Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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The Essay Project: How Modernism Has Given Us Who We Are

June 16, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Irving-howeIncredibly this is our 54th essay!

I haven't done an essay in a few weeks because this particular essay took forever to read. Partially this was because I had company coming and I only clean the house before company comes so it took a while to get the house up to my mother's standards even though she's not the company coming. 

Then there was the dry, academic essay itself. Then there was the fact that the Sarah Lawrence student who photocopied it from a book back in the early 1990s didn't notice there were unreadable words at the bottom of every page due to their bad copying job. (It was also maddingly stapled so that you have no idea which direction you should be going turning pages). This didn't stop me from reading it, however. It just made me stop after every three pages and take a brain rest.

The essay is an introduction called "The Idea of the Modern" by Irving Howe, most likely from his book The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts (1968). And it is good summary of what modernism is. But the essay was very interesting to me for another reason.

First I want to say there's always been something that has bothered me about modernism and I've never been able to put my finger on it (its un-scalability??) Although I did (as I was taught to) love many of its practitioners. I've felt this way for as long as I've known what modernism is/was (I think like we're still obsessed with it), going back to college or back to when we read "Prufrock" in high school.

I absolutely cannot read this essay and not think about the vitriol of politics today and how what was once a modernist fringe point of view has become a mainstream way of thinking. So the challenge for today's essay is to read it on two levels: (1) historical modernism and (2) listening for things you've heard people say on Twitter, Facebook or protest rally signs or the crazy Uncle or Aunt narc-splaining at holiday dinners or wherever you hear these basically nihilistic spews. 

This is en example of how dry the thing is:"…historical categories are helplessly imprecise and that the unified style or sensibility to which they presumably refer are shot through with contradictions."

Any sentence with contains the phrase "to which they presumably refer" is a little soul crushing. But we slog on! Because we're literary warriors!

Another one, "Historical complexity and confusions are seldom to be overcome by linguistic policing." Who could argue with that? Except the linguistic police. "…the important thing is not to be 'definitive' which by the very nature of things is unlikely, but to keep ideas in motion, the subject alive."

I actually agree with the sentence but I've spent no small time wondering about how 'the nature of things' works. 

The whole essay is about the "sensibility" and signs of modernity, which "seems willfully inaccessible" with its "unfamiliar forms" and "subjects that disturb the audience" and "threaten its most cherished statements."

This is what we like about it, it's revolution and irreverence. From 2022, however, we have what I would call 'mercenary modernists.' They don't care about the struggle. They're professional disturbers and threateners. In some cases they've picked a side to work for and they don't even know what the issues of the struggle are. Or in some cases, they're just trying to draw focus back to themselves for purely narcissistic reasons.

This is why we can't have nice, revolutionary things right now. Think about the caricature of the angry white male (or female) in America as you read the rest of this.

"The prevalent style of perception and feeling….is a revolt against the prevalent style, an unyielding rage against the official order."

"A modernist culture soon learns to respect, even to cherish, sigs of its division. It sees doubt as a form of health."

"It cultivates, in Thomas Mann's phrase, 'a sympathy for the abyss.' It strips man of his systems of belief and his ideal claims, and then proposes the one uniquely modern style of salvation: a salvation by, of, and for the self."

Wow.

"Subjectivity becomes the typical condition of the modernist outlook. In it's early stages, when it does not trouble to disguise its filial dependence on the romantic poets, modernism declares itself an inflation of the self, a transcendental and orgiastic aggrandizement of matter and event in behalf of personal vitality…freedom, compulsion, caprice."

"Modernism thereby keeps approaching–sometimes even penetrating–the limits of solipsism." 

There you go. He just said it. And then goes on to quote a prediction from Herman Hesse:

"a whole generation caught…between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence." And Howe emphasizes, "Above all, no simple acquiescence." Howe says this "posits a blockage, if not an end, to history." 

"The consequences are extreme: a break-up of the traditional untiy and continuity of Western culture, so that the decorum of its past no longer count for very much in determining its present, and a loosening of those ties that, in one or another way, had bound it to the institutions of society over the centuries."

That doesn't seem all bad though, right? Some of that traditional unity was kind of sexist and racist. But there's that scary law of unintended consequences…

"Culture now goes to war against itself, partly in order to salvage its purpose and the result is that it can no longer present itself with Goethian serenity and wholeness. At one extreme, there is a violent disparagement of culture (the late Rimbaud), and at the other, a quasi-religion of culture (the late Joyce). In much modernist literature, one finds a bitter impatience with the whole apparatus of cognition and limiting assumption of rationality. The mind comes to be seen as the enemy of vital human powers. Culture becomes disenchanted with itself, sick over its endless refinements. There is a hunger to break past the bourgeois proprieties and self-containment of culture, toward a form of absolute personal speech, a literature deprived of ceremony and stripped to revelation. In the work of Thomas Mann, both what is rejected and what is desired are put forward with a high, ironic consciousness: the abandoned ceremony and the corrosive revelation." 

I'm getting exhausted reading this.

"But if a major impulse of in modernist literature is a choking nausea before the idea of culture, there is another in which the writer takes upon himself the enormous ambition not to remake the world (by now seen as hopelessly recalcitrant and alien) but to reinvent the terms of reality."

Here we go. We are there. Politicians are doing this as we speak.

"…the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs has charged, "modernism despairs of human history, abandons the idea of a linear historical development, falls back upon notions of a universal condition humane or a rhythm of eternal recurrence, yet within its own realm is committed to ceaseless change, turmoil and recreation."

Ceaseless change, turmoil and recreation. In business-speak this is called 'disruption." It makes me so tired I need to go lay down for 30 minutes.

Ok I'm back. Howe says, "…always the hope for still another breakthrough, always the necessary and prepared for dialectical leap into still another innovation." The "predictable summit…violates the modernist faith in surprise" so "culture must all the more serve as the agent of a life-enhancing turmoil."

And then we have our modernist ideas of the artist, the Genius,

"…declares Hegel in a sentence which thousands of critics, writers and publicists will echo through the years, 'it must be the public that is to blame…the only obligation the artist can have is to follow truth and his genius."

Stick a fork in it.

Modernism, Howe says, is devoted to raising questions, not answers. "We represent ourselves, we establish our authenticity, by the questions we allow to torment us." We embrace uncertainty, "the makeshifts of relativism" because "men should live in discomfort." He quotes Eugene Zamyatin: "Revolution is everywhere and in all things; it is infinite, there is no final revolution, no end to the sequence of integers."

He then lists some basic attributes of modernism:

  1. Rise of the avant-garde as a special caste

    "an avant-garde marked by aggressive defensiveness, stigmata of alienation….Bohemia both as enclave of protection within a hostile society and as a place from which to launce guerrilla raids upon the bourgeois establishment, frequently upsetting but never quite threatening its security…the avant-garde scorns notions of 'responsibility' toward the audience; it raises the question of whether the audience exists, of whether it should exist."

    It's a ready made pose for any artist seeking their artist otufit. So convenient and attractive. Just speaking for myself. But here's the thing, the bourgeois have adopted it and contorted it and now here we are. 

    Howe goes on to say as much, "the avant-garde writer or artist must confront the one challenge for which he has not been prepared: the challenge of success. Contemporary society is endlessly assimilative, even if it tames and vulgarizes what it has learned, sometimes foolishly…the avant-garde is thereby no longer allowed the integrity of opposition or the coziness of sectarianism; it must either watch helplessly its gradual absorption into the surrounding culture or try to preserve its distinctiveness by continually raising the ante of sensation and shock."

