How that Magic really worked: on Duncan & Spicer

The "Poetry as Magic" workshop questionnaire is hilarious, and because it is so damn funny its easy to take it lightly, that Duncan and Spicer admitted that much of the questionnaire is a farse, that selection in the workshop had little to do with the questionnaire itself (this according to Elka, I know nothing about this...). But with that, I do think it could be a sort of indicator--while good answers don't guarantee that one can write decent poetry, I bet that bad answers nearly promise bad poetry, in that one cannot think on ones feet, that one cannot answer a question creatively, or that one does not know the references. (I am not here implying that these references are the be-all-end-all of poetic knowledge or that a different set of references wouldn't suffice just as well, being well aware that this specific set of references could easily be construed as exclusionary, the clique that Emily mentioned made her feel like such an outsider). But yes, I think the questions can be taken more seriously than at first glance. And it's great to see some poets having fun (whereas Pound, Eliot, & co. nearly always seems to have so much seriousness about).

A few questions I found particularly "serious," in that they could convey insight into someone's poetics:

What is your favorite political song? An easier way of asking, are you swinging right or left. Lets face it, conservative poetry and liberal/leftist poetry is quite different.

Which of these figures had or represented religious views nearest to you own religious views? For me the also read as a history test, in making sure that I knew in the first place what these people stood for, or even who they were. They next set was even more difficult.

Write a paragraph about how the fall of Rome affected poetry. I would assume that nearly every answer would be intentionally absurd. Or even that knowing about the actual state of Roman poetics at the time wouldn't necessarily give one bonus points.

editing a magazine w/an unlimited budget. An obvious question of poetic preferences and knowledge of contemporaries.

openning that endless chasm: on Ginsberg via Coolidge

This week I had the most response to our Clark Coolidge article, A First Reading of On the Road and Later. I felt like this when I first read the beats, mostly when I first read Howl just before coming to Berkeley, coming out of a conservative Christian suburban background into a world of poetry where obscene could be done well, with a point, with intellectualism. Perhaps I was nearly coming out of the 50's into the 90's. It was quite liberating.

It's funny to recall that there was this absent-minded intellectual vacuum, immediately before the Beat onslaught. This was for me too, a conservativism, an anti-intellectualism that required being openned up into a large chasm, that required something on a huge-scale, an openning of a vast door I couldn't even imagine the edges of. Poetry. As an urge, a need. I was already an English major, but this poem made me a poet. And it is nearly pathetic how much my early writings sound like Ginsberg. Writing came free of the books I had read and became an actual work I could do. In class we discussed if Howl was used-up, too familiar now, not shocking now. It no longer shocks me. It is very familiar. Yet, it will never be used-up.

This is perhaps a sentimental connection for me, but this is why the Beats have the popularity that they do. They're accessible without dumbing down or being simple (that I would argue other "accessible" writing is in danger of doing). They are likeable (and perhaps as easily hatable) and so people, young people, grab on and don't let go.

Endless lines of words that you followed if only because you couldn't see their ends. This brings, no matter how many times I've read Howl, an anticipation, in breathlessness as I read, in knowing how he read the poem, which such energy and fury that one can't help but keep going. Someone mentioned in class that they felt the poem was too long. I'd argue that they didn't read it fast enough, with enough fury, that they lost the energy of it. Once you have captured the energy, it is precisely the length of it, the endlessness of it, that makes you keep going and wanting more.

You wrote from what you didn't know toward whatever could be picked up in the act... I don't think my current writing sounds anything like Ginsberg, and the subject matter is absolutely different, but I still use poetics in this way, as an exploration. Last semester in workshop Laura Moriarty said it was evident in my work that I sat down to write not knowing what would come out, without a preset conclusion in mind, that I let things go where they will and it is the journey and the figuring out of things that makes the poem. Perhaps the best compliment, the best assessment of my process I've heard yet ...Poetry starts here.

As an undergrad at Berkeley I shot a photographic response to Howl, a collection of photographs that relived the places, the energy, the confusion, the rage, that Ginsberg catches. It was an invigorating project to undertake. (And I only regret that it has now been lost...).

Anyone up for a good tree slamming?: on Olson & Creeley

I am admittedly a fan of Creeley, and somewhat a fan of Olson, and I say somewhat only because I know much less of his work. I was in a class where a student presented an AMAZING interpretive dance to The Kingfishers--while someone read the poem, she performed her amazing choreography percussed by intentionally exaggerated exahalations. Really, wow.

