Considerations of Cliche: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames] by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

Got this from poetry.org, which continues to send me daily poems ... for them, I guess, Poetry Month is about 40 days long. I remember enjoying Ferlinghetti's early stuff, but this is, mildly speaking, not him at his best. The best line -- the only line worth retaining, to my view -- is the first one. The rest is -- if I may press on -- a bunch of tired cliches, name-dropping and irrelevancy. "The North Pole is not where it used to be" -- how does that contribute? "Manifest Destiny is no longer no longer manifest" -- I'm inclined to shout "Horray!"-- creepy, imperialist doctrine to begin with. "Civilization self-destructs." Absolute Deadsville. Was it George Bernard Shaw who said civilization was a good idea, we should try it some time? "Nemesis is knocking at the door." This is a little better. I might keep this one, if I were him. But I want to say, come on, more flames -- is there any fire here? Only stale rhetorical questions, tiresome qualifying phrases, the hollow pronouncement at the end... well, this poem fails to conquer me, let alone the conquerors. Although I do appreciate the sentiment. Somewhat.

The interesting thing about this poem is that it shows Ferlinghetti is still writing -- lame drafts, at least -- and that because he has (and deservedly so, I might add) a much-beloved name, poetry.org thought it was worthy to send to all and sundry.

The use of cliche interests me. There are a bunch of so-called "plain-language" poets -- I can think of not a few that appear quite frequently on our local scene, and I'm sure they are to be found on every scene, stalwarts who seem to have have little trouble breaking into print, or even printing book after book -- who appear to actually relish the "howling winds" and "driving rains" in their poems. As long as their heart and politics are in the so-called "right place", this kind of stuff is considered fit to publish. To a reader like me, it's plainly speaking, unacceptable. (Normally, if it hadn't been Ferlinghetti, I wouldn't have read past "Civilization self-destructs.") But at times, cliches actually work -- their common touch actually touches. This does interest me.

It seems to me that a poem has to have a certain "zinger quotient" of linguistic freshness to sustain a dead or half-alive metaphor -- even though most of the time dead metaphor or tired phrase will automatically second- or third-rate a poem. It could be an unusual concept or slant, a formal mastery or otherwise saving grace. When examples come up, I'll explore this. Indeed, I've already found one. But tomorrow.

Silliman, Seth and the SOQ/Post Avant

Seth Abramson has been railing, here and here, most eloquently if wordily, against Ron Silliman's SoQ/Post Avant binary, which Silliman persists, nilly-willy, to promulgate. Oh how familiar to my ears. Here's my comment (slightly amended) which I left on Seth's most recent post, and which, believe it or not, I put some effort into writing.

Ron Silliman's opposition of SoQ and Post-Avant is patently reductionist and polarized. The likes of Henry Gould and I were pointing this out back in 2005. As I said in that post, where does Poe, who first coined the term SoQ, fit in? Yet Silliman is a juggernaut. I reckon he'll keep on railing against that SoQ strawman regardless of this or any other discussion: he lent us a profoundly deaf ear in the past. For that reason, I only visit Silliman occasionally now. Silliman shares a vast awareness of the *sociology* of poetry, particularly the poetry he is interested in, which for the most part, doesn't do a lot for me. I also appreciate his links lists and astute political observations. But -- he has his axe to grind, and he definitely has something to gain by the likes of you lashing out so verbosely against it. I find it interesting that here at least he links to you, creating (I hope, at long last, he proves me wrong) the disingenuous impression of being "open minded".

Difficulty in Poetry

There's quite a lot on the issue of difficulty vs. accessibility in poetry in this blog. To encounter the tip of a considerable iceberg (including an inconclusive debate with Josh Corey), click on the label below. Today, though, an interesting article appeared in poets.org, a summary of a panel discussion with Carl Phillips, James Tate and Kay Ryan. If you know these poets, I'm sure you can well imagine why I call this "difficulty lite". However, our late friend Reginald Shepherd really gets in the meat of the matter with this essay that catalogues and discusses the ways (or most ways) poetry can be difficult. I think it's the most thorough treatment of the subject I've come across.

Adze (aka Allen Sutterfield)... alive & well

Allen Sutterfield at the launch of "Grendel's Pond" in Chengdu's The Bookworm.
-- courtesy of Della Marina

Was relieved to get this message the other day:

Thanks Brian, yep, I'm ok. I'll give you more details later but no real damage in Chengdu proper. Did you ever receive GRENDEL'S POND? aLLEN

And yes, Grendel's Pond, Allen's chapbook -- rubber-stamped April 11 -- arrived in the mail the same day. To my happy surprise, here was the dedication on the inside front cover:

FOR

"Montreal Bryan"

Poet, Friend and Companion
on many dives
into the depths
of
Grendel's Pond

The writing itself? Well, I have yet to give the chapbook a proper whirl, but I can say this much: although he's been a wonderful editor and mentor/friend on my own writing journey, his writing has never been entirely my cup of tea -- although I'm sure I understand the subtleties of its "taste" better than ever.

