To speak the unspeakable, that is often the poet’s job. Finding a language for what otherwise goes shoved under the worldwide carpet. In Dawn Lundy Martin’s beautiful and uncompromising new book, “A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering,” we are given a language for the body. The body as object of obsession, the body as lover, the body as slave, the body as violator, and violated. The winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and published by the University of Georgia Press, Martin’s book has made her a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. And I for one, hope she wins.

The first time I heard Abraham Smith read I was shot back in time. I pictured me, a scraggly beat-girl, hearing Burroughs and thinking Whitman while rocking back and forth to a new sort of preacher’s sermon. Smith has a rolling rhythm come from deep in the backwoods of Ladysmith, Wisconsin that rocks a bit like a boat on the rough Mississippi heading for the West Village circa 1963. All this to say it felt, at the same time, familiar and utterly alien. In his new book, Whim Man Mammon just out by Action Books, Smith pounds out a rhythm with a boot heel and sits you down to listen to the man behind the pulpit. Although the title might suggest a book heavily steeped in the language school, Smith shakes off any sort of categorization by blending his singular narrative deep into song that harkens back to Woody Guthrie and those storytellers intrinsically interested in the mythmaking of American culture.

How do you square this:

Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one at all. With digital fragmentation any notions of authenticity and coherence have long been wiped. When we're everywhere and nowhere at once -- pulling RSS feeds from one server, server-side includes from another, downloading distributed byte-size torrents from hundreds of other shifting identities -- such naïve sentiments are even further from what it means to be a contemporary writer. Identity politics no longer have to do with the definition of a coherent self, rather it has to do with the reconstructed distributed, fragmented, multiple and often anonymous selves that we are today. We're infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute. [Kenneth Goldsmith in the Harriet Blog]

By the time I was diagnosed with colon cancer, the sense of my own physical fragility and vulnerability had been pretty much pounded into me by my HIV diagnosis, my bout with Bell’s palsy (especially frightening since there are no treatments if the facial paralysis doesn’t end on its own accord), my subsequent hospitalization for a shingles infection in my inner ear which left me with only half the hearing in my right ear, my bouts with kidney disease and recurrent kidney stones (mostly caused by various HIV medications), the hearing distortion in my left ear which no manner of tests has been able to diagnose, let alone treat, an episode of secondary polycythemia, a condition in which one produces too many red blood cells which also earned me a hospital stay, since my blood was turning to jello and I was in imminent danger of a stroke, and my osteoporosis, because of which I’ve suffered several painful bone fractures. This not to mention more mundane matters like my low testosterone and my high blood pressure (the latter has come down since I’ve started exercising and losing weight). [Reginald Shepherd in the Harriet Blog]

Once more illness has kept me away from the blog for a while, this time due to surgery to kill the tumors on my liver. The surgery was successful, or so I'm told, but I ended up in the hospital for several days due to complications.

It recently occurred to me (I’m not sure why it took so long) that there’s a decidedly disproportionate representation of the self-proclaimed avant-garde in the online poetry world. Bloggers in particular are much more likely to be what poet Ron Slate calls avant-gardeners than to be more “mainstream” poets. (When I first started my own blog a little over a year ago, someone wrote to say that she had been waiting for “a mainstream Ron Silliman” as a counter-balance, an indication of his iconic status in the online poetry world.) There seems to be a high degree of technophilia among “post-avant” bloggers. This is in part due to the fact that most of them are relatively young white men, who tend to be aficionados of all things computer-related: blogging, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, which I confess to being too old to know much about and too stodgy to care, computer and video games, text messaging, iPods and iPhones and Blackberries and Bluetooths, etc.

Once again illness has kept me away from blogging for a bit. I had surgery on Friday on the tumors on my liver, which the surgeon believes he has gotten (yay!), but I had to go the emergency room on Saturday in intense pain that turned out to be caused by pneumonia in my right lung. As Frank Sinatra sang, everything happens to me. Yeesh.