  2. The problem of belief

    "Weariness sets in, and not merely with this or that other belief, but with the whole idea of belief. Through the brilliance of its straining, the modern begins to exhaust itself."

  3. Self-sufficiency of the work

    a move "toward an art severed from common life an experience…The Symbolists, as Marcel Raymond remarks, share with the Romantics a reliance upon the epiphany….For the Symbolist poet…illumination occurs only through the action of the poem…And thereby the Symbolist poet tends to become a magus, calling his own reality into existence and making poetry into what Baudelaire called 'suggestive magic.'" 

  4. The idea of esthetic order is abandoned

    "it downgrades the value of esthetic unity in behalf of even a jagged and fragmented expressiveness" because "formal unity implies an intellectual and emotional, indeed a philosophic composure; it assumes that the artist stands above his material, controlling it…After Kafka it becomes hard to believe not only in answers but in endings."

    Or feelings.

  5. Nature ceases to be a central subject

    Nature becomes an idea, a "token of deprivation," a "sign of nostalgia." 

  6. Perversity–which is to say surprise, excitement, shock, terror, affront–becomes a dominant motif.

    "The modernist writer strives for sensations…he has little use for wisdom." 

  7. Primitivism

    "Sophistication narrowing into decadence–this means primitivism will soon follow. The search for meaning through extreme states of being reveals a yearning for the primal….the turning upon one's primary characteristics, the hatred of one's gifts, the contempt for intelligence, which cuts through the work of men so different as Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, and Hart Crane….is always haunted by the problem of succession: what, after such turnings and distinctions of sensibility, can come next?"

  8. A new sense of character

    "Character for modernists like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, is regarded not as a coherent, definable, and well-structured entity, but as a psychic battlefield, or an insoluble puzzle, or the occasion for a flow of perceptions and sensations…into a stream of atomized experiences, a kind of novelistic pointillism."

    The hero's struggle is a lack of belief in anything. "In Hemmingway's novels, the price of honor is often a refusal of the world. In Malfaux's novels, the necessity for action is crossed by a conviction of its absurdity."

    Is this why we see such a lack of the heroic in our current culture? Our movies are filled with superheroes that don't seem to translate into heroic actions in real life. Maybe this because we have a subterranean disbelief in heroism and "the meaninglessness of the human scheme" and "the joke of progress."

    And in the end, ourselves.

    Howe quotes D.H. Lawrence, "I am weary even of my individuality, and simply nauseated by other people's."

  9. Nihilism, boredom

    "Dostoevsky tries to frighten…by saying that once God denied, everything terrible has become possible. Nietzsche give the opposite answer, declaring that from the moment man believes neither in God nor immortality, 'He becomes responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life." 

    I'm with that last guy.

    "Nihilism lies at the center of all that we mean by modernist literature, bothe as subject and symptom." 

Ok, so that's all very heavy and depressing. But Howe predicts a kind of vague end to all of it. "How do great cultural movements reach their end? It is a problem our literary historians have not sufficiently examined, perhaps because beginnings are more glamourous." 

What will end modernism, Howe says in his closing sentence, is "the kind of savage parody which may indeed be the only fate worse than death."

Fingers crossed. Taking another nap now.

Ellipsis, Joan Didion and Me

June 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

DidionThis recent Atlantic article by Caitlin Flanagan, originally entitled "Chasing Joan Didion," was interesting to me in that it was both a fan account as Flanagan visited the places Didion had once lived and, in moments, an illuminating description of what Didion does best.

Like this, for example:

“This is Joan Didion’s magic trick: She gets us on the side of ‘the past’ and then reveals that she’s fully a creature of the present. The Reagans’ trash compactor is unspeakable, but Jerry Brown’s mattress is irresistible.”

And this,

“People from the East often say that Joan Didion explained California to them. Essays have described her as the state’s prophet, its bard, its chronicler. But Didion was a chronicler of white California. Her essays are preoccupied with the social distinctions among three waves of white immigration: the pioneers who arrived in the second half of the 19th century; the Okies, who came in the 1930s; and the engineers and businessmen of the postwar aerospace years, who blighted the state with their fast food and their tract housing and their cultural blank slate.”

Since I am very different from Joan Didion, I often wonder what appeals to me about her. Flanagan is seeking a similar objective in this essay. For me I think one thing is Didion’s hardline, constant re-evaluating of her family history (especially its myths and legends) which, like mine, seems inseparable from her family state’s very history:

“In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, there’s an essay called “Notes From a Native Daughter”—which is how Joan Didion saw herself. It’s generally assumed that she began to grapple with her simplistic view of California history only much later in life, in Where I Was From. But in this first collection, she’s beginning to wonder how much of her sense of California is shaped by history or legend—by stories, not necessarily accurate, that are passed down through the generations.”

And a certain aura around her in the idea of writing being a performance:

“Heading to the seminar that most freighted and engaged her: the writing class of the great Mark Schorer, whom I knew very well when I was growing up. He was a very kind person and also a peerless literary critic, and he found in Didion’s early work evidence not just of a great writer. 'One thinks of the great performers—in ballet, opera, circuses,' he said. 'Miss Didion, it seems to me, is blessed with everything'…

Her grand achievements:

For years it was known as the greatest leaving–New York essay of all time. It’s about the revolving door, the way you can arrive there young, innocent, and new, but the very process of adapting to the city will coarsen and age you.”

And in this famous first line,

“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

As Flanagan says, “Everyone who loves Joan Didion remembers that sentence—the shock of it, the need to race back up to the top of the essay to see if you’d missed something. ‘I had better tell you where I am, and why,’…When I fell in love with Joan Didion, it was just the two of us and all of those electric sentences, and that was enough.”

Flanagan also talks about how this aspect of performance felt empowering for women:

“She was in Berkeley as a Regents’ Lecturer, and because my father was then the chair of the English department, he was sort of serving as her host. She came to our house for dinner, and she hardly said a word. But a week or so later, when my father said, 'There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,' that got my attention. Apparently, her office hours—usually the most monastic of an academic’s life—were being mobbed. Not just by students; by women from the Bay Area who had heard she was there and just wanted to see her. All of these women felt that Slouching Towards Bethlehem had changed them.

It wasn’t a book that was supposed to change anyone. Not only because that was by no means Joan Didion’s intent, but also because—look at the subjects. How can an essay about Alcatraz (as an attractive, mostly deserted place, not as a statement on either incarceration or the land theft perpetrated against California’s Indian tribes); an essay about a baby’s first birthday party; a forensic investigation of the marital tensions that led Lucille Miller to kill her husband—how can all of those add up to something life-changing?

Because in 1968, here was a book that said that even a troubled woman, or a heartbroken woman, or a frightened woman could be a very powerful person. In “Why I Write”—which was, in fact, the Regents’ Lecture—she famously described writing as an act of aggression, in which a writer takes control of a reader and imposes her own opinions, beliefs, and attitudes on that reader. A woman could be a hostage-taker, and what she held you hostage to were both shocking public events and some of the most interior and delicate thoughts a woman can have. This woman with the vanda orchid in her hair and her frequent states of incapacitation could put almost anyone under her power.”

Flanagan relates this back to her own childhood:

“I had no power growing up, but I did have books and ideas, and I could be funny. I know I could have ended up being a magazine writer without ever having that chance experience. But what Joan Didion taught me was that it didn’t matter that I had such a messy, unenviable life—I could sit down, all alone, and write enough drafts to figure out what I thought about something and then punch it out into the culture.”