Basically, with some lyrical exceptions in his oeuvre, he's a kind of "language poet", branching off from people like Olson, Kerouac, Patchen and Ginsburg, although quite disconnected from, and possibly unaware of, prominent later or "other" members -- Zukovsky, Bernstein, Andrews, Silliman, et al -- of that movement. He's written over 5,000 texts -- poems, fragments, prose poem- or journal-entry like things --which he has paired with visual images, and which are connected together into a grand organizational scheme -- as yet, not totally realized, and probably impossible to "complete" -- that he calls "The City of Words". A central notion is of an ethereal (although always actual, he'd argue) world created by words into which writer (paired with the reader) enters on an open-ended journey of discovery. Process is the thing, which enables, of course, a kind of endless "anything goes" on the part of the writer. Demands on the reader, though, as he negotiates through this multilateral web and tries to parse intended from accidental meanings, can require an elite level of literary awareness. Frequently Allen's work consists of a conscious meditation on the process itself in the midst of the process, a kind of writing about writing. Many of these are unsatisfactory to me -- emotionally meager, sensually devoid. However, pieces marked by formal completion, trenchant observation, that are particularly"alive" in their awareness, delicate, airy, even visionary -- and there are a number of those -- can elicit my appreciation, even admiration. Flipping through the book, I see a few of the texts we argued about in his basement apartment in Toronto's Beaches two decades ago. Four pieces, all told, from a series he called "Runes" -- first words (or final words) of other poems strung disjunctively together, which themselves suggest a kind of narrative or at least, an intriguing juxtapositional dynamic. My response at that time: what the hell? Too mechanical. Now, though, I quite enjoy them in their polysemous serendipity. Here's one of my favourites:

TEXT 2659

for
is
catch
it
I
sleeper
inside
in
closed
bed
contained
trip
what
that
the
what
is

I see he also included this particularly astringent little text. To me it has resonance for all his work:

TEXT 5134

Poetry is more than lies on the surface.

-- Tram's APOTHEGMS

Here, a poem. And here, a prose poem, one of his strongest texts. My dialogues with him have figured prominently in this blog...although what can be found here is the tip of a pretty large iceberg. To sample some of his critical insight, which can be acute, click on the label below.

CONTEXT

I don't like poems that seem to say, "Guess what I mean." And I don't much like symbolist poems, in which people and things are standing in for the real subjects, who for some reason are absent. I also don't care for surreal or impressionist poems that assume a reader wants to help interpret the poet's dreams.

This is not to say that I think everything in a poem should be on the surface. Not at all. It's simply to say that there should be a surface, a place for a reader to stand. Young journalists used to be taught to answer the questions who, what, where, when and why in the first compressed paragraph of a story. I would go so far as to say that the first four of these ought to be answered in a single reading of most poems.

-- Miller Williams, in Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems

I quote this not because I like it, but because I generally agree with it; with the second paragraph I exclaimed, "Yes!". (Strange confluence of attitudes...) I suppose I would say poems that keep you guessing too long. I find the first paragraph a bit reactionary for my liking. But the journalist questions, which I've never thought to apply to poetry, provide an interesting criterion to assess accessibility, even reader/writerly fulfillment. Generally, I don't feel satisfied with poems I write unless they communicate clearly on most if not all of these basic levels. But such a stricture makes me want to see what I can get away with and still feel satisfied with the effect of the poem... e.g. a poem that clearly answers the question who, but not what, where, and when, or what but not who, where, and when. Maybe such a poem would achieve a greater universality than one that clearly demarcates its where and when.

Easy Readin' Poet #1: Sharon Olds

Strike Sparks, Sharon Olds' selected, was one book I'm glad I ordered: earlier this year I whipped through it in a matter of days. Her poems, cumulatively speaking, are simply a great read: "fire in the hands" Michael Ondaatje puts it in back cover blurb, commenting further on how "with roughness and humour and brag and tenderness" she "carries readers through rooms of passion and loss." (I quote him because, well, he puts it so well.) A series of poems on the death of her father carry a kind of momentum that reminded me of a page-turner novel, hard to put down. And yet... and yet. What I came away with was a series of remarkable reading experiences, but not a single memorable line. And no desire to re-read, not for a long while. (When I do re-read, I'm put off -- it's like reading yesterday's news.) I'm reminded of something journalist Carl M. Cannon said in a recent article in the Atlantic concerning ex-Pres. Bill Clinton (I happened to be reading this article around the same time):

"...it wasn’t easy to cover Bill Clinton. For a lot of reasons. For one, covering his speeches isn’t as simple as covering another president’s speeches because his quotes aren’t that good. He’s articulate, but he’s not eloquent and he reminds you of the difference between the two. I’d come back from an event and think, “Boy! That event was great! Clinton was great, the audience was great…” But then I’d look back to my notebook and realize, “Well, there’s not much there, not much usable.”

Will poetry critics eventually come up with a similar assessment of Sharon Olds? In poetry, the linguistic bar is much higher than in public discourse: there's no question Sharon Olds is eloquent, but is her level of eloquence, vis-a-vis the standards of poetry, the equivalent of mere articulateness in the political sphere?

This is one question concerning a number of "easy-reading" poets I'll be featuring here. Just what is "true eloquence" in poetry is open to debate, but I'd say it consists in unforgettable lines, lines so striking and fine that they dig immediate roots in the subconscious and are on people's lips for years (centuries) to come. I think of Marvell's "The grave is a fine and private place/but none, I think, do there embrace", Blake's "Tyger, tyger burning bright/in the forests of the night/what immortal hand or eye/dare frame thy fearful symmetry", Whitman's "I loafe and invite my soul/I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass", Eliot's "Let us go now, you and I, when evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table", Yeat's "What rough beast slouches toward Bethleham to be born?", even Irving Layton's "Your figure, love, curves itself into a man's memory." (Any faults here are mine: proof though is, I'm quoting from memory...)

