the music of snow on the warm plain
of Michigan, you could be my voice
calling to me at last, calling me out of Spain,
calling me home, home, home, at any price.”

Other great poems in total:

Heaven

One of his most steely greatest hits, the canonized, “Animals Are Passing From Our Lives” which references the book’s title.

They Feed They Lion, Names of the Lost, Philip LevineThey Feed They Lion (1972) has some good stuff as well:

The expertly rendered, “Cry For Nothing

Coming Home, Detroit, 1968

The infamous rage of “They Feed They Lion

From “Autumn “

“I stand
in a circle of light, my heart
pounding and pounding at the door
of its own wilderness.

A small clearing
in the pins, the wind
talking through the high trees,
we have water, we
have air, we have bread, we have
a rough shack whitening,
we have snow on your eyelids,
on your hair.”

How Much Can It Hurt

From the “If He Ran” section of “Thistles”

“He feels the corners
of his mouth pull down,
his eyes vague.
Some old poet
would say, Bereft.
He thinks, Up Tight,
Fucked Over, trying to walk
inside my life.”

From “Dark Rings”

“The sun hangs
under the rim of night
waiting for the world.”

From “The Way Down”

“and now the tight rows of seed
bow to the earth
and hold on and hold on.”

From “Breath”

“you go
about your life one
more day. I give you
almond blossoms
for your hair, your hair
that will be white, I give
the world my worn-out breath
on an old tune, I give
it all I have
and take it back again.

In The Names of the Lost (1976), he revisits his great love poem with “Autumn Again.” “A Late Answer” is also good. Many of Levine’s poems were published in The New Yorker and anything published there is as good as lost to the sands of time, unless you have a subscription.

What Work Is, Philip LevineMy favorite book was clearly What Work Is (1991) by how I dog-eared the pages and this is also the book that had just come out when I first discovered Philip Levine.

In “Coming Close” he compares the perilous factory machine with a woman:

“Is she a woman?…
You must come closer
to find out, you must hand your tie
and jacket in one of the lockers…
hauling off the metal tray of stick,
bowing first, knees bent for a purchase,
then lifting with a gasp, the first word
of tenderness between the two of you,
then you must bring new trays of dull,
unpolished tubes. You must feed her,
as they say in the language of the place.
Make no mistake, the place has a language,”

Fire” (another New Yorker poem, so good luck with that.)

Every Blessed Day

Among Children

What Work Is” which ends,

“How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.”

From “Snails”

“I was about to say something final
that would capture the meaning
of autumn’s arrival, something
suitable for bronzing,

Something immediately recognizable
and so large a truth it’s totally untrue,”

My Grave” (video)

“Facts”

Gin” (video)

Burned” (see how Poetry magazine provides its classic poems online for free? New Yorker I’m talking to you)

Soloing” (video)

“Coming of Age in Michigan”

The Sweetness of Bobby Hefka

“The Seventh Summer”

~ ~ ~

Older Philip LevineI want to close by saying that although there is much to love, there was one other thing I found disappointing in Levine’s poems, his lack of humor. And this is not because that is a requirement of my poets in any way. Anne Carson isn’t that much of a barrel of laughs, to be honest. Albert Goldbarth is very funny but he can be deadly serious too. Same with Kim Addonizio and any slew of poems I come across that are either funny or not so funny.

I can appreciate melodrama and tragedy just as much as the next reader, because I see tragedy and humor as essentially the same thing, one the flip-side of the other’s energy. I would argue the most tragic poets are also the funniest poets.

But the lack of humor poses two problems for me with Philip Levine. It’s on record that he was a funny guy (on video, with students, in essays and in interviews). He seems to withhold this from his poetry in large part. Which also indicates to me the second issue, his tragedy must be as muted as his humor. He’s taken the middle way.

So not only has part of his personality been eliminated from his poetic voice, but it feels like a necessary and lacking ingredient missing in the message itself. This might seem counterintuitive, but again I would argue that when we feel more deeply in one direction, we feel more deeply in them all.

