lots and lots of neat

recommended: sally keith

I recently found this video on youtube of starlings in one of those fluid formations. I don't know if I can really describe it, except that they are flying over a marsh, and whatever their rhythm, they appear to collapse into themselves, and to form what looks like some solid object. And that object, as soon as it drifts into itself, drifts away from its center, or coerces to form another object. I know it's a common sight. And I know every time I get to see it I'm captivated. One time, when I was living in Virginia, driving toward the Newport News Tunnel, I saw a rope of these starlings flying over the highway. They were going north. And there was no end of them that I could see.

Sally Keith's poem "Lullaby on the Marsh," in Issue 09 of A Public Space, is not about starlings, or birds. The poem is about Achilles. And it is about motive. And the way motive moves inside Achilles, sometimes solidifying, sometimes just drifting, not necessarily aware of a purpose, but acting, still, with purpose, like the men who prepare their houses for winter. For me, Keith is able to move language in her poem like those starlings. I am always aware of some solidity present as the impulse of the poem. "Shape of the wave underneath the wave" she says toward the opening of the poem. She touches that shape in different ways.

It's what I am always impressed with in her first book Design. Keith writes with an acute awareness of what matters in a scene, and she keeps that focus very present for me, even making it feel as though that concept, that focus, is a solid thing in my chest. And her poem is there to help me understand this complexity as a denseness. However quickly it might morph into another denseness.

Related Links:
YouTube video of starlings
A Public Space
Design
Dwelling Song

recommended: derek walcott

The more poems I read in magazines the more I am disappointed by their specific occasion. Whether it's the "I have an imagination so let's celebrate" occasion or the "I have found this new way to relate to my past" occasion, the depth is limited and predictable. And what upsets me most is how it seems the more senior the poet, the more efficient the poem is at fitting into either of these occasions. I understand the pressures at a magazine to feature poets who will be recognized by their subscribers, and then might attract new readers. I understand why these poets' poems are appearing. I just don't understand who can read those poems and not get cynical about those poets, and this editing system that keeps ushering these kinds of poems to publication.

The new poems by Derek Walcott in the new issue of A Public Space (Issue 09) are intriguing to me. On one side I admire the poems because I admire Walcott's poetry, and his deep consideration of citizenship, and place, and how identity weaves and conflicts with these elements. On the other side, I feel as though every book of his I've read is dealing with this issue, using very similar approaches (the larger forgiveness offered by nature by virtue of her obliviousness, the invasive nature of what Walcott terms the "enemy" in "21" from APS). And so then I wonder if Walcott is showing mere competence in these poems, an ability to write another Walcott poem, or if I should recognize and appreciate the continuing nature of his project. What does it mean to continue writing poetry?

This is probably a larger issue than I can address in these brief-ish blog posts. It's mystery enough that keeps people writing, and I suppose what I'm asking here is what obligation a poet has to his subject, and his evolution as a writer. Is Walcott still evolving? With someone of his stature, accomplishments, and, of course, accolades, this is a tricky question to pose.

Related Links:
A Public Space
Omeros
Selected Poems (2007)

recommended: terrance hayes

Should poetry require a specialized knowledge to be understood and enjoyed? I teach poetry to third graders, and to university students. And with both I stress the importance of feeling the poem. And what I mean is taking the poem on its own terms, giving the poem space to touch them intellectually and sensually. Usually I don't have to coach the kids so much. They really can be one of the most accepting audiences for a poem. The older students, however, suffer from Preconceived Hierarchy Syndrome. At some point of their lives, they were told that poems have a secret language to them, some grand symbolic hierarchy, and if they are really going to understand poetry, they need to know all those pieces. It's maddening sometimes to listen to their intellectual shoehorning. This must mean this. I can say that it's not their speculation that discourages me, it's the absolute certainties they frame them in.

What, then, to do with Terrance Hayes' poem "Snow for Wallace Stevens" in the recent issue of Harvard Review (No. 36)? Should I need to know that Terrance Hayes is black? Should only black people find offense at Wallace Stevens' open racism? Can a white person ever really know the nature and depth of this offense? Does this poem limit its audience then, to black people, who are capable of feeling the poem on these terms?

I understand that this issue of specialized audiences is not raised for the first time in this poem. I can never be housewife in the 1950s, so does that mean I can never relate to Adrienne Rich poems? But I wonder how much knowledge of this moment is necessary to understand the love hate relationship Hayes is describing here. I came to the poem knowing Terrance Hayes is one of the editors at jubilat, that a diagram explaining how to read Wallace Stevens wraps the cover of the most recent issue. I can guess, without knowing he participated on an AWP panel related to Stevens, that he has a deep commitment to his poetry.

So then I wonder, when I read the poem in the Harvard Review, whether dropping the title of one poem, "Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery," is enough offense to force the crisis, "How, with pipes of winter / lining his cognition, does someone learn / to bring a sentence to its knees?" I don't think I'm being naive in asking this. These "pipes of winter," that refer as much to the italicized lines earlier in Hayes' poem allude also to the snow in the cemetery, touch on Stevens' racist attitude. And Hayes wonders here how it's possible someone so close minded could be so capable of wisdom or resonance or understanding, or whatever the power is that Stevens passes in his poems.

