The Best American Poetry

On bad reviews . . .

"It's just a review, it's not a gun."

Mark Morris, choreographer

-- sdh

"And" versus "&" in modern poetry

In the new Poets & Writers, Kevin Nance has a fascinating piece on the ampersand in modern poetry. Click here to read it in its entirety after taking a quick peek here:

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In the twentieth century, the ampersand was rediscovered and exploited, variously, by several generations of American poets, especially those eager to declare their position outside the academic mainstream. Several of the Black Mountain and Beat poets used the ampersand freely, and with conspicuous inconsistency, as an occasional substitute forand—notably Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” with its “blond & naked angel.” The relentlessly experimental e. e. cummings was fond of the ampersand, as was Frank O’Hara. A number of African American poets also adopted the figure, as Amiri Baraka did in “Monday in B-Flat”: “I can pray / all day / & God / wont come.” The ampersand in American poetry reached its apogee in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), in which the poet used the mark to undercut the erudition, complexity, and formality of his rhyme and stanza structures, as in the sequence’s opening:

I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.
What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, such uses of the ampersand suggested experimentation, casualness, a desire to tweak the sniffing nose of literary decorum, and a certain kind of haste. “It is, after all, an abbreviation,” Harvard scholar Helen Vendler pointed out in an e-mail exchange. The ampersand became a mark of originality in American poetry, part of a customized system of punctuation whose earlier elements had included Walt Whitman’s ellipses, Emily Dickinson’s dashes, and cummings’s quirky parentheses and lowercase i. (Later, some of the New York School of poets deployed the exclamation point in similar fashion, even as A. R. Ammons was making his own highly idiosyncratic use of the colon.) Other poets embraced the ampersand for its mere presence on the typewriter, whose keys they were determined to “play” in virtuoso style.  
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Suit My Mind: A Q&A with Jericho Brown and Christine Garren

Another surprise.  Let me tell you a story you don’t want to hear. 

After I my first book was published, I felt a sort of emptiness that I don’t know if I can explain.  It was as if the one thing I had for years been doing was done and taken away from me… 

No, it was as if the one thing I had for years been doing was done, and I had given it—my world beyond this world—away. 

Worse, there was no time for my sorrow and no way to explain it to anyone.  Surely, I wanted the book in print.  Surely, I understood that others were not so lucky to have their books taken yet.  Besides, I had to do the work my best poet friends said I should be doing:  promote, promote, promote.  Say yes to everything until the book has legs enough to walk on its own.  Then say yes to everything else. 

And yes, they were right…

But I was tired, and I missed having lines and words and rhymes I could obsess over.

Soon after my book was released, I was fortunate enough that several writers gave it very kind reviews.  And I was foolish enough to read them.  One of those reviews was written by Wayne Johns, a poet in his own right. 

I searched around for his email and wrote him a note of thanks for his care and attention and honest advice geared toward the future of my work.  His response was one I can only describe as clairvoyant.  He seemed to know that I was no longer writing since the book had been published.  He seemed to know that I was lost without working on the countless revisions that had become who I was. 

He asked for my address, said he had a gift for me that would be perfect at that moment.  A few days later, I found in my mailbox a book I had never heard of by a poet who friends had neglected to mention.  Among the Monarchs by Christine Garren.  

Wayne Johns knows all.  I fell, again, in love with poetry. 

Christine Garren’s poems are rooted in exchanges with landscape.  Her turning and shifting and dirtied awe read as if James Wright and Franz Wright have found common ground.  Her eye for the oddities represented oddly makes it clear what Jean Valentine has to do with Paul Celan, what we all have to do with Emily Dickinson.

Christine’s most recent book is The Piercing. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry.  Her chapbook, The Difficult Here, is now available at 42 Miles Press.

Though I think each of her short volumes is best read in one sitting for the cumulative effect she creates, here is one of her poems I found online:

 

The Piercing

Small piercing as if in an earlobe

your leaving caused. Air is filling it now, time fills it

the view through these windows fills the tiny hole.