I think, though, I'll get out of the way, and let the poet speak for herself, leaving you to decide. Here's one of my favourite poems of hers from the collection I just mentioned...

The Race

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark brown moustache told me
another airline had a nonstop
leaving in seven minutes. See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you'll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes, and ran, the bags
wagged me from side to side as if
to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then
run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor,
and then I took a deep breath, I said
goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit it into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle's eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people's hair was shining, they were
smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light,
I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge, I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.

Let's take a break (forever)

O'Hara, Ashbery, Creeley, Dorn, their progeny. The cool, the neat. People like that stuff. I like that stuff. Mental but not too cerebral (at least, not that way); playful, casual, off-hand, off-cuff jaunty. I hear choruses of, "That's fun!" I hear choruses of, "That's neat!"

Is it because we don't want to be too involved?

Kudos to Andrew Shields for summarizing and directing our attention to Reginald Shepherd's excellent post on difficulty in poetry.

Here's Christian Wiman's latest defence of our (perpetually) nearly vanquished, extinguished art. So long has poetry been nearly extinguished in certain fora (e.g. the public one) that it bolsters my faith that it will never actually be extinguished. A fine read indeed...

Charles adds a valuable contribution to the ongoing (ever ongoing) Difficulty/Accessibility debate by defining and discussing what he calls "engagement".

Other forms of tissue paper...

In response to this post by Scoplaw:

You absorptives just don't get it! We anti-absorptives aren't interested in "real people", "trapped in bad situations", in the "human drama", all that cloying claptrap! We're interested in employing our vocabulary to jiggle with your synapses and make you see, hear, feel in a totally fresh, new way! And if you can't appreciate what we're doing, to hell with you! At the same time, you ought to respect us, esteem us, and in the end, applaud us, because we're cool. We're hip to what you're doing even if you're not hip to us, in that way we're superior. So come on board and join us, we're it and we want you to be with it too, which is, of course, what we're doing. It's all for the good of poetry, right? It's all in the name of keeping it contemporary, right? What's that expression on your face?! OK! Stay in the dark if you want to! Shut up!

Absorbing the absorptive vs. non absorptive on this Xmas morning...

In the wee hours of the morning -- and all through the house, nothing stirred except my little pinkies on this keyboard -- I just finished reading Robert Archambeault's summation of the current debate (involving Josh Corey, et al) on "absorptive" vs. "anti-absorptive" poetry -- with, believe it or not, considerable interest. Funny, Josh has been meditating on this binary, under various guises, for at least the past three years. In late 2004, it was "organic" vs. "non-organic" poetry. Were any of you there for that one? You can read my summation of it here.

If anything, over the years Josh has moderated somewhat: now he clearly acknowledges that he enjoys different types of poetry (and prose) for different reasons. As Robert points out, Big Science may yet shed light on how different kinds of poems actually appeal to different parts of the brain. Different personalities also tend to favour different parts of the brain (the enneagram suggests a few things about this). Strokes for different folks... cerebral hemorrhages...

One wonders (at least I do) how much this intellectualized debate -- which really seems to boil down to a highly sophisticated attempt to show how "what I like" is better than "what you like" -- also simply boils down to plain ol' insecurity. Josh, because he prefers composing the difficult & challenging "anti-absorptive" poetry over supposedly simpler "absorptive" poetry, resorts to the same kind of self-justification that poets in general do in defending their art form before a predominantly prose-reading public: that is, by claiming that because it makes more demands on the reader, it's somehow better. The more marginalized poetry has become, the more poets seem to suffer from a mania for self-justification. (This trend, alas, has gone on for centuries.)

Ah well. Proof is in the pudding as well as in the eating. (How Christmasy can we get!) If a particular poem succeeds on its own terms -- if it illuminates and astounds, is brilliant and beautiful (I don't think I use those terms lightly -- do I?) it succeeds no matter side of a particular binary it falls into, what "school" it comes from.

As for absorption, we all know certain kinds of paper are better than others for that.

OK... giftwrap.

Season's greetings!

Randomness & Art III: Our Googletries

Here, in any case, is my take on the Google Search experiment chez David. (It's been posted there, along with David's and Thomas', since Sunday.)


GOOGLE SONNET 1: RAW GENERAL SEARCH

Welcome to the Death Clock, the Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away... second by second.
Would you like to increase your brain power today?
Have some Hallmark ornaments you just don't want anymore?
What is the impact of recent hurricanes on U.S. Oil Markets?
Stanford University scientists have discovered a potential new weapon in the battle of the bulge: a hormone that reduces the urge to eat.
At least 500,000 earthquake survivors in Pakistan still have no shelter.
The dust-up in the Dungeon video arcade began when a group of Jordanian teenagers cursed aloud about the television reports.
Love is when you look into someone's eyes, and suddenly you go all the way inside their soul and you both know it.
The first space mission in a decade to Earth's closest neighbour, Venus, has blasted off.
Sensational revolution in medicine! Enlarge your penis up to 10 cm or 4 inches!
"We rented an apartment," she said, adding that her husband taught her how to use her explosives belt.
We drowsed for a while in the gentle purling murmur of the river, until Demi spoke again.
Why are you jerking off to this ten-second video clip?
Welcome to the Death Clock, the Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away... second by second.


