Month: September 2021

The Essay Project: The Dawn of Writing Workshops

September 24, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re getting down to the last two essays from the David Rivard class at Sarah Lawrence back in 1994-ish. It’s another Philip Levine one and I would say this is my favorite essay in the project so far, but then Levine is one of my favorite poets so this is not a surprising thing. This essay makes me want to do a deep dive into all of his prose. It’s called “Mine Own John Berryman” and it talks about his experience at the Iowa Writers Workshop with teachers Robert Lowell (who sucked) and John Berryman (who was great). This essay, like “Entering Poetry” which we covered a few weeks ago was from his autobiography of essays that had just come out, The Bread of Time (1994).

The most wonderful thing about this long essay experiment has been how I’ve come to soften about essays I formerly disliked. I’ve grown up, changed. But Philip Levine: it is so heartwarming to be able to say there has been no change. I still love his poetry and prose and this feels like a rediscovery.

This essay is full of not only beautiful passages, but criticism and praise of his teachers that hits exactly the right notes, like this beginning:

“I can’t say if all poets have had mentors, actual living, breathing masters who stood and sat before them making the demands that true mentors must make if the fledgling is ever to fly. Some poets seem to have been totally self-starting….I’m thinking of such extraordinary examples as Emily Dickinson and 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 advantages of being geniuses….I think also of those poets who had to be poets, whom no one or nothing short of death could have derailed from their courses—John Keats, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Rimbaud—who outstripped their mentors before they even got into second gear. There are those who were lucky enough to find among their peers people of equal talent and insight to help them on their way, like Williams and Pound, who for the crucial early years of their writing careers ignited each other…As for those of us here in the United States of America in the second half of the twentieth century, we have developed something called Creative Writing…One can only regard it as one of the most amazing growth industries we have. Thus, at the same time we’ve made our society more racist, more scornful of the rights of the poor, more imperialist, more elitist, more tawdry, money-driven, selfish, and less accepting of minority opinions, we have democratized poetry. Today anyone become a poet; all he or she has to do is travel to the nearest college and enroll in Beginning Poetry Writing and then journey through the dozen stages of purgatory properly titled Intermediate Poetry Writing and Semi-Advanced Poetry Writing, all the way to Masterwork Poetry Writing, in which course one completes her epic on the sacking of Yale or his sonnet cycle on the paintings of Edward Hopper, or their elegies in a city dumpster…”

Did he write this yesterday? From his grave? Yes. Yes. Yes. All of it. And how he threads the success of poetry workshops to the decine of civility. It's like he was my mentor and I didn't even know it.

And then! And then he goes into his own early experiences squeezing poems out of the collegiate poetry factory, with Mr. Confessional Robert Lowell no less who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Lord Weary’s Castle. Ground zero for the whole enterprise at the famous Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Levine didn’t go to Iowa in 1953 to study with John Berryman (not yet famous for his “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”) but to study with the famous Robert Lowell.

“To say I was disappointed in Lowell as a tacher is an understatement…a teacher who is visibly bored by his students and their poems is hard to admire. The students were a marvel: we were two future Pulitzer Prize winners, on Yale winner, one National Book Critics Circle Award winner, three Lamont Prize winners, one American Book Award winner.”

Wow. Taking down Robert Lowell of the great Boston Lowells, relative of famous poets Amy Lowell and James Russel Lowell in just two sentences! Who Lowell was contrasted with who "we" were. It’s like buttah!

And what an amazing workshop class it was: Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass (who would continue in the tradition of Robert Lowell confessional free verse), Jane Cooper, William Dickey….among others.

“Lowell was, if anything, considerably worse in the seminar; we expected him to misread our poesm—after all, most of them were confused and, with few exeptions, only partialy realized, but to see him bumbling in the face of ‘real poetry’ was discouraging.”