The people on the street, the manic father

the other father carrying his child in pink—this

millimeter's-width opening is for a decade to fit through.

Look, there you go. There I go—there our landscape goes as if

through a fantastical roof's hole, the shingle pulled off, the nail off—

our death is

flying over the city.

 

Today is Thursday, and I’m thankful for Wayne Johns.  In memory of his deceased partner, the amazing poet Rodney Jack, I asked Christine Garren a few questions.  Today is her birthday, and here are her brief and beautiful answers:

 

Donald Keene moves (back) to Japan

Click here to read Jamie Katz's brilliant feature on Donald Keene, the Western world's leading interpreter of Japanese literature, a Columbia professor for more than seventy years. On a visit to Japan in 1990, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Professor Keene, who, in addition to discussing everything from Basho and linked-verse to the merits of a traditional Japanese breakfast, taught me the two key rules of pronouncing Japanese and made my two-week stay go a lot more smoothly than would otherwise have been the case..With his books and anthologies, Keene taught an appreciation of Japanese culture to generations of students, not only at Columbia, his home base, but the world over, In April 2003 he was awarded a medal of honor from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I wrote the inscription, appropriating the tanka as an appropriate form:

To Donald Keene we
owe much of what we know of
Japan's verse and prose.

In shadow of rising sun
stood the lean tree unobserved.

 

Then Keene could be heard:
in accents lucid and keen
he rendered the scene.

And the bare branch of winter
burst into cherry blossom.

Here's an excerpt from Katz's feature in the current Columbia College Today. -- DL

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Keene’s approach to teaching and writing bears the imprint of his freshman Humanities instructor, Mark Van Doren ’21 GSAS. “He was a scholar and poet and above all some­one who understood literature and could make us understand it with him,” Keene writes in Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. “Van Doren had little use for commentaries or specialized literary criticism. Rather, the essential thing, he taught us, was to read the texts, think about them, and discover for our­selves why they were ranked as classics.”

The experience of taking the College’s general education cours­es was “incredible,” Keene says, and he fondly remembers the great teachers he encountered as an undergraduate. Among them were the “learned and gentle” classicist, Moses Hadas ’30 GSAS; Lionel Trilling ’25, ’38 GSAS and Jacques Barzun ’27, ’32 GSAS, who led Keene’s Senior Colloquium; and Pierre Clamens, a French instructor “who was very stern, but gave everything to his stu­dents,” Keene says.

His chief mentor, however, was cul­tural historian Ryusaku Tsunoda, a pio­neer of Japanese studies at Columbia whom Keene often refers to, simply, as Sensei. “He was a man I admired com­pletely,” Keene says, “a man who had more influence on me than anyone else I can think of.”

As a senior, Keene enrolled in Tsu­noda’s course in the history of Japa­nese thought. Fifty years later, in a CCT interview (Winter 1991) with David Lehman ’70, ’78 GSAS, Keene remem­bered: “The first class, it turned out I was the only student — in 1941 there was not much pro-Japanese feeling. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a waste of your time to give a class for one student?’ He said, ‘One is enough.’
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Either Death or Sunlight: A Talk about Publishing with Jericho Brown and Michael Dumanis

Here we are at gratitude day four, and since earlier blogs and resulting conversations this week have taught me so much about the process of selecting, anthologizing, and publishing, I thought you might be interested in hearing from someone who works as an editor.

Michael Dumanis is Associate Professor of English at Cleveland State University, where he also serves as Director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, a literary press, and teaches poetry in the consortial Northeast Ohio MFA Program (NEOMFA). He is the author of the poetry collection My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007) and coeditor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). His writing has previously been recognized with residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Center, and Yaddo; fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the James Michener Foundation, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Wesleyan Writers' Conference, and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture; and a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

I met Michael when we were in school together in Houston.  He's proven to be a very helpful reader of my poems and a great friend.  With thanks to him for our ten years of arguing and laughing, here are some things he had to say about his own writing and about the Cleveland State Poetry Center:

Where Could You Be Going When That Wind is Blowing?

"My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit."