I must confess, when I embarked on the exercise I was unfamiliar with flarf -- there were links in David's post, but I hadn't really read them thoroughly. Perhaps so much the better. What I came up with was something more in the spirit of Cornell's boxes -- appropriating whole pieces from the random assortment and arranging them into a "sonnet" box, suggested, easily enough, by the title that David gave the exercise. (Notice -- the poem does have 14 lines, if you disregard the wrap-around. I love that term raw general search, by the way.) So you could say I took pretty darned laid-back approach to this one -- producing something more akin to sixties' or early seventies' style "found poetry" than to the intense parsing and mashing of pre-fab phrases we see in flarf-related poetries. (Probably you flarfist hipsters out there would find this terribly old hat.) And like the "found poetry" of the sixties & seventies, what I did flings the inane crap we're bombarded with pretty much back holus bolus at you dear readers out there, but in the context of a blank page which, like the gallery context of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans, gives them a false dignity and throws them into relief as the inanities they are. (Even the comparison to Warhol shows how "old hat" this approach is...) This of course is an electronic page, which undercuts the irony quite a lot... I think this Google sonnet would be more effective on high-quality vellum. As I cut and pasted it together, tho, I imagined it being read out loud. Big dramatic pauses between each sentence. That kind of thing.

Of all the phrases provided, the "Death Clock" leapt out at me as particularly evocative, and an obvious one to start with. After that, with rapid selection of what struck me as the most interesting phrases I found myself shaping the thing into a question-declaration sequence leading back (obviously enough) to the "Death Clock" as a closing refrain. In following a highly traditional symmetrical pattern (yes, falling back on good old Death to keep things profound), I got the notion of giving a fairly representative survey of all that's out there that's bombarding us and poisoning us as our timeclocks tick away. I found this actually more exciting than perhaps it is. I think here the sampling falls down. I ended up seeking other sources: a piece of highly typical spam that hit me between the eyes that very morning + a phrase almost anyone gets blasted at them if they do the tour of porn on the net (haven't we all?), and then, because I wanted something gentle to counter all the violence I googled in "gentle murmer river" and the third last line is what I came up with, courtesy of someone's blog.

At this point I would like to replace that sentence about the Jordanian teenagers with something, say, from the realm of Sports. I love the evocativeness of "the dust-up in the Dungeon video arcade" -- "video arcade" is pretty sporty too-- but we already have another line from the same incident (I think it may be from the same article) which is darker still, and "video" is used in the second to last line . I googled articles on hockey , sports violence, Todd Bertucci even, but so far have come up dry -- that is, of anything with the requisite punch. (Despite the fact that Todd with his "sucker punch" broke another player's neck...) I guess eventually I'll come across one that seems right, if not right on. So much for randomness.

I of course am tempted to tighten the poem -- take away hanging phrases like "a hormone that reduces the urge to eat" and "and you both know it", but I also like leaving them in. They seem to me to me typical of the kind of excess of obviousness that beats middle brows into submission.
________________________

Of all our attempts, I think Thomas Basbøll’s contribution to the experiment is the most vivacious and successful on its own terms -- if somewhat intellectually driven.

Welcome to the Death Clock: a friendly, second by second reminder to work out the percentage of memories that are designed, manufactured and tested to specifications.

Here are the updated graphs for October. As you can see, the fish leapt from the water. This framework only provides guidelines: a limited amount of content. There will be "more deep cuts".

Like me, he had the instinct to start with the Death Clock. I think that fish leaping from the water -- such a delightful surprise -- saves this piece from being irredeemably dry. The double-sense of "deep cuts" is cutting...

____________________

David's is perhaps more deeply parsed.

GOOGLED TRIPLE SONNET #1: COOKED

Memory
that is
designed,
manu-
fact-
ured and
updated graphs
explain
how
to
make
the opening
sonnet
a limited
amount
of content
available in
English please
visit
for more
Blue Steel
the areas of
pre-engineered
buildings and
a New York college
trapped
in
an existential
nightmare victims
of a cruel
and enduring myth Love is when you look
into someone's
eyes
information
does
not want
to be free
it wants
to be brief economics
bath water
deer

I'm not so sure about this one. I like the way "information does not want to be free it wants to be brief" is thrown into relief as a summative statement towards the end. (I considered using that line, but couldn't fit it in... "sonnet" being such a "disciplined form", ;-)) The final four words are splashed on like dabs of paint -- that I enjoy -- and deer, read out loud, would be taken as "dear", a term of endearment I rather like after all those arid explicative-sounding phrases (the bath water too is refreshing -- sex in the bath, perhaps? No I think I'm reading too much into ...). "Graphs" though doesn't follow grammatically (that is, if you want a smooth splicing). I'm not sure why we need Blue Steel (the first vivid image in the piece), and if you're going to parse, "existential nightmare" seems a bit cliche-ish. Why is it called a triple sonnet? (Maybe this is my ignorance here... I'll soon google "Triple Sonnet" and see what I get.) I'm also not sure about "Cooked", although I can sense what you're telling us about the process. (Half baked? Mine, too, though is a work in progress...) Oh well, David, you described it as an attempt, and I know you were probably less at leisure last week than Thomas and I.

Thanks for bringing us the exercise. Your last two posts have been beautiful...

Randomness & Art discussion part II

Nichiren Daishonin

It's funny how blinded we are when theorizing about art without art actually in front of us. Rather like drawing a human figure without a model... the result will be frequently more than just a tad distorted. Just placing the Joseph Cornell boxes in my last post (I did it for decorative purposes...I just liked them) rather undermined my own arguments about dangers of "systematically random" art lacking heart. Clever, whimsical, his boxes are elegant and tasteful juxtapositions compared to sausage-grinding of disparate morsels exemplified by Flarf poetry (which can actually have plenty of heart -- in rare instances). They show possibilities for the juxtaposition of found materials that my own remarks don't acknowledge at all... that I find interesting. So much in one's generalizations depend on what one has recently been reading and impressed by. I would reckon that Thomas Basboll -- in saying "I much prefer poems that clever people put together out of things lying around in plain view to poems that creators found in their hearts" -- hasn't read Plath or Vallejo or Franz Wright for a long while....I was just reading them last week.

