Antiphon

The first issue of Antiphon, a new online poetry journal based in the UK, includes my poem "The View From Here."

On reading through the rest of the journal, a few of the poems struck me in particular:

"Why do you live on your own, without any children?", by Michaela Ridgway
Nil by m0uth, week 3, by Cora Greenhill
Triptych, by Claire Dyer

But most of all I liked Archie's Paris, by David Harmer, which reminded me of the first sentence of Reginald Shepherd's essay "Why I Write" (which I quoted in my brief eulogy for him when he died, over three years ago now).

Whisky, by Ciaran Carson

Sometimes literature can make you thirsty. The late fifties and early sixties novels of Marguerite Duras (such as Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia) all made me want to get drunk on whatever the characters were drinking, even before I found out Duras was an alcoholic.

I don't recall ever reading something that made me want to get stoned or do other illegal counterfactuals. (Not that I was unable to find other reasons ...)

This one from Ciaran Carson's 1996 collection Opera Et Cetera made me want to drink some whisky, among other things (it also made me want to try to interpret it, but I'll leave it at typing it again to see how the lines feel under my fingers):

Whisky

Of how the life of water is distilled to liquid gold; how the water of
The Liffey becomes Guinness; how explosive cocktails take the name of Molotov;

How the wild mountain thyme blows around the blooming heather, and the perfumed smoke
Of poteen rises high into the azure sky; how turf is the conducive agent, and not coke;

How coke is crack, not heroin, nor smack; how marijuana is La Cucaracha,
Maryjane, or blow; how many States of mind there are in Appalachia;

How you turn into an insect overnight, or after-hours, from eating
Magic mushrooms; how the psilocybin got your brain and led to some 'Strange Meeting';

How the tongue gets twisted, how 'barbarian' is everyone who is not Greek;
How things are named by any other name except themselves, thereof I meant to speak.

While I was typing, the associations began to flow:

The wild mountain thyme brought to mind Penelope Houston, whose punky folk I loved so much in the early to mid nineties (shortly before I read this book for the first time, in September 96): she did a burning cover of that song.

Poteen made me think of Brian Friel's Translations, which I played a small part in and co-directed in Saarbrücken in 1994.

Turf made me thirsty for Laphroaig.

The Appalachian States of mind made me think of Brad Mehldau playing "New York State of Mind" as solo jazz piano. Far-fetched? I don't care!

Turning into an insect overnight? You know what I thought when I read that; you thought the same thing after all.

But after-hours made me think of the movie "After Hours", whose basic idea I would like to steal for my long unwritten tale "The Clerk," which started being pondered in the main Basel Post Office years ago.

For me, Strange Meeting is a tune by Bill Frisell I once began to write some words for.

barbarian is everyone who is not Greek: this idea always reminds me of Adorno's claim about lyric poetry after Auschwitz being "barbaric"—"not Greek"?

Perhaps this is all free association; perhaps this is "naming things by any other name except themselves."

Reginald Shepherd

"I write because I would like to live forever."

Reginald Shepherd, "Why I Write"

Rest in peace, Reginald.

*

"A poem has never oppressed anyone ..." ("The Other's Other")

"But literature is one of the few areas of life in which I do not feel oppressed, in which I have experienced true freedom." ("The Other's Other")

"I have an intense desire to rescue these things that have touched me and place them somewhere for safekeeping, which is both impossible and utterly necessary." ("Why I Write")

To Make Me Who I Am

I have mentioned this line from Borges before (several times actually), but it is one that always comes back to me: "I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar."

It came back to me again in Reginald Shepherd's "To Make Me Who I Am," the long autobiographical essay which opens his Orpheus in the Bronx, when I recognized myself in this:

My gifts were also my curse, and I wished that my differences (I knew that I was smart and that being smart was better) also came with the power to defend myself against those who rejected me.

By Way of Introduction

Last month, I read Reginald Shepherd's essay collection Orpheus in the Bronx, a little while after having read his Fata Morgana (which I have been commenting on off and on for the past few weeks). In his brief introduction to the collection, Shepherd wonderfully captures something that people should keep in mind when they talk about the politics of literature: "I have been oppressed by many things in my life, but not by literature, which enacts possibility rather than closure."