Although I'm sure the idea of power through writing would have sounded appealing, there were instead for me very specific rhetorical devices of Didion's style that just seeped into my writing almost unawares, such as her use of ellipses, not just those little three dots at the end of a thought but, as Oxford dictionary defines it, "the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues."

Or as others call it, Didion's

In Joan Didion, Sentence and Style, Kathleen M. Vandenberg goes into some detail about the ellipsis thing:

“Writing, Didion notes, is ‘an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding, rather than stating.”

In 2005, Didion described her process as “discovering what’s on my mind and then hiding it.”

Why would she do that? There’s a whole chapter on women doing this kind of subterfuge in Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America by Alicia Ostriker, a chapter which is all about male/female power dynamics and I’m assuming Didion was caught up in this very thing from her own mythologizing of male power, trying to write around it, and her ideas about her own ‘fragility.’

Vandenberg says as she wrote about politics, “she focused on the use of language as ‘an obscuring device’” and her writing is often about the “rhetoric of gaps” which occurs as a “deliberate withholding of interpretation and commentary at the level of the sentence.” Vanderberg shows examples of connected sentences without and transitional words or phrases in between. And she explains how Didion's various grammatical tricks gives us the impression that Didion’s voice is “both forceful and understated.”

It’s hard to know where our influences come from. As Charles de Gaulle once said, "Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life." All I know is I enjoyed reading Didion’s reserve and evasion just as much as I enjoy my own.

So it would seem to follow…

But late in her life Didion herself felt it was her writerly evasion that possibly wrote her self. And she tells us this with predictable understatement that is not quite a warning but a matter of fact:

“I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or who I have become.”

In any case, I don’t believe writing is all that powerful in that it can forcibly change another's mind like a hostage. Although I do think there is a level of intimacy in making the attempt to change a mind.

Rather, for me, Vanderberg gets to the crux of the truth right here:

“What is withheld, what is omitted, is in many ways more powerful than what is present…her reflections on pivotal moments are inevitably pared down, set in sentences deceptively short and simple given the complexity and weight they are meant to convey”

The unsaid develops a certain power like a vaccuum of air.

Toward the end of the book, Vanderberg quotes the end of Didion's book Blue Nights which deals with the death of her only daughter, a poem-like string of sentences that are full of many typical Didion rhetorical strategies, including ellipsis:

“Go back into the blue.
I myself placed her ashes in the wall.
I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.
I know what it is I am now experiencing.
I know what the frailty is. I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
You may see nothing still to be lost.
Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”

Poems About Music

June 2, 2022 / / 0 Comments

SpellSince I spent the early part of the year writing poems from songs (and really enjoying it) I was interested in what other poets had done with their inspirations and found a few anthologies with music poems in them. 

Unlike poems about movies (a relatively new technology), poems about music go way back into the centuries all the way to Homer. Like they did for movies, Everyman’s Library has published Music’s Spell, poems about music and musicians. If you’re looking for more contemporary poems, this might not be the book because it's heavily weighted toward historical poems mixed with some contemporary ones.

Some other highlights:

"Music" by Anna Akhmatova whose Lyn Coffin translation ends with:

“And she sang like the first storm heaven gave,
Or as if flowers were having their say.”

"The Flute" by Andre Chenier about a music teacher and the Lloyd Alexander translation ends with:

“With my young fingers in his knowing hands, again
And yet again he guided them until they could,
Of their own will, draw music from a tube of wood.”

"From Fruit-Gathering" by Rabindranath Tagore which ends:

“The flute steals his smile from my friend’s lips
and spreads it over my life.”

"The Tongues of Violins" by Walt Whitman:

The tongues of violins!
(I think O tongues, ye tell this heart, that cannot tell itself;
This brooding, yearning heart, that cannot tell itself.)

From "Gerog Trakl’s Trumpets:"

“Dancers rise from a black wall–
Scarlet flags, laughter, madness, trumpets.”

From Hamlet by William Shakespeare which ends:

“Call me what instrument you will,
though you can fret me,
yet you cannot play upon me.”

From Walt Whitman's "Proud Music of the Storm" which ends:

Give me to hold all sounds, (I, madly struggling, cry,)
Fill me with all the voices of the universe,
Endow me with their throbbings—Nature's also,
The tempests, waters, winds—operas and chants—marches and dances,
Utter—pour in—for I would take them all.

"The Solitary Reaper" by William Wordsworth that ends:

“The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.”

From "Don Juan" by Lord Byron:

“The devil hath not, in all his quiver’s choice,
An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice.”

And “The Singing Lesson” by David Wagoner which ends:

“If you have learned, with labor and luck, the measures
You were meant to complete,
You may find yourself before an audience
Singing into the light,
Transforming the air you breathe—that malleable wreckage,
That graveyard of shouts,
That inexhaustible pool of chatter and whimpers—
Into deathless music.”

FunnyI actually got the idea to look for music poems from another anthology, Seriously Funny, Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else edited by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby, which Billy Collins recommended in his Masterclass. There was a definite style of poem in this anthology, long-lined narratives at the expense of short, funny pieces. And I'm sure reading a book full of long-lined poems crammed with odd details influenced a recent Rockford Files poem I finished last week. But strangely there were more unfunny poems in the anthology than funny ones, although there were some interesting music poems sprinkled in:

WojahnThen there's Mystery Train by David Wojahn with its famous sequence of rock poems. My well-read friend Sherry, seeing I was writing pop-culture poems in graduate school, recommended the book to me when we were both at Sarah Lawrence in the mid-1990s.

The middle sequence contains 35 poems on various rock history milestones: James Brown at the Apollo and on tour, a poem about the car Hank Williams died in, Jerry Lee Lewis’ scandalous marriage to Myra Gale Brown ( I was surprised to relearn her name today since she’s always credited as “underage cousin” even on Jerry Lee Lewis' Wikipedia page and even in this poem she gets no name), Ritchie Valens before his plane crash, the Beatles in Hamburg in 1961, a poem about the song “Surfin’ Bird,” Janis Joplin leaving Port Arthur in 1964, Dick Clark hiding his real age, Elvis shooting the TV while watching Robert Goulet, the last days of Brian Jones by his swimming pool, Altamont, listening to The Rolling Stones and  Creedence Clearwater Revival in Vietnam (and The Doors during the making of Apocalypse Now), John Berryman listening to Robert Johnson, the “Exile on Main Street” Rolling Stones tour, Nixon naming Elvis an Honorary Federal Narcotics Agent, Malcolm McLaren signing the Sex Pistols, Elvis in Las Vegas, drunken bar parodies of Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley's tour, Brian Wilson’s sandbox, Lisa Marie Presley, Bo Diddley, Roy Orbison’s comeback tour, and TNT Colorizing the movie A Hard Day’s Night.

