The Best American Poetry

Obscure poetry in the age of Google [by Jordan Davis]

For “obscure poetry” read “dignity.” Read “personal information.”

Say exactly what you mean, tell it exactly as it happened. You don’t have to hedge on specifics out of fear the reader won’t know what you’re talking about. Whatever provoked the poem, whatever cliff face you clung to in the night after your saint’s day, name it. Any strange name will be found, now. Here, have some Kaiserschmarrn.

That time you fell asleep on the subway. Days in Zuccotti Park. The spectacular breakup and the aftershocks, the friends egging each of them on. Or just the overdue fines on Irony, Contingency and Solidarity, the Grundrisse, The Anarchist Cookbook.

Every effort at totalizing human knowledge ends with the capture and destruction of that library. And then again, maybe not -- the encyclopedia led not to the fall of French enlightenment but to its apotheosis -- the Revolution.

The kingdom will be yours, but first you will need to tell us your story, all of it, especially the parts no one must know. Those are the most important parts, and they alone will assure you the kingdom.

Dick Cheney led the Vice Presidential search committee.

I remember the first time I used Google how clean the page was, no ads, no banners, no headlines. Just, “I’m feeling lucky.” Spoken like an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.

Anthology of the Drive [by Jordan Davis]

Eighty is a mild road. There are a few scraped hills that verge on picturesque, there are cooling towers, there are valleys strewn with silage and barns. The speed traps all telegraph themselves a mile away except for that one hummock outside Buckhorn.

Tree-covered ridges look nice in sun, clouds, mud, best of all after an ice storm, of which I think there must have been one a week all winter last year. But the monotony! The changes -- in elevation, in landscape, in the local papers -- are so gradual they don't take any effort. The highway food doesn't do much for me, other than the Wawa at the 476 interchange.

The Sapp Bros coffee pot, the Gio BBQ billboard, the bizarrely crusted steak on the Iron Skillet sign somewhere between Grove City and Clarion...

Gabe Gudding writes about this road, or rather ON this road, in Rhode Island Notebook. (In it, he claims to have mailed me a dead fly. Never got to me, Gabe -- send it again.) He praises the Shenango, a nubbly little thing but it marks the transition from Ohio to Pennsylvania, and it’s as far from his starting point as my destination is from mine. At the Shenango River sign, he’s almost half way.

Last November I had the bright idea that a decent meal might be had in State College. I wound around past the prison, the football temple, the center with my name on it, and wound up on the main drag, Beaver Street, around dinner. Success: the Green Bowl serves Mongolian style buffet stir fry, fresh vegetables and a little protein, tasty and reasonable, students, faculty and families crowded in and cheerful about it. I thought, what a good vibe hurray, and made the second half of the trip without snack pain or cramps from Arby's. Made a note to get to know the town better.

More Mountain Talk [by Ian Brown]

More Mountain Talk

I.

Waking up
one morning, Sunrise
said, ‘Mountain,
must you always be
there sitting alone?
Oh how I am
tired of wasting
away my light on
your familiar angles
and dirt inclination.
Do you not have anywhere
else to be
but here?  Forlorn
my shadows are sick
of you.  They do not
desire anymore
ascension, but rather,
an open field to run
in and stretch.  So,
Mountain, I say to you,
leave this place,
if you can, I do not
appreciate you-
r bigness anymore.’

II.

Sunrise, I am
sorry
that you feel
the ways
that you feel.
Yes, I am big,
because I was born
big.  Maybe
it is hard
for you to see,
but Sunrise,
you must know,
that there is
nothing that exists
as big as
you.

-- Ian Brown

 

Jordan Davis, Guest Blogger February 19-25

photo (c) Brian Johansen

This week we welcome Jordan Davis as our guest blogger.  Jordan is poetry editor of The Nation. His chapbook, POD | Poems on Demand, was published this fall by Greying Ghost. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and his prose in Chicago Review, Boston Review, Slate and the Times Literary Supplement.