You can see this in people who lived through traumatic situations, how they gravitate to gallows humor. They need it. It solves a problem in their despair. They use it to cope. And somehow, the more horrific things get, the funnier they get too. Absurdity is both heartbreaking and very funny. Because joy and despair move out into the spaces of our psyches in equal measures.

If I have missed some side-splitting Levine poems, please send them to me. I have already stated my inability to be a Levine completist. And if I have already read some funny poems in the books I’ve encountered, I’m more than willing to believe I could have missed some humorous nuance. Not an impossibility.

I could imagine Levin saying his poems aren’t funny because poetry to him is deadly serious and that his poems are deadly serious. Because life is serious. I don’t imagine him saying this about all funny poems that exist or about any particularly humorous poets. Maybe he would just say this about himself. He seems like a poet who felt he owed his past something serious, his people something serious, his Detroit. And maybe it wasn’t f**king funny.

There’s nothing is wrong with this point of view. It’s reasonable.

I just have happened to have thought about this funny thing for quite a long time. And I just can’t agree that there is no employment for comedy in a serious world, especially if humor is already an organic part of our personalities.

And undoubtedly things have become deadly serious. Could Levine even have imagined the circumstances we live in today? I have a feeling he saw all of this coming quite clearly.

And yes, current events have made me challenge and re-evaluate emotionally the ideas I’ve always had intellectually: is there a place for humor in a tragic world?

I’m under no delusion that comedy can fix the deadly seriousness anymore than poems can or paintings or music or any other kind of art could. But our job as jesters or artists or poets isn’t to do that anyway.

Part of our job is, no question, one of witness. But we have other jobs, too: to help ourselves cope and to help the people actually doing the fixing and the fighting cope with their own feelings. (And this might entail some sparkle and gravy from time to time.)

Artists often find themselves confused on this point. We find ourselves in a crisis of profession when we don’t see ourselves as the fixers, when we don’t see ourselves in the hero positions.

We may not be the heroes.  We might be the silliness or the loveliness or the roughness or the absurdity that illustrates to everyone the value proposition of this tragic life, the joy and the woebegone we are fighting for and fighting over.

Anger and humor work in sympatico, I believe.

You don’t have to be funny to be my poet; but if you are funny and hold back, that’s really frustrating to me and kind of leaves me feeling empty. Because you never found a place for this part of your being in service of the fight.

All that said, read Philip Levine. He is an important poet, whether mine or not.

~ ~ ~

Incredible Postscript!

So something incredible happened after I finished this essay yesterday, March 23, but before I published it. I received a book from Amazon yesterday afternoon while I was finishing up three essays, (this one, the Proust piece and the Challenger essay). It was a crazy work day yesterday with Zoom meetings all day. A plumber was at the house fixing a toilet. The book came  and I had no time to look at it and it sat on the dining room table until late evening.

Berryman, Homage to Anne BradstreetAs part of another long project on poetry history, I’ve been taking classes and reading American poetry anthologies and essays. Last week I started with the Harper American Anthology Vol. 1 and re-read Anne Bradstreet (America’s first poet). I decided it was probably time to read John Berryman’s long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. So I found an affordable copy on Amazon for $2.00, $6.00 with shipping.

Sometimes it’s great to get a used book because it has a history of its own, maybe library bindings or marginalia from a prior owner. You can try to trace a previous reader’s thoughts through their comments. Sometimes you even get an inscription at the front or some random bookmarked page.

In this book I received yesterday, there was a pretty incredible letter stuck inside between two interesting poets, but also information pertaining to this essay itself!