I have been oppressed by many fewer things in my life than Reginald (I was not raised by a single mother in the Bronx, for example), but I could not agree with him more: one thing that has never oppressed me is literature. It has always freed me from whatever wanted to hem me in.

Light Years

In my post on previous post, on Reginald Shepherd's "With the Wind Blowing Through It," I said that it's not depth but difference that poets find interesting, while the popular conception of poetry is that depth is the point.

"Light Years," the next poem in Shepherd's Fata Morgana (you can find it here if you page down a bit) attributes the search for depth to the you that the poem is addressed to:

You walk ahead as if you know
the way, full of purpose and intent
on seeing what's to be seen
if you look hard enough, look deep
enough, so certain the world is as you find it.

Look at what the search for depth is associated with: a sense of purposeful, intentional direction; a belief that there are depths where meaning can be found; a confident belief in one's perception of the world. The poem's speaker has a different relationship to the world in the poem's final lines:

... You call me back
to the world of things, sometimes
I don't know why I should go there.

The poet, we poets like to think, is someone who "looks hard enough" and, in many strains of contemporary poetry, finds "no ideas / but in things." But this first-person voice seeks to escape from things, not into deeper meanings, not into what is hidden inside the things, but ... where?

I reread the poem now to look for clues as to how to answer that question, and while doing so I thought, "But now I am looking hard enough ..." But my answer is not between the lines; it's on the surface, in the lines themselves, and it's in the lines about surface right before the ones I first quoted above:

... Late afternoon flatters my skin
with pattern, and then the setting sun undoes
the picture. Dark, light, bright
slip through my fingers, color distinctions
fade with the day.

The poet does not look harder or deeper; the poet looks at surface patterns and traces their changes over time. — I'm not sure I really agree with that statement, but I am always tempted by the idea that poetry is not about depth, and I'm enjoying tracing the lines of that idea by thinking about Shepherd's poems.

With the Wind Blowing Through It

Poets have a tendency to present simple things as being deeply meaningful—or so says the popular understanding of poetry. One response to this understanding is to deny it—but if your poems don't aim at some meaning beyond the simple statement of the words themselves, then what are you writing them for? Another response is to accept that understanding but argue that it's not as simple as that—which accepts that understanding at a different level! A third response is to embrace it: yes, we poets are finding deep meaning in simple things. But then you risk sounding exactly like a poet is assumed to sound by those who never read poetry—the "wow, man, deep" school, if you will. A fourth response is to historicize it—poets are like soothsayers, who take their auguries from the patterns the birds fly in the sky. All this as an introduction to the last three lines of Reginald Shepherd's "With the Wind Blowing Through It" (from Fata Morgana):

The same sky keeps happening
but differently each time
(today with finches in it)

Perhaps it is the poet's willingness to see what is different in the same that makes the poet a poet, while also leading to the popular conception (misconception?) of poetry as something deep put in a simple way. But it's not the depth that is the point for the poet (or is it?), but the difference—the defamiliarization of the sky, in this case (sorry, Shklovsky sometimes rears his charming head). Or to be less theoretical and more poetic about it, in the words of Paul Celan, "something intervenes."

"Oh, wow, man, that's deep."

A Handful of Sand

I'm always putting things into poems
where I think they'll keep ...

These are the first two lines of Reginald Shepherd's poem "A Handful of Sand" (like all the ones I've quoted over the past few weeks, it's from his collection Fata Morgana). Again, my response to the poem (at least the one I am developing here) is more of an association from than a reading of the poem. In this case, it was nice to hear a poet articulate something that I have sometimes felt: one purpose of poems for the poet is to act as mnemonics to help one remember things that one does not want to forget.

If this becomes the poet's only reason to write poems, then it's probably time to stop trying to get published, since what one finds memorable may or may not be something one can turn into a successful poem. More than just this desire is necessary—but it's an interesting desire nonetheless.

(Sometimes I get the feeling that some published poets don't distinguish between anecdotes and poems ...)

I hope that RS is continuing to recover well from his serious illness last month. In the light of that illness, the last line of "A Handful of Sand" could have been painful to re-read now:

I will not entirely die.