I’m sure that every writer remembers his or her first review. I’m even more sure that every writer remembers his or her first bad review. To be honest, I don’t remember the first review of my first book, where it appeared or who wrote it, what it said or where I was when I first read it. But I remember exactly where I was when I saw my first bad review, of my second book, Angel, Interrupted. I was at Borders in Chicago, in my old hipster/gayboy/yuppie neighborhood of Lakeview. I haven’t been to that Borders in many years, but ten years ago they had an excellent selection of literary journals. I picked up a copy of Chelsea, in which my work had appeared several times, and there it was.

So, following Ange Mlinko’s suggestion in the comments section of my last post, here’s all I’m talking about regarding the difference between Truth and Clarity. (They sound like allergy medicines, don’t they?) Truth (to me) might go something like “Socialist democracy is the best form of government.” And I’m always delighted to read good poems by people who hold that opinion (Anne Winters?) but most poems that merely want to tell me that Truth aren’t usually good poems. There are much better ways than poems to make arguments or deliver messages.

Clarity, meanwhile, is more like caffeine. Or a pair of glasses. (I rely on both.) See better, see with more energy, become awake. What does Truth have to do with a poem like (to pick one everybody knows) “The Red Wheelbarrow”? What do we talk about when we talk about this poem?

It is the first day of spring. Renew. Read. Rev up.

In attempting to carry on some of Rigoberto’s wonderful work introducing new books and old favorites from his collection, I thought I’d start a Thursday shout out series. (Unlike Rigo, I may not be able to do it every Thursday, but I will do my honest best.)

Often, the poems that thrill me the most, the ones that make me ignore all the clutter on the table and commit myself to reading them, often memorizing them, are poems that take a stand, that have a strong sense of risk and urgency (I said NOW!). Add that to an individual voice that won’t quit and language that sandblasts the paint off all those ordinary houses we drive by, and you’ve got Alex Lemon.

Many of the comments in response to my most recent post revolved around the question of authorial intention and its importance or even relevance to the reading and interpretation of a work of verbal art, so I have decided to explore the question in greater depth. This post incorporates some of my prior responses to comments on that earlier post into an extended discussion of the matter of authorial intention.

One of the greatest legacies of the much-maligned (mainly by people who haven't really read them) New Critics is the separation of the author and the text. When I read a poem, I read the poem. I have neither the desire nor the ability to discern an author's intentions. I care about what the author wrote, not what the author thought he or she was writing. Even if one thinks of a work in terms of its author, if what mattered most to a writer was what was in his or her head, there’d be no reason to write anything, since one already has access to the contents of one’s own mind. One writes because one wants to produce something separate from oneself. I can't imagine how I could fathom Shakespeare's intentions, for example, or how, if I could, that would usefully illuminate his plays. In Keats's words, the poet is no one.

Ada Limon likens poets to soothsayers. But poets seem to me no wiser or more visionary than anyone else—possibly the opposite is closer to the truth. Poems in general aren’t so much wise or fortune-telling things as they are (some of them; no generalization does justice to the art) providers of concise moments of clarity.

T.E. Hulme, in “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” which he gave to the Poets’ Club in London in 1908, said "I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way. The President [of the Club] told us last week that poetry was akin to religion. It is nothing of the sort."

Ironically enough, given the topic of my last post, I have been sidelined from this blog for a while because I've been painfully sick wth what my oncologist thinks (but doesn't know) are new chemotherapy side effects. But I am better now, and I am back. Happy reading.

Politics, history, biography all inform and sometimes even deform art (style can be seen in one sense as the scar history leaves on art, what Adorno calls a hardening against the pressure of suffering), but they enter into art as artistic materials, and are transformed within it. And art speaks back to these things; it is not merely subject to them. To treat art as a social or economic or historical epiphenomenon is to strip it of its identity as art, and of its liberatory potential. This is why I am an adherent of what Adorno calls immanent critique.

The Frame

From Gulliver's Travels, "A Voyage to Laputa, etc.," at the Grand Academy of Lagado :

"The first professor I saw was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him...Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas by his contrivance the most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. He then led me to [a] frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was about twenty foot square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square with paper pasted on them, and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order....The pupils...took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn the engine was so contrived that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

"Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labor, and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which however might be still improved and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames..."