The incredible things about this letter numerated as follows:

  1. The letter was from John Berryman (squeal!)Berryman envelope
  2. The letter was dated February 11, 1960, months after Berryman had published Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.
  3. The letter was addressed to the poet Henri Coulette.
  4. It’s hard to know but this copy of the Bradstreet book could be Henri Coulette’s which might explain why the letter was stuck inside the book.
  5. Henri Coulette was one of the poets in the amazing cohort at Berryman’s Iowa Writing Workshop (along with Philip Levine). Levine lists out the illustrious roster in his essay, “Mine Own John Berryman.”Berryman's student roster at Iowa Writers Workshop
  6. In the letter, Berryman mentions looking forward to a future visit with Coulette and also “that cut-up Phil Levine.”Berryman to Coulette Letter
  7. So there you have it, from John Berryman’s own mouth: Philip Levine was a funny mother-f**ker.

Big Bang Poetry Has Moved

Mary's dollhouse 2011Like this fragile dollhouse being shuttled from Lititz, Pennsylvania, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, back in 2011, Big Bang Poetry has moved.

It has taken a few more weeks but we’ve moved 3 of the 4 sites, the first being cherscholar.com and then its sister-blog.

My own personal site will be the caboose on this journey, hopefully making the trip over the next month.

But I want to get back up and running with this site first. Come back in the next few days for a new essay or two or three.

The official working-through-my-stack-of-SLC-essays project will also resume shortly with some old Atlantic.com essays I was set to complain about before this whole kerfuffle with the websites began last fall.

Stay tuned.

 

Time to Make a Move

It’s been a rocky year kids for reasons I can’t even begin to explain to you. But one of the final adversities this fall was the slow crashing of our dear webhost Typepad over the last three weeks, starting with their inability to display images on the site. Fortunately I was able to backup all (or most of) the many words but it’s been made clear by the downtime (and Typepad’s own homepage missive that they’re no longer taking new customers) that it’s time to move all the sites to more stable and supported pastures. That will take quite a bit of time and effort (and that’s after researching where we can even go). I don’t know if I’ll even be able to restore everything, but if not we can revisit old posts from time to time.

Brave new start.

So anyway I’ll be gone for a while which is kind of bummer considering I was within a shot put of finishing both the Cher TV shows and the Essay Project and was in the middle of a new set of Grammar poems.

The big irony here is that I had taken some time off blogging this fall (and off social media too, although I didn’t do as well with that). I had decided to just stop talking for a minute and start listening (but mostly just stop talking already). And when the weather changed last week I crafted some new posts about poets and madness, Cher's new Decades collection and a few other things that won’t see the light of day for a while.

Honestly, I’m one of the lucky ones in this hosting meltdown because at least I had most of my backups from 2007 and I’m not depending upon any of my words to eat. They’re provided free of charge. Since I’ve never felt this current life’s mission has been to make money or get ahead, I’m not suffering quite as much as some others at this time. (For anyone on Typepad who doesn’t have backups, try visiting archive.org, the Wayback Machine, and you can grab stuff there.) And Typepad most likely will stabilize again (fingers crossed) but this is a big wakeup call for us old-timers over there. And this whole experience just highlights how fragile an internet life can be and how it can all become destabilized and disappear overnight, just like Vint Cerf indicated all those many years ago when he warned us in a speech that a generation of intellectual property will probably be lost. Web companies come and go. The supports you take for granted can lose their way. It’s all part of the digital lifecycle.

It could be worse…always.

Which brings me back to my little goal of shutting up for five minutes. It might be longer than that. I will be taking this opportunity to watch one of my favorite movies, Into Great Silence. I will pretend to be a monk for a while until my little Chatty Cathy comes out again, which is inevitable.

In better news, ICANN has called everyone back into the office for the first time since they shut down in April of 2020. So oddly 2023 is feeling like what I expected 2020 was going to be. And that includes trips into the LA office starting January, during which I’ll see the Joan Didion exhibit at The Hammer Museum and will report back on that when the sites are all moved. This also means there will probably be no NaPoWriMo 2023 for me next year as I won’t likely be up and running by that time.

But there’s plenty of work for me offline and I hope to catch up with everyone down the line. I hope the rest of everyone’s year goes well and next year we can pick up with new books and fun Cher stuff. 