The Tendency of Dropped Objects to Fall

Reginald Shepherd has been quiet on his blog because he was seriously ill for weeks—close to death even. My comments on his poems were, unknowingly, made during his illness. I have more comments on them to come, as well as on his essays.

Here's another moment that reminded me of W. G. Sebald, this one from "The Tendency of Dropped Objects to Fall":

..... In exile Andromache's handmaid

builds a miniature Troy with toothpicks
and superglue, with matchsticks
from a story that she read: a helpless glitter
with tinfoil walls and someone

rolls over it in his sleep.

In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald wrote about a man who built a miniature version of the Temple of Jerusalem. There's some information about Sebald's source here.

The building of miniatures with toothpicks reminds me of Brian Phillips's comparison between poetry and shortwave-radio operators, in this essay. Poetry as toothpick temples and Troys?

Snowdrops and Summer Snowflakes, Drooping

Another moment in Reginald Shepherd's Fata Morgana that caught my attention was this, from the poem "Snowdrops and Summer Snowflakes, Drooping":

The river is silted with sentiments, Ophelia
sings flowers in hell to all the goodnight
ladies martyred to plots ...

That makes this poem a much better version of one I wrote long ago, "Gretchen and Ophelia," which toyed around with the similarities between Gretchen in Goethe's Faust and Ophelia, the way that they die over and over again on stages all over the world.

Where is Hamlet being played tonight? Who is playing Hamlet? Who Ophelia? Where is Faust being played? And who is playing Gretchen? Questions like the claim that somewhere a radio station is playing a Beatles tune as you read this. Which station? What tune? "Things We Said Today" would be my choice.

Shepherd continues with all the things he would give Ophelia, all the flowers, and concludes with this:

... What I wouldn't give
to hear her shut up that infernal singing,
walk out of sullen water open-eyed.

Things Waiting To Be Dangerous

Before Larry Craig brought gay cruising methods to public attention, Reginald Shepherd described them in his poem "Things Waiting To Be Dangerous" (first in the American Poetry Review and then in his book Fata Morgana) and then went some other places, too:

... (Bring it on, the waiting
in a basement stall for someone to sit down,
tap one foot yes, the workmen's overtime

contempt, a waste of spirit and I don't even
drink. Bring all the men in bedrooms
bathrooms backrooms bookstores alleys

who left me unsatisfied, came with me
after all. I miss them now. Bring on my
retrovirus, invisible catastrophe, distracted

palindrome and abstract doom,
another decade's style in sex, or maybe
it was imported, bring me something to drink. Something

gets tired, undresses for bed.)
...

That's quite a parentheses.

Even This; Eugene

Resonances between poems and songs are often intriguing, especially if I am pretty sure the poem and the song have never met outside my mind.

Here's a phrase from Reginald Shepherd's "Even This," from his book Fata Morgana:

... Keep walking
and the lake finds you,

That recalled Greg Brown's "Eugene," from his CD The Evening Call:

The dog is bound to find me sooner or later
Sometimes you got to not look too hard
Just let the dog find you

*

Both of these are available on-line, but instead of looking them up on-line, you should buy the collection and the album. They are both magnificent.

How People Disappear

As I have noted before, I like the effect when a poem (or story or novel or book of any kind) seems to coincide with whatever is going on around me while I am reading it.

Back in March, while reading Reginald Shepherd's intoxicating collection Fata Morgana, I noted the snow outside when reading these lines from the poem "How People Disappear":

.... Late March
keeps marching in old weather,
another slick of snow to trip
and fall into, another bank
of inconvenient fact.

(To be precise, as I noted in the book, it was March 26, and there was snow on the ground in Basel.)

"How People Disappear" is a brilliant version of a type of poem (death of a parent) that must always somehow circumvent the easy generation of feelings afforded by the sadness of its content. The poet must avoid anything that might seem like a desire for pity, while at the same time articulating the feelings that the experience generated (and making the poem a vehicle for those feelings).