The problem with re-reading all these poems these days is that the subjects seem too obvious now and over-visited. And the poems all sound the same for the most part. There's not much variation in the form, tone or point-of-view. Some exceptions are:

  • "Buddy Holly Watching Rebel Without a Cause, Lubbock, Texas, 1956" (a poem which was also in our movie anthology)
  • "W.C.W. Watching Presley’s Second Appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”: Mercy Hospital, Newark, 1956"
  • "Woody Guthrie Visited by Bob Dylan: Brooklyn State Hospital, New York, 1961"
  • "Delmore Schwartz at the First Performance of the Velvet Underground, New York, 1966" and another poem directly following about Lou Reed at Delmore Schwartz’s wake.
  • "History Being Made: Melcher Production Studios, Los Angeles, 1968" about Charles Manson
  • The Assassination of John Lennon As Depicted by the Madame Tussaud Was Museum, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 1987"

SweetAnd then lastly, the anthology Sweet Nothings, An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry edited by Jim Elledge which like the unfunny-funny poetry anthology above it has a lot of poems only tangentially referencing rock songs (and some not even). But there were still some good exceptions:

  • David Trinidad's "Meet the Supremes" (a list of an ode to all girl groups)
  • Kay Murphy's "Eighties Meditation"
  • Jim Elledge's "Strangers: An Essay" (about Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise)
  • Dorothy Barresi's "The Back-Up Singer" and "Nine of Clubs, Cleveland, Ohio"
  • Christopher Gilbert's "Time with Stevie Wonder in It"
  • Sydney Lea's "The One White Face in the Place"
  • Michael Waters' "Christ at the Apollo, 1962"
  • Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died" (probably the most famous poem about popular music)
  • Mark Defoe's "Dream Lover"
  • William Matthew's prose poem "The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives"
  • Ronald Wallace's "Sound Systems"
  • Lisel Mueller's "The Deaf Dancing to Rock"
  • Thom Gunn's "The Victim" (about the death of Nancy Spungen)
  • Joseph Hutchinson's "Joni Mitchell"
  • Katharyn Howd Machan's "In 1969"
  • Robert Long's "What's So Funny 'bout Peace, Love and Understanding"
  • Dana Gioia's "Cruising with the Beach Boys"
  • Gary Soto's "Heaven"
  • Albert Goldbarth's "People Are Dropping Out of Our Lives"
  • David Bottoms' "Homage to Lester Flatt"
  • David Wojahn's "Buddy Holly" (much better than the Mystery Train poems, IMHO)
  • Van K. Brock's "Sphynx"
  • Richard Speakes' "Patsy Cline"
  • Richard Blessing's "Elegy for Elvis"

Larry Levis' "Decrescendo" with the line:

"The man on sax & the other on piano never had to argue
Their point, for their point was time itself"

James Seay's "Johnny B. Goode" with the lines:

"though I could probably write one of those pop-culture essays
on its All-American iconography,
the railroad running through the promise-land"

Michael Loden's "Tumbling Dice" with the line:

"is 'Ooo Baby Baby'
still the melting point of ice?"

 

And I must mention to end, surprisingly none of these anthologies included my favorite music poem, "Serenade" by Billy Collins. 

 

Conspicuous Poetry Consumption: Poetry Scrolls

June 1, 2022 / / 0 Comments

RangeWe have a few locations here in Albuquerque and Santa Fe (Range Cafe, The Standard Diner, Meow Wolf) that have Art-O-Mat machines, converted cigarette dispensers made into cigarette-pack-sized art dispensers.

For $5 you can buy art objects and I have an office shelf half full of them because I can't pass them up. In fact, I will panhandle five bucks if I find myself near one of these machines without cash.

Art-o-mats

 

About six months ago at the Range Cafe near the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center I came across a poet in the Art-o-Mat selling poetry scrolls in his cigarette box.

This poet calls himself Reverend Stray Toast (a.k.a. Max Toast) and his creative packaging includes nutritional information (Total Fascism 0%) and the warning that "poetry has been scientifically proven to have the ability to, under certain circumstances, Change Your Life."

IMG_20220511_180401 IMG_20220511_180401 IMG_20220511_180401

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IMG_20220511_180427

The box contained three scrolls.

 

 

 

 

Show-love

"Show Love" (click to enlarge) is about getting back what you put out with lines like "I will stay until I become the depiction of I love I miss in the world" and "being alive is harder than being intelligent."

This is mostly a poem of fragments and ramblings about abandonment, competition, self-hate and inauthenticity.

He stays in the realm of abstractions a bit too much but he's putting it out there on little scrolls…so enjoy it I say.

 

 

 

Sequentialism

"Sequentialism" is a complete free association poem where one word in one line rolls into the next: "history story teller/teller at the bank/Banksy at Gaza/gauzed wrapped strip nude" and some lines even repeat a word like "miss your face face your fears/fears of commitment meant it/the other way."

 

 

 

 

 

Class

The final scroll contains three poems: "Class," "Resonate" and "Go Figure" which tells us to "Figure something out/with your hands./Now fix it."

 

Digital Poetry: More Predictions and the OuLiPo

May 31, 2022 / / 0 Comments

OulipoSo plugging along with The New Media Reader. The computer-prediction essays are getting a little bit tiresome but we have a few more to slog through. Some of these predictions of automation now seem a bit sad, especially reading from the tired, old future.

"Augmenting Human Intellect" by Douglas Engelbart" (1962) https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/

Englebart divides new media concepts into:

  1. Artifacts or objects.
  2. Language symbols/concepts
  3. Mythologies/strategies
  4. Training ("to be operationally effective")….geez, sounds so chilly when you say it that way.

Englebart came up with ideas of the computer mouse, application windows, the idea for the word processor and he helped establish the Internet and video conferencing. He is called "one of the great inventors of the 20th Century."

This paper is about rethinking how we organize information and he talks a lot about note cards, sorting links, concept packets and the serial progression of ideas not being how the human mind really works. Our brains are more of a scrambled, interconnected, linking tangle (aint that the truth). The human mind wanders down paths and crisscrosses itself. Engelbart takes us through how the mind diagrams a sentence or scans complex statements.

He also talks about how hard it is to get people to see how hard-wired they are in  doing things in a certain way. And that changes doesn't come as a big shift, but in lots of little shifts we make. You have to wait to see a big impressive change. He believes the computer can help us "add-up" to something impressive. 

"Sketchpad" by Ivan E. Sutherland (1963)
http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/sutherland%20(1963)%20sketchpad.%20a%20man-machine%20graphical%20communication%20system.pdf

This article basically predicts much of what became Photoshop. 

"The Construction of Change" by Roy Ascott (1964)
https://www.academia.edu/740569/The_construction_of_change

Acsott was first to use the word cybernetics and this is one of the first essays about new media art. Ascott goes back to the 1960s happenings which he says felt more like taking part in rituals and an interaction that was 1:1.  He sees the participation in new media art differently, as "loops of creative activity…fusion of art, science, personality." He differentiates between the act of making art and the end result and how happenings and new media are both about the act of making more than the end results. This was actually an interesting essay about the curriculum for the art students at the Ealing School of Art and how students were encouraged to experiment even with their self-identified personalities and how this led to thinking outside the self-box.

"A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Intermediate" by Ted Nelson (1965)

Nelson is credited for inventing the idea of hypertext and this essay deals with the changing nature of text, pieces of text in a state of flux, links to ever-changing text and separating the changeable elements out of larger texts so they will always be current. If you were ever an admin in a legal offrce or a paralegal, you might remember the stack of monthly update pages that endlessly needed to be swapped in and out of legal binders. In this way Nelson was predicting micro-content and the buzzworthy "headless CMS." 

The Internet as it exists apparently doesn't really do what Nelson envisioned, but is described in this essay as "a monumental public publishing space" which gained critical mass by employing a subset of hypertext concepts.

Nelson sees technology as an "adjunct to creativity…offering a data structure in a changing world."

The essay also informs us that a "small computer" would be a good corporate or educational investment for $37,000. (Yikes!) Nelson then goes into some interesting theories about writing is: outlines, editing, word processing and "handling information." 