From then, The Kingfishers always has a place for me. And wierd for me because I'm not so much a nature person. I would normally hate a poem like this, and I don't. And whats great about this poem is that it's not just about nature. That's precisely why I don't hate it. But none of that makes sense, SO: here I see Prufrock & the party scene, a little of the Ancient Mariner, a little of Pound.

Immediately Olson takes us into the realm of an epic, the openning line an attempt at profundity, which I nearly agree with and in some ways don't. It's THE WILL which has me hesitating, which seems to give humanity too much credit, too much agency, that they make an attempt to do something, when much of change is a passive reaction to surroundings. (Perhaps humanity here isn't the right word, since I am viewing this through a rather American lens, since I am being most critical of a passive American mass in my assumptions). And also not agreeing in that so many things do not change, or at least do not change that rapidly, have not changed in the span from the writing of the Kingfishers til now. Beaurocracy & the dollar & white heterosexual males still rule America.

But Olson has a larger scale than just the bedroom where the man wakes, the pool, the birds. Mao, French, Italian. Or a smaller scale that the bedroom, the pool, the birds. His breath, his lungs. At the end of section 4: And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time. The breath as discrete and continuous, at least until death, though Olson seems to herald even this decay as part of the cycle (where I would equate a life-cycle, earth-cycle with the cyclical nature of breath itself). And as they are fed and grow, the nest of excrement and decaying fish becomes a dripping, fetid mass. Where even they decay of elements in the nest is employed to bring life and shelter. (Another example: think compost). Later he writes of the birth of air, water, a state between the origin and the end, between birth and the beginning of another fetid nest.

machinations in times of war: on WCW

I was most interested this week in WCW's introduction to The Wedge. He begins with, "The war is the first and only thing in the world today." Perhaps still true, though I would say simply "war" rather than "the war" because there are far more than one. We've heard numerous comments in class that in some sense everything we've read this semester is war poetry. Well, yes. And here, it's 1944. No exception.

But Williams continues, "The arts generally are not...a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field." I'm not sure if I agree or disagree. In some sense, I agree that its the way war poets fight the war efforts (especially in contemporary poetry where most poets do not politically support current war efforts), but in some sense, especially anti-Hitlerian movements/efforts in Europe, in 1944, was it really enough? Hell, Oppen said that poetry was useless at this time, and joined the military instead. I recently saw a film about post-war South Korea of the early sixties (translated as Aimless Bullet, 1961) where a character who was a poet said he would ony write 10 poems, that the current state of his world did not deserve more than 10 decent poems. Oppen seems to have shared this sentiment for some time. Williams, however, the opposite. I am torn in that I understand both sentiments.

On the next page Williams makes "two bald statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words."

The first statement is perhaps fairly easy to agree upon. Any sentimentality in a machine is something a person may ascribe to it, pictures taken with a camera, loaded onto a hard drive, the car you adore and give a name to and then it's crashed, the phone where you receive messages from loved ones--but the actual machine, the plastic, metal, fiberglass, etc. of its contruction are simply inanimate and lack feeling.

So with this, Williams equates words with plastic, metal, etc. in the making of a poem/car. The poem takes you places, but as the reader you are the one that prescribes upon the poem a certain meaning, the poem does not tell you how sentimental it is (or is not). It is a thing, a machine, that the reader must interpret. In this sense, it is nearly like the Objectivists. Poem as object, as thing, as product, outside of author, outside of feeling, outside of sentiment. (where these things are replaced by the reader). This is so precisely modern & industrial a concept, where on the first day of class we made lists of what influenced modern poetry and here is direct evidence. The poem as a machine.

Conformity to the dollar & the Socialist ethic: on Langston Hughes

I tend to consider myself fairly neutral on the Langston Hughes judgement scale. I can recognize his contributions, his ingenuity in incorporation of both musical rhythms & spoken (vs. written) speech, etc., and how much these trends continued later on; I appreciate his LACK OF CONFORMITY to "white standards", that is, his conflict with other black writers like WEB duBois; but I agree with the point that his message only goes so far, that he has one message, and its not developed or evolving much as his poetry progresses. I, of course, imply that this lack of poetic progression is negative, but what is, of course, even more negative is that (white)views towards blacks weren't changing either, so Hughes had to keep reiterating his point.