A completely different point about the same poem: I searched for it and found the original publication in the archive on the Ploughshares website. But I also found several copies of the poem at various poem sites (americanpoems.com, plagiarist.com, poemhunter.com). If it weren't on the Ploughshares site (and on Reginald's blog here), then I would feel uncomfortable about using the "illegitimate" sites to refer to it. Or should I steal it from the poem-gathering sites and put it here on my blog? I could ask Reginald (if you read this, Reginald, what do you think?), but I am also wondering how others feel about such republication of poems on-line (not because someone loved your poem and put it on their blog, but because it has been put on an on-line collection of poems that, I assume, does not pay for the rights).

Smartish Pace 15

Issue 15 of Smartish Pace contains three of my translations from the French of poems by Jacques Réda: "The Jay," "The Milk of Dawn" (a favorite of mine), and "The Dead House." (Note that, as of this writing, the issue is not on-line; I'm referring to the print edition.)

Of the other poems in the issue, I especially enjoyed quite a few:

Gary J. Whitehead's "The Mouse in the House" juxtaposes the sound of a mouse in the house with the memory of the speaker's mother tearing up her late husband's unsent letters to his estranged sister. How's that for a unique approach to the "late-parent" poem?

Mark Yakich has two poems from a sequence called "Green Zone New Orleans," the second of which I put an asterisk by. "You'll never / See your own // Corpse and nobody / Will ever know // Your mind."

Brooks Haxton's "Consort at Bay Window" begins with the beautiful line "Pine ribs in the body of a lute" (I'm a sucker for poems with lutes and mandolins in them).

Christopher Cunningham's contribution, "The Absinthe Drinker," is an ekphrastic poem based on Degas's painting "L'Absinthe."

Jacqueline Berger's "Cigarettes" is a very unusual poem—a "my parents died" poem apparently written before the fact (or at least "before" for the speaker), with the additional twist of its being the smoking fantasies of a non-smoker:

I'm not a smoker,
but I always imagine myself with a cigarette
when my brother and I visit our parents' graves.

There are two of David Kirby's long, chatty poems; for me, the contrast between the two shows how tricky it is to make his style work: the first, "The Only Good Question" (which turns out to be "What the fuck?"), weaves its various threads together so that they disappear and return with a good sense of timing and a final sense of closure. The second, "Sigourney Weaver, Certified Public Accountant," may be as funny as its title promises, but all the riffing ends up feeling like unmotivated free association without the strong sense of timing and closure of "The Only Good Question." Or rather, "Sigourney Weaver" may provide an intellectual sense of closure, but it does not (at least for this reader) provide an emotional closure.

I read Bradley Paul's "How to Stop Your Doppelgänger from Plagiarizing You" as an excellent variation on "Borges and I," which opens up the dual scene of Borges's test into a triangle: speaker, Doppelgänger, and a "you" that the poem introduces at just the right time (the timing helps the poem be more than just a repetition of Borges).

Bob Hicok has four memorable poems in the issue: "Les fenêtres" juxtaposes a translation of Baudelaire (a translation that seems to be done by someone who does not quite understand the French) with the speaker's inadvertent assumption of a role as a midwife (!). The other three all have some great lines:

We are boring people who thrust our arms
out of cars in the belief that flying
will notice and come to wrap us in the lift-off.

("Hope is a Thing with Feathers That Smacks into a Window")

In a poem about Kenneth Koch:

... I feel free
when reading his "no rabbit stew" poems
to not read them or read bits of them or start one
and think, this is boring, because on the next page
there will be one about which I think, this is like being
a speed-boat painter while the speed boat's
on the lake and tearing my hair out.

("Why Would Your First Guess Be Cock?")

In "Reading to Jesus," which is also addressed to Jesus, the speaker wonders about apologizing to Jesus:

to apologize for ever saying "Jesus fucking Christ,"
for parsing breath into such a twisty
implication of divine self-love, though if anyone
could fuck himself it would be You

And the poem concludes with a dramatic shift of register:

... I bet
You never won at tag, and when the hammer struck
the first time, did You curse the old man or love
this last chance to feel human?