After this essay, we get into some early experimental pieces, specifially around the French group OuLiPo (pictured above).  and this subsection begins with a great quote from Alan Turing: "Only a machine can appreciate a sonnet written by another machine" which states exactly what I mean by saying people seek out art to communicate with other people and the content of that communication is only interesting to most of us if it has originated from the mind of another human being who might be having the same human experience we are.

But in any case, new media likes to test this premise all the time and a French group of artists formed in 1960 around ideas for creating art with constraints and procedures. The "Brief History of the OuLliPo" by Jean Lescure differentiates between intentional literature and random literature. The OuLiPo were interested in mathematical constraints, failures of language, language games and paintings that involved "the dissimulation of the object of reference." 

The first OuLiPo piece we look at is "A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" by Ramond Queneam (translated from French by Stanely Chapman). The New Media Reader presents the poem as strips of a sonnet and invites you to cut up the pages to recreate physical horizontal page strips which are basically the separate variations of lines of a sonnet. You can swap out various lines in endless combinations to create an almost-infinite number of rhyming sonnets. This took planning to get the various lines to rhyme in French and English. 

Examples of swappable lines:

With breaking voice across the Alps they slog

Lobsters for sale must be our apologue

No need to cart such treasures from the fog

Bard I adore your endless monologue

French versions:

Barde que to me plais toujours tu soliloques

On regrette à la fin les agrestes bicoques

The strips would look like this:

    Stips

More about the making of the poem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Thousand_Billion_Poems

These experiments are curious and interesting but ultimately senseless and unmoving. No ideas but in structure.

The next piece is maybe the first Choose Your Own Adventure, a piece called "Yours for the Telling" by Raymond Queneau.

There are only 21 pieces of content to read but what was intersting to me were the word choices upon the presentation of the alternative narrative path, for example: if you don't want to follow this path, here is another:

  • if not
  • if it's neither here nor there to you
  • If it's all the same to you
  • if you don't care
  • If it's immaterial to you
  • If you wish
  • If you prefer
  • If you rather
  • If so
  • If you have no objection

The next essay in the section is "For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature" by Claude Berge. He creates poetry graphs to describe narrative combinations. (The art of data). He groups combinatory literature in three buckets:

  1. Machine procedures that help you create art
  2. Machine procedures that transform existing content
  3. The transposition of concepts of mathematics into the realm of words.

He says the first combinatory art forms were musical dice games, some by Mozart. He lists the current players:

He uses terms like plastic arts, Fibonaccian poems and Exponential poetry.

The next essay is "Computer and Writer" by Paul Fournel. He talks about how the computer aids in combinatory/random literature (for example it makes the lose strips of 100 million poems easier to read).

He divides machine-aided literature into three buckets too:

  1. Machines that help build a pre-created narrative to be read by a reader (Author > Computer > Work)
  2. Machines that help read the reader read a pre-created narrative (Author > Computer > Work > Computer > Reader)
  3. Machines that work with the reader to build unique narrative (Author > Computer > Reader > Computer > Work)

The last essay is by Italo Cavino, "Prose and Anticombinatories"
http://www.creativepiecemeals.com/plotor7.html

Cavino provides an example of a crime story and like most of these experimental computer-based fictions, there's too much exposition at the expense of other important narrative elements (dialogue, character development, place building). 

These stories are heavily actions after actions, logistics of choice, subsets of options and random options. Not much thought is given to how motivations and plot are crafted to move a story forward, which makes these stories completely uninteresting. 

But that's a problem for another day.

The Essay Project: Ruthless Creativity (Roethke Teaching and Memorizing Poems)

May 11, 2022 / / 0 Comments

HugoTwo essays this time around to catch up a bit. The first is “Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching” from Richard Hugo’s great book of essays on writing, The Triggering Town. This is an interesting comparison to Philip Levine’s essay on taking a class with John Berryman.

In his class Theodore Roethke focused on reading poets with “good ears” like “Yeats, Hopkins, Auden, Thomas, Kunitz, Brogan" [who interesting Roethke was once in a relationship with….so must have had something better than good…ok I’ll stop].

He talked about “falling in love with the sounds of words” and “the heart and soul of poetry” which sounds a big vague.

Hugo continues about the reputation of Roethke's classes: “One sad thing about university reputations is that they lag behind the fact. By the time you hear how good an English department is, it is usually too late to go there.” Hugo says that despite this rule, Roethke got better as a teacher as time went on. Roethke talked about taking risks, “a lot of poets don’t have the nerve to risk failure…you have to work, and you had better get used to facing disappointments and failures, a lifetime of them.”

RoethkeHugo talks about the crazy hard final exam Roethke would give to his students: a list of 10 nouns, 10 verbs and 10 adjectives and you had to use five words from each list, write four beats to a line, six lines to a stanza, three stanzas, two internal and one external slant rhyme per stanza, a max of two end stops per stanza and the poem must have clear and grammatically correct sentences that made sense….and finally the poem must be meaningless (that last one was Hugo’s own masochistic addition)!

The point of the exam: “Two many beginners have the idea that they know what they have to say—now if they can just find the words. Here, you give them the words, some of them anyway, and some technical problems to solve. Many of them will write their best poem of the term….the exercise is saying: give up what you think you have to say…”

“The second half of the Roethke final usually consisted of one question, a lulu like, ‘What should the modern poet do about his ancestors?’” 

Hugo talks about Roethke explicating a line from Yeats’ “Easter 1916” poem, the line “Stumbling upon the blood dark track once more” and how “blood dark track” according to Roethke “goes off like rifle shots.”

Hugo says this is

“simple stuff. Easily observed. But how few people notice it. The young poet is too often paying attention to the big things and can’t be bothered with little matters like that. But little matters like that are what make and break poems, and if a teacher can make a poet aware of it, he has given him a generous shove in the only direction. In poetry, the big things tend to take care of themselves.”

Later Hugo says,

“A good teacher can save a young poet years by simply telling him things he need not waste time on, like trying to will originality or trying to share an experience in language or trying to remain true to the facts (but that’s the way it really happened). Roethke used to mumble: ‘Jesus, you don’t want to say that.’ And you didn’t but you hadn’t yet become ruthless enough to create. You still felt some deep moral obligation to ‘reality’ and ‘truth,’ and of course it wasn’t moral obligation at all, but fear of yourself and your inner life….Despite Roethke’s love of verbal play, he could generate little enthusiasm for what passes as experimentation and should more properly be called fucking around.”

[Oy, I just said that.]

But Hugo says that the

“quest for self is fundamental to poetry. What passes for experimentation is often an elaborate method of avoiding one’s feelings at all cost. [Yes!] The process prohibits any chance the poet has to create surrogate feelings, a secondary kind of creativity but in most poems all the poet can settle for. The good poems say: ‘This is how I feel.’ With luck that’s true, but usually it’s not. More often the poem is the way the poet says he feels when he can’t find out what his real feelings are.”

Hugo then talks about people who struggle to appear interesting,

“There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try to appear usual.” It doesn’t surprise me at all when the arrogant wild man in class turns in predictable, unimaginative poems and the straight one is doing nutting and promising work. If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.”

Hugo says James Wright “was one of the few students who was writing well in Roethke’s classes.”

Then Hugo moves to talking about the future of American poetry, quoting Mark Strand who “remarked recently in Montana that American poetry could not help but get better and better, and I’m inclined to agree. I double that we’ll have the one big figure of the century the way other nations do, [William Butler] Yeats, [Paul] Valéry."