Jordan will be reading or participating in the following events:

Thursday, March 1 - 9 a.m - AWP: The Constant Critic Anniversary Panel: Poetry Reviewing in the 21st Century in Continental A, Hilton Chicago, Lobby Level
Monday, March 26: Tribute to Kenneth Koch reading at Pace University, NYC campus (room/time tba)
Sunday, May 20 - 3 pm Reading at In Your Ear, DC Arts Center, 2438 18 St NW, Washington DC

Welcome, Jordan.

-- sdh

Goodbye WS; Hello to you in this dark evening season [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’m sure lots of people reading this blog know we lost a staggeringly great poet, Wisława Szymborska, a few weeks ago. It was Feb 1; she was 88. I can’t help giving us this one of her poems right now.

Museum

Here are plates with no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.

Here’s a fan–where is the maiden’s blush?
Here are swords–where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.

Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his mustache on Exhibit Number…

Eight. Metals, clay and feathers celebrate
their silent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper’s silly hairpin giggles.

The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot.

As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!

Well at 88 she outlasted a lot of dresses. Still, it sucks. No more of those poems.  I had always hoped to meet her. One thing I always Iove about her, evident here, is how much it pissed her off that the world didn't hold meaning in a visible way: how battlegrounds for instance went back to parks, a shudder shared by many but also more subtle situations too, like how you might have been at a railway station one day, even though you weren't, and how odd that it happened anyway, the meetings, the thefts, even without you. "A suitcase disappeared, not mine."

As for me friends, life continues to present itself as a war, a hot war against bleak feelings. Is this feeling thing that is me a biological thing or a thing amid the world with a usage quite askew? I may now know a thing or two about the answers to my offset typesetting, but I also have to dine on a good deal of doubt. What I can see is that life requires a dire pressing forward without leaving a sufficiently convincing trail of flower petals to find one's way back to the beginning.

Instead it's all beginning and all middle, all the time, and you just have to keep rowing even when the scenery changes on one side and stays precisely the same on the other, and other magic tricks of reality. Maybe that's a kind of growing, you're on a riverboat and after some point the inner coast of the river is always the same few houses and yards, while the outer coast starts blurring by peopled with odd beings carrying small electronics. You don't age like leaves falling onto a pile of snow, you age like snow melting off a pile of leaves, you arrive rising up from underneath. 

It's the dark side of the year my bleaders, mid february and dark and rainy with a little spritz of spring here and there. As is my habit, I'm speaking now to those of you fighting the darkness like a war, at all costs, this is the season to fight this thing, the darkness of life, life's rotten disjointment. I'm a believer in stories and stories get into your fiber about what you should be doing and how much it takes to feel alright, and I'm a believer in changing your fiber to fit a better story. It just takes a lot longer than your average hot war. It takes gallons of therapy, of one sort or another. And these gallons are gallions and this war is a land air and water war, and we have to fight for a story that makes it alright. We have to fight our own fiber.

Get some Szymborska, let her rock you from the beyond. Plus, you know, keep up the fight with your dress! Seriously. We need you. I need you, on my side. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Hold Steady [by Michael Robbins]

When I was a wee bairn in the seventies, a mass-market paperback called The Poetry of Rock was often to be found among the macramé and marijuana seeds. This anthology was a weird little bible to me, its concordances the records that were always lying around with their mystically resonant titles—Aja, Slider, Sticky Fingers, Dixie Chicken—and glorious gatefolds. I’d pore over lyric sheets the way Harold Bloom claims he immersed himself as a child in Blake and Hart Crane. My earliest act of literary exegesis was attempted when I was eight or so, as I listened again and again to a secondhand eight-track cassette of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, trying to understand what it could mean to know “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”