The Hicok poems are followed by Reginald Shepherd's "Miroirs." I have just finished reading his book Fata Morgana, and I am overwhelmed there and in this poem by how wonderfully Shepherd's poems fulfill an aim that he has talked about on his blog and in his essays: how the poem should be an emotional experience prior to understanding. Again and again, his poems produce an emotional effect that can be overwhelming, one that draws me in and makes me want to decipher some of the more riddling passages (the ones that non-readers of poetry would reject as "difficult").

Joseph Harrison's "The Catch" is a ballad stanza that reads like a humorous companion piece to Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish"; part of the humor comes from the fish at the center of the poem: Asian big head carp, which, the epigraph tells us, "are known for jumping into fishermen's boats."

Gail Mazur's "Little Tempest" recalls the day after the last hurricane: "Everyone was out strolling, everyone seemed pleased / in the aftermath. That cold clear light." (But then, I am a sucker for the word "aftermath.")

Dawn McGuire's "I Sleep in My Clothes" depicts a stroke victim who can still write but cannot read. McGuire, a neurologist herself, boldly approaches her figure in his first-person voice.

Finally, Joanne Lowery's "Pleasing Others" describes how "unsuccessful so far" at doing so, the speaker buries herself, to be dug up after "centuries of solitude" as a major archaeological find, when she will finally "know that I do not disappoint."

The play between understanding and emotion also features in one of my Réda translations, "The Milk of Dawn," which is about hearing Woody Herman as a youth:

In our initiation into poetry,
A major moment was the song beginning: "Milkman,
Keep those bottles quiet" — we never really fully
Understood all of what followed that command.

DPP8 results

The results for week 8 of the Daily Poem Project are in, and once again the class and the bloggers have agreed: the winner for both is Eve's Awakening, by Reginald Shepherd.

13 bloggers voted, with Shepherd's poem receiving 5 votes, Corpus Hermeticum, by Eric Pankey, receiving 4, and O my pa-pa, by Bob Hicok, receiving 3.

13 votes were cast in class, where Shepherd was an easy winner, with 6 votes. Of the others, only Hicok's poem, with three, received more than one vote, and Pankey, so popular with the bloggers, did not get any votes in class.

There were some quite contradictory comments from the bloggers: several felt this was the weakest week yet, while others felt it was the strongest. I belonged to the latter group.

I was already on record as an admirer not only of Bob Hicok's work in general but of O my pa-pa in particular. When I first read it as part of the project, I thought it would be an easy decision for me this week, since I enjoyed it more than almost any poem in the rest of the project until now. But every day, another striking poem came along, and I had to read them all carefully several times to decide that I was indeed going to be vote for Hicok's poem, with Reginald Shepherd's a close second.

The comments on the call-for-votes post show, though, that this week generated a wide range of opinions:

Donald Brown:

If I were to title my comments it would be something like: Why I Do Not Read Poetry Mags. This is the worst week yet. Dismal, disheartening, even. For some reason I have the idea that a poem, whatever it may be about, is also "about" command of language. Doing something interesting with it. Also, that, whatever the subject matter, one avoids clichés, the predictable, the banal, and -- one tries to at least -- the bathetic and sentimental. Somewhere between my standards and those of Hallmark Cards resides the world of poetry magazines . . . and Poetry Daily.

This harangue is mainly against #50, Hickok, and #52, Grøndahl (the latter is a translation and that may be the problem, language-wise, but in terms of content it's clichéd treatment of a cliché -- gee, does that make it postmodern?; the former takes issue with all those awful "Dad" poems and then proceeds to write one as bad as one would expect, or worse).

Those are the worst offenders, but they manage to contaminate the rest. For instance, Dybek (#51, "Pan") -- clearly he knows how to write and work a line, but I'm underwhelmed by the paucity of imagination here, by something "school-teacherish" about it (yes, I know, most people who publish poems probably teach in some capacity, therein may lie the problem, but I won't go there).

The last four lines of Gallaher's dubya-bash say all that needs to be said, the rest, I guess, sets us up for it, but, "Now watch me make this shot" -- fish in a barrel, John, y'know? "Obit," Lehman's (#54) coulda been ok without that "hard-hitting" ending. Spare me a pundit's obit on the 20th century. Talk about belated! Are we done yet? No, #55, a Creation myth for the "new Eve"? Talk about 20th century! Zzzzz.