—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

We Knew How to Love: Tuesday with Fanny Howe and Jericho Brown

Welcome to your Tuesday of gratitude.  It was a Tuesday that I first saw Fanny Howe read her awe-inspiring poems at the Blacksmith House Poetry Series run by Andrea Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Many of you know I'm that fool who will cry at a good poetry reading, so yes, I sat in the darkened audience listening and weeping for two reasons:  1. I had been dreaming of the chance to meet Fanny and see her read since, several years before, encountering her book of essays, The Wedding Dress, a book that led to me reading everything she had ever published.  2.  The poems she read were perfectly strange, completely heart rending, and just that damn good! 

Fanny Howe is the author of thirty books of poetry and prose, including The Lyrics, What Did I Do Wrong? and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vacation.  She is a recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, an award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation.

I finally got the chance to read Fanny's most recent book of poetry, Come and See, in early November and found that I had yet to fall out of love with her writing.  I couldn't pass up this chance to share with you some of the questions I had about the book, about family, and about her life as a poet.  With thanks to Fanny Howe for treating me like a son and inviting me into her home the year I lived in Boston feeling quite lost, and in memory of the novelist Ilona Karmel, this is Tuesday with Fanny Howe:

Shelley Stenhouse + Tony Hoagland at KGB Bar

SEASON FINALE

Tonight!

December 12
Hosted by Megin Jimenez and Matthew Yeager
Reading starts at 7:30pm
Admission is FREE
www.KgbBar.com
85 East 4th Street

Shelley Stenhouse won the Pavement Saw Press Award for her collection, PANTS; was a finalist for the 2009 National Poetry Series; received a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellowship; an Allen Ginsberg Award; two Pushcart Prize nominations, and three residencies at Yaddo Art Colony. Her poem, “AIDS,” has been quoted in Poet’s Market. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Third Coast, Margie, and New York Quarterly (among others), and in Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets. Shelley has read on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and on several television networks: NY1, Oxygen and Manhattan Cable’s Poetry Thin Air. Her collection Impunity was published this year by NYQ Books

Tony Hoagland was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His books of poems include Unincorporated Personas in the Late Honda Dynasty (Graywolf Press, 2010); What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College. Hoagland's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the 2008 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers magazine, as well as the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry.

*****

Happy New Year from Monday Night Poetry! We will return in February 2012.

Until the Fulcrum Tips: A Conversation with Rita Dove and Jericho Brown

Welcome to the second of seven days of surprises, a week of gratitude!  After reading my first book, you may not believe it, but I am thankful for my childhood.  Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize when I was in elementary school, and she was poet laureate by the time I was in high school.  I imagine I don't have to tell you what seeing her face on posters in the schools and libraries where I was reared meant to my sense of possibility for living my life as a poet whose work actually reaches people.  

The author of several books of poetry, a
novel, and a book of essays, Dove is also a playwright and librettist.  She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  When I was told that I’d have the chance to blog here this week, I had just finished reading her introduction to The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry. I immediately asked her if she would answer a few questions I’ve always had about her life, her poetry, and her work as an editor that I could share with this week's readers.  Gracious as ever, she agreed.  In memory of Sterling Brown, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath, poets without whom I could not exist, here is my conversation with Rita Dove:

Happy birthday, Frank

 

Sextus Propertius: A Bio Note [by Jack Hanley]

Sextus Propertius was the greatest of the elegiac poets of Rome. He was born of an affluent Umbrian family at or near Assisi and lived from about 50 BC to 16 BC. We learn from Ovid that Propertius was his senior and also his friend and companion, and that he was third in the sequence of elegiac poets, following Gallus (born 69 BC) and immediately preceding Ovid himself (born 43 BC). The known poems of Propertius consist of four books comprising 4046 lines. Cynthia, the first book, was published around 25 BC. He was the most psychologically astute of the Roman poets, a deeply introspective man who mastered a language of selfhood.