Though still, one has to question where his motivations really came from, having a rich white patroness, what she was like, how she influenced he and Hurston's writing. Did she encourage him to be "as black as possible" (in quotes because I realize its a ridiculous statement), speaking in vernacular to emphasize the cultural differences b/w Harlem & the rest of Manhattan? That emphasizing differences put blacks & Harlem culture on display? I don't know anything about this woman, but I think one has to question her. Hughes also wants to highlight these cultural differences, though his motivation is in the now seemingly cliched, but still not fully recognized, statement "black is beautiful," in calling attention to the differences, while saying that the differences are equal, and in some cases, better (as he chastizes the upper-class blacks valuing white attributes, upholding lightness as a standard of female beauty, etc, wanting to "be dull like the Nordics" in their choice of worship music).

One peice that does seem most interesting to me, that I hadn't read before, is Goodbye Christ. In some senses his message has shifted, so that it's no longer the black/white struggle, but the proletariat struggle, the socialist worker, a call to workers of any cultural background, and the "anti-conformist" struggle. (I don't know if anti-conformist would be the right word, communism having its own form of conformity, though it's comformity to a working class, not the elite, where conformity to the elite, hollywood, corporations, in the general way the term is used now). Ain't nobody gonna sell ME To a king, or a general, Or a millionaire. He incorporates so many different politics here, anti-monarch, anti-military, anti-elite. It is very well-done. (And hardly the "simplicity" that his harshest critics assign him).

He's way more rad than you think: on Wallace Stevens

I'm starting this post knowing that I'm going to have to defend myself: I was a bit disappointed in our reading list for Stevens, knowing that he wrote much more interesting stuff than what's on our syllabus. Because it is the usual suspects.

If you feel a bit let down, read: Metaphors of a Magnifico, Six Significant Landscapes, Explanation, Of the Surface of Things, Esthetique du Mal, The Irrational Element in Poetry, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.

I mostly realize that I can't prove my point in a brief blog post, that I don't have time to prove my point, that I haven't examined the works I'm telling you to read recently enough to make any productive statement about them, so perhaps I'll just bash what we did read a little and then throw in some great quotes from the stuff I like better.

The Snow Man. I don't hate it. When I reread it I get it's main point, I understand his delight in the imagination, in the metaphor, etc. But I suppose I'm just jaded, that I've read it too much to enjoy it--it doesn't feel fresh to me. And I feel this way even thought I fully identify with him metaphor, that I am so often the snow (wo)man, finding the beauty in the desolate/crass/grotesque/obscene and loving it.

Thirteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird. I guess it seems simple. I thought I liked this poem, but it seems too simple after Stein. She looked at things in 13 or more ways and didn't feel the need to explicate what she was doing. And she did it better, more productively, because by not overly explaining she made the reader think about what was happening. (I'll admit, that she did also make many readers simply close the book and not look, but that's the risk she took and it was a good one). I suppose the distinction is that Stein wants to look at things differently and Stevens wants to look at them again, look at them fresh. (Funny how I now feel that reading him, reading The Snow Man, is so unfresh). Perhaps he was successful in acheiving this then, thought I don't know if he is now. Despite my sounding like I hate this poem too, there are sections I quite like (2, 4, 5, 7). My boredom is really just in the way it is set up, like dumbing it down for us. (Perhaps as a revolt against the uberintellectualism of previous poets).

But wait, here comes the good stuff:

"I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way the ants crawl
In and out of my shadow."
Six Significant Landscapes


"Rationalists would wear sombreros." Six Significant Landscapes

"We no longer like Poe's tintinnabulations. You are free to tintinnabulate if you like. But others are equally free to put their hands over their ears." The Irrational Element in Poetry

"You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it."
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

poetry as "the bread of faithful speech." Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

"Above everything else, poetry is words; and that words, about everything else, are, in poetry, sounds." The Noble Rider...

"We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession. In its ultimate extension, the truth about which we have been insane will lead us to look beyond the truth to something in which the imagination will be the dominant complement. It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential." The Noble Rider...

"The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination."
Esthetique du Mal

bleeding hemlines & drinking as if to cleanse her soul: on Mina Loy

How have I come so far without having read Mina Loy?? It is utterly ridiculous. She cuts & I am glad for a little bleeding now and then.