What got me going below was David's reference to Peter Matthiessen's conflicts between what he perceived as the egotism of his writing and his Buddhist beliefs, and his parry that "elimination of ego" and "forgetting of self" wasn't necessarily "phony" or "arrogant." Clearly I wasn't explaining where I was coming from -- a perspective derived from my own 9-year practice of Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism, which is actually quite different from the monastic tradition of Zen (as interpreted by Watts and Suzuki) that forms so much the dominent impression of Buddhism here in North America. For that alone, I think the following, from our discussion on David's blog, has value:

Three blind men describing the elephant of art... well we have rope here, a fan there, the side of a great boulder... eventually, hopefully, we'll come up with a satisfactory composite picture (perhaps by the hundredth comment).

What's on my mind right now is how am I to eat my words, particularly "arrogant" and "phony". I suppose with a zesty vinegrette of humour, and a side-order of humble pie.

As a practicing Buddhist myself (gloop, gloop) for the past 9 years (mmmm, but the pie is delicious), I have no trouble with freely admitting that there I was projecting the arrogance (and yes, elements of phoniness) in myself on the project you propose, and indeed, it actually feels like quite an accomplishment to still have such balls & bombast after so much time. Horray for Balls & Bombast!!

But then, the Lotus Sutra gives me special dispensation to Still Be Crazy After All Those Years. (Do we need such special dispensation? I’d say anything helps in this Politically Correct, hypocritical era…)

Be that as it may… a few remarks about “elimination of ego”, and “forgetting of self” in what I know of Buddhism, to give some indication of where I was coming from in previous remarks. The sutras of provisional Buddhism (that is, prior to the Lotus Sutra) propose the renunciation of desire (& I suppose ego, that lovely Freudian concept, is bound up in desire) as the way of eliminating fundamental darkness of human nature that is singled out as the source of suffering. But on any close examination such a project goes at cross purposes with itself, as the desire to renounce desire is itself a desire, so of course any result in that direction will still result a desire-filled state…. even if it appears as a serene contentment with self-enlightenment through direct perception of one’s own mind (a pitfall of Zen, by the way). A dogmatic belief in the elimination of desire is in the end undesirable to living beings, as we need desire to eat, procreate, survive, appreciate this life and achieve happiness. A fighting spirit has its uses, particularly in a world full of injustice, where the strong step all over the weak, etc. The ultimate Buddhist – that is, an ultimately enlightened Bodhisattva -- may well emerge as ultimately alert, courageous with an indomitable fighting spirit, but have the wisdom (and reserves of gentleness) to know when and how to employ his power to confront evil (yes, evil, it does exit) in any given circumstance. This of course requires supreme intuition based on wisdom acquired through Buddhist practice. Wisdom is an inscrutable thing… but the Mutual possession of the ten subjective worlds, a concept I have no time to get into, would suggest that where there is life, there is desire and this is by no means a bad thing (or bastard to escape, as you put it). Ultimately, the best way to go may be to, as Nichiren Dishonin puts it, to “suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy, and chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo no matter what happens.” Not to endeavour to eliminate desire, but refine desire through practice, cause your desire to naturally embrace suffering of others through acts of warmth, compassion (and yes, humour – why be so serious about it all?), gentle or not so gentle, as appropriate.

Poetically, the upshot of all this is that someone like Franz Wright or Vallejo or even Plath may be closer to Buddhist enlightenment than someone who to “eliminate ego” tries to cut himself off of his feelings & play around with words in a superficially “egoless” way. The latter could be construed as false -- & “phony”, and & “arrogant” -- however angry-sounding those words may seem. So am I eating my words? Well, yes, but as far as I’m concerned they still have nutritional value. (Gloop, gloop.)

P.S. I appreciate your concern about the artist being “present in his art”. And maybe a line or two from your google search might be useful for a poem...

Welcome to the Death Clock.
Do you have some Hallmark Ornaments you don't want anymore?
etc.

More to come...

THE ORGANIC/NON-ORGANIC DISCUSSION CONTINUES (AGAIN INDEFINITELY... PART 2 OF 3 OR 4 OR 5

It's taken me a while to get back to the discussion of Organic vs. Non-organic poetics, which has been passed like a ball from one blog to another over the last couple of months. There is a Chinese proverb that says in effect, "Want a thing long enough, and you don't." Since I last talked about it, Xmas, some very heavy family issues, work, excellent reading that came my way, as well as revision and creation have made me disinclined to put in the hours to read over the arguments and refine some of my drafted points. In the meantime, as I was saying, other bloggers have put in their seven cents worth, stealing at least some of my thunder (boom, boom). I was beginning to think that if I waited long enough, somebody would be bound to say more or less what I intended to say, reason enough to stay silent on the issue for good… but I still find, despite myself, I have things to express on the ol' dichotomy, if only to further explore and articulate where I stand in relation to it. In this post, I'll be focussing on the contributions of others to the discussion over the last month and a half, with insertions of a few parenthetical snipes and assorted pop-gun fire, just because... well, I find the temptation irresistable. Put it down as a quirky idiocyncracy. I am still trying to define myself, "find my voice" (although why emerging poets are always described as having a pronounced case of laryngitis is beyond me...)