The Essay Project: Bits About Value, Confession, Intimacy, the Poetry Buffet and the Unconscious

We’re getting down to the bottom of the Sarah Lawrence essay class stack. It's hard to estimate how many we have left, but a lot of it is probably unbloggable. Below is a short-stack of five single paged items that are not necessarily related but some are.

CupidValue

The first is a Time Magazine Art section piece from February 1996 by Paul Gray called "Attention Name Droppers." At the time, a formerly obscure and newly attributed 16th century Michelangelo statue of Cupid had set philosophers of value into a tizzy. The same thing had also just happened with a newly found Shakespeare elegy.

“It is easy to see why people who make their living studying Michelangelo and Shakespeare should be agog at the possibility of more material to occupy their attention….[but] neither the Cupid or the elegy is intrinsically different now, in the full glare of worldwide publicity, than a few weeks ago, when both enjoyed obscurity.”

Exactly. And this is what make these valuations problematic…always. They're based on social ideas, not objective ones. We all think we're objective, but…

I’m always referencing this book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom because it exposes just this kind of illusion we have about what good judges we are of things like music, food and art. There’s a similar story in the book about a painting that had one value before being discovered as belonging to a famous artist and one afterwards. Or maybe it happened the other way around, that what was deemed a brilliant thing was suddenly discovered to be not so brilliant because it suddenly wasn't attached to a famous person anymore.

“Aesthetics,” Gray says, “for all the millions of words that have been written on the subject, remains an inexact science. We cannot say why a painting once supposed to be a Rembrandt loses face when its connection with the master is disproved, even though it looks just the same as it did when we admired it before.”

Perfectly said. Except that we can say: judgement is social, judgements are made based on social pressures, social aspirations, social likes and dislikes, even if they’re subconscious.

RukeyserConfession

There’s a three paragraph excerpt of Muriel Rukeyser from her 1949 book The Life of Poetry about confession and revelation: “Confession to divinity, to the essential life of what one loves and hopes, on a level other than the human, is full of revelation. The detachment, here from conscious to unconscious emotion values, has the power to change one’s life.”

“But there is another confession, which is the confession to oneself made available to all…the type of this is the poem in which the poet, intellectually giving form to emotional and imaginative experience, with the music and history of a lifetime behind the work, offers a total response. And the witness receives the work, and offers a total response in a most human communication.”

Very similar to her earlier statements from the Digital Poetry post I made back in June. I’m just beginning to understand Rukeyser. Baby steps. Powerful stuff.

RevellReading as Intimacy

The next piece is from Donald Revell’s book The Art of Attention where he talks about poetry being a form of attention, “itself the consequence of attention. And, too, I believe that poems are presences.”

He quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to say, “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing…the creative act is continuous, before, during, and after the poem. An attentive poet delights in this continuity…I am speaking of intimacy, which is an occasion of attention. It is the intimacy of poetry that makes our art such a beautiful recourse from the disgrace and manipulations of public speech, of empty rhetoric. A poem that begins to see and then continues seeing is not deceived, nor is it deceptive.”

He then quotes this from Walt Whitman:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
         through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Revell says, “the poem of attention is not merely a work in progress; it is a work of progress in the most natural sense.”

DipieroSomething for Everybody…or Not

The next is a grumpy little column from W.S. DiPiero called “One Paragraph on our Poetry.”  It’s a long paragraph of which I’ve only excerpted about half, starting where he says,

“what’s wrong with it is that it’s worried about being right. Heart-throb platitudes, huggy acecdotalism, outraged stridencies over injustice in countries to which the poet migrates in search of worthy subjects, scrupulous self-censorship….agonies endured (or sworn to) entirely for the ‘appropriate dramatic fulness’ of a poem….valiant eloquence in defense of poetry…Does it matter? Poetry which exists in all of its words but which does not need only words for its existence…”

and then he takes on the new formalists.