My first reading of the week was the Pound essay comparing Mina Loy with Marianne Moore. Being familiar with Moore (and, honestly, being generally disinterested in her as well) I was in furious anticipation to read Loy seeing that Pound felt they were so different. Yay. Give Moore a small chisel, Mina (the little sex kitten, or should I just resort to calling her Minx) a stabbing ice pick, crushing the block to mix her drink. I can only hope she makes me one too.

I Y Lunar Baedeker. (And I had no idea what a Baedeker was). In the first stanza I was caught offguard, a 20’s woman with the balls to write about cocaine? Have men even had the guts to talk about coke yet? A silver Lucifer? A mirror. Lucifer/Narcissus. The entire thing reads to me much like howl. (a long time favorite). I don’t know the history, but I can’t imagine that Ginsberg could have written it without having read this.

I agree with those who say her alliteration can go overboard, but here it’s used beautifully: NOCTURNAL CYCLOPS CRYSTAL CONCUBINE. Rock on woman. The veil of night, darkness, deformity, beauty, drugs, sex, control, animalistic, beastly. In just four words. Condensare. At its most brutal & beautiful.

And the sound-i-ness of it: eye-white, sky-light \ white-light district. Yes, yes just for the sound of it, but I don’t totally buy it. Sure, she’s soundy, but I also take her comment as half-hearted sarcasm, because she knows damn well what she’s doing. eye-white as is bug-eyed as in up all night as in cocaine. the white-light district as in the sexuality of it, but by giving it a white light she decriminalizes the scene (white as opposed to red, obviously). This being in line with her blatant feminism. Also echoed in the last stanza, “fossil virgin,” virginity being an archaic ideal, going back to the “Immortality” of the 3rd to last stanza…in at least 2 ways. One: must be dead to be a fossil, virginity brings death, not immortality. The virgin is not immortal b/c they do not live on vicariously in their (lack of) offspring, are sexually dead/sexually void.

(Being the first week of reading 2 poets I don't know if I am supposed to write about both poets, or just write something. If I need to I'll write on Moore later).

tracing miner(e)al butterflies with spoons: on Gertrude Stein

Don’t get me wrong, Pound & Eliot are pimps. HD’s Notes on Thought and Vision blows me away every time. But it’s the same every time. I’ve read them all several times and it’s the same. Hugh is still old and depressed. There are white petals. I read the same game of chess, still, like most other female readers of poetry, long for a fragrant bouquet of hyacinths, and, like all the other Marie's in the world, have renewed appreciation for my posession of an otherwise too common name. All great feelings, but the same ones, renewed.

This seems precisely what Stein wants to highlight—repetition, thoughts are not fully linear, they go somewhere, they progress, but they get stuck, loop, skip, repeat, repeat (all now explaining in music technology terms that Stein wouldn’t have understood in the same way we do now).

How is it that Stein, in precisely getting at the repetition of thought, experience, while highlighting it, is able to elicit from her poetry non-repetitious response? I get something different out of her at different times. (something I don’t get from Eliot, that is, I still do not read greek, though my italian is now better and maybe that’s something).

My beloved copy of TENDER BUTTONS, the $5 Dover, has been loved some. Not enough yet but some. All of my marks have been in pencil so that I can’t distinguish which were made at what time, knowing that I have now read through it at least 3 times, and have read fragments in many anthologies, of which of course my marginalia is not preserved. Some of my comments, what I’ve pointed out, seem juvenile now. (a little boost to tell me that my poetics has progressed).

I am drawn to MALACHITE. Mineral. real. a greenish blue or precise way to say color. red is vague. and a shape, a spoon leaving tracks. what hardness given way to wings with some black. which makes me examine how spoons are hard and soft or rock and brush-footed. the specificity and vagueness of it. does she mean the butterfly or the mineral? the flying or the real? And Malachi? The last book of the old testament? (I just emailed my friend attempting to find out if Jews uphold the entire old testament or only the first five books of the Torah).

imagiste, flowers, flowers, flowers: on HD

I have a serious love/hate response to HD. Upon first read, several years ago, I loved her. I even named my cat after Tribute to the Angels (Lady, after the composite character of goddesses). I found her edgy, powerfully feminine, subtly suggestive. I still think these things, but, having been exposed to more poetry that is also this way, I am nearly exhausted that with HD between the edgy, feminine, & suggestive, there are so many damn flowers. I just don't think in terms of flowers.

But, yes, I must admit that GARDEN is a really truly fantastically kick-assilly written poem. (How's that for a formal critique? Perhaps here I'll only look at the first section of the poem because I may have much to say).

