I was googling Simon to see
what he was up to in the two worlds he inhabits (astrophysics and poetry), and
ran across the delightful adjective
Gaussianity, which I would like to believe rhymes with insanity.
Simon's recent post (Silence == Freedom?) reminds me of a similar line of
thought I've had, regarding degrees of freedom. Roughly restated, Simon
posits that some poetry (the recent work of Cole Swenson, for example) attempts
to reduce the number of data points, in an attempt to widen the interpretive
space. In this context, "data points" are quanta of imagery, concrete
language and interstitial elements (among other devices) that reduce the range
of reader response. The analogy of signal-to-noise leaps to mind.
Also information theory, in which we learn that the message with the most
information is the one that is least expected. On one end of the scale,
you have the "I-am-walking-my-dog" poem (Simon's characterization, I
usually call them "wonderment-at-sunset" poems) and at the other end you have
Simon's apple-fascism-toytruck poem (which I usually dub the gratuitously-weird
poem). The former could be said to over-define the solution, leaving us
with only a handful of fitting functions (that is, a paucity of literary
interpretations), while the latter leave so few crumbs on the ground we could
follow them anywhere we wish. Take for example, Simon's example of Wayne
Koestenbaum's
Investigation. If one were to envision an N-space with dimensions such
as narrativity (I like this nounifying the adjectivating of nouns), conventionality of theme,
regularity of layout, ratio of latinates to Saxonisms, . . . (what
Kasey once
termed "scales we can meaningfully use to measure") one could approximate this
poem's position. But's that's only a structural description, and not (I
think) where Simon is going with this. If we assume that Wayne had
something in mind, then we can attempt to use the clues in the poem to
deduce what that something was (not so much a narrative arc as a narrative
polynomial, perhaps). The more lucid the clues, the more likely our
understanding will match his intentions (and the order of clues matters, which
Billy Collins (horrors!) once characterized as knowing when and how many
of your cards to expose). Lucidity, is not, of course, a necessary goal of
poetry – in fact, a certain degree of subtlety,
depth and misdirection can be good for the work. Still, it is
difficult (at least for me) to detect the difference between a poem with maximum
capability for Reader Response and one that is merely terminally interior.
I once wrote one of those:
Not Cream-Colored Ponies
The laundry line. The plastic parabola: conjure up
the beaded vector, the 50-50, the satellite
with its gulp and stutter.
Two men hold hands, then 12 rows of nuns, a drummer.
When he was young, the driver ran reds. Please stop
beside the painted buffalo.
Gupta recommends his cousin, H1B and view of the Valley.
Roger’s stuck on the Bay Bridge, Nordstrom ship above
his nipple, backup buttons.
I saw you knitting idle, idle. Looking for a change
in the face, the singed brow, the All’s Clear.
The radiograph said she had some lead
in her head. I was her bodyguard moons before
she swooned off camera. We walked it off.
Pretty paradigm: upturned, all the shells were empty.
When we finally beat Rommel, he had enough sense
to take a few souvenirs.
You asked the man at the salmon farm and you, still
tasted like iron. Here’s a meal: mussels up to
extreme unction.
Yeah, over there. A little to the right.
Potbelly black, warm as toast. Your hands
up like surrender.
Needless to say, the poem never found a home, even after imploring the finest of
the PA journals to take it. On a similar note,
Jilly
directs us
here: "How
does one journey from opacity to transparency?"
~~~
Seth is back and I missed the fact somehow. His review of The
Deathly Hallows reminds me of something
Josh said a
while back: "That says much better what I was trying to say about
anti-absorptive poetry, and even retains a hint of my initial judgment that
narratives of completion and closure satisfy less-than-adult needs." I
agree that Jo could have axed a couple of hundred pages in the middle, but the
kid in me loved the summarization (that worst of evil in poetry) right down to
the good guys winning and the principal characters living happily ever after.
I don't read children's literature with the expectations I reserve for Pynchon
or Atwood.
~~~
This must be Simon Day. He mentioned mainframes, a word that I haven't
heard in a while. Time was when that's all we had to work with, of course.