My friend the poet and critic Christopher Hennessy, who maintains a fascinating blog on the multiple relationships between identity (particularly gay identity) and creativity at Outside the Lines, recently asked me, after I described to him one of my chemotherapy side effects, that even picking up a piece of cold fruit burns my hands, whether I planned to write about the experience of having cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. Some excellent poetry has come out of that experience, most notably the late L. E. Sissman’s Hello Darkness. The very much alive Marilyn Hacker has a fourteen-poem sequence called “Cancer Winter” in her book Winter Numbers, dealing with her experience of breast cancer. There is also, in prose, the late cultural critic Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and, more problematically, AIDS and Its Metaphors, and the late Audre Lorde's Cancer Journal. I have not encountered the stigmatization of cancer Sontag writes of, though I am very familiar with the stigmatization of HIV, which has absorbed much of the “you brought this on yourself” discourse that used to surround cancer.

The dichotomy people in the literary world frequently make between mainstream and experimental poetry, conservative and “progressive” poetry, is very similar in form and tone (the attribution of sin to one and virtue to the other) to the dichotomy people (some of them the same people) make in the field of popular music between disco and punk. Disco bears the burden of inauthenticity and ideological mystification, complicity and social complacency—bodily pleasure as the opiate of the masses. I find this still-too-common characterization curious, since disco’s main producers and audiences were black people and gay men. Punk, on the other hand, bears the banner of authenticity and critique, transgression and rebellion, a revolt against the body and enjoyment (see the Sex Pistols song "Bodies"). Rebels of all stripes tend to be rather puritanical.

I have posted a revised and much longer version of my Harriet post on "post-avant-garde" poetry, now titled "Defining Post-Avant-Garde Poetry," on my own blog, to be found here.

In this extended version of the piece I discuss various writers' conceptions of the phenomenon I address, including Paul Hoover's new modernism, Stephen Burt's ellipticism, and Ron Silliman's third way. I also further expand on the idea that the mainstream/avant-garde dichotomy is outmoded. I hope that all who are interested in this topic will take a look.

That many of the New American Poets were gay (Ashbery, Robin Blaser, James Broughton, Duncan, Edward Field, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Peter Orlovsky, James Schuyler, Spicer, Wieners, Jonathan Williams) is not incidental to their quest to find new ways of saying and, by implication (stronger in some than in others) new ways of moving through the world. But those projects were not necessarily or even often conceived of in political terms.

Whatever the New Americans’ interest in social transformation, and whatever forms that interest took, it doesn’t seem to have extended to gender. Only four of the forty-four poets in The New American Poetry are women, and only two of those, Barbara Guest and Denise Levertov, are even heard of now, though Robert Duncan was quite fond of Helen Adam’s romantic ballads. I’m told that it was only at his insistence that she was included at all. That can be seen as commentary on the book's gender politics. But I also wonder what other women were writing and publishing in that mode at the time. The only one I can think of is Diane di Prima, whose first book was published in 1958. Joanne Kyger's first book wasn't published until 1965, and Anne Waldman's (who was only fifteen in 1960, when the anthology was published) not until 1968. I don't think that Allen deliberately excluded women poets. But the paucity of potential female contributors says much about the sexism of the “progressive” or bohemian countercultures of the Nineteen-Fifties and Nineteen-Sixties, especially the Beats, though Gary Snyder does address gender and sexual equality. (The “conservative” anthology against which The New American Poetry is often counterposed, Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson’s New Poets of England and America, published in 1957, does a bit better, with seven female contributors out of fifty-one total.)

Well, this is it, the last entry in a movimiento here on Harriet, in which I featured every Wednesday (25 Wednesdays to be exact) books that excited me, intrigued me, renewed my faith in poetry. The honor of the send-off goes to poet Alessandra Lynch, for her second collection of poems selected by James Richardson to be part of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series.

This is the second of three posts devoted to the seminal Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry. This post deals with the question of the "New American Poets"'s political commitments, or lack of same.