Garden being of course the Garden of Eden, as suggestive of purity, of prelapsarian, but also as the setting for the first sin. Duplicities/heavy metaphor are precisely what makes this poem work throughout. Second line: rose, cut in rock. Where rose, the transient, short-lived, now a permanent fixture in rock. Where we see later rose as a euphemism for female genetalia that is is fixed in rock may make a statement for the enduring enticement of females as sexual figures, or that the sins of sexuality, the first sin (the rose as a product of the garden) has lasted. hard as the descent of hail. where hail can be read perhaps as ejaculation, where the rose, being as hard as the hail, has equal sexual power/prowess. Sexual power is even further asserted in the next two stanzas. Scrape the color from the petals like spilt dye. Color from the rose read as bleeding after the loss of virginity, as she break(s) the tree. Break is here another of those great duplicites, as it could mean a rather violent breaking or hurting, but also a taming, where male (tree, duh) is tamed by female (rose).

But then it gets more complicated. If I could stir. The female is not sure she would have the agency to pull this off. She is iffy, lacks confidence. Or stir could be read instead as "arroused." As in the virgin contemplating even if she'd like sex, if it would be all its cracked up to be. She ends this section in a reassertion that no, she could do it, the tree would be broken, the man would be broken.

that premature yellow death & doctrine: on T.S. Eliot

Eliot has always been one of those guys: I don't know what he's talking about 1/2 the time and thats precisely why he's so intriguing. Eliot & Pound. And part of the reason I'm intrigued by them is that they're so damn pretentious and I want to know why. And part of the reason I hate them is that they're so damn pretentious and I want to know why.

Let's take Prufrock. Dear old J :: really only 23 year old Eliot. I am 26 (not that I'm jealous that he had already produced masterpeices by my age and I don't know what the hell I'm doing) and would not at all presume to speak in the voice of an older woman. And yet he does it. Presumptuous prick. And he pulls it off. And here's why. That yellow fog. He writes of (what can safely been assumed as) London, yellow in its old age, in it weathered industrialization. It is tired, worn-out, dirty, and this energy may just give Eliot enough of that worn-out mentality to write this poem. Do I dare disturb the universe? Eliot pulls it off by creating in J an alter ego of sorts, how he will feel as an older man, because this Eliot at 23 of course dares to disturb the universe, each time he sets his pen to paper he attempts to disturb the universe.

And he does.

Let us go then you and I. Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. Time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea. Do I dare? Do I dare? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already. I am no prophet--and here's no great matter. That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all. It is impossible to say just what I mean! I do not think that they will sing to me. Human voices wake us and we drown.



Let us fear death by water.

a pact & the old fascist: on the ringleader EP

First a quick note on A Pact. Because I've read it several times and never thought that much of it, perhaps not having enough background on it, or just looking at the text without the context (which I could turn into a large argument for historical theoretics, how this poem is so lost without it). WALT WHITMAN. The American. The ultra-liberal. vs. Ezra Pound. The ex-pat. The ultra-conservative. A strange union. Pound just had to come to terms with him, figure him out, even though they seem so radically different. And it's funny how I think of someone like Ginsberg, paying homage to Whitman in more reverent ways than Pound, of how Pound and Ginsberg would relate. (or how Ginsberg felt about Pound, which could be an interesting thing to look into).

But, old dear Hugh. I am quite drawn to the first quote, from Nemesianus, Summer heat calls us into the shade. As an allegory for the ex-pat poets. The problems brewing in the teens political climate, how much their leaving was not only in search of other artists & intellectuals, but how much did the world already hate Americans by this point? I don't know. But, the war is horrible, we poets have to hide, in our books, in our linguistics, in our histories. (And this seems so much different from the later, older Pound who was in the middle of the politics & histories). But, yes, this is where he's hiding--his ultra-intellectualism. In the first stanza this takes the form: He strove to resuscitate the dead art \ of poetry. Dead, old, shaded. As in, Pound's world of allusions that we all have to look up, that most intellectuals of his day had to look up. Furthering this later: half savage country, the summer heat that he seeks to leave behind.

This quote is one of the few in Pound that really works this well, so many of the allusions seemingly stuck in to make him look cool. This is different, yes, in the almightly Latin, but with the links to the ex-pat community, the theme of the work as a whole, etc. Well done, EP, not that you need my pat on the back.