Levine then gives an example of Lowell misreading a Housman poem and continues with a final discomforting scene:

“His fierce competitiveness was also not pleasant to behold…he seemed to have little use for any practicing American poet….During the final workshop meeting he came very close to doing the unforgivable: he tried to overwhelm us with one of his own poems….someone, certainly not Lowell, had typed up three and a half single-spaced pages of heroic couplets on ditto masters so that each of us could hold his or her own smeared purple copy of his masterpiece. He intoned the poem in that enervated voice we’d all become used to….I sat stunned by the performance, but my horror swelled when several of my classmates leaped to praise every forced rhyme and obscure reference…No one suggested a single cut, not even when Lowell asked if the piece might be a trifle too extended, a bit soft in places. Perish the thought; it was a masterpiece. And thus the final class meeting passed with accolades for the one person present who scarcely needed praise and who certaininly had the intelligence and insight to know it for what it was: bootlicking.”

I love this man.

Levine goes on to contrast the experience of his next workshop teacher, John Berryman.

“To begin with, he did not play favorites: everyone who dared hand him a poem burdened with second-rate writing tasted his wrath, and that meant all of us. He never appeared bored in the writing class; to the contrary, he seemed more nervous in our presence than we in his.”

“We returned the next Monday to discover that Berryman had moved the class to a smaller and more intimate room containing one large seminar table around which we all sat.”

My favorite teacher did that too. That must have been a thing.

Levine describes how Berryman managed to weed out “unserious” students, “a contingent of hangers-on” until “all but the hard-core masochists had dropped.” And incredibly not only was Levine one of these masochists, he was too poor to pay for the class and was coming anyway. Berryman would joke about it to Levine when Levine tried to say there had been a mix-up with the registrar. “I was the only nonenrolled student attending, but so extraordinary were his performances that the news spread and by the time he gave his final Whitman lecture the room was jammed to the bursting point.”

It never occurred to me to sneak into classes I wasn’t registered for. Dagnabit.

Berryman taught them how to find “hot” areas of their poems and revise toward the heat, how to be ruthless and make radical revisions. “There are so many ways to ruin a poem,” Berryman said. Levine talks about how Donald Justice was the superstar of the class.

Berryman also was a scholar of Shakespeare and one day had the students all re-read The Tempest. “There is great poetry hiding where you least expect it,” Berryman said. “We must find our touchstones where we can.” Beautiful.

Levine is often sarcastically funny. When Berryman was extoling the virtues of Macbeth, how Shakespeare had less than two weeks to write the play and how Berryman said it “’took him no time at all to write it, and yet it would take half the computers in the world a year to trace the development of the imagery that a single human imagination created and displayed in a play of unrivaled power.’" Levine, a former auto factory worker, retorts, "So much for the School of Engineering.”

Berryman also put students in their place. He “made it clear, those who best understood prosody—Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Blake, Hopkins, Frost, Roethke—had better things to do than write handbooks for our guidance.”

Other great Berryman quotes:

“Speed, achieved by means of a complex syntax and radical enjambment.”

“Certain poets are so much themselves, they should not be imitated: they leave you no room to be yourself, and [Dylan] Thomas was surely one of them, as was Hart Crane, who probably ruined the careers of more young poets than anything except booze.”

“Better to learn from a poet who does not intoxicate you, better to immerse yourself in Hardy, whom no American wants to sound like.”

“Write everything that occurs to you; it’s the only way to discover where your voice will come from. And never be in a hurry. Writing poetry is not like running the four hundred meters.”

“’No poet worth his salt is going to be handsome; if he or she is beautiful there’s no need to create the beautiful. Beautiful people are special; they don’t experience life like the rest of us.’ He was obviously dead serious, and then he added, ‘Don’t worry about it, Levine, you’re ugly enough to be a great poet.’”

Levine also drops the bombshell that Snodgrass claimed Lowell discouraged his confessional poems instead of inspiring them.

Levine talked about how Lowell’s favoritisms divided his class into “hostile factions” whereas in Berryman’s class everyone in the class stayed friends and “took pride and joy in each other’s accomplishments…we were learning how much farther we could go together than we could singly, alone, unknown, unread in an America that had never much cared for poetry.”