Paul Muldoon writes of Leonard Cohen, “his songs have meant far more to me / than most of the so-called ‘poems’ I’ve read.” The list of artists of whom I could say this seems long until I remember why “most” of the “poems” I read are “so-called.” Popular music—rock and roll at first, soon followed by pop, country, jazz, disco, R&B, the blues, soul, hip-hop, metal—has been for me less a passion or obsession than what Kenneth Burke said poetry was: equipment for living. I remember listening to “Tumbling Dice” as a teenager and wondering whether even the Stones themselves understood what perfection they had achieved. I didn’t get people who simply put music on in the background as they talked or read or ate. You had to, yes, immerse yourself in it, like a religious mystery. In college, before I quit drinking, I rarely got laid, in part (only in part) because the end of the night would inevitably find me pressed against a stereo or jukebox, trying to filter out the sounds of a party or bar so I could concentrate on the Ramones. It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. Rock and roll is, among other things, our profoundest celebration of the ridiculous.

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Rodger Moody of Silverfish Review Press

NA:   Silverfish Review Press has been a press since 1978.  Have you always been the editor?  How has the press evolved since then? 

RM:  I’m the founding editor. Silverfish began as a literary magazine publishing three issues a year. One of the issues was a poetry chapbook. The magazine published, poetry, prose poetry, short fiction, translations, and interviews. The last issue was released in 1997. Around 1996 Silverfish began to shift its focus to full-length poetry titles.

NA:    What inspired you to become an editor of a press?

RM:  When I was a graduate student at the University of Oregon (1976 - 1978) I had a work-study job at Northwest Review. My job was to pick up the daily mail, log in the submissions and distribute them to the poetry and fiction staff. I had the opportunity to eavesdrop on staff meetings and conversations between the editors. When I was about to graduate it occurred to me that starting a literary magazine would be a way to keep in touch with the writing community. I thoroughly enjoyed graduate school and was concerned about being swallowed whole by working just to pay the rent. What I really wanted to do was to learn the ins and outs of book publishing.

NA:  How many books do you publish each year?  How does one become a Silverfish poet?

RM:  The press releases two titles a year, three if the financial support is available. Silverfish sponsors the annual Gerald Cable Book Award for a poet who has yet to publish a full-length collection and there is a second series which is generally by invitation only though Silverfish will read unsolicited manuscripts.

 NA:  You began as a chapbook press and then began doing full-length books.  Do you still publish chapbooks?

RM:  Silverfish no longer published chapbooks. I love everything about the chapbook format. I’ve hand sewn a few which is a fun learning experience. I’ve also had a few printed with spines. Selecting endpapers is challenging, and fun. But because the format is physically small, bookstore owners are reluctant to stock chapbooks. They simply get lost on the shelves. I’m also enamored of the pamphlet format.
   
NA:   A lot of presses are funded by universities, but Silverfish is an independent press.  How do you stay afloat, especially in economic times like these?

RM:  Over the years I’ve learned how to network with our distributor --Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. Silverfish is a nonprofit c 3 501 tax exempt literary organization. And though fund-raising is more difficult than I had anticipated, Silverfish has been fortunate to have had generous patrons and a few donors who give small, annual donations, some year after year. Author readings and reviews help get the word out about new and backlist titles. It also helps that Garrison Keillor has read several poems by Silverfish poets on The Writer’s Almanac and that reviews have appeared in publications such as Library Journal, Booklist, and The New York Times Book Review. And the press has been fortunate to consistently receive grant support.

On A. R. Ammons's Birthday: Two Poems in his manner by Atoosa Grey

Merging

From behind the creek’s
left eye
I said
what is that noise
crackling

The creek replied 
That is the sound
of my lips
clapping

I splashed
my leafy hands
in the water
to stir laughter into
the creek’s voice 

Twin

I chased the Sun to tell it there was a hole in it

But that starless Hole pointed to a shadow in me that held the Sun captive.

-- Atoosa Grey

Editor's Note: We will be posting poems inspired by Ammons all this week.

Real Life Poetry Top Five [by Michael Robbins]

(1) John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead. Years go by, perfectly good records are released that you like and listen to a lot, then something like Supreme Clientele or Arular comes along, and you realize everyone else has been treading water. Game changed. That's what this collection of essays feels like. Not since DFW has anyone even approached this level of the form. It's my favorite record of the last ten years or so. If I weren't a lazy bastard, I'd buy a bunch of copies and hand them out on street corners like Lee Harvey freeing Cuba. Read Sullivan's best essay, on the Christian rockfest Creation, here.