Not much to say about this except that maybe it’s just best to just skip the dishes in the buffet you don’t like, instead of railing at all the eaters. Pea soup isn’t for everyone.

CarljungThe Unconscious

The last piece is a collection of two blurbs about the unconscious. The first is “Writing and the Unconscious: The Imagistic Leap” from The Portable Jung that relates analytical psychology to poetry:

“the writer’s conviction that he is creating in absolute freedom is an illusion” and that artists are swimming with an 'unseen current' and guided by it and that it is a psyche 'which leads a life of its own' and that only a writer who 'acquiesces from the start' can begin to function.

BlyThe other little piece is from Robert Bly’s book Leaping Poetry.

“a great work of art often has as its center a long floating leap from the conscious to the unconscious” and possibly many leaps. He also says that “powerful feeling makes the mind associate faster…increases the adrenalin flow, just as chanting awakens many emotions.”

A Book About Trauma: Writing as Therapy, Writing as Witnessing

Surviving-homeA few weeks back when we were reviewing some revision essays, a few teachers remarked on the issue of poetry as therapy for those poets who weren’t keen to do the work of revision, as if this was the cut-off between professionals and therapy-seekers. The topic came up again as I was finishing Richard’s Gray’s history on American poetry.  Gray's second-to-last section was entirely about the act of writing poetry after trauma, specifically the collective trauma of the 9/11 attacks and the kind of group therapy that occurred when hundreds of poems found themselves tacked up all over New York City and every living poet of note took a turn at trying to speak about the 9/11 tragedy in verse.

These poems holistically challenge the ideas that “politics kills poetry” (Tim Scannell) or that therapy has no place in poetry.

Gray says the 9/11 poems are a mark of witness, a mark of despair or rage from a single voice in an effort to join a collective experience of sense making. Gray talks about the tropes of these poems: falling, ‘the’ moment of a disaster, the moment just before, the helplessness of words, the unsayable, transfiguration of the ordinary, nostalgia for innocence, and a community’s sharded fall into the depths of psychic harm. These poems also call in question the lines between private and public spaces and explore tools we have as humans to map the loss, the very particular coordinates of loss, and also trauma’s heavy burdens of impotence and exhaustion.

Gray explores a large group of 9/11 poems in an attempt to determine which ones are shallow and cliched and which ones are meaningful in order to understand how we can find meaning from trauma and strategies for writing about it.

To me, the 9/11 poems seem to operate like other trauma poems of our time (school shootings, for example) or like trauma poems from our past (most war poems).

Surviving Home by Katerina Canyon is a book about a set of personal traumas, which in many ways makes it a hard book to review. It is first and foremost an exercise in listening more than reviewing. The scenarios are pretty harsh and their ramifications are felt everywhere throughout the book. Which, as a second point, makes it hard to know which poems are “succeeding,” especially when reviewing the book from a very different life experience.

I feel you have to read a book of trauma in two ways at once: listening in the Brene Brown sense, a kind of human-to-human sense, and also reading with an ear to craft and execution. But even that is not easy.

Reading from a craft perspective, I want to say Canyon's simple poems were more impactful than the more complicated poems, and yet the complexities in those poems were an important representation of any confusing and entangled experience. 

The first poem, “Involuntary Endurance,” is a good introduction to what you’re going to get. In fact, the hardest poems seem front-loaded in the book: “I Wish I Could Tell You This Has a Happy Ending,” “I Felt My Brother’s Wrists,” and “My Pain Is Sculpted into Art for You to Consume.”

Her titles are particularly good.

She explores deep wounds, like in “Thoracic Biology” where she says, “most times when I sleep, I dream of/my hands, clutched tight around something/I cannot see, and I cannot let go.”

Her poems are mostly conversational and she works with sensory feelers into the terrain of her Los Angeles past like in the poem “My Life Map” or poems about her mother: “Small Bear to Great Bear” and “An Afterthought of a Netflix Show” (with an uncanny appearance by Carol Burnett).