Hugo ends by giving us Roethke’s thoughts about the pressures of publication:

“’Don’t worry about publishing. That’s not important.’ He might have added, only the act of writing is. It’s flattering to be told you are better than someone else, but victories like that do not endure. What endures are your feelings about your work [Oy, Feelings again]. You wouldn’t trade your poems for anybody’s. To do that you will also have to trade your life for his, which means living a whole new complex of pain and joy. One of those per life is enough.”

Whew. I don’t know about you but I feel better right now.

The second essay is a short article from Poets & Writers in 1988 called “Poetry on the Run” by Arthur Roth who learned to memorize poems while he was out on long runs around the neighborhood.

As an aside, one of the interesting things about this 1988 issue of P&W is that there is only one ad for an MFA in all the pages of this article (Warson Wilson College in North Carolina). The rest are for two workshops, a prize-winning announcement and a writing conference. Times have changed.

Anyway, since running (and swimming after developing an arthritic hip), Roth has memorized about 76 poems. “Memorizing—like running—gets easier the more you practice.”

And he claims the practice often “halts him in his tracks” with the discovery of a new meaning in lines he previously thought he knew very well.”

I am terrible at memorizing even the basic life things so I don't see myself doing this….or running.

The Essay Project: Checklist for Poet Newbies

May 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

WingThe next essay in the stack is actually the introduction of the book Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell. I remember we were assigned this book in a high-school poetry class and the teacher went off on a weird tangent about writing detective screenplays (I think she was having a breakdown) and we never ended up reading it. Then the book was again assigned in a poetry class I took in college and we never read it then either. So I've had this book twice and never read even so much as the introduction of it. And every time I read the title I want to start singing "No Night So Long" with Dionne Warwick, although the lyric is "living on the wind" not "sleeping on the wing." That doesn't seem to matter in the situation.

The material in the intro is pretty basic for advanced poets, but it's probably useful for teachers running poetry intro classes. And then again, sometimes coming back to basic is a good opportunity for a beginner’s mind reset.

And oddly these precepts kind of track to life in general, too. The intro is divided into three sections as follows. My peanut-gallery comments in parenthesis. 

Reading Poetry

  • Don’t read poems like a newspaper article but like listening to a friend telling you a story, like the way you overhear a conversation among strangers, or like the way you listen to music, “that part of your intelligence that includes your feelings, imagination and experience."
  • Think about what words excite you?
  • Don’t get freaked out by:
    • a word or words you don’t know,
    • a person or place you are not familiar with,
    • a sentence that is long and hard to follow,
    • a sentence that is incomplete,
    • words ordered in an unusual way.
  • Read the poem slowly (I actually read a poem first fast and then slow the subsequent times).
  • Use what you do understand to help you with what you don’t understand (This is also helpful when reading stupidly-academic essays).
  • A poem may not have “a point” in a conventional sense. (Or, I would add, that point might seem smaller than you think is worthy of a poem).
  • Not all  meanings are hidden. (Some are though.) You might be disappointed trying to find the “deep meaning” when one isn’t really there. 
  • Keep focusing on how a poem is affecting you. (In this case it really might help to "make it all about you.")
  • Don’t worry about technique at first (unless that comes naturally to you). Sometimes the form and style can be distracting on the first read.
  • Read a few poems by the same poet to get a sense of their style and voice.
  • How to frame the adventure: “Think of the rather pleasant process of figuring out a part of town you’ve never been in or an interesting person you’ve just met.” Reading poetry is “something like traveling—seeing new places, hearing things talked about in new ways, getting ideas of other possibilities.”

I thought this was good, too: “Poets are not big, dark, heavy personages dwelling in clouds of mystery, but people like yourself who are doing what they like to do and do well. Writing poetry isn’t any more mysterious than what a dancer or a singer or a painter does.”

WorkshopTalking About Poetry with Others

  • It’s like talking about sports in that “you admire different qualities, you watch for and are excited about different things, you even use different terms when you look at soccer and when you look at baseball. And, of course, you only find out how to talk about all that by watching the games.”

    (This reminds me of learning to watch NFL football and how my comments have changed over the years from confused questioning and mocking of the gravitas of the TV announcers to actually seeing the plays as they happen and being able to express admiration for some feat of skill. You don’t have to be an expert in a week or a month. In fact, the malfeasance of innocence and ignorance isn’t such a bad thing at first. It can help you see outside the matrix and often advanced users cannot do this.)

  • You can express your own sense of things….your way of seeing or your own particular experience.
  • Concentrate on the poem (and what it might be trying to do not what you think it should do).
  • You may need to pay less attention to detail in a long rambling poem than is required for a 13-line poem.
  • Don’t worry about finding the one true thing of a poem. A poem could have many complimentary or competing truths. (In fact, a lot of poems can be reduced to “it’s complicated.”)
  • This is a good reading tip too: notice how you are feeling when reading a poem. Sometimes other life events can influence your interpretations. Were you preoccupied with some other thoughts?
  • Preface comments with “I think” and “It seems to me” (although that should go without saying, it bears repeating when debates start up).
  • Don’t try to say everything at one go. Sprinkle thoughts throughout the conversation, (which is what a workshop poetry discussion is, a casual conversation not a presentation of genius in front of a thesis board).
  • Don’t be afraid to be critical, “there’s nothing sacred about it.” (This is debatable. Some people take this shit very seriously).
  • Don’t be afraid to ask questions instead of asserting answers all the time.
  • If you do assert a theory however, “to be convincing, you need to refer to a particular part of the poem—to words and lines.”
  • If you're not sure what to say, talk about the kids of words in the poem, the title, the beginning and ending.
  • See every conversation as practice.

This was good too: “Sometimes because they find poetry difficult and complicated, people make the mistake of talking or writing about it in an abstract, general, overcomplicated way. They think that being abstract and general is more serious and is the way to talk about difficult and important things—that being simple means you’re 'shallow' or uncomplicated or unintelligent. In fact, abstraction is often a way of being evasive…”

Writing Your Own Poems

  • Don’t write about “things you think you ought to care about.” (Write about what you do care about.)
  • Don’t worry about trying to “transform” what you care about into something abstractly meaningful, (or Poetic with a capital P as Tom Lux used to say, which is another way of saying, write small).
  • Plan it all out in advance or don’t, let the poem take you somewhere it wants to go. Sometimes beautiful accidents happen this way and you are taken to a much more meaningful place, along with your reader. (Another way is to plan and then be willing to abandon the plan if some other magic starts to happen.)
  • Remember that nothing is set in stone. (You have the rest of your life to change and revise it all.)
  • Put the poem down for a few weeks after finishing it, even months and then look at it again with a fresh head.
  • Read a lot of poetry. (Like Billy Collins says in his delightful Masterclass, this is the only way to find your unique voice….by encountering other unique voices over and over again.)
  • Try stream of consciousness writing. Let go of sense. (But then shape the result into some sense; the world is packed-full with nonsense poems so push farther. Make the poem sweat a little.)
  •  Try rule-based and formal projects. Try your hand at translations.
  • Find friends who you can share poems you write with. Give each other encouragement and feedback.

 

NaPoWriMo 2022 Wrap-up

May 1, 2022 / / 0 Comments
Andrew-Wyeth-Wind-from-the-Sea

Andrew Wyeth (হ্যা তারা)

Whew. Ok. So that's another NaPoWriMo in the bag. One more year to go.