(2) The Daily, culture section. I don't think anyone reads The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only newspaper. Making almost none of your content available on the internet, not even behind a paywall, is an interesting business strategy. And I wish Rupert Murdoch spectacular failure in everything he is and does. But for some reason—well, because someone was savvy enough to hire Sasha Frere-Jones as the culture editor—The Daily contains some of the best writing on music and culture-type stuff around. Read Zach Baron's HST retrace "Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas" and tell me it doesn't deserve a Pulitzer. Or a Grammy.

(3) @TriciaLockwood. Tricia is a dear friend, but even if she were evil like @rupertmurdoch I would have to admit that she is the funniest person on earth. She is the funniest person on earth, people. Big blue ball? You live on it? Get with the program. Here is an article about her famous, famous tweets, and here are a couple of her poems. Tricia's first book of poems, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, will be published by Octopus in the summer and I suggest you start camping out in front of Walmart now.

Fuck Them [by Michael Robbins]

Most of the poets I know are atheists. Hell, most of the people I know are atheists. Given that only 1.6 percent of Americans self-identify as "atheists," I conclude that I live in a bubble, like most hypereducated aesthetes on the liberal-left end of the political spectrum (I realize that's redundant). To their credit, most of the atheists I know don't consider themselves to be super-special people who should get together and crow about how much smarter they are than all the dimwits who fall for old fairytales about their big daddy in the sky, which is what Daniel Dennett would have them do (consider the self-triumphalism of the ReasonFest conference).

I have nothing at all against either a philosophically-informed atheism or a casual atheism that arises from a simple lack of religious temperament. There is little that annoys me as much as that smug atheism whose adherents refer to themselves as "freethinkers" or "brights." I have met a lot of these people, and not one—not a single one—has ever had the slightest idea what he was talking about.

Perhaps my anecdotal experience is misleading. Perhaps there are scores of self-described freethinkers who know the history of the concept of reason, who have read Aquinas and Kierkegaard and Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth, who can refute the countless historical errors and category mistakes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins as handily as David Hart and Mark Johnston can. But if there are, they're keeping a low profile. And I'm confused about why they would associate themselves with an intellectually bankrupt movement (Johnston rightly calls them "undergraduate atheists"). Because there is an honorable atheism, a school of real thought to which atheists can lay claim. Hart puts the point this way:

The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison.

Nietzsche would laugh at the idea that the human animal could free itself from delusion by seeking an ontological foundation in the natural sciences. Because the idea is laughable.

Eye on I

Television host Johnny Carson once challenged a guest to speak for five minutes without using "I."  He and his guest sat in silence for what seemed like a long time (since it was TV, it was probably not more than 30 seconds) and then burst out laughing.

During a lecture many years ago, Donald Hall advised his students to look down a page of their prose and rewrite any paragraph that began with "I."

The other night during the KGB bar reading, Star Black told her audience that she banned "I" from her work for five years.

Later, while introducing Mark Ford, David Lehman shared that while working for Newsweek, he wrote something like 125 articles without using "I."

For starters, let's all take the Johnny Carson challenge and see what happens. 

-- sdh

A Conversation with Anthony Madrid [by Michael Robbins]

I first heard of Anthony Madrid when we were on the same "local poets" bill at the University of Chicago in May of 2009. I read before he did. When I got to a line that riffs on Roethke, I noticed a tall goofy-looking guy in his late thirties or early forties nodding with recognition and pleasure. A few poets later, that goofy-looking guy stood up and read some poems that shook my confidence but good. I emailed him the next day, he wrote back immediately, and thus began one of the most important friendships of my life.

After a few disastrous title misfires, Anthony's book I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say will be published by Canarium Books this summer. It's the book of your dreams, if you know how to dream.