In a later post (I keep promising this, I know... but I will get around to it, eventually), I'll weigh in more heavily with my own take, particularly on some of Josh's peculiar attitudes to "organic" poetry… even if Josh is no longer Josh, but somebody else.

Josh, in a post on January 11, points out that there is clearly a spectrum between the extremes of so-called "organic" and "inorganic" approaches. Where one stands on the spectrum is a reflection of attitude, pure and simple.

To recap, the argument here stems from my reading of Peter Bürger's book Theory of the Avant-Garde, from which I derived the notions of the organic artwork or poem as that in which all of its parts are subordinated to the whole-to the poem's poemness-while in the nonorganic poem the parts are not so subordinated-the whole, goal, or telos of the poem is exterior to it, located in "reality." From there I suggested that all poems can be located on a scale, Kinsey-style, with 1 being entirely organic and 6 being entirely nonorganic. Not surprisingly, nowadays most poems produced by younger poets fall somewhere in the middle, and you could make a game out of assigning a "Kinsey" number to various magazines and publishing houses (Fence 3, New England Review 2, Aufgabe 4, The New Yorker 1, Syllogism 5, and so on). Pure 6's are very rare, more the domain of individual poets, while 1's are still quite common. Nonorganicism in poetry generally takes the form of a greater or lesser degree of parataxis or montage (often formalized into constructs like the ideogram, the New Sentence, etc.). Its original goal was to put ordinary means of language, and the ideological structures they support, into question; nowadays most people who introduce a nonorganic dimension into their work are after a particular aesthetic effect, but the possibilties for political critique still attract many writers. That slippage from radical attack on poetry-as-given to a style is why Bürger suggests that the nonorganic mode is no longer to be preferred to the organic, which means both can coexist as styles precisely because both are equally inadequate for re-imagining a world that, to paraphrase Richard Hugo, is inadequate as given and will not do.

He goes on to say that while he can't help but feel that there is "still something valid, even heroic, about the modernist project of presenting the usual hierarchical means of meaning-production with a sufficiently complex NO." At the same time, he also admits to being "a bit of a classicist at heart, addicted to my own aesthetic responses, and that's why I think my own poetry rarely rises above a 4 on the organic-nonorganic scale."

An attitude (like pretty well any such personal stance) to which he is perfectly well entitled. (As for me, depending on the day, I'm a 2.3 repeater, a 1, or when my tiresome perfectionism keeps me from writing at all, a 0… )

to be continued...

Organic/Inorganic Part 3

Brennan Wysong contributes to the discussion with an appreciation of the dichotomy in terms of reader participation in the process:

Perhaps to further the dichotomy, might the difference between the organic/inorganic also be in terms of reader participation--say, in terms of analysis vs. (an attempt at) synthesis? In the organic, we find ourselves assuming all parts contribute to the whole and so we simply try to understand how they contribute to this unity. ("The tone of this poem is solemn because it's an elegy.") With the inorganic, and esp. with some Language poetry, there is an attempt on the reader's part to synthesize into a whole what cannot be reconciled as such. This leads to what Hank Lazer refers to as "a dialectical tension between possible continuities and radical discontinuities."

(That dialectical tension that sounds like a perfect definition of reader frustration, apathy, etc.. Ah, but there is titillation: excitement, promise of revelation. The transcendental pleasures of random juxtaposition…)

Mike Snider, who makes some pretty strong headbuts against against random "word salads" and other tendencies associated with Language and related poetries, takes issue with the very use of the term "organic" by Josh, Berger, and others. Living organisms, he points out in an astute and beautifully written post, not only depend on having internally consistent relations among their component parts, but these parts for their very existence depend on valid relationship to the external world. The implications for "organic" poetry are obvious:

It's an odd, and, I think, misleading use of the words, since by "organic" Bürger seems to mean self-referential, self-enclosed. The use of "organic" by Burger and by Josh … at first, intriguing because usually "organic" is the term used to indicate value and relevance to a well-lived life. But it's misleading because it fundamentally distorts what it means to be organic, whether in the natural world or in the world of art. Organic things - living things - certainly have an internal structure in which various parts are dependent on each other for their continued existence, but those internal relations have evolved in relation to an external world.

First, that set of dependencies in a living thing only exists because its ancestors were able to interact successfully with their organic and inorganic environments, with other creatures and the utterly indifferent rock and water and sun and air. It is utter nonsense to speak of a living thing as self-contained.

Second, those relations are fragile. We see this most dramatically in cancer, when some set of cells, by ignoring their relationship to the whole creature, dooms that creature's relationship to the world, except perhaps as food for other creatures. But blind cave fish illustrate another point: all things in that set of relations, even eyes, have a price, and when that price is not repaid by value to the rest of the organism through relations to the outside world, not even eyes, which have evolved independently many times and in many lineages, can maintain themselves however beautifully and intricately they are connected to other parts of the creature.

(My next project: to create the poetic equivalent of a cave fish: remove the eyes from a poem, and yet ensure that it thrive in a sea of sighted readership… Hmm… joking aside, I tend to agree with Mike about the misleading nature of the "organic/non-organic" terminology, and for that reason, employ, when I remember to, quotation marks around the terms…)

K. Silem Mohammad, more sympathetic to the "non-organic" trends, articulates so beautifully an overview of the antagonism between the two camps that I can't help quoting it as a fine contribution to the discussion:

Josh writes:

"my utopia of poetry is a world where EVERYONE is a poet, in which all voluntarily assume the pains and pleasures that come with the highest possible sensitivity to language."