Meanwhile, I’ve been collecting some final stats on this year’s set of poems.

There were:

  • Nine pretentious literary references 
    1. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
    2. Edna St. Vincent Millay
    3. Proust
    4. (twice)
    5. Cyrano de Bergerac
    6. Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo
    7. Theodor Adorno
    8. Wordsworth’s lake
    9. Svengali from Trilby
  • Two probably-misapplied psychological traits
  • Quantum mechanics
  • Words in five languages
    1. English
    2. French
    3. Spanish
    4. Italian
    5. Some Latin stuck in there

Two late arrivals displaced two planned poems, which changed our demos somewhat:

      • Songs with men: 24
      • Songs with women: 11

I had to gather images for all the Twitter posts and after a while I just decided to add them to the NaPoWriMo page. In the process I found this interesting thing about painter Andrew Wyeth’s  windows. 

Although I love all the songs I picked, I did regret not being able to find a spot for a song of Sara Bareilles’ with her vast array of very helpful and inspiring love songs. And to that point, lots of fascinating and magical things happened during the making of these poems but one of them was this: as I was lamenting the lack of Bareilles in this set, my music app shuffled up a Bareilles song that fit very movingly into one of the new Electrical Dictionary poems, which is a sister set of a sort to this group.

I was also able to create linkages between a few of these poems and some of the poems in “33 Women” from NaPoWriMo 2018 and we could revisit some of the lovely women there. So that was nice.

In related news, the Poetry Society of America is doing a "Song Cycle" series right now where their investigating the relationship of poetry to music in the opposite way, music inspired by poems.

The Essay Project: Poetic Responses to the Devastation of War

April 19, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Czeslaw MiloszAs I’m working through this stack from the essay class I took at Sarah Lawrence College in the 1990s there is no order to them. Over a year ago I just pulled the stack out of a box in my garage and have been pulling essays off the top of it. Occasionally I’ll come across something that’s more research than essay and I’ll stick that stuff back to the bottom of the stack to figure out what to do with later.

So it’s always incredible to get an essay during a timely moment. And this week’s pick was eerily apropos in light of the horrible news continually coming out of Ukraine.

The packet is chapter 5 from the book The Witness of Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz,  a book I own and read so long ago I didn’t recognize this re-reading it again now, or maybe it just didn’t resonate back then before such an event as Ukraine or the political crack-up we've been witnessing worldwide over the last 10 years.

The chapter, called “Ruins and Poetry,” talks about the ways in which Polish poets once dealt with the hellish devastation they experienced between 1939-1945, examining “what happens to modern poetry in certain historical conditions,” how certain luxuries of thought become meaningless.

Milosz starts by saying,

“a hierarchy of needs is built into the very fabric of reality and is revealed when a misfortune touches a human collective, whether that be war, the rule of terror, or natural catastrophe. Then to satisfy hunger is more important than finding food that suits one’s taste; the simplest act of human kindness toward a fellow being acquires more importance than any refinement of the mind. The fate of a city, of a country, becomes the center of everyone’s attention, and there is a sudden drop in the number of suicides committed because of disappointed love or psychological problems. A great simplification of everything occurs and an individual asks himself why he took to heart matters that now seem to have no weight.”

This immediately reminds me of the luxury of experimental and avant garde poetries and how this luxury is not available to poets in communities experiencing peril, but is more often a poetry project chosen by white, middle-class writers and artists. But I was ahead of myself. Milosz continues,

“And, evidently, people’s attitude toward the language also changes. It recovers its simplest function and is again an instrument serving a purpose; no one doubts that the language must name reality, which exists objectively, massive, tangible, and terrifying in its consequences.”

Which is exactly where we find ourselves now, not only with language theory but in the reality that is in contention on the Internet and in the news.

Milosz talks about the underground Polish poetry written under German occupation, it’s “documentary value” more than its “artistic rank.” It’s only after the war, an “exceptionally trying collective experience,” that poets are able to try to define the disintegration they experienced and explore a language that poorly served as “a façade to hide the genocide under way” and how even the language of  “religion, philosophy, and art became suspect as accomplices in deceiving man with lofty ideas, in order to veil the truth of existence.”

First, we look at the poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz, “Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak” and how the poem is an “accusation at human speech, history, and even the very fabric of life in society, instead of  a poem pointing out the concrete reasons for the anger and disgust. That probably happens," Milosz says, "because as was the case in Poland during war, reality eludes the means of language and is the source of deep traumas, including the natural trauma of a country betrayed by its Allies.”

And after such devastations, all writers and artists suffer an existential crisis of confidence. Later Milosz even invokes the famous Theodor Adorno adage, paraphrasing that “after the Holocaust, poetry is impossible.”

“Next to the atrocious facts, the very idea of literature seems indecent, and one doubts whether certain zones of reality can ever be the subject of poems or novels…On the other hand…documentary poems belong to literature and one may ask, out of respect for those who perished, whether a more perfect poetry would not be a more appropriate monument than poetry on the level of facts.”

We then look at Anna Świrszczyńska and how she witnessed the atrocities of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and how it was only “many years later” (30 years in fact) that she could “reconstruct that tragedy” with a “style of miniatures scenes," very short poems or micro reports, single incidents in her book Building the Barricade.

“Building the Barricade” 

“A Woman Said to Her Neighbor”

These poets search for “equilibrium amid chaos” and often “take refuge in the world of objects” as “human affairs are uncertain and unspeakably painful, but objects represent a stable reality, do not alter with reflexes of fear, love, or hate and always ‘behave’ logically."

“Objects in [Zbigniew Herbert’s] poetry seem to follow this reasoning: European culture entered a phase where the neat criteria of good and evil, of truth and falsity, disappeared; at the same time, man became a plaything of powerful collective movements expert in reversing values, so that from one day to the next black would become white, a crime a praiseworthy deed, and an obvious lie an obligatory dogma.”

Sound familiar?

“Moreover, language was appropriated by the people in power who monopolized the mass media and were able to change the meaning of words to suit themselves. The individual is exposed to a double attack. On the one hand, he must think of himself as the product of determinants which are social, economic, and psychological. On the other hand, his loss of autonomy is confined by the totalitarian nature of political power. Such circumstances make every pronouncement on human values uncertain. In one of Huber’s poems the narrator hears the voice of conscience but is unable to decipher what the voice is trying to say.”

The poem “The Pebble,” Milosz says, is polemical, especially the last three lines.

“Pebbles cannot be tamed, but people can, if the rulers are sufficiently crafty and apply the stick-and-carrot method successfully. Tamed people are full of anxiety because of their hidden remorse; they do not look us straight in the face. Pebbles will look at us ‘with a calm and very clear eye’ to the end. To the end of what? We may ask. Probably to the end of the world.”

Milosz says

“events burdening a whole community are perceived by the poet as touching him in a most personal manner. Then poetry is no longer alienated….if we must choose the poetry of such an unfortunate country as Poland to learn that the great schism in poetry is curable, then that knowledge brings no comfort. Nevertheless, the example that poetry give us perspective on some ritual of poets when they are separated from ‘the great human family.’”