-- Jack Hanley

Mad Men versus the "TC" Critics

Why did it irk me so much, the high-handed dismissal of Mad Men by Jenny Diski in the January issue of Harper's? I am a fan of the series, true, but I don't expect everyone to agree with me. No, it was the smug, knowing voice that got my goat -- that, and the substitution of bias for reasoning. Consider:

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The style of the Sixties in Mad Men is so relentless and polished in every detail that it actually deals a death blow to authenticity. It is caricature, not authenticity, and although that, in a David Lynch sort of way, can be thrilling and effective if you subvert the style to darker devices, Man Men isn't sure whether it wants to be pastiche or historical realism. It wants it both ways, and for me, it is this indecision, which feels muddy and expedient as opposed to subtle or sly, that is Mad Men's self-sabotage.
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This is double-think -- as the "actually" in the first sentence concedes. Notice that approval is withheld not only because of too much accuracy but because Mad Men does not "subvert" and is not "dark" enough. These are code words. Again Diski's rhetoric gives her away. Reread the passage and ask yourself what David Lynch is doing there. How does exactness of detail compromise authenticity? And what does it mean to say that some alleged trait of the series "feels muddy and expedient"? Only two words in the passage stand up to the skeptical reader's close gaze: "for me."

But perhaps one shouldn't be surprised by the resentment that the popular success of a culturally ambitious television series will arouse among theoretically-correct (TC) critics. Jenny Diski, the author of a bad-girl-in-the-1960s memoir, exemplifies here what Susan Sontag called the perils of "interpretation." It is, in Sontag's words, "not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius" but also "the revenge of the intellect upon art" and "upon the world."  -- DL.

Ruth Stone's 1st Interview, Lucille Clifton's Last: A Conversation with Jericho Brown & Chard deNiord

I have seven days of surprises for you.  The theme of this week is gratitude, and I am most grateful for people like Chard diNiord who has edited a book on the history of post-World War II poetry in America titled, Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs (Marick, 2011).  This book of interviews with seven senior American poets--Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Jack Gilbert, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, and Ruth Stone--and essays on Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell’s correspondence, James Wright’s poem "To the Muse," and Philip Levine’s poems "The Simple Truth" and "Call it Music," presents a view of the bold and original epoch in contemporary American poetry after 1945. In their wise and always engaging responses and commentaries, deNiord's subjects reflect candidly on their careers and the unprecedented big tent of American poetry today.

Chard is the author of four books of poetry, most recently including The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).  His poems, interviews, and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best of The Pushcart Prize, Ploughshares, Salmagundi, and of course, The Best American Poetry. He is the co-founder of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry and an associate professor of English at Providence College.  

Beacause I so desperately want to spend this week giving my own view of the recent past, present, and future of some of what's "best" in American poetry, I sent Chard a few questions I had after reading these interviews and essays.  In memory of Lucille Clifton and Ruth Stone, here are those questions, and here is how he so graciously responded:

Jericho Brown, Guest Blogger December 11 -18

This week we welcome Jericho Brown as our guest blogger.  Jericho worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including, The American Poetry Review, The Believer, jubilat, Oxford American, Ploughshares, A Public Space, and 100 Best African American Poems.  His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award. Find out more about Jericho here.

Welcome, Jericho. 

-- sdh

"On Translating Sextus Propertius (XII)" (by Phoebe Zinman)

Cyndi, we love the taste of you scrambled on our tongues, and Rome holds us less fondly when you are gone. No matter that we do not know the sordid details of Sextus Propertius’ love affair with you. We, too, have been abandoned to a world transformed by first loves, beginning and ending in declarative perpetua.

Prometheus, chained to the mountain, stopped struggling against the vultures and thought of the red dots of fire that would mimic the night sky, much as we pause in our grieving for love lost to think of all the poems we will write. 

-- Phoebe Zinman

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENTHUSIASM PART 7 by Brian Bouldrey

7 All Right, That’s Enough

When I was a kid, one of the albums in my parents’ record collection was Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”.  I would sit listen to it and stare at that cover, the lovely lady Redi-Whipped into a strumpet parfait (incidentally, that was shaving cream on her, mostly, which is something to remember as an artist when you are trying to be “realistic”—artistic truth is made of something other than).  My mother must have had an egg timer set in the kitchen, because while I was allowed to look at that album, there were limits.  In she’d come and say quietly, “All right, Brian.  That’s enough.” Still, she was the first to teach me to take time to dream.