So, finally, my vote: #56, "Corpus Hermeticum" -- Eric Pankey. "A year, but only a day or two recalled, / And then only piecemeal: / a fallow field / Winter-dulled, a lean horse / Subsumed in fog". If it looks like a poem and sounds like a poem, it must be a poem! One for the week. Not great, but, hell, the thrice-great Hermes might not be utterly offended. And "a contingent cosmology" -- nice. I mean, what other kind of cosmology could there be, these days....

Anonymous said:

I vote for "Eve's Awakening" by R. Shepherd. If that poem wasn't included in the week's work, I would have abstained. Voice and rhythms are astounding in Shepherd's work, and the other poems sound so much weaker.

Bruno Navasky:

My vote is for Reginald Shepherd, although I laughed out loud eading Hicok's "O my pa-pa" and Gallaher's poem about the shrub.

Felix:

My vote goes to Eric Pankey. "Corpus Hermeticum" is a poem on nature, on the difficulty of writing a nature poem, but also--as the title suggests--on the difficulty of reading and understanding poetry. Still, Pankey is not merely self-reflective, but evokes a powerful series of images.

Bruce Loebrich:

Here's my ranked list:

55. Eve's Awakening, by Reginald Shepherd
56. Corpus Hermeticum, by Eric Pankey
54. Obit, by David Lehman
53. The War President's Afternoon Tea, by John Gallaher
52. Selected Exercises in Case Law II, by Cathrine Grøndahl / tr. Roger Greenwald
50. O my pa-pa, by Bob Hicok
51. Pan , by Stuart Dybek

See the list of the winners from the first six weeks in the post with the results of week six. Week Seven results are here.

DPP8

THE DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK EIGHT

Here are the poems to vote for in week eight of my Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, May 14, to Sunday, May 20):

50. O my pa-pa, by Bob Hicok
51. Pan , by Stuart Dybek
52. Selected Exercises in Case Law II, by Cathrine Grøndahl / tr. Roger Greenwald
53. The War President's Afternoon Tea, by John Gallaher
54. Obit, by David Lehman
55. Eve's Awakening, by Reginald Shepherd
56. Corpus Hermeticum, by Eric Pankey

The Rules:

You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). In any case, I will not post the comments until after the final vote is in (secret ballot). You may vote by the title, the author's name, or the number of the poem in the list above. Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists). Please VOTE BY THURSDAY, MAY 24!

Abstaining: If you read the poems but decide that there is no poem that you want to vote for, I would be interested to know that you decided to abstain.

Week 7 results are here. The results of previous weeks are summarized in the post about the week 6 results.

Shepherd on Race and Academia

I highly recommend Reginald Shepherd's long, thoughtful post "Some Thoughts on Race Academia." I have two small glosses to the text, neither of which is about its central issues.

First of all, Shepherd writes, near the beginning: "My blog is my public face." This was hammered home to me recently when the always lively and interesting Ms. Baroque quoted a post of mine in some thoughts she had about translation. How fascinating to see how my thoughts, which had seemed rather private, were suddenly revealed to have become completely public. I stand by what I said in that post, and I do not regret going public with those comments, but I had to see the remarks quoted to fully understanding that a blog is indeed a "public face."

Right at the end of his post, Shepherd writes: "Multiculturalism is just a new word for segregation, keeping all the minorities safely in their places." This reminded me of an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Review of Books long ago. A search in their on-line archive located it: "The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding." Here is the paragraph that struck me back in 1997:

"Coming, as I do, from Ghana, I find the broad cultural homogeneity of America more striking than its much-vaunted variety. Take language. When I was a child, we lived in a household where there were always at least three mother tongues in daily use: we spoke English (Ghana's official language and my mother's) and Twi (my father's first language); and our cook and steward, who came from further north, also spoke the language of Navrongo, where they were born. (The watchman spoke Hausa.) Ghana, with a population smaller than that of New York State, has several dozen languages in active daily use and no one language that is spoken at home—or even fluently understood—by a majority of the population."

(The full article is only available to subscribers to the archive, but I have it if anyone wants it.)