This in the context of his larger discussion of the "organic" vs. the "inorganic" in poetry, or let's say modes of poetry based on the illusion of direct communication of transparent (i.e. familiar) meanings between a unified speaker and a (presumably also unified) listener, vs. modes of poetry that often take as their starting point the subversion or denial of such direct lines of contact between writing and reading subjects. The organic approach is distrusted by the avant-garde inorganicists because it relies on passive subscription to the dominant values that determine what gets counted as authentic, realistic, or beautiful; the inorganic approach is distrusted by the establishment organicists because (among other reasons) it resists evaluation along the lines prescribed for writing in the dominant poetic tradition (i.e. formally conservative and/or discursively "natural" composition).

Both these camps … have reason to believe that they are exercising "the highest possible sensitivity to language" when they promote their own tastes and denigrate the tastes of their opponents. In the eyes of the organicists, the worst crimes of inorganic poetry are defined precisely by insensitivity to the qualities they hold most dear: euphony, conventional structural coherence, sincere and eloquent expression of universal human emotions, etc. For the inorganicists, however, those who valorize the organic lack sensitivity on multiple contextual levels. They fail to acknowledge the significance, for example, of framing, of the ways in which the establishment scene of poetic practice and readership comes with pre-set parameters which are indestructible in themselves, but which may be interestingly tweaked and challenged by the intentional deployment of cacophony, disrupted coherence, deliberate stagings of insincerity and inarticulacy. More importantly, according to the inorganicists, the organicists lack one of the most old-fashioned of poetic values: Keatsian "negative capability," or the ability to accept that beauty and its cousin pleasure, being fundamentally irrational, may inhere in those habitations one would consider most likely to be unamenable.

In the background of all this blogger discussion is a series of highly polemical articles Joan Houlihan published over the last few years in the Boston Comment. (Must-reads for those interested in this issue, as these columns have been highly popular and influential in the poetree world.) Houlihan portrays herself as a staunch, if beleaguered, defender of what she herself describes as a "mainstream" poetry ethic, that is, "of the poetry that existed from last year all the way back to Beowulf, the kind of poetry that favors parsable syntax, drama and story, tension and resolution, epiphany and symbolism, connected imagery, strong, recognizable voice or narration, and some impact of either an intellectual or emotional nature."

(My note: hey, that sounds exactly like what I'm trying to do…couldn't put it better… DUH!)

Houlihan, described by Josh et al. as shrill, adhominemesque and pretty darned limited as a critic, writes an engaging primer on what readers like yours truly find irritating, dull and impenetrable or (or should I say, not-worth-penetrating?) in much of the poetry published over the last thirty-odd years. In it she takes on three (four, if you like) fundamental trends: the extreme prosification of poetry, the exaggerated prominence of all-too- easy poets like Collins, Tate, Levine, and Mary Oliver, the tendency of those (particularly the latter three) to continue to publish book after book long after their spark is gone, and then... incoherent extremes of Language and other established "experimental" (read Non-organic) poetries. Personally I find much of her reading highly sensitive, her analysis masterful. Consider her treatment of pieces of experimental poetry, and substitution of words to show that the writing doesn't go anywhere or penetrate that far. Confusing in the bad sense. I'm reminded of criticism of much atonal music, how it "doesn't go anywhere", and manages in the process to sound like nails scraping against a blackboard. (Or much abstract expressionist and other experimental art, which has become its own kind of establishment.) I have an appreciation for her gutsy, unafraid-to-make-enemies stance in a context where much criticism is all-too-tepidly kind. At the same time I remain wary because I prefer to at least try to keep an open mind to the new and different, even if it involves suspending belief as well as disbelief, pretending "empty mind." Chalk it up to negative capability, or a vain attempt at such. Anyway, as I always say, more later....

"ORGANIC" vs. "NONORGANIC": the discussion continues (endlessly...)

Josh Corey has a thought-provoking series of posts from December 3-6, where he discusses "organic" vs. "nonorganic" poetry. For me, it is a real privilege to tap into his intellectual process, as he is tremendously widely read, very much in touch with elements of the contemporary scene that I am not, & has a working familiarity with critical materials like Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde and Pierre Bordelieu's Genesis and Structure of Literary Field, neither of which I will probably ever read in this lifetime. In his consideration of those two works he allows me at least a peek at some of their key insights. The dichotomy he describes, however, is not unfamiliar to me. Adze (see bio, & poem) and I had lengthy discussions back in the late eighties around very much the same duality, as Adze, with his endless "city of words" text, TV (text-visual) series, and Big Pages (which covered entire rooms) tends strongly towards the "nonorganic" (what we called process-oriented art) and I - with my tinyman series, Biblical monologues, love poems series - etc. towards the "organic" (what we called product-oriented art). Over the years of our discussion, I became more open to admitting random elements in my work… but it seems I have a pretty well genetic predisposition towards the kind of singular, "accessible" expression to be found in, "organic" poetry, whereas he is equally predisposed to celebrate the surprises and superabundant possibility to be found in the "nonorganic". To which I say, vive la difference.