The carvings on the porches of a Gothic cathedral are more than dream, more than decoration, but an education. Most people couldn’t read back then, so the images in churches were the guides for storytelling. Most of the friezes and frescos on the cathedral fronts and in the retablos behind the priest were strictly biblical, but cathedrals were made big for some other storytelling, too. The stuff way up there, not front and center, may not be given top priority, but it is, without a doubt, part of the secret history of art, faith, and the world.

 So far as the early Fathers of the church were concerned, there is no doubt as to the purpose in authorizing wall pictures. St. Basil, in 379, said in a sermon, “Rise up now, I pray you, you famous painters of the good deeds of the army. Make glorious by your art with colors loud or by your cunning, make illustrious the crowned martyr, by me too feebly painted.”  Cunning!

And Ruskin, fifteen hundred years later, said, “Gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.”

Poor Ruskin. The socialists wouldn’t have him because he was such a religious ninny. The conservatives won’t have him because he’s such a socialist do-gooder. No wonder he longed for inclusion and unity. And any time somebody takes him out of context, he sounds self-righteous, contrived, or dead wrong. It’s hard to grab an isolated quote from Ruskin and not make him sound like a nutjob.

He brought a lot of this on himself. He would work so hard defending the indefensible: Goths, leafless trees, frosty fortitude, imperfection, pre-industrial ecology, and just when he wins you over, just when you think you might join him in his lonely crusade to do some crazy thing like glorify the dark ages or stop air pollution, he’d turn on you. He’d bite the hand that fed him. Ruskin would get the girl, and then he’d have the wedding annulled.  He was a game-board thrower.

He loved the grotesque to a certain point, and to the uncareful mind, it’s hard to see where that point was.   He found his limits exemplified in an image on the church of Santa Maria della Formosa. Over the entrance, its mocking demon face, clearly falling-down drunk and sticking its tongue out.   “Wassuupp!”  he seems to be saying.  One eye is swollen and the other is bleary.  This face marks the difference between lightness and play in art and the pursuit of endless pleasure.  The beast over the entrance of Santa Maria is nothing but mocking, nothing but mere irony—he is too cool for any school:  ”The expression of low sarcasm,” writes Ruskin, “is, I believe, the most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall.”   It has taken me years to understand why this image is “too much”, in my age of wretched excess.  But at a certain point, everybody becomes their mother  “All right,” I agree, “that’s enough.”

And that’s enough out of me, I’m sure you’ll agree.  I am honored to have yammered in my enthusiastic and grotesque way.  I will leave you with an experience and a poem by poet  Josh Weiner, a man of great enthusiasms (some day I’ll tell you all about the weird pixie sticks incident). He was asked to find a work of art in the Baltimore Museum of Art and write a poem about it.  He passed by the Velazquez and the Tiepolo and found instead a “Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish”.  “Enthusiasm for the grotesque is exactly what prompted my writing of the poem--the sculpture is pretty grotesque, in a highly charismatic fashion; it also hit me like an open signifier, which was a space I could enter and play in.”  Here is the poem he wrote.  In the words of Dick Cheney, “YOU’RE WELCOME.”  BTdubs, if you put the phrase, “, Mr. Bond” after everything Cheney says, it’s funnier.  Try it!  Okay, I’m done.  Shutting up.  Peace out.  Here’s Josh Weiner's gloriously enthusiastic grotesque poem.