Some of the poets gathered by Allen did indeed seek to transform society. Some sought to transform consciousness. Some sought to transform writing as a practice. Most just sought to write poems that felt more genuine to them than the products of the poetic orthodoxies of the 1950s. Robert Creeley, for one example, was almost purely concerned with the lyric notation of the moment-to-moment movements of his mind, emotions, and sensibilities. As he wrote in the preface to For Love: Poems 1950-1960, “Not more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it me” (cited in M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets 147). This implies a notion of a life more authentic or at least more awake than the one most people live, but has no necessarily political valence: various religious disciplines of attention have the same goal.

John Ashbery was a Yale Younger Poet (and Frank O’Hara almost was, in the same year), and the revolution which interested him was what Julia Kristeva calls a revolution in poetic language, largely inherited from such forebears as Raymond Roussel and Gertrude Stein, what he calls in the title of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard “other traditions” (including Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Laura Riding, John Brooks Wheelwright, and David Schubert). It’s important to note that Ashbery has cited such canonical figures as W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens as among the poets who most shaped his poetic idiom.

It's taken me a while to post this piece, as I've been beset by chemotherapy side effects of my colon cancer treatment, especially a debilitating bout of chemo fatigue, and a nasty cold on top of this, which just seems unfair. But when has my life ever been fair?

Much of what poet and critic Joshua Corey understatedly calls the “remarkable storm of controversy” occasioned (but not caused) by my attempt to describe a phenomenon, “post-avant garde poetry,” much mentioned but little defined, was aroused by my linking of current “post-avant” poetry with what has been called “the New American Poetries,” after the famous Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press in 1960. This observation was purely descriptive, not evaluative. The poets often referred to as “post-avants” have clearly been influenced by the New American Poetries. But there is much disagreement about who has the right to claim the New Americans as their inheritance, as if their work and its legacy were something to be owned. But no one can lay exclusive claim to an artistic heritage or tradition. Such things are available to all, which is one of the many ways in which literature improves on life.

In turn, this debate derives from how one interprets that work and that legacy. The two main claims that have been made are a) that the very diverse poets gathered under the rubric “New American Poetry” were political and/or social revolutionaries and b) that they shared a program of total or near-total negation. I will investigate both these claims.

I hope that this series of posts will prompt debate, but I also hope that the debate will maintain a reasoned and reasonable tone. Shouting matches do nothing but make one hoarse, and personal attacks do nothing but make one mean.

This first post discusses the anthology as a whole and its work in producing the grouping we now call "the New American Poetries" out of a number of poets whose work often had very little in common. The second post will focus on the artistic statements of individual contributors. The first post will address broader issues of the relationship between "progressive" art and "progressive" politics. I won't spoil the ending.

I have been thinking about diction lately—the quandaries of word choice. Maybe it is partly to do with my 3-and-a-half–year old son’s vocabulary becoming richer and more sophisticated, and one finds oneself pushing him gently towards one word choice over another, though both might be more or less intelligible in context. Diction is often what makes or breaks a poem, though it can seem one of the least important of its mechanisms. Perhaps since John Ashbery made jarring registers of diction—from Elizabethan to contemporary slang and pop references--so much a part of his style, it has become a common-place of contemporary American poetry. Well-handled, mixed registers of diction can be playful, rousing, provocative; though it seems to me mixing registers is often adopted by poets as a postmodern tic, and that when it is applied glibly, the effect is of a poem channel-surfing, or too busy talking to itself to listen.

It’s tempting to invoke the phrase “Oedipus complex” in discussing this book by debut poet James Allen Hall; Mother (with a capital M), mythic figure, source of many glorious beginnings (and a few tragic endings), and indeed the defining lens to the worlds of the imagination and reality, is an unavoidable muse, an inescapable word uttered as an expression of wonder, a declamation of fear, and as the point of reference for things beautiful and dreadful. But Hall’s Mother moves beyond the son’s eye and takes shape as an independent body with agency and history outside male desire. She exists, with and without him:

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"Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Now is the time that face should form another;
Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
And threescore year would make the world away.
Look, what an unthrift in the world doth spend
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee."