Programming was a great deal more collegial then, with everybody sitting on long
tables in the computer facility, putting together their decks and poring over
their recent listings. The mighty IBM 370 supported hundreds of online TSO
users on the USC campus, while all the time, cranking through jobs submitted by
those of us with programs to process. The beast blinked periodically
within the glass-walled room, elevated on raised floors and surrounded by long
rows of disk drives the size of washing machines. The total disk capacity
of the facility was an awe-inspiring 2 gigabytes (20 drives, each with 100 MB
disk packs). The CPU itself was outfitted with 128 MB of memory, composed
of millions and millions of magnetic rings wrapped in fine wire. Of
course, as you are reading this, your PC's video card probably has more memory.
About a decade ago, big multi-CPU servers became possible, and the interest in
mainframes renewed from what had been a considerable slump. Beowulf
clusters running Linux now dominate large-scale computing. My company
works with hardware engineers that design some of these machines (we normally
only do the boot loader, Linux port and system software). I never get
anywhere near the ultimate customers (which tend to be universities and research
labs), but most of the applications involve algorithms that employ parallelism
– problems that can be solved by breaking down the
computing into subtasks, having them all run at the same time, and then melding
the solution together from the individual results. Not every problem can
be solved this way, of course, but researchers have shown considerable ingenuity
in restating problems so that they can be solved this way (I'd be interested in
the problems that Simon is solving, actually). One class of problems is
The Search, best exemplified by SETI@Home, in
which millions of computers are used to look for evidence of extraterrestrial
intelligence by having everyone take a small piece of the data stream and look
for anomalies. Other problem domains, such as weather prediction, can be
done by focusing on local conditions, and then knitting them together in an
overall model. As you can tell from the state of long-term weather
prediction, this doesn't always work out so well. There are problems where
you just need the fastest machine you can get your hands on, and parallelizing
the problem isn't possible. For those, everyone twiddles their thumbs
while Moore's Law runs
its course.
~~~
It is difficult for me to imagine the (cliché
alert) dark and brooding Charles Simic as "The
Poet of the People" (thanks to
Ron for the link), a poet of whom Vendler says "There is no escape hatch in a
Simic poem: you enter it and are a prisoner within its uncompromising and
irremediable world". I know that many of the PA crowd charge him with SoQ
sensibilities, but I think he's written some wonderful stuff, including this
brief, amazing poem, War:
The trembling finger of a woman
Goes down the list of casualties
On the evening of the first snow.
The house is cold and the list is long.
All our names are included.
~~~
I'm also reading Ashbery again, specifically Houseboat Days.
Familiarity breeds contempt and I find myself significantly less startled than 5
years ago. Good stuff, of course, and I'm not left with that same sense of
freedom around which Simon builds his hypothesis. I do find Ashbery,
at times, a bit too urbane, coming off like Lord Peter Whimsey (no
relation) just back from a holiday on the Côte d'Azur, tossing in a few French
phrases to lend gravitas to what looks like unremitting silliness. It's
always difficult to figure out where Ashbery is going, which I suppose is the
wonderful part of his work. Where would modern poetry be had he decided to
become a fishmonger instead?
~~~
My
goodness. I thought that The New Sincerity was at least one part joke, not
that Tony, Andrew and Joseph didn't have some serious words to say about it from
time to time. This
guy is certainly taking it seriously.
~~~
Yes, this is one one of those blog posts that goes on and on all day.
Particularly on a Sunday (or if you wish, on a sundae). Mainly because I'm
bored stiff (one of those odd lulls between engagements). I did my treadmilling,
read the paper, swapped in some new UPS's (uninterruptable power supplies), and
did the company's accounting. At that point it was 9:30, and I had gotten
up just before 5. Junie's arriving on Tuesday, but I already did some
mopping and vacuuming, and one doesn't want to be obsessed with these things,
does one? (Think Monk). I looked in my ridiculously overstocked
spice cupboard and decided that I had too much marjoram and too many caraway
seeds, so I cruised through Joy of Cooking and found Hungarian Goulash au Blanc,
which uses both, and a number of things I have on hand anyway all the time
(paprika, onions, red peppers, garlic, beef stock). It's only 15 minutes
into its 2 hour simmer, and then I have to Correct The Seasoning and figure out
what it really needs (sour cream? salz und pfeffer? red wine?)