Here's "Rhymes," the poem that made me want to go back in time and publish it under my own name before he could write it. Our interview begins after the jump.

 

THE door is rusted; the wall is clean. Red, yellow, orange, green.
Many a maiden has come between | a gentleman and his luck.

Red, yellow, orange, red. Never you mind what the minister said.
You live, you die, and then you’re dead—so go ahead and be evil.

The smallest cage in the human zoo. Red, yellow, orange, blue.
Ready or not, it’s time we do | away with all this uplift.

So, purple-orange, black and white. Oh say can you see by the traffic light?
Your kid can try with all his might, he’ll never do long division.

The 400 Blows was about a kid. Red, yellow, orange, red.
It could have been me and yet instead | they set the controls for tragic.

Oh orange, orange, yellow, black. A passionate fuck to patch the crack.

A narrative designed to attract | children and other retards.

 

Regarding yours of March 18: yellow, yellow, orange, green.
Most of these citizens aren’t really mean, just reckless with people’s feelings.

Oh green, green, que te quiere green. God got giddy on Halloween.
Jebus, the Jolly Ghost, and He | put a razor blade in the apple. Now,

You’re on your own and off your meds. Greens and yellows, blues and reds.
It’s only with certain groups of friends | you dare undermine the uplift.

So, purple-orange, yellow-blue. Polly, gimme your answer true.
I order demand and require that you | tear it, little parrot.

So, let’s hear it all for the cash machine. Purple-orange, yellow, green.
Dirty Bomb and Laser Beam | are here to collect the rent.

Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding by Beth Ann Fennelly

You ask me for a poem about love
in place of a wedding present, trying to save me
money. For three nights I've lain
under the glow-in-the-dark-stars I've stuck to the ceiling
over my bed. I've listened to the songs
of the galaxy. Well, Carmen, I would rather
give you your third set of steak knives
than tell you what I know. Let me find you
some other, store-bought present. Don't
make me warn you of stars, how they see us
from that distance as miniature and breakable
from the bride who tops the wedding cake
to the Mary on Pinto dashboards
holding her ripe, red heart in her hands.

from Open House: Poems by Beth Ann Fennelly
chosen by Adrienne Rich for The Best American Poetry 1996

Michael Robbins, Guest Blogger February 12-18

This week we welcome Michael Robbins as our guest blogger.  Michael’s first book of poems, Alien vs. Predator, will be published by Penguin in March 2012. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He reviews books regularly for the London Review of Books, Poetry, The New York Observer, and several other publications  . Michael received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago.  Read Robert P. Baird's interview with Michael here.

And you can hear Michael read his own poems at one of these upcoming readings:

3/1: AWP Off-site Event, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, Chicago, 7-10 pm
3/2: Stop Smiling storefront, 1371 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, time TBA
4/4: Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby St, New York (with Sasha Frere-Jones, Kristin Hersh, Sara Marcus, and Choire Sicha), time TBA
4/6: Pete's Candy Store, 709 Lorimer Street,  Brooklyn NY, 7:00 pm

Welcome, Michael.

-- sdh

The Dogs are Howling, Allen (by Laura Orem)

An Italian greyhound being "stacked" prior to a going-over by the judge.

The 136rd Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is going on right now at Madison Square Garden. Purebred dogs of all shapes and sizes compete to be judged "Best in Show" and have their names engraved on the big trophy. It may seem confusing - how do you compare a chihuahua and a Great Dane? - but the dogs aren't really judged against each other. They are measured by their breed standard, compiled by the breed's parent club, which describes the ideal specimen of that dog.   The closer a particular dog gets to perfection, the higher the chance of being chosen "Best in Show."  But there are also those indefinable characteristics of personality and sparkle, that make the judging so exciting. It isn't always about the numbers.