The point of this blog entry, then: is this mention of this one poem enough to establish Stevens as a racist? Or should more information be required. As I started to write on this poem, I searched for any other links between Hayes and Stevens, and I found Major Jackson talking about Stevens' insulting reference to Gwendolyn Brooks. That finally convinced me of the crisis in Hayes' poem. But shouldn't something of that caliber be in Hayes' poem? This poem succeeds most at the love/hate dynamic Hayes has with Stevens. He admires Stevens' poems, there is plenty of love. How could he make me understand the hate better?

Related Links:
Harvard Review poetry editor Major Jackson speaks of race and Wallace Stevens.
Harvard Review
Wind in a Box

recommended: geoffrey g. o'brien

It is fascinating to think about how grammar, and sentence, create a momentum by manipulating syntax. Those wily academic sentences that pile one subordinate clause onto another succeed when they know how to build the tension of the sentence's momentum, and then release it. It's a beautiful thing, really. Often enough it alone can stretch the intelligence, and widen the concept the writer has in mind.

Geoffrey G. O'Brien's poem in the September/October 2009 issue of Boston Review relies upon the momentum created by a sentence. But the sentences in O'Brien's "Poem Beginning to End" are not participating in a closed system. And what I mean is not just that the sentences can point in multiple directions, it's that the sentences that get started are derailed, usually as the function of a line break, but sometimes mid-line. But, and here is the magic of the poem, most of the time it doesn't feel as though there is anything grammatically irregular. Yes, there are distinct moments when I feel disoriented reading the poem, but O'Brien maintains enough consistency with the images, like men, a cup, some house, that I feel as though I'm still in the same general location.

And so I'm left with a vague sense of disagreement. I'm assuming the speaker can feel that all these people around him don't really have a common purpose, and they're not going to find one, because they're not all that interested in it. For me, this unhinged grammar is meant to make me feel unsettled, the same limbo that the speaker is in. Yes, meaning cannot be produced by a poem that defies the mechanics of communicating, but I can still claim a sense of what this all means. And for me there is value in that.

Related Links:
Boston Review
Green and Gray

some neat links

Dan Beachy-Quick
(book reviewed 10/6/2009)

A Gift for My Daughter (New York Times, 8/3/2008)
Dan Beachy-Quick talks about what it's like being the father of a 3-year old.

John Yau
(recommended 10/9/2009)

Making Poetry Public (Poetry Foundation, 2006?)
A review of Jenny Holzer's installation at 7 WTC, focusing especially on how words can have their place in the public sphere.

Mary Szybist
(recommended 6/19/2009)

Joshua Kryah's Review of Granted (Electronic Poetry Review, 2005)
Kryah considers Szybist's poetry of spirituality, primarily through the corporeal she proposes.

recommended: anne marie rooney

I like Shane McCrae, and I don't even know him. I like him for his poem "Horse Running Fast" that appeared in a recent issue of APR. I mentioned in my recommendation for McCrae that I felt like he was making use of Stein in repeating this image of the horses running. He came to my mind when I read Anne Marie Rooney's poem, "What my heart is doing" (found in Pleiades 29.2). It's similar just in the fact that Rooney brings her poem back over and over to "My heart," it is a "lifted willow bud," it "lifts nothing." The heart in Rooney's poem has a magical intensity that is continually remade with its repetition.

I have to say, though, that Rooney's poem is smarter than some bland anaphora stringing together a bunch of sentences. This poem is centered on the heart by sentences and similes consistently drawing attention back to it, and in my mind it runs a big risk doing that--the risk of being too earnest. Few people really want to be told, repeatedly, about the state of someone's heart. Even when it has that magical intensity to it, the speaker can very easily tip into the pathetic.

Rooney avoids this by keeping the state of the heart ambiguous. After all, the poem's title is simply "What my heart is doing." The poem doesn't say "aching" or "jubilating" or "simpering." It talks about a heart that is lifting, but it has weight, unlike shadows, and sometimes it can be a dark animal. Rooney runs the risk of an earnestness that leads straight into the magically intense mystery of why and what and how the heart feels.

Related Link:
Pleaides

recommended: jim moore

I like the peace that can be found in a room whose furniture has been arranged so that it suits the room entirely. I like considering the phrase "feng shui," because it's a real example of English appropriating a foreign language phrase, and then using it as though it had been English all along. I like how both these things simply accumulate over time--the tidy arragnement of my apartment, the words I keep in common usage when speaking with friends.

I like how Jim Moore's poem "Courage" (found in Volume 29.2 of Pleiades) is an arrangement. Yes, I do mean as an object on the page. But more interesting to me is the way each of the ideas have their place. As Moore shows, courage can be something that arises from confrontation. Like watching two friends' marriage dissolve, and then learning how to remain friends with both of them. Like dealing with the untimely death of your father.

