WhimsyLand

I realize that I never actually produced the punchline to yesterday's blog title, which was this claim by George "the man who would be President" Allen, that his opponent was guilty of discriminatory conduct and sexual innuendo.  I ended up reading MMM poetry submissions and lost track of time.

~

This month's Poetry arrived shortly after I had commented on the last month's.  Perhaps with all that money they have managed to lobby for a change to the Julian calendar, or perhaps I'm just a little behind the curve, as always.  The cover pronounces the featured work of Albert Goldbarth (who's star seems to be in the ascendant, along with Muldoon), the venerable Richard Wilbur, and the relatively obscure Dava Sobel, but then I'm obscure and what of it?  Poetry issues seem to have content that is gathered up in the arms of the editors among the relatively recent acceptances and shaped into a theme of some sort.  If I had to put a name to this month's collection, it would be "poetry that is either accessible or poses as such, tending toward Wyoming nostalgia without the gay cowboy factor".  AG leads off with a competent anecdotal piece and moves on to more comforting Britannica-eque 1400, an elegant list poem that enumerates rotting horseflesh, pulp of the cherry, and "the grease from an otter's anus", for most of a page until you receive the punchline that all of these were used as paint pigments before the miracle of acrylics.  Charlie Smith gives us Smarty Pants ("the little affairs I mean / in which some vagulous babe chucks a Chuck // under the balls") which still strikes me as accessibility on steroids.  Clive James continues with Natural Selection, which is a little like a paleontological class taught by man entirely sure that metaphor trumps carbon dating ("The little lobsters, in their mating fever, / Assaulted from the sea, stormed up the cliff / An swept inland as scorpions ...").  William Wenthe's Poorwill is sedate and ornithological ("Goatsucker, nightjar: names given the family / of birds ...), and John Pursley III's piece reminds us that even Columbus was confused about what he had discovered (BTW, I liked his poem, irrespective of my carping), but his Belt Buckles and Little Britches is so nostalgic and pastoral that you would have thought it was penned on commission for the issue (though, I will admit very competent).  Mary Kinzie extends the metaphor, contributing a little spatial diversity to what is otherwise the same message.  Full stop, while Richard Wilbur translates Pierre Corneille from the French, in what seemed like a commercial for Desperate Housewives in the middle of a show on the Discovery Channel.  Lucas Howell gets us back on track with The Poker Players ("Those men with grimy fingers and fistfuls of change") and Primitive Road ("Say you love the fields, the black of midnight, / coyotes' yipped prayers, and ...").  Even Roger Mitchell's change of venue ("Fisherman's Ditty") strikes me as literate C&W.  I liked Linda Gregerson's Sweet, which could have easily spilled over into the issue's sluice-pond ("Your mother's wrong but sweet, the world // has never self-corrected, you Americans break my heart.").  Brian Swann's This Place seems almost like an argument for 19th-Century Natural Science ("... It could have been / a poppy head in a display case. ...") and Reginald Shepherd's My Mother Was No Kind of Snow brings up the rear of this Biology class with verse that is sometimes stale ("My mother was a murder of crows") and ultimately redeeming ("My mother always falling / was never snow, no kind / of bird, pigeon or crow").  The View from Here is an odd collection of perspectives from those peripherally associated with poetry.  Robert Kavesh, apparently a man in his eighties, echoes Gioia's insistence that "Poetry had a place in business".  Dava Sobel just plain pissed me off from the first paragraph: "The spheres of science and poetry probably intersect in all eleven dimensions, for poems, like discoveries, spring from insights of unusual acumen ...".  What a load of horseshit.  Do you know how this scientist is able to write poetry?  I follow the advice of Wemmy, which is to write drunk and edit sober (that may be overstating it, but not much).   Occasionally, you get a Russell or Feynman who can actually occupy worlds so distant from one another as Science and the Arts, and be articulate in both.  Ever notice how many scientists are competent poets?  Aside from the odd physician (CDY or Peter) it's a rarity.  Robert Aitken's Koan After Koan is an interesting take by a Zen student.  Nicholas Photinos relates the segues from musicianship to poetry, and who am I to say?  Matt Fitzgerald is "a preacher who has benefited from reading poems", and good for him ("Perhaps it says that death's hold over life limits our perspective").  Still, I felt like I was being hand-held through the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy of poetry.  I like D.H. Tracy and can't tell you why.  I've read some of his work, which I liked, if not loved.  I do like his contributions to Poetry, however.   In Bad Ideas, he discusses the limits of poetic license, among other things, and whether and how famous poets have completely warped history and gotten away with it.  It made me wonder why everybody doesn't just do the research like A.G. does before putting pen to paper.  The Letters to the Editor are mainly a gang-up on John Barr's recent piece in Poetry, American Poetry in the 20th Century.  Most of the letter-writers accurately characterize Barr's diatribe as warmed-over Gioia, and spend the next eight or ten pages proving it.  I particularly liked Robert Wrigley's assertion that "the only credential for a poet is the poems themselves ...", however much I may hold that opinion in some doubt, nowadays.  Barr responds relatively petulantly ("I'm sorry to have bored Robert Wrigley with the insipid and obvious, ...") and could stand to read a couple year's back issue of The Atlantic to find out how best to respond to your LTTE critics.

More tomorrow, most likely.