2011 Best in Show Winner: Scottish Deerhound Grand Champion Foxcliffe Hickory Wind. (Hickory to you and me.)

The annual WKC show also introduces new breeds to the American audience. Of course, most of these breeds aren't "new" at all; in fact, many have been around for thousands of years, but they may be unfamiliar here. To be a recognized breed in the US, the parent breed club must make an application to the American Kennel Club, proving a sustainable US population with responsible breeding practices. There are six new breeds this year: the American English Coonhound, the Cesky Terrier, the Entelbucher Mountain Dog, the Finnish Lapphund, the Norwegian Lundehund, and - take a deep breath before attempting to pronounce this one - the Xoloitzcuintli (left). The "Show-Lo," as its called for short, can be traced back to the ancient Aztecs and is the national dog of Mexico. You may know it as the "Mexican hairless." 

All dogs begin in their breed competition. The winners of each breed go on to their group competition. Groups are made up of breeds with similar purposes or jobs. The AKC recognizes seven: the Terriers (self-explanatory), the Herding Group (German shepherds, border collies, corgis, etc.), the Working Group (mastiffs, Rottweilers, etc.), the Hounds (everything from dachshunds to Irish wolfhounds); the Sporting Group (setters, spaniels, and retrievers); the Toy Group (little guys bred solely for companionship); and the Non-Sporting Group (everyone else who doesn't fit into any of the other groups). The winners of each group go on to the Best in Show competition; the winner here is literally the top dog.

Toy poodles being judged in their breed competition.

One of the fun parts of watching the WKC show is hearing the dogs' registry names. Like the names of racehorses, these names reflect the ancestry of a particular dog. At Westminster, they are proceeded by the word "Champion;" to be a Champion, a dog must have earned at least 15 points (depending on placement) at AKC sanctioned dog shows. Only dogs with this distinction can be entered at the WKC show.  But all of these dogs are also family pets. It's kind of impossible to holler, "Come back here, Champion Oreo Cookie of Royal Nabisco," so of course, all the dogs have "call names." Sometimes they are diminuitives of their registry names (like Cookie or Biscuit for above); sometimes not (like Sport or Butch). For example, growing up I had a registered German shepherd. His registry name was "Conrad Von Dornberg." We called him Atlas.

The registry names can be pretty pretentious. With this in mind, Slate has posted a little quiz. Can you identify which of these is the real name of a WKC group winner and which is a real line from Allen Ginsberg's Howl? I got 15 out of 15 (I teach Howl regularly, so I had an advantage). No cheating - and let me know how you did. Make your puppy proud.

Ginsberg or Canine?

Tune into the USA channel tonight at 8pm to watch the last three group competitions and root for Best in Show.

A Conversation with Ange Mlinko [by Michael Robbins]

To my ear, Ange Mlinko is about the most painstakingly
elegant poet around. Her first two books,  Matinées and Starred Wire, are whiz-kid graduates of the New York School. Without seeming derivative, they work the Ashbery-O'Hara-Schuyler tradition as if it were a form—especially Starred Wire, which, Stephen Burt wrote in The Believer, extends “into a kind of imagined aerial realm, a Technicolor urbane pastoral, bigger and stranger than what we see with unaided eyes.”

So her poems have always been "layered and loaded up," as she once put it. But with Shoulder Season (2010), Mlinko has become a full-feathered, info-soaked Byzantine, her language as far from the plain style as Paul Muldoon’s or Marianne Moore’s or Geoffrey Hill’s at its loopiest. But it remains almost as far from grandiosity as Frank O’Hara at his most laundry-listing. This is where I note that she has, nevertheless, a sensibility all her own—and she does, but it seems parsimonious to say so. Read a few of her poems and you might wonder whether anyone else has a sensibility at all. 

You can start with “Shoulder Season,” quoted below. Our interview begins after the jump.

On the strength of the light in the southeast
I could surmise this isn’t the time for poinsettia.

Snowflakes hard as schoolyard jacks
fall from a cryogenic layer of air

eagles use as lorgnettes. It’s unseasonable
judging by the light in the southeast.

The poinsettia has been delicately
loosening the bolts locking velvet bracts

in attitudes of warm jouissance
so that a cuticle of dried blood hue

encroaches on the edges of a lively red,
then altogether drops to the ledge a corpse.