This essay made me reflect on my own experience with the best teacher I ever had, Howard Schwartz. Later at Sarah Lawrence College when I was getting my MFA in one of the imfamous Creative Writing programs, Tom Lux confidently announced to us that in his workshop and classes we would get the closest reading of our lives. And to his credit, it was pretty close, but no cigar on the closest. That was in Howard Schwartz’s class. Lux would take us line by line, but Schwartz took us work by word like a poet mechanic. We’d spend ten minutes debating whether a title should be using the word “A” or the word “The” and it drove some students batty but I wouldn’t have changed a thing about any of the many classes I took with Howard Schwartz. He too was the just right combination of encouraging with no-bullshit tolerated. You had to have a tough skin or develop one. Some students couldn’t do it.

I'm going to order the full Levine suite toot suite!

The Essay Project: Language Poetry

September 16, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This next article from the Suzanne Gardiner class at Sarah Lawrence was an interesting one, "1NK M4THM4T1CS, 4N 1NTRODUCT1ON TO L4NGU4GE POETRY by JOEL LEW1S" and it appeared in the magazine Poets & Writers in Sept/Oct 1990.

One of the interesting things about this old P&W article from 1990 is that it wasn’t wall-to-wall Writing MFA ads like it is these days. This article only has three: Washington University in St. Louis, Vermont College and Cleveland State University. Which seems like a lot but it's not. There are also ads for journal subscriptions, writing competitions and book publishers.

In this essay, Joel Lewis quotes Language poet Charles Bernstein to say Language poetry “does not involve turning language into a commodity for consumption; instead it involves repossessing the sign through close attention to, and active participation in, it’s production.”

Total sense, right?

Lewis traces what exactly Language poetry was reacting against starting with the New York School's opposition to the New Criticism of the 1950s, “the egocentric, single-image, quasi-romantic poem that dominates literary magazines.”

The irony here is that language poetry has come to dominate magazines and book prizes over the last few decades every bit as much as new criticism once did. And how strange it is that everyone is always reacting against literary magazines and most likely because their poems were not getting into them (which involves its own egocentricity). And then considering the very small readerships of literary magazines, it's quite amazing so many revolutionary poetries result.

“I look out my/window and I/am important” jokes scholar Robert J. Bertholf. Even the line breaks are true. Bertholf continues with the satire of the typical workshop instructor asking, "Has s/he earned this last line, class?”

You can see why someone would want to revolt.

Lewis says “it seems that mainstream poetry exists simply to justify an apparatus of writing grants, workshops, summer poetry camps, and magazines, rather than for any reading audience.”

Which is an interesting thing to say because I can tell you this: thirty years later Language poetry has done nothing to change that fact, but arguably made it worse.

There’s a fine line between art pieces that use words as visual material and experimental poems that do the same; and I feel language poems sometimes cross that line depending upon the intent of the poem. Lewis overtly states this when he says Clark Coolidge’s landmark 1970 book Space “turned the subject of poetry onto itself by treating words as solid objects, much in the way a painter uses a tube of oil paint—as material for making art.”

The intent of sense making by parataxis is a different intent that separating words entirely from any sense-making aim. And word as paint, wood or any kind of object steps away from poetry and becomes a physical object of art. I have the same issue with digital poetry that likewise doesn’t use words for any language-sense-making aim.

Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman (pictured above), Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andres and their journals from the 1970s and 1980s are discussed.

“Admittedly, a good deal of the poetry is difficult. It requires that the reader drop his or her notion of the poem as anecdote or self-revelation and accept it as a ‘living document of the author’s engagement with the reader and the world through language as the agent of shared thinking.’”

This reminds me of a very talented undergraduate poet I knew at University of Missouri-St. Louis named Diane Harvestmoon who once said she read Gertrude Stein like listening to rain falling. I finally got it and still believe her definition of language poetry was the best I've ever heard.