This was all Sweet Junie's idea, as she knows how I get with not much to do all
day, so she told me to go to Safeway and get something to cook and rent a guy
video that she wouldn't want to see anyway at the same time. I'll tell you
how it turned out.
~~~
This Bloglines thing is really addictive. I wonder if I will get any
work done during my normal work week. I find myself refreshing the list of
blogs I'm tracking (currently 59 feeds of poetry blogs), and something is always
happening. As of 5 PM MST, 'becca has been to the Farmers' Market,
discoursed on bookmarks, and questioned her recent ocular choices. What's
next!? I should just go read some MMM submissions and monitor my simmering
pork. Which is what I will do. More tomorrow.
I
got my Abraham Lincoln
yesterday a few short days after Paypal'ing to Kasey and Anne. I went for
the subscription, not wanting to devote my entire journal budget to the
attractive Seventeen Year Plan (only $968). I was laughing because it came
the same day as Ploughshares, and I was thinking my head would probably
explode if I read them at the same time. As it turns out, the
Ploughshares was all fiction, so the damage should be minimal. As one
would expect, AL is filled with sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, chickpeas, and
very inventive writing. The actual volume is much like 32 Poems,
inexpensively bound, small enough to fit into your pocket, and generally
appealing to your no-nonsense, it's-all-about-the-work sensibilities. Gary
Sullivan has a prose poem (well, I think that's what it is) about People Who Had
Their Cake and Ate It Too which takes place at a county fair. I was
tickled to see osCommerce mentioned in the next poem a few lines below the "cute
little nippy bottles" of Negro Modelo. One has to expect intros such as CA
Conrad's "when Mother first grew / tentacles from her / shoulders Frank found a
/ path of ink across his / breakfast ...", because, after all, this isn't your
mother's poetry. Alli Warren contributes a post-post-modern villanelle
where many are dead and somebody eats meat and there's a party. In the
second poem, fish and chickpeas are consumed (which sounds pretty good,
actually), and the third poem ends with "The only chocolate you find is the
chocolate / you cook with", so my culinary-poetic inclinations were satisfied in
3 short pages (4, if you count Gary's Cakes). Matt McCloud realigns an
impersonal (" ... he has been assigned to segregation / will be taped from the
torso up"). Rodney Koeneke describes Etruria, which was apparently
"Napoleon's contrivance" ... actually there's a lot of contrivance in this poem,
and "the postage stamp carries no stain of the eminence it represents", which I
thought was a pretty damned fine line. Sharon Mesmer reminds me that
anyone who "thinks Starship Troopers was a good movie" is probably a true
fascist, even though I always liked the movie with its weird outtake commercials
for The Empire and the sad fact that the hero never got intimate with Denise
Richards and how much Jake Busey looks like his dad. Nada Gordon has a
couple of poems where I could barely hang on like some carnival ride right up to
the point where the "Tigers fuck on the carpet / You must eat your neck", which
I admit threw me for a moment. Omigod, Sandra Simonds "ate lint from an
empty tin can of chickpeas". There is a strange connection between A.
Lincoln and garbanzos, but I'll be damned if I know what it is. Shanna
Compton does Tony Danza where everybody gets a guidebook, talks about
"the internets" like George Jr., and find love "shoved up underneath that
dumpster full of used avants". Michael Magee wants to know Is It Just
Me Or Is Lebanon Starting To Look A Little Foxy? which even includes an
equation (internet = a defaced poster for a 10-yr-old sexpot). Lanny
Quarles is next up with Tzadik to Golem, Come in Golem! in which
you will find the delightful phrase "used in diagnostic sphygmology / by the
Palace grannies". Bill Luoma was almost unparseable, but I think that's
what he wants to be ("stop the loach is tilting mobilinga I see sue / acqua
bonnie hobbe katapepsi mountain dew"). Rachel Dakarian has 3 poems,
including Sexxy War Kriminal where a broken dish can be reborn as a
princess. Drew Gardner mentions Limbaughs right before Katie Degentesh
puts them in a title. Weird! Anyway, it's certainly a lot of fun and
even deep in places, and you should go buy one before Kasey runs out of staples.