He then talks about Mallarme’s sonnet “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Allan Poe" and says

“it was Poe’s use of English and his form of versification that contributed to this marginal place in the history of American poetry…From romanticism, of course, comes the idealization of the lonely, misunderstood individual charged with a mission in society, and thus French symbolism emerges as a specific mutation of the romantic heritage…Society appears as given, like trees and rocks, endowed with the firm, settled existence typical of nineteenth century bourgeois France. It is precisely that aspect of poetry in isolation as depicted in this sonnet which strikes us as incompatible with what we have learned in the twentieth century. Social structures are not stable, they display great flexibility, and the place of the artist has not been determined once and for all…Polish poets found out that the hydra so ominously present for the symbolists is in reality quite weak, in other words, that the established order, which provides the framework for the quarrel between the poet and the crowd can cease to exist from one day to the next.”

And finally, Milosz leaves us with this very conclusion about how we choose (or are forced) to write:

“Polish poets may reproach their Western colleagues who generally repeat the thought patterns proper to the isolated poet. That would be a reproach for lacking realism. In colloquial speech, the word ‘unrealistic’ indicates an erroneous presentation of facts and implies a confusion of the important and unimportant, a disturbance of the hierarchy. All reality is hierarchical simply because human needs and the dangers threatening people are arranged on a scale. No easy agreement can be reached as to what should occupy first place. It is not always bread; often it is the word. And death is not always the greatest menace; often slavery is. Nevertheless, anyone who accepts the existence of such a scale behaves differently from someone who denies it. The poetic act changes with the amount of background reality embraced by the poet’s consciousness. In our century that background is, in my opinion, related to the fragility of those things we call civilization or culture. What surrounds us, here and now, is not guaranteed. It could just as well not exist—and so man constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins."

Recently (as part of a Katharine Hepburn project) I’ve been reading the poems of H. Phelps Putnam, the famous poet Hepburn failed to bed despite many attempts. (Her father threatened to shoot Putnam during a visit to Fenwick).

Putnam was very famous as poets go, as famous as Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay at the time they say. Notoriously low opinion of women, except for the great Kate herself who surfaces very well in his poem "Daughters of the Sun." These days you’ll never see his name referenced in any poetry anthologies nor are you able to find any decent pictures of him online (just tried).

But his poem below seems a very American response to the devastating news of war, but one that exists far away and requires a less dramatic reprioritization of the hierarchy of one's needs, a war that gives the poet the luxury to experience anxiety but not devastation. His priorities are challenged but to a lesser degree (at least where love and laughter become prioritized). This is a valid response in its context, albeit far luckier. In this case, the poet is dealing with the news of World War I.

1914-1917
H. Phelps Putnam

Our days are clamorous, and all about
All men say this and that, and crack their throats:
Of shame some bawl, and some of honor shout,
And still the nerve-wracked crowd upon them dotes.

Alas, my love, I know not what they mean—
Would that I did, life is much gentler so—
For it is merely something heard and seen,
The shadowed stir of a galanty show.

One thing I know, one unhowled truth for us!
I love you and you me—it is enough!
It is the point of flame round which the world

Of misty clamor turns, and turning thus,
Is but an irony, our mirthful stuff,
Of laughter born, and into laughter whirled.

Words as Cogs and Machines

March 31, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Happenings-with-tiresI’m going to take these a few essays at a time now from the New Media Reader.

The first is yet another essay about the affordances of computers and yet more predictions for a utopian age of computers and then we finally get into more obvious literary concerns with two essays from 1961 that begin to show how computer theory and avant-garde literary theory merge.

In the introduction to “Man-Computer Symbiosis” by J. C. R. Licklider (1960) Norbert Wiener (I love the name Norbert) and Katharine Hayles raise issues for humanists around ideas about true subjectivity, paying most attention to the fuzzy border where humans end and machines begin (never more relevant than today with our smartphone addictions). Wiener also shows where New Media projects began, right around World War II with the development of anti-aircraft guns. Computer science then began to study how did humans and machines fit together in cutting-edge weaponry systems and war games.

These technological advances, Wiener says, also intersected with new thinking about the self as an illusion which dovetailed nicely with increasingly-popular Zen Buddhist ideas of the self.

And here is the pivot where the humanist and the engineer come into conflict.

The engineer, not typically steeped in history or  liberal arts, rarely pauses to consider the human consequences beyond the building of a new gadget or tool. Humans do respond as if they in fact have a real self. And this always guarantees my favorite scary boogeyman: unintended consequences.

IMG_20220331_091640_01

The article alludes to this itself with a reference to “The Monkey Paw" story about magic wishes and unforeseen consequences. Wiener sees a parallel with  computer engineering: handy solutions may bring bigger problems.

This article predates the beginnings of the Internet (APRANET) in October of 1969, but Linklider predicted “men will communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” He even predicted cyber-romance. But like other predictors of this era, he completely failed to predict the downsides: cyberstalking, cyber-bullies, conspiracy theory proliferation.

He talks about the “inflexible dependence on predetermined programs” and who in a modern office environment doesn’t twitch at that little string of words?

In the article Licklider dreams of a computer/man symbiosis similar to the insect/tree symbiosis. He sees computers performing both the most repetitive, clerical operations of the human mind and solving more difficult problems with more efficiency and speed than a human brain can manage.

He says the question is not what is the answer. The question is what is the question. I don't know for sure, but I think I've heard my father say that a few times. We’re still struggling with this little bit of wisdom anyway. We spend too much time asking the wrong things and studying the wrong data.

Most interestingly, Licklider does a survey of his own thought process and maintains that 85% of his thinking time is spent “getting into a position to think or decide,” the bulk of his time learning, gathering and researching versus a small amount of time spent actually digesting information and calculating. He says it takes him “seconds to determine.”

He admits, “books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis.”

The next essay is “’Happenings’ in the New York Scene” by Allan Kaprow (1961). The introduction addresses how audience participation and  interactivity attempted to break down the barriers between creators and their audiences and how this influenced media artworks and menu-driven media seeking non-hierarchical relationships. The introduction also notes an article by Söke Dinkla, “From participation to Interaction,”  where she notes that these kinds of participation happenings often occur along a fragile border and that their efforts were never entirely free of authorial manipulation. I think this is relevant to current, similar multi-media experiments.

Kaprow defines for us what happenings were in the realms of theater, writing, music and painting and he traces the history from of interactive performance from circuses, carnivals, traveling saltimbanques and medieval plays.

Drawing connections to modern media pieces, Kaprow notes that happenings often had no literary point; they might not “go anywhere” or have any beginning, middle or end. Audiences co-mingled with creators who aimed for un-artiness, a more natural habitat and results had a rough, studio-like feel. Pieces were not written but generated in action. Words were materials, structures based on chance techniques.

Kaprow admits that most of the attempts at un-self-consciousness failed and these events felt ironically planned and academic. And all too often, the results were boring.

But admittedly happenings have had a profound influence on new media pieces, like all kinds of chance artworks and writings. But there’s no reason that chance characteristics and interactivity must necessarily define media pieces.

The last essay is “The Cut-Up Method” by William Burroughs (1961) introduced by Brion Gysin. Like happenings, surreal and beat experiments also influenced not only new media projects but computer game theory. Gysin reminds us that initial poetry generators were meant to be an intermediate step for generating a rough draft of content, and that even Burroughs admitted to performing a human edit as he worked toward a final draft. (My boss at ICANN just reminded me this week what an oxymoron the term 'final draft' is and it reminds us how truly final anything really is).

The benefit of such a method for Burroughs was the happy accidents that resulted and Burroughs insisted, “all writing is, in fact, cut ups.” Mentally speaking, this is very true.

Read more about this kind of creative assemblage: "Cut Up: The Creative Technique Used by Burroughs, Dylan, Bowie and Cobain"

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