“This is not writing aimed at reaching the masses, but at that fierce and devoted group of believers who are already serious readers of poetry.”

Poet’s poets. Scientist’s scientists. There is a definite need in the world for pure experimentation away from any practical application. And sometimes, like unintended consequences from pure scientific experimentation, there are found practical benefits. These poets ask “’How does it make meaning?’ Rather than ‘What does it mean?’” This means these poems study the way we read poems, which is important but not for everybody. There are other neccessary goals for poetry. When anyone makes the statement that this is the new poetry and other poetries are done for, then we have a problem. When magazines and book prizes publish mostly language poetry, then we are leaving out other vital audiences and experiments.

I, myself, am interested in project-based language poetry which Lewis here calls “procedural investigations”like Ron Silliman’s using no verbs in his poem “Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps” or Ted Greenwald’s poem on one-word lines, “Makes Sense” or David Melnick’s poem using a “self-invented vocabulary list,” “PCOET” or Len Hejinian’s poem “My Life” which is almost autobiographical but in a mishmash scramble:

"…Why are these people writing to each other. It’s true that there are times when its embarrassing to have come from California. The late afternoon light, which my mother always referred to as “backlighting,” gentled the greens with blue and grey. I only want the facts. It’s o.k. to have pancakes for dinner.”

These writers are trying to get out of their own heads and Lewis says they are not interested in writing what they already think. He traces their influences to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Louis Zukofsky, Gertrude Stein, Robert Creely, Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Larry Eigner, Francis Ponge, Paul Celan, Vladimir Khlebnikhov, early William Carlso Williams, 1960s cinema and art, the writings of earthworks artist Robert Smithson, minimalism, scientific, nonliterary vocabulary, Rolan Barthe’s writings about the death of the author and other ideas of post-structuralists. These poems reject new Criticism’s ideal of "representational language carrying meaning in a story or anecdote."

The problem with destabilizing authorship (which eventually results in destabilizing expertise and somehow humility) is the atmosphere of meaninglessness we are living in today, where everyone accuses their neighbors of fake news. To challenge reality is to destabilize it and there are political ramifications for that once the cat is out of the bag. To use a flawed piece of rhetorical language.

Like digitial poets, language poets have written a lot of criticism and theory. And Lewis admists “these critical writings are far more interesting than Language Poetry itself.” I’ve said as much about early digital poems. “Their works may become little more than fodder for numerous internalized academic debates. Will Language Poetry become part of the very institutions it opposes by providing yet another entrée on the menu of Modern Language Association (MLA) conventions.”

Yes and yes and yes.

Lewis also points out that Language Poetry “has generated a great amount of outright hostility….Poetry raders, at some level, are a society of believers….has faith in the rituals of the form: the conventional handling of metaphor, closure, and the narrative are not only accepted by expecte, and any desecration of the tabernacle of poetry often results in the cry of ‘philistine’ or anti-poetry.’”

There’s also a new accusation of white privilege made against language poets, that these poets exist in a safe harbor that permist the luxury of experimentation and play. Marginalized writers may feel pressed to keep trafficking in sense-making. No group is monolithic, however, and there are experimental black poets like Harryette Mullen. But many other poets from marginalized communities might feel they cannot afford to avoid the poetry of poltical witness in service of what Language Poetry critic Tom Clark calls “the usual disjointed, self-referential mucking about grammar.”

Because even these attempts to avoid the self somehow comes back upon the self and self-referenced process.

Ron Silliman admits this poetry “threatens established thinking” and so it now exists as threatened. We are now wringing our hands at the loss of rational thinking on social media and in govnerment. Instead of pushing readers to use their critical thinking skills more, people have given up figuring out the new quagmires and as a society we're all doing far less critical thinking.