On the strength of this I could prise
piccolo jonquils out of April edemas.

The National Medals of Arts and Humanities: "Dwelling in possibility . . . "

You can catch Rita Dove at 9:29 and John Ashbery at 15:20. Congratulations!

How many poems does President Obama quote in his remarks?

-- sdh

Does Woody Approve?

(photo credit Gabriel Don c 2012)

Jim Tyler's Poetry Broadsides (by Stacey Harwood)

I have admired Jim Tyler's work ever since David gave me a Tyler broadside of his haunting poem "Dutch Interior."  Tyler works quietly at his letterpress in Ithaca, New York. He sets type entirely by hand, one letter at a time, and prints on a hand-operated press, slowly, one sheet at a time, and one color at a time. The results are precise and beautiful, as you can see in the slideshow below (be sure to use the full-screen option).

Framed broadsides make terrific gifts, don't you think?  You can find a complete list of  Larch Tree Press broadsides here and here.  Or you can write to [email protected] to ask about availability and prices.

-- sdh

That Is Not What I Meant at All [by Michael Robbins]

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I had to take a seminar to learn how to be a “writing intern” in the Humanities Core. This involved writing fake comments on fake student papers and pretending to read books about pedagogy. At one point we were asked to identify what was wrong with various claims in a student essay. The problem with one claim, about Patroclus as I recall, turned out to be that the student had framed the claim in terms of Homer’s intentions.

This was interesting: a New Critical no-no had been elevated to the status of a pedagogical given. It was supposed to be obvious that the appeal to authorial intention was always and everywhere to be avoided. Now, I hold very little against the New Critics, who were supple and intelligent readers of poems, and Wimsatt and Beardsley’s original brief against “The Intentional Fallacy” remains one of my touchstones of twentieth-century literary criticism. But it’s not as if there’s no controversy here. Because I’d actually done the reading for a different class, I knew that the instructors of this seminar were ignoring the difficulties posed by bodies of water that begin spontaneously to quote Wordsworth.

In 1982, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels shook up the bottle city of literary theory when “Against Theory” was published in Critical Inquiry. It’s a stunning and intricate defense of intentionality whose thesis is that it’s simply a truism that when we ask what a text means we are asking after its author’s intention. Theory is therefore superfluous. But what everyone remembers is the wave poem.

“Suppose,” Knapp and Michaels say, “that you’re walking along a beach and you come upon a curious sequence of squiggles in the sand.” These marks, on closer inspection, prove to spell out the first stanza of Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal.” Naturally you will assume someone inscribed the words there, probably with a stick. But then a wave comes in, you retreat, and when it recedes you see that the first set of squiggles has now been joined by a second, which prove to be the second stanza of the poem. At this point only two possibilities present themselves: either there is some agent producing these marks by invisible means (some scientists in a submarine are testing a new beach-poetry ray) or they have been produced purely by the chance operations of natural forces. But if the marks are not being produced by an intentional agent—this is the kicker—then, say Knapp and Michaels, they are not language. The marks, although identical to the marks that make up Wordsworth’s poem, bear only an accidental resemblance to words. They are not, in themselves, words, because words must be produced by beings who know how to use words and intend them to express meanings. Therefore our discovery of words’ meanings is identical with our discernment of their author’s intention.

There’s a lot more to Knapp and Michaels’ argument, but my reaction to this part of it remains what it was when I first read it: no wave is ever going wash up a couple of stanzas of Wordsworth by chance. Knapp and Michaels recognize this, of course: it’s a thought experiment. But my response registers an intuition about the utility of thought-experiments for making judgments about the real world. Whenever I hear that a train is going to run down five hapless people unless I pull a lever, in which case it will run down only one hapless person, I want to know what those people are doing on the tracks in the first place, why I can’t just yell at them to get the hell out of the way of the train, and how exactly I managed to get myself involved in some ridiculous ethical drama in a train yard when I haven’t been near a train yard in years.