 “The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish”

is not a man being swallowed by a fish
with eyes like eight point throwing stars
it's a man being swallowed by a war
a man being taken into the mouth of a woman
or being swallowed by his work

 it's a man traveling far inside a book
a man being swallowed up in smoke
he swallows the smoke, that blends around him like a thought
it's a man being swallowed by a sound
he shapes it so he lives inside a song

of a man being swallowed by his kin, his skin
a man being swallowed by the State
(Leviathan in 1948)
it's a man being swallowed by another man
literally, eaten as a pathway to god

it's a man being swallowed by a sight
he cannot reach, cannot touch, cannot trace

 it's a man who won't recognize his face
who can't fit the parts, or find the place

 it's a man in triumph over death
who laughs and beats the dust from his clothes
a man tasting dust inside the laugh

it's a man who listens to the clock
a man with nothing to exchange
a rude man, his twin he leaves behind
it's a man who wants to be a bride

a man being swallowed by his fault
with something old to show and new to hide

it's a man who tries to haul the rope
a man who stooping can’t provide
a man who can’t forget his name

it's a man who doesn’t know his worth
it's a man being swallowed by his wrath

his youth, yield, luck, the law, his fear, the fog, his fame

it's a man being swallowed by a coat
his father’s coat, he smells of the fit
a man being swallowed by his vows
it's a man softly squeezing for the vein
he never finds it, he’s minding the road

it's a man being swallowed by a room
in which he finds a man being swallowed by a fish
it's a man who thinks what’s in a man
who exits into night at closing time
the figure of a man being swallowed by a fish.

    -Joshua Weiner

Homage to Sextus Propertius -- P. J. Moriarty's Version

My desire does not cease. Its finger, obsessed,
     Accuses the noble face, like fierce Rome, of death.
And here I am, divided by what I might say,
     All Beginning, Finality, descends to Heart;
Never does devout constitution sustain love.
     Cynthia, never less, your pour-over in song like milk.
World grants us: we will not be quietly softened
     Nor will our likeness be possessed by a simple phrase.
Tendered we must know: Will we not break apart? A mystery
     Crushed poor Prometheus into a grain of sand?
I will not ease, I become flame: drawn, life ruins its path.
     Though many may tame its raging love.
None but the first long breath of a soul swells
     So immensely that it forms it own gravity.
So I make a portrait of its withering grace.
     As though no one has ever aspired to lament their Love:
So affirmed is the despondency held in the portrait’s heat,
     Its severity and nature cannot be recalled.
Yourself: a small picture of a world at its own end:
     Cynthia from the very beginning, Cynthia at the end.

-- P. J. Moriarty

 

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENTHUSIASM PART 6 by Brian Bouldrey

6.  What Mozart and Mike Tyson Have in Common

Everybody loves the play “Amadeus”, but I don’t.  First of all, the story of Antonio Salieri recognizing the genius of Mozart, and being the only one to do so in a world full of mooks who wouldn’t know genius if it hit them with too many notes, and deciding to spend a lifetime to destroy true genius—that’s not only historically untrue, as far as earth history is concerned, it’s not even emotionally or epistemologically true, as far as earth humanity understands it. Ruskin and I love the grotesque in art, but you can go too far with grotesque, and that's for my final installment tomorrow, but for now, all's I'll say is that "Amadeus" is, for me, the dramatic equivalent of this thing Ruskin goes batshit crazy about:

I am fairly good at perceiving talent or even genius in a protégée, one of those superserious students I described in my last posting. Some of them have overtaken me.  When they do, I experience, of course, what I like to call “The Nausea”, the overwhelming desire to congratulate and vomit on a friend who just got a prize or publication.  But the need to hurl quickly subsides, replaced by an inner need to “get the hell to work” and an outer need to do everything I can to spread the word about that genius.  I think this is also enthusiasm.

I also think the author of Amadeus mis-assesses Mozart as somebody incapable of growth, or growing up.  You can hear self-discovery in every Kochel number, and dramatically in his operas, which are, like Kitty Kelly biographies and baby animal videos on YouTube, idiotic and riveting.  Take the ridiculous plot of Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte”: two guys try to prove their girlfriend is truer than the other’s by pretending to go to war and returning in the disguise of two foreigners out to woo one another’s girls.  But the goof pretense of “going to war” doesn’t sit well with the girls: war is serious business, and their boys will probably die.  Mozart, himself a dopey guy, almost runs headlong into his own satire, and only through the creation of a light, goofy, playful conceit, does he come to darkness, to seriousness, to some of the saddest music and feeling I’ve found in art, arrived at through a stupid plot point.  I used to think this scene, and the farcical final garden pardon of the Contessa at the end of Marriage of Figaro, were unearned emotional moments; I now think these are places that show that fools rush in in order to become wiser men.