So although I feel there is a need for this type of experimentation and I personally enjoy reading the results, the project’s goals have not been met…like…at all. I compare these language experiments to spending the last decade watching ghost-hunting reality shows. I really enjoy it; I always hope they’ll find proof of a ghost; but reviewing the results from ten years ago against shows of today we don’t have much to show for all of it. Does that mean we should stop trying to prove ghosts exist? I don’t think so. But we should have more humility and, like any good scientist, reconsider our hypotheses.

The artcile also includes some sample writings from Charles Bernstein which encapsulates language poetry's goals in a surprisingly sensical way:

“Poetry is like a swoon, with this difference,
it brings you to your senses.”

And this from Rae Armantrout

“Going to the Desert
is the old term

"landscape fo zeroes"

the glitter of edges
again catches the eye

to approach these swords!

lines across which
beings vanish / flare

the charmed verges of presence”

and this fragment from “Person” by Bob Perelman:

no matter how liberal the building codes
glass houses conceived in sin from day one
blizzards of chance down on the fountain of youth
all without a verb
because capitalism makes nouns
and burns connections.

The Essay Project: Duende

September 7, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I remember this next essay in the David Rivard class packet. It was a popular one at Sarah Lawrence because Federico Garcia Lorca wrote so eloquently about New York City. The essay is “The Duende: Theory and Divertissement” and like other Spanish works of poetry and prose, it dances around the topic a lot. And I really like that about Spanish poetry; but I’m annoyed by the fog of un-specificity in the essays. It starts to sound like so much spiritual, tent-revival mumbo-jumbo after a few pages.

Lorca's essay is describing moments when someone will say, “Now that has real duende!”

He says Manuel Torres once said this about a singer, “You have a voice, you know all the styles, but you will never bring it off because you have no duende.” This statement is so assertive you sense there's a blowhard behind it. Lorca goes on to say duende can be found in “anything that springs out of energetic instinct” whatever that is.

Lorca admits it's all a big mystery, “ a mysterious power that all may feel and no philosopher can explain.” He calls it an “earth-force.” All artists work toward perfection “at the cost of a struggle with a duende,” which is not an angel or a muse, “the Muse dictates and…prompts. There is relatively little she can do, for she keeps aloof and is so full of lassitude….The Muse arouses the intellect….but intellect is oftentimes the foe of poetry because it imitates too much.”

Ok, I'm half way there but not completely…sounds tricky. He continues…

“The Girl with the Combs had to mangle her voice because she knew there were discriminating folk about who asked not for form, but for the marrow of form—pure music spare enough to keep itself in air. She had to deny her faculties and her security; that is to say, to turn out her Muse and keep vulnerable, so that her Duende might come and vouchsafe the hand-to-hand struggle. And then how she sang! Her voice feinted no longer; it jetted up like blood, ennobled by sorry and sincerity, it opened up like ten fingers of a hand around the nailed feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni—tempestuous!…”

The arrival of the Duende always presupposes a radical change in all the forms as they existed on the old plane. It gives a sense of refreshment unknown until then, together with that quality of the just-opening rose, of the miraculous, which comes and instills almost religious transport…”

"All of the arts are capable of duende, but it naturally achieves its widest play in the fields of music, dance, and the spoken poem, since these require a living presence to interpret them…”

"The magical virtue of poetry lies in the fact that it is always empowered with duende to baptize in dark water all those who behold it, because with duende, loving and understanding are simpler, there is always the certainty of being loved and being understood; and this struggle for expression and for the communication of expression acquires at times, in poetry, finite characters.”

If you’re still confused, here is more information about the Duende in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende_(art)

The essay has a spiritual element I didn’t quote but that is captured in Wikipedia: “at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical.” The Wikipedia also contains Nick Cave’s description of duende as a sadness in love songs.

So although I think Lorca’s very long-winded description is way too elusive to be useful (which may be the point), I actually do believe in duende. The problem is, it’s subjective measurement. What produces an emotional response in one person does not produce an emotion response in another. A lot of it has to do with culture and environment.

This is duende as described in the final stanza of Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.”