But there are also some experimental pieces, like “The Tyger, Interrupted” with literal interruptions into the William Blake poem, “The Tyger.”

There are some faint light beams of hope here too, some short reprieves for both Canyon and her readers: “Aunt May” which references Z.Z. Hill’s song “Down Home Blues" and “The New Hope” where “I kick the crust between my soles,/This is where I will find a picket fence/Painted white like dandelions.”

Which brings us to another point about experimental poetry and poets who express disdain for the political act of witness or explorations of trauma: the choice to go fully experimental or dismissive is an opportunity provided a privileged writer. Poetry of witness and therapy are less valuable to people who don’t need it. You don’t value the picket fence when you don’t need to; you can have it or not have it. I can have it or not have it and so this poem challenges me to understand what the symbol means to Canyon. What symbolizes a fantastical cliche to me takes on an out-of-reach realism for someone who has no easy path to the symbol and cannot take it for granted. So poetry like this challenges the very idea of cliches themselves. Symbols are cultural and relative.

Which leads us right into her poem “Authority Questions” with the lines “would it have been different/if I were white, and if I had blue eyes/and I lived on a ranch with 500 head of cattle? Would the doctor have still called me a liar?”

It gets worse from there.

The traumas here are racism, physical abuse, (being locked in the closet “All Day Long” with her autistic brother), drug trauma, (“Trifling with Heroin” which opens with “She learned to cut lines at eight”), “The Consideration of the Black Bear” where she says about her father, “I was raised to be/the perfect fault–/to take the blame/to allow you to be King.”

Even a poem called “Blessings” seem mostly ominous. There are quite a few meditations on god and godlessness, a school shooting poem, (“A Petition for Unrecognized Children”), a few Trump poems, poems about Sojourner Truth and Harvey Weinstein.

And this probably speaks to my GenX love for kind of new structures but my favorite poem in the collection was the “I Left Out ‘Bells and Whistles’ Written with a Little Help for Websters Dictionary,” a dictionary poem about (ominous) words and phrases born the same year Canyon was born, (which I'm guessing from the tool below was 1968). This makes me think we should all consider the words born with us and what vibrations, legacies and ramifications their ideas had on the world (similar to all the ramifications of our beliefs and actions); and isn't exploring ourselves and our words, and exploring ourselves in words the whole point of writing poems really.

Use this tool to help you search for your own birth words: https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler/

Digital Literature: The Medium

What is a Digital Poem

I want to start this digital catch-up by saying I’ve been thinking a lot about what separates digital poetry from digital art which happens to be using words as material. I think this is the main point of contention for paper poets around pieces labeled digital poetry, especially when few if any of the aims of poetry-as-meaning are involved. Many digital artists use words as material and since there’s no narrative element to the thing, they want to put it in the digital poetry bucket (as if poetry is just that nebulous thing that is not narrative or sensical, which is a pretty small view of what poetry is).

So I’ve been trying to come up with some parameters in my own head just to understand it myself. And here’s what I’ve come up with:

  • If the piece uses words (language) that are un-readable, or not even meant to be read in the traditional sense (to come to a meaning as a phrase or sentence would): this is digital art,
  • If the piece uses words and their meaning is the primary driver of the piece, meaning the piece is meant to be read in a traditional sense: this is digital literature, digital poetry or digital story,
  • If the piece can be read in a traditional sense but that’s not entirely the point of the piece or a secondary benefit of it (maybe there is a balance of meaning from both visuals and from words): this is a digital hybrid of art and literature.

MmThe New Media Reader

We’re almost done with the conceptual essays about computers and it looks like we’ll be going into actual essays about art and hopefully examples of interesting things. These two are by Marshall McLuhan and you know we’d have to pass through McLuhan because he’s the one who famously said, “the medium is the message” which has digital art all over it.