To summarize Josh's arguments, there are two rubrics poetry falls under (as described by Bürger, et al...NB, in this summary, I'm interpolating obs. of my own, which I'll indicate as much as I can considering the haste I'm in… as I'm doing this summary as much for me as for readers out there…if I distort or oversimplify Josh's views in the process, my apologies…)

Under "organic":

· Poems with definite unifying (and limiting) subject matter: this poem is about war, about love, etc. These are poems most people identify as "poetry": Poetry from the canon (Lovelace Keats Wilber Plath & beyond, inc. "popular" poets like Tate, Collins, etc. ) I would say (my interpolation) that the contemporary poetry in this vein is largely Romantic, with recognizable tropes: love, death, natural motifs, etc.
· Characteristics: quoting from Corey: "the work's elements refer primarily to itself and only secondarily to exterior contexts (whether those be the facts of its production or the work's subject matter)
· Ironically, although it is called organic, this has taken, "through force of tradition", Josh says, very artificial, "inorganic" forms: the sonnet, villanelle, etc. Josh writes: "the attitude of the author has a lot to do with it, I think: the ethos of making the poem look easy, effortless, never letting them see you sweat-the labor of concealing labor - associated with labour."

Under "nonorganic":

· Poems/poets of the 20th C. (21st C.?) "avant guarde": Language Poets (Bruce Andrews, Bernstein, Silliman, etc.), & others associated with that sort of "experimental" work. Predecessors like Olson, Pound could be grouped here, although they definitely had "organic" elements, as did TS Eliot, regarded as avant garde when he took the literary world by storm with "The Wasteland", although really a kind of "romantic/organic" poet in the spirit of his compositions…
· Characteristics: quoting from Corey, "in the nonorganic works elements retain some of their independence-which does not mean, I think, that these elements could necessarily stand on their own as artworks, only that they primarily refer to some external reality (again, the facts of production or subject matter) and only secondarily do they make a contribution to the integrity of the artwork they belong to. Hence expression through pastiche, fragmentation. My note: A critical (in both senses of the term) influence: deconstructionism (Derrida, etc.)
· While "concealing the labour" is a characteristic of organic poets, the nonorganic writer must "show their work." Quoting from Corey: "in nonorganic artwork the parts do not form a unity: it is an assemblage of pieces between which cracks are visible, and the pieces have some degree of independence from the unity of the total work. The more minimal (or the less intrusive) the structure of the whole is, the more independence the parts have, and the "harder" the poem is likely to be."
To quote further from Bürger: "It is true that at the surface level, automatic texts are characterized by a destruction of coherence. But an interpretation that does not confine itself to grasping logical connections but examines the procedures by which the text was composed can certainly discover a relatively consistent meaning in them" (79).
· I would tend to add (this is me, not Josh), that the procedures by which the text is composed is indicated encompassing "conceptual umbrella" titles that "nonorganic" poets tend give to their creative projects: Pound's the Cantos, Silliman's The Alphabet, my friend Adze's "City of Words" are cases in point. (Those who are familiar with Bernstein and Andrews can corroborate or deny… I am not yet very familiar with them)

Corey, while he considers Bürger's "provocative conclusion that… organic and nonorganic artworks are equally (in)valid for the present", & favours himself lyric and sensual elements in poetry, says

"I'm interested in at least trying to experience any text that in some way foregrounds its artifice and involves or implicates me in meaning-production. And I'm much quicker to reject bad or even good organic work than I am nonorganic writing because I feel like its form is a lie that won't admit it's lying. (I'm speaking of modern and contemporary writing, of course; I can love Keats without making any claims for his inorganicity.)

It's interesting how Corey, while conceding the personal nature of his preferences, cleverly draws us towards "non-organic" poetry by consistently describing "organic" poetry in unfavourable terms, and "nonorganic" poetry in favourable terms: Organic is easy, effortless, no sweat (at least for the reader), and nonorganic "difficult", showing evidence of the work involved, therefore, presumably, a greater challenge to read (and a problem that can be solved, as Cris puts it). Organic is a kind of duplicity, a lie "that won't admit it's lying", nonorganic is not clearly described as a lie, or if it is a kind of lie because it is "(in)valid", at least admits to its limitation; therefore it is implied that it is more expressly, honest & "true". Organic work is "driven by force of tradition," whereas nonorganic work is "experimental." Organic work, because it refers to "reality", is described as independent, whereas organic work refers primarily to itself (therefore insular), is dependent. Reading Josh's description, I begin to feel inclined myself to prefer "nonorganic" poetry any day. But do I in my poetry practice? It seems to me all his arguments can be turned on their heads. More on this later…

Corey, Tate, Snider, Difficulty

Among the people I have on my blog roll is Josh Corey, a poet who is capable of some pretty stellar expository. Check out his posts starting with Nov. 18. I had never really read James Tate before reading this, but after reading a few poems in my Norton Anthology, I could see exactly what he was talking about vis-a-vis this guy, and ibid for Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, all these easy, popular poets who nevertheless are lauded (with reservations) by the literati, included in major anthologies, etc.
This had lead to a debate between Corey and one Mike Snider about the value of difficulty/abstruseness in poetry. My take on it is that there is a certain degree of difficulty, of challenge, of pushing the limits in poetry that is of value, and the limit varies with eveyone. I like intellectual challenge and scope , arcane vocabulary, purely "expressionist" use of language, etc. My limits go to say, Eliot's Wasteland. Pound, or, among our contemporaries, G.C. Waldrep, poets I find immensely rich and enjoyable. But if poetry becomes too impenetrable, cryptic, private, "cerebral", devoid of evocative imagery -- again, what is "too" is purely personal -- well it tips the scales into a kind of abyss.