Whimsy Speaks Again

Nice set of interviews with poets sponsored by 32 Poems.  This from Serena Agusto-Cox's interview of Mary Biddinger:  "I have had good and bad experiences in writers’ groups. The better experiences have always been with writers who shared some aesthetic sensibilities with me and who swapped poems beforehand. I’ve been told that my poems are difficult to understand on a first read. I was always the girl in the workshop who finished reading her poem and was met with resounding silence and befuddlement. I can’t workshop well with readers who want all of their questions answered in a conventional way. "

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Robert discusses the aforementioned (in a prior blog post) "negative" review section by Jason Guriel in Poetry (also discussed by Seth).  Robert:  "I'm sure there's life in an aesthetic of imprecision and distrust of order. And some of my best friends write in rhizomes. But I'm even more sure that too many of the poems I've seen in the past decade fall into the techniques Guriel describes out of an uncritical acceptance of the aesthetic predicated on those techniques. Call it Jorie Graham's Disease."  And what are these 7 Deadly Sins?

1. "reliance on buzzwords" (think: absence, abjection, the body, ellipsis, etc.)
2. "distrust of order" (as both theme and compositional principle)
3. "distrust of linearity and having a point" (call it Ashberying)
4. "anxiety over what words mean" (or, I'd add, the pose of anxiety)
5. "romantic bluster" (think Hart Crane on a bad day)
6. "imprecision" (I bet a comparison of contemporary poetic syntax and that of Swinburne would be instructive)
7. "sympathy for small critters" (I think this one's pretty self-explanatory)

Some of these are implied in the questionnaire at The Futility Review.

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Coincidentally, the same book that Guriel reviewed by Jane Mead (The Usable Field), is reviewed on the Verse site by Christina Pugh.  And more favorably:

"The Usable Field is not quite a dream book, not quite a landscape book, nor exactly a book of elegies -- though in another sense it is all of these. It is first and foremost a book about the phenomenology of personhood finding its integrity and often its literal bearings in a world that, though familiar, feels perennially unmapped -- a place in which persons must search not only for the content of the soul, but also for the delineation of its very boundaries."

Oddly, I sense that Jason and Christina read the same words, and came to the same preliminary conclusions about the text.  At that point, they diverged.

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Steven goes from swearing off desserts to swearing off booze.  The man is a glutton for punishment.  Personally, I liked the idea of swearing off Lent for Lent.

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Court Green's call for submissions specifies poems about the 70's.  That could be interesting.  I listen to "#1 Hits of the 70's" sometimes when I'm on the treadmill, and it seems impossibly long ago.  Except for Queen, who sound fresh as ever.  The videos are often unintentionally hilarious, as well.  There was one this morning, where Abba is singing "Dancing Queen" at the Royal Theater in Stockholm in bad pants suits and barely synchronized swaying. 

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This must be Negative Review Month.  Michael rips into All-American Poem, by Matthew Dickman.  It won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and he, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.   It was published by Copper Canyon Press.  Here are some blurbs:

"Matthew Dickman’s first book of poetry,All-American Poem, delivers the way those LPs delivered. It is a great book of poetry, one of the great first books of poetry to arrive in the last ten years. Dickman’s poetry will be compared to Whitman’s, O’Hara’s, Stern’s and Koch’s. His poetic voice is full of singular magic, Dickman magic. It’s a poetry so good, I can’t stand it."

"All American Poem plumbs the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. In these unhermetic poems, pop culture and the sacred go hand in hand. "

"And how frightening, too. For “Trouble” also recalls Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in which suffering consumes those experiencing it while the rest of us appear cruel without meaning to. For the tortured, nothing else matters but the torturer, even as his “horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” Life goes on despite that tiny shudder that comes from knowing that as you read this sentence, someone somewhere is in pain."

"His authority is that of the native, unwavering and resolute. But it is his artfulness and large spirit, telescoping without sentimentality the single outlook of a speaker who has escaped such conditions and now looks back, as bluesy as such projects go, that gives his poems a universality of feeling, an expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure." -- Major Jackson, Boston Review.

 “Matthew Dickman's all-American poems are the epitome of the pleasure principle; as clever as they are, they refuse to have ulterior intellectual pretensions; really, I think, they are spiritual in character-free and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration...We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds.” —Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judge.

To be fair, I looked for as many of his poems as I could find on the web.  Here are some excerpts:

"Roma":  "Last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened, / you know, the way bodies do / after spending the afternoon having sex / on an old couch while responsible people are suffering / with their clothes on in cubicles and libraries."

"Love":  "We fall in love at weddings and auctions, over glasses / of wine in Italian restaurants where plastic grapes hang / on the lattice, our bodies throb / in the checkout line, the bus stop, at basketball games / and we can’t keep our hands off each other / until we can— / so we turn to rubber masks and handcuffs, / falling in love again."

"Grief":  "When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla / you must count yourself lucky. / You must offer her what's left / of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish / you must put aside / and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,  / her eyes moving from the clock /  to the television and back again."

"Trouble":  "Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills / to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter  / hung in the Tahitian bedroom / of her mother’s house,  / while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes / you can look at the clouds or the trees / and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground."  (from The New Yorker).

Oh, my.  This really is terrible stuff, what Seth describes as "truly, truly horrific poetry."  You read this juvenile fantasizing, adorned with titles you would expect to see scrawled on the insides of a 4th grader's Valentine note, and think "did someone just make a terrible mistake?"

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Junie and I watched "I'm Not There", the Bob Dylan movie.  Or whatever it was.    I can imagine this being one of those movies that everybody wanted in on.  There's Christian Bale, Richie Havens, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson and Heath Ledger (only a few of them actually playing Dylan).  It was very enjoyable, and Cate Blanchett was brilliant as the young, chain-smoking, irascible Dylan in black shirts and shades. 

 

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America's 10 Saddest Cities:  A somewhat surprising list of cities with the highest depression rates, most suicides, and high numbers for crime and divorce.  Surprisingly, #1 is Portland, followed by St. Louis, New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Nashville, Cincinnati, and Atlanta.