In
case you haven't heard, Gonzo is gone. Only a dozen more to go, and then
we can redirect the Potomac through the rest of the Augean Stables.
Boulder).
The online apps are all organized on the trademark "clean" page at
The
latest Poets & Writers showed up. Amongst the astounding
number of ads for MFA programs, I found: An article on the 50th
anniversary of
Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Another on The Guerilla Poetics
Project, a collective of poets and publishers whose activities include "sneaking
poetry broadsides . . . into bookstores and libraries [within] . . . target
books". Small Press Points has a nice plug for Octopus Books and a
quote by Zach Schomburg. Literary MagNet provides short props for
1913: A Journal of Forms, Alehouse, Avery, Cadillac
Cicatrix, and Rattle. Teresa Weaver talks about losing her job
as book editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Peter Selgin
borrows liberally from Bill Bryson in A Short History of Everything,
which actually discusses his novel-writing. Mark Allen Cunningham tells us
how to read Cormac McCarthy and lauds his "lavish prose". Edwidge Danticat
(what a great name) is the feature (and cover) article discussing her
Brother, I'm Dying. Stephen Dixon talks about writing in his 70's (go,
Stephen). The story of Junot Díaz and his 11-year hiatus between novels.
Long article on the elfin Bin Ramke, our local editor of the Denver Review, who
has survived the Foetry/CPS affair to go on to publish his 9th collection (it
also mentions that he had an early love of mathematics, whodathunk?).
An Annual Look at Independent Presses includes our own Kristy Bowen's
Dancing Girl Press (Der says he met Kristy briefly at the Columbia library
last year). Lightning Strikes Thrice discusses small presses that
have won big awards, including Margie/IntuiT House for Troy Jollimore's Tom
Thomson in Purgatory which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
San Antonio's Wings Press has been literatontos for 30 years.
Timothy Schaffert on how to assist in book jacket design. My favorite
curmudgeon, John Poch, has an article called "Pimp My Writing", in which he
advises CW profs to let students fall on their ass a little more often.
Zillions of more ads, awards, contests. The Stadler Center for Poetry
announces that G. C. Waldrep is the "New faculty member & Director, Bucknell
Seminar for Younger Poets". Good for you, GC. 
I've
been reading Wikipedia today, after reading about
Junie
has adopted this interesting culinary protocol that involves salads and proteins
and nutrients and such, all ranked and lined up in a table that dictates her
meal selections. One of the many interesting variants in one section of
the spreadsheet is the ghanoush/hummus family. The reason that I group
these two delights is that they share all the same ingredients except for the
starchy base. Chickpeas (garbanzo beans) are much more than a starch of
course – they are relatively
Walsenburg Update: The Rio Cucharas Motel turned out to be pretty
decent (if creepy). They did have everything promised in the
web-listing: double outdoor tennis court, indoor pool, restaurant.
The tennis court surface was a beautiful adobe and these amazingly lovely giant
sunflowers were growing through the net. The indoor pool and restaurant
have been closed since the Ford administration. The room was spacious,
however, and cost only $53 which included state, city and local hotel tax.
Ally, John, Junie and I imbibed various libations and played a game in which one
had to identify famous quotes. If you got one right, you received a marble
representing one of the 9 planets (Pluto was reinstated for the game), which we
would lay out on the carpet as our own personal solar system. I thought
the Earth marbles were particularly nice, blue with cloudy swirls of white.
Neither the marbles nor the interplanetary distances were, thankfully, to scale.
Alys's Restaurant (no, you can't get anything you want) was packed and for good
reason: Alys is apparently closing up shop and was outdoing herself with
an outstanding menu, decent wine list, and unavoidable dessert tray. 