Click here to watch sad girlfriends say goodbye to stupid boyfriends.

How can we observe beauty, then choose, as those Italians do in Mozart’s operas and Forster’s novels, to pass it by? Hazlitt described the quality of Titian’s painting in his essay “On Gusto” (“gusto” being the 19^th century word for “enthusiasm”), “Not only do Titian’s heads seem to think—his bodies seem to feel.”  Says Marianne Moore, on the subject, “Gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves.  Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”

Now consider the boxer.  I know, I know: ick.  Blood, sweat, tears, shiny shorts.  But a boxer always says he’s going to win.  Mike Tyson said, “I try to catch my opponent on the tip of his nose because I try to punch the bone into his brain.” Oh, Michael.  It’s Christmas time, and that was just a beautiful Christmas story you just told the children.

But this kind of swagger is saddled with an odd-duck humility.  Because boxers speak of losing as if they aren’t losses.  The very best boxers only win about half their fights.  Winning doesn’t seem to be the point, really.  Since there’s little money to be won in amateur boxing (and amateur boxing is most boxing), the difference between winning and losing is pretty much the difference between eight bruises and nine.  Success and failure aren’t terribly different.  Boxing seems to be an effort to redeem failure—and therefore pain.  After all, you can still learn a lot by doing a geometry proof incorrectly.  They shouldn’t call that sport “boxing”.  They should call that sport, “aporia”.  Or “writing poetry”. 

Failure in success, success in failure: Here’s a line from a capsule review in the New Yorker, regarding “Little Miss Sunshine”, written by David Denby: “A charming…family comedy about a winner-take-society—America—that is driving its citizens crazy.” That movie is a satire.  Satire, an aspect of the discursive mode,  is one of the many modes I am afraid poets have walked away from over the centuries, abandoned to fiction in that terrible revolution (and subsequently abandoned to nonfiction, and they aren’t taking very good care of it either), and poetry needs to reclaim them, because how can the sparkly lyrical poems and the grand epics survive without the binding grasses of enthusiastic love for daily life. Where are the poems that resemble the crazy crap going on in the old church capitals? 

Learning to celebrate the ordinary—in myself, in my work—is a task perhaps hardest, because who doesn’t want to be extraordinary?  But the common species of flora and fauna are the most pervasive, and finding ways to see daily life as the incredible thing it is, that is the most important task, too.  Marianne Moore, I think, says so in her essays, in her liner notes to boxer Muhammed Ali’s spoken word album, and here:

      "....Your dress, a magnificent square
cathedral tower of uniform
    and at the same time diverse appearance—a
species of vertical vineyard, rustling in the storm
    of conventional opinion—are they weapons or scalpels?
        Whetted to brilliance

by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is superior to opportunity,
these things are rich instruments with which to experiment.
    But why dissect destiny with instruments
    more highly specialized than the components of destiny
       itself?"

           -Marianne Moore, from "Those Various Scalpels"

Homage to Sextus Propertius -- Erin Burke's Version

Those who desire without fingering
are of the noble, conscientious Romans, right?
So many unlike divisions – it is
the huge Hypanis Veneto who says to Eridano –
I cannot consider love alone ample nutrition.
Cynthia, the beauty, in her distance.
Give her until the end, and she takes 
always the shortest step away from it.
With her own eyes, does she not see me?
The total of the ego infinite in its mutant longing
when you extinguish all for love’s temper. 
There is never a long solution to the aching nocturne,
callous in its grave.
Try, you can review the present as a wet flower
and nothing more than the arms of love:
all elements translate to and serve her
blind in their resistance:
Cynthia to be first, Cynthia to be last.

