WhimsyLand

Jonathan has had some interesting things to say about poetry recently.  Here's one:  Having insights about the poetry you read turns out to be harder than expected. In other words, having insights that can actually be articulated intelligently.  I've often encountered poems for which I thought that there was nothing more to say than was already in the poem.  This may be another way of saying that the poem was fully accomplished. 

And this:  A lot of lyric poetry is the mimesis of an imaginary self. Styles of self-presentation, stylized selves. From here comes the illusion that the author's biography is at all relevant to the reading of lyric poetry. Yet all the facets of personality that are relevant are already there in the mimesis of the self. Suppose the stylized self is narcisissist, brooding, and reckless. Well, if we found that the biographical self of the author is also narcissist, brooding, and reckless, we might be tempted to say, "Aha, I've found the explanation." A moment's reflection is enough to conclude, though, that this explanation is tautological. Suppose we find that the biographical subject is a nicer or meaner person than the lyric subject. This doesn't explain anything either, obviously, though it might help to dispel the biographical illusion.

That got me thinking about poets whose work engenders a sense of the author:  Bob Hicok, John Ashbery, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, and others.  There are many poets whose work I love that don't normally leave an autobiographical afterglow:  Mary Jo Bang, Dean Young, Ted Hughes.  The style (High Modern vs. Flarf, for example) is a factor, which is closely related to the narrative or temporal sense of the verse.  Even pure story-telling (or pure descriptive) poetry can leave you with the feeling that you know how the world looks through the poet's eyes.  I find it difficult not to be at least slightly moved by verse.  It's like trying to read Franz Wright without getting depressed.

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I heard Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman recently on NPR, just after the devastating report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Regarding carbon caps on American industry, he said:  “The U.S. economy is not something to be experimented with, in my judgment.”  Let's see, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates 17 times in recent years.  We will have spent at least half a trillion dollars on the Iraq fiasco by the end of the year.  Taxes were cut radically in the two terms.  CAFTA was passed.  Energy and drug companies were handed huge windfalls and subsidies.  The looming Social Security and Medicare crises were ignored.  The ratio of CEO income to average worker has tripled to 400.  The middle class has shrunk, poverty numbers are up, and the gap between rich and poor has widened substantially.  And we don't want to experiment with the economy?  Instead, we'd rather experiment with the planet that sustains human life?  Estimated world-wide cost of the predicted one meter rise in sea level is in the trillions of dollars.  That doesn't count ecological costs.  If something really bad happens — like a shift in the Gulf Stream and the rapid cooling of Europe, you don't even want to think about the consequences.

Interesting BlogQuotes

The challenge facing the poet is then to translate a personal, subjective experience of language/reality into a textual message that will communicate itself, however incompletely, to another reader, by means other than simple reportage. This challenge is always doomed to at least partial failure, and hence the chimerical aspect of poetry in general. - Kasey.

Jonathan Mayhew was in one of my dreams last night. He was screaming something about Jesus from a bullhorn while pacing at the edge of Golden Gate Park. - CDY

In our degraded democracy, self-interests are more common than deeply felt and realized principles, so it’s not really surprising to see this situation extended to poetry. - Dale.

The roast comes from a long & ignominious tradition in America. Some say that The Roast, rather than jazz, is the one true American art form. - Sharon.

Thomson bought Delmar and then Aspen. Harcourt bought Academic Press and Mosby, joining them up with previous acquisition Saunders. Then Thomson and Reed-Elsevier divvied up Harcourt. //  Between 1999 and 2003, ten different customers of my company became two. That consolidation created an “oligopoly.” Unlike a monopoly, which is capitalism taken to its logical (and disastrous) extreme on the supply side, an oligopoly is capitalism taken to its extreme by a limited number of buyers. - David

The everyone who agrees Firstborn was THE bad book are all of Gluck's critics, and Gluck herself. No one else understands what the hell any of these people is talking about. They're too busy trying to catch the pieces of the baby. - Another David

In his complaint about the territorialization of the American poetry scene I hear another version of the tension between particular and universal: in our urge to carve up the fictional universe of poetry into conceptual categories (post-avant, School of Quietude), individual-existential-actual poems are being lost. Of course you can't actually recognize/represent a post-avant/SoQ poem on its own existential terms: you need the categorical cues most of us are all too eager to provide. - Joshua

Words always obscure the face behind them, but the Academy of American Poets has apparently determined that the ghost within American poetry is Karl Marx. A little late to the party, but — welcome!  - The Other Joshua

I find I have to sit with Wright's poems for a long time before I can move on to the next. I'm so used to -- trained to -- consume poems, burn through them, look for the irreducible spark doubting its presence.  - Jordan