But courage is also something that accrues, and the wise person draws on diverse impulses and impressions to learn what courage is. Just shifting the perspective on a couple of the ideas I used in the previous paragraph. Sometimes courage is confrontation. It is a common belief that we learn courage from our fathers. This would probably explain why there are three different father figures in the poem, creating three different impressions. And I guess that's the peace I find in this poem. After all the images and their position against the ideas preceding and following them, I find that courage has a wider scope. There are simple elements to it, and complexities. That might sound like a mere platitude, so let me offer this. The Iliad would be an obvious example of courage for its simple catalogue of men killing other men. But it's an example of courage for the less obvious, but entirely relevant, complexities that arise when men are killing other men.

Related Links:
Pleiades
Lightning at Dinner: Poems

recommended: michael waters

Maybe it's a problem that superiority isn't such a foreign sentiment. In fact, I would venture to say that we crave superiority in some way. Even poems that are charged with a victim identity are making an appeal to some higher justice that grants their speaker the higher, yes, superior, ground to whatever he or she views as the aggressor. I guess what I'm saying here is that the immediate stance in Michael Waters poem "Dead Iraqis" from Pleiades (volume 29.2) shouldn't be so familiar, but for obvious reasons it is. But it's Waters rhetorical situation that surprised me on the first read.

Because I am an American who has issues with American service men being in Iraq, "Dead Iraqis" make me uncomfortable. I don't want to imagine two Iraqis eating a dead Iraqi, which is the image this poem starts with. And I don't want to shift my first impression to a more permissible thought, that these "Iraqis" are really just birds, not people. Isn't that worse? Doesn't that imply that all these people we're killing over there are no more significant than the birds I find have been run over on the street? Birds children could kick, whose feathers would explode into the wind.

Yes, Waters has written a masterful political poem, because there is no easy resolution for it. I would even say that its political agenda is fairly clear. I think I know what Waters' opinion is on the war. It's the dilemma he poses that keeps me interested. What does it mean to have such disregard for people that we leave them to rot "underfoot?" How can we be responsible for so much carnage and remain oblivious? Even if these were birds, we would never stand to live with so much death around us.

Related Links:
Pleiades
Darling Vulgarity

some neat links

John Tipton
(recommended 8/12/2009)

Emily Wilson's Review of Tipton's Ajax Translation (The Nation, 7/1/2008)
This is not Emily Wilson the poet, this Wilson is a critic at University of Pennsylvania. Her review touches on Tipton's contemporizing touches in his translation of Sophocles' Ajax. 

Shane McCrae
(recommended 10/12/2009)

Recommended Summer Reading List (No Tells Blog, 6/29/2009)
These are nine books Shane McCrae recommended back at the beginning of this summer, along with his explanation of why.

Karla Kelsey
(recommended 9/25/2009)

Review of Notes on Conceptualism (Octopus Magazine #12, 2009)
Kelsey gives a good background on what "conceptual writing" this and offers a review of the book by Place & Fitterman."

recommended: james hoch

I am always interested in the poem that doesn't know, that is obviously trying to know, that spends so much of itself looking into what it might know, I would think it got tired of not knowing. To me, this is the poem that is helpless to its subject, and, when it's being done right, when I can sense that the poet isn't just using it as a device, or a trick (as many poets do), then I am helpless to what this poet might tell me.

What's at stake here goes back to that maxim by Frost: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." Some poems claim that they don't know, because the poet wants to be seen as someone who is helpless to his poem. More often, he's just being lazy. He doesn't want to know what lies at the heart of his poem, because, really, he just wants to go on and write the next poem. Whatever validity Tony Hoagland has in his "skittery poem of the moment" argument, this, to me, is at its heart. Many poets are fascinated by the fact that they have an imagination, and they delight in all the craziness it can produce, and then they further delight in the quick associations it can make. But many, many of them don't take time to try and dig a little further into the source of all those imagination snacks. I don't care if they think they're impersonating Dean Young, because, ultimately, they aren't. If they were, they would take their poems as seriously as I think Dean Young takes his.

A long wind-up to James Hoch's poem "Disgrace and Oblivion in Ancient Rome," found in the September/October 2009 issue of American Poetry Review. Here is a poem with an investment that continually redeems itself over the course of the poem. What is history? What is history, according to a father who was a history teacher? What is history, when you don't know what you think of that father? What is a father? These are the kinds of questions I hear in this poem. And, then, what I hear more, is how these play out amid a backdrop of the ruins in Rome, or the sculpture of Stalin in Vilnius, both of which could be read as a figurative take on the speaker's history. They could also be read as a larger awareness of how these generational issues take place as a part of history. Generations make up history, though it doesn't always seem so immediately evident.

Hoch has made a poem here that is both sentimentally aware, and intellectually ambitious. Even if it hasn't come close to answering those questions it proposes.

Related Links:
American Poetry Review
Miscreants