The introduction to two of his essays talks about what the “medium is the message” means, that the delivery medium of any content influences our understanding of it in profound ways we do not often realize. (You can see this clearly with social media arguments on the internet; the internet medium had transformed the way we argue and the ways we tolerate ((or don’t)) opinions that differ from our own).

But McLuhan’s statement was made for television not the internet and his examples go back to the first printing press and how mass-produced books changed the way people thought about…well everything. The introduction also quotes Neil Postman (who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death) who said, “the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”

Oh boy.

The first essay is “The Galaxy Reconfigured or the Plight of the Mass Man in an Individualist Society” (1962) where McLuhan talks about “sense rations” and changing patters of human perception, using William Blake’s “Jerusalem” and how our imaginations acclimate to new technologies, how they change how we think, how technology actually facilitated changes from gothic to renaissance to realism in literature. The printing press (or the idea of a popular press) brought to us the idea of a mass consciousness, a group vision, the lack of one single vision, and that all endeavors became “a mosaic of the postures of collective consciousness” and then we started to question, ‘what is truth?’ and then the sheer volume of voices gave us “mental anguish.”

The task of the individual artist became to “tap into the collective consciousness” even if the forms were individualistic and private.  He says this occurs both with music and writing technologies. We “behold the new thing” and are “compelled to become it.”

And then he goes into capitalism and market economics and self-regulation of markets and feudal societies confronted with technology. But then he comes back around to how technology can isolate the senses and hypnotize society. How we become what we behold as we are swept away by the novelty. He says, “the most deeply immersed are the least aware.”

We are often lured by the idea of an improved future. And in some cases the new technology does provide improved future (think of the washing machine, for example). Another example is the printing press which brought us the novel itself and the sustained tone of a long story which produced in readers a “feeling of living in the world.” Not too shabby.

The invention of the novel lead us to study the new reader which led to Edgar Allan Poe writing "The Philosophy of Composition" and inventing the detective story (all good there), then symbolist poetry, the reader as co-author, and the nineteenth century mass surrender of unique selfhood, the assembly line, the unconscious, the non-logical.

So that happened.

His second and famous essay is “The Medium is the Message” (1964)

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividng all things, as a means of control, personal and social consequences of any medium technology is an extension of ourselves.” He says machines usually fragment and decentralize.

Interestingly, he talks a lot about the invention of the electric light, pure information without a message. And he uses this to launch into talking about how the content of the medium is just another medium when you pull back the layers. Writing is really a medium for speech, which is just a medium for our thoughts, which is then a medium for our nonverbal impulses.

Technology changes the scale, pace, and pattern of human affairs. The railroad accelerated time and enlarged the scale of previous human functions. New kinds of cities came to be, new kinds of work and leisure that evolved to be independent of location. Then the plane came and dissolved the railway city.

There are independent consequences in the use of any technology. Again his example of the electric light: what it’s used for is irrelevant; it dramatically changed our lives and our behavior. "Content tends to blind us to the character of the medium."  Content is a distraction.

He quotes something my father used to always quote as well because he worked for IBM for many years, probably the original 'thinking outside the box' idea: "IBM is not in the business of making machines, but in information processing."

And McLuhan insists light is a communication medium and it's no coincidence they called light companies “light and power." Electric light eliminates time and space just like the radio, the telegraph, the phone, the TV (and now the internet).

He criticizes technology apologists for being disingenuous when they say technology is the scapegoat for the sins of the world. It's like saying “apple pie is neither good or bad. It is the way that it is used" (and "guns don't kill people…")

There are consequences of innovation. These apologists speak "in the true narcissistic style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form."

But it's more complicated (as it always is) than good or bad. The printing press gave us trashy novesl and nationalism, but he says, it has also gave us the Bible (and Choose Your Own Adventure books). Movies brought a world of illusions and dreams, point of view, then cubism happened, the idea of perspective, the interplay of planes, contradictions, instant sensory awareness of the whole…

Like all cultural things, it's not always easy to unravel: “Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.”

That's a lot of omelet to chew right there. 

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