--- Erin Burke

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENTHUSIASM PART 5 by Brian Bouldrey

5. This Posting is Ruskin-Free

Here is a story from my life as a teacher at a university with very serious students. Since I've gotten everybody into a churchy mood, I will step into the posting pulpit.

Enthusiasms 5:1-8
And it came to pass in those days that one of my disciples, one of those of the occident, dispatched unto me an email begging dispensation, saying, “I’m, like, chairing the dance marathon? And one of our big sponsors?  They can only do lunch today? And I need to leave class early?” And you may ask, was this a request or a demand cast as injunction, for what, truly, was the question?  And I spake upon him, “Sure. Just leave the class quietly so you don’t disturb the other students.”

No matter; my sermons fall upon the matriculators of a certain university, who comport themselves in the robes of ambition and of Abercrombie and of Fitch, and they, perhaps, in exceeding unseasonable maturity, do do lunch (verily, I do say do-do). For this maturity I am most grateful, and there is much feasting in celebration.

And it came to pass that ON THAT SAME DAY a second acolyte, this from the orient, bowed unto me and spake, “Will you release me from mine obligations a tad early so that I might attend to my duties regulating the adoption of Chinese orphans, for a major donor from the great city to the south (Chicago, that intertwining serpent that devoured Gog and Magog) has bid take me to see the newborn babes?” And I asked unto him, “Dost thou mean orphan, frequently, or orphan, a child without parent,” and the student, being not of the occident and unfamiliar with the indulgences of Gilbert and of Sullivan, put ear close to his master and asked, most sincerely and without irony, “What?”

And lo, THAT SELFSAME DAY, when the flock suffered to be assembled around their devoted teacher, when she of the occident and he of the orient gathered their quills and the syllabi of edicts, it came to pass that a third student, neither of the occident nor of the orient but of the savage southern lands whose designation is barbaric, for the flag of his city state is crimson and not the Pantone 292 of our cloudless sky and state (and yet I forbade the lefties to mock the Samaritan, since only he had paid his tithe of shekels and camels in full), claimed to all at the table that he, too, was engaged on a mission of great mercy, which involved the fates of every member of the association of students as yet to matriculate into the schools of law, congregating as a society with such shared hopes, and if this red-state disciple did not depart, yea, with the student of the orient and she of the occident, these legal larva might spend the rest of their lives attending to the composition of poetry or dwelling in a similar Cimmerian pit of despair, and did not Aristotle cast the poets from the republicans?

And verily I say unto you, my brow did knit and my tongue did become tied and there were other manifestations of darning with faint praise, until, apace, I recovered, but spake without circumspection,

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I CERTAINLY HOPE THAT YOU’RE TAKING TIME FROM ALL YOUR BUSY SCHEDULES SO THAT YOU CAN DREAM.”

Then came a moment as THE LORD darkened the room with cloud as he had at Golgotha, and a stillness, that is, one that precedes war and other chaos, a silence that is experienced by,  perhaps, the thespians Abbott and Costello as they backed into one another in the mansion afflicted by spirits, and of the Mummy and of Dracula and of Frankenstein’s monster and by all the creatures of the disturbed dreaming imagination and did not realize they were backing into one another; verily, the stillness that proceeds a Harlem Globetrotter having thrown a bucket laden not with water but with confetti, or that proceeds the deployment of the whoopee cushion. 

This is as exhausting for me to cast in King James Bible prose as it is for you to read it, so I’m going to make my point here, because it needs to be entered into this business of enthusiasm here, after I have introduced the notions of enthusiasm, grotesqueness, and the necessity for play as well as seriousness in our work.  

Because what happened after I admonished my overachieving undergrads to dream, something nobody had ever expected them to do, let alone their professor, was that there was the roaring and whooping.  I might as well have told them to remove a limb.  They didn’t know what to do with it.  So, in typical overachieving fashion, they took a picture of me, photoshopped faun horns on my head, with a unicorn and a rainbow and my equally careful/free colleague John Keene at the end of the rainbow, and below all of this pie in the sky, my immortal words “Take Time to Dream!” 

I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

Robert Creeley