Thrill Me

Reginald Shepherd was kind enough to send me his essay on "Some Issues in the Teaching of Creative Writing," which he has been quoting from on his blog recently. One passage that he did not put on his blog struck me (I hope he does not mind my quoting it here): "When I read a poem, by a student, in a literary journal, in a collection of poems by a single author, or in an anthology, I want to enjoy the poem, to immerse myself in the poem’s world."

This reminded me of my time at the Spoleto Writers' Workshop (summer 1998). On our last full day in Spoleto, the writers went to the master class of the Spoleto workshop on bel canto singing, which we had been invited to observe.

In the singing workshop, each singer would sing an aria or a song which he or she had prepared, then the teachers (Judith Coen for the women, Bob Shewan for the men) would comment on the singing and work with the singer for a while. They would grab the singer's face in mid-song; they would have them sing while flapping their arms like birds; once, Bob even made faces at a singer in the middle of his aria! (We couldn't actually see Bob's face because his back was to us and his face was literally in the singer's face.) What was most striking to me was the metaphorical meaning of all this for writers who had just been workshopping for ten days: the workshop leaders had been doing the same to us the whole time — but the writers (including myself) tended to respond differently to our teachers' proddings than the singers did. If they seemed to take it all in a fairly professional way, we would often take it all in a very emotional way, as if the teachers' criticisms were personal. As Judith Coen said to one of the singers: "I'm pushing you so hard because I want you to thrill me."

I have told that story to students over and over again in the past nine years: if I criticize their writing (whether creative or scholarly), it is because I want them to thrill me.

Reginald's essay also reminded me of another anecdote. Reginald wrote: "One student rather disarmingly admitted during a class discussion of Shakespeare’s sonnets that 'I can understand this when I work at it, but I don’t like having to work.'" I had a similar disarming remark once: while I was discussing essay writing with students (quite advanced ones), one of them said, "So what you are saying is that you want us to think about we write." Bingo.

Good Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd's "One State of the Art" is yet another fine piece of prose from the pen or keyboard of RS:

"Reversing Pound's dictum that technique is the test of a poet's sincerity, many contemporary American poets seem to believe that technique is instead a sign of insincerity, that something too apparently shapely cannot be deeply felt, or that the urgencies of feeling are necessarily at odds with the imperatives of form."

"... what Allen Grossman has called the four tasks that the significant poet must be expected to perform: to point out what is significant in the world of common experience; to defeat given expectations with respect to how things are assembled (and poems themselves are very much in the category of 'things'); to make clear how difficult it is to make meaning; and to make clear how interesting the world is."

I also liked this tidbit from D. W. Fenza's "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?", a link I found thanks to John Gallaher:

"Poets often allude to other poets, not because they like to show off or generate footnotes, but because they love to enter that mysterious communal place where the dead, the living, and future generations exchange their gifts with one another. Poetry is the loveliest of all conversations, for it seeks to belong to no one person but to overlapping and concentric circles of self, friends, family, tribes, communities, and humanity."

Koethe

Andrew Osborn's interview with John Koethe (from the Southwest Review, on-line at Poetry Daily) not only taught me how to pronounce "Koethe" ("katy"; not a rhyme for "Goethe") but also contained this interesting summary of Koethe's writing style:

"I like poems to be locally clear so that when you're reading them sentence by sentence you sort of think you understand what they're saying. But then I also like them to be globally obscure, so that the whole poem remains the kind of free-standing artifact I was talking about earlier. You don't really know what the whole poem means, but you can read any sentence of it and, in a conventional sense, it seems clear."

I've tried to find the passage where Reginald Shepherd made the same point on his blog, but I have not found it. I was struck by how two quite different points made the same claim (one I am quite sympathetic to).

I printed out the interview to read it because it is so long. I had also printed out John Ashbery's "Yes, 'Senor' Fluffy" from PD, and it happened to be the next thing in my pile of things to read. The last lines of the interview with Koethe refer to "an enchanting exhibition devoted entirely to clouds" that he attended in Berlin. The first lines of Ashbery's poem:

And the clouds fretted and flew, as though
there was a reason for their acting distraught.