from 11,112,006,825,558,016 Sonnets
by William Gillespie
Spineless Books, 1999
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Reginald Shepherd has proposed a definition for the term "post-avant poetry"—a term bandied about by poets without much consensus about its alleged referent, so I do not envy him his task, even though his definition has provided a scaffold for much subsequent discussion. Despite the currency of the term, I must confess that, since encountering the coinage in an early entry by Ron Silliman on his blog, I have studiously avoided the use of the moniker "post-avant" to describe any of the work by my peers, if only because I think that the overuse of the prefix "post-" in a lot of postmodern commentary never actually indicates the foreclosure of a particular, historical paradigm, so much as the prefix indicates our impatience that such a persistent, conceptual heritage has not yet been transcended—and thus we preemptively do so, long before we have yet constructed a much more innovative radicalism to replace it. I think that the term "post-avant poetry" thus signals a desire, among poets, for the obsolescence of the avant-garde, despite the fact that no other futuristic categories stand at the ready to upstage it….

Competing, scholarly priorities have prevented me from contributing to these interesting discussions on Harriet, and I fear that my own comments might seem very late in coming. Reginald Shepherd has expressed anxieties about the acid tone in an article by the poet Charles Bernstein, who formulates a sardonic rebuttal to an article by D. F. Fenza (the executive director of the AWP). Fenza has written an absurdly paranoid diatribe against the avant-garde, equating poets of the Language Movement with a species of "ichneumonid," a kind of wasp that can lay its eggs inside the live body of a caterpillar—a victim that then goes on to spin a cocoon, but that, alas, does not live long enough to hatch as a beautiful butterfly, because the horrible parasite devours its host from the inside out and then hatches forth from the cocoon instead, as a wasp. Fenza warns young poets to be wary of this threat that avant-garde theory might pose to their budding talents and their newborn careers….

I'm very gratified by the strong response my recent posts, especially "AWP, Communazis, and Me" and "Who You Callin' 'Post-Avant'," have received. It's wonderful to know that people are reading and that they care enough to comment.

However, I have been disturbed by the tenor of many (by no means all) of the responses, which have been hostile and sometimes vitriolic, even descending to the level of personal attack, either direct or implied, including all kinds of baseless negative assumptions about me (including insinuations that I am some kind of conservative or even reactionary). Many of them have also engaged in what felt to me like willful misreadings of what I had actually written.

I shouldn't have been surprised that my post on AWP and its discontents should have received some rather negative responses, since in that post I criticized Charles Bernstein's hyperbolic parody of AWP as Nazi, Stalinist, and MCarthyite. I would remind everyone, though, that criticism is not attack. But I was shocked that my post on post-avant poetry received so many such responses, as I considered it an innocuous description of a phenomenon that is much mentioned but not much defined.

More below the virtual fold.

I was prompted to write this entry by the citation of my blog entry "Orwellian Me" in article called "Blogging the AWP, Part Two," on the Chronicle of Higher Education's "*Footnoted from Academic Blogs" page. Author Jennifer Howard cited me discussing the shifting boundaries of "inside" and "outside" in the poetry worlds; noting my use of the phrase "post-avant," she asked for a definition, which I provided on the site. It occurred to me that it might be useful to do so in more expanded form here, especially since Don Share's most recent Harriet post notes that "Harriet readers frequently see calls for a definition of what, precisely, 'post-modern' and 'avant garde' poetry is." (And no, Peter Campion's uninformed dismissal doesn't cut it.)

The phrase "post-avant poetry," to my knowledge first coined by Joan Houlihan in a jocular mood, is bandied about quite a bit in the online poetry world (I’ve never seen it in print, an indication of how separate the two realms often are, though many people participate in both). It’s used with the assumption that "we all know what that is" but, like the phrases Don mentions in his post, the term is rarely defined. Here follows my attempt to do so, for whatever use it may be.

[I participated in the panel “A Celebration of Alicia Ostriker” at AWP last weekend. Here’s what I said:]

Preparing for this panel, I tried to think of how to sum up my relationship to Alicia Ostriker’s writing—and realized I can’t do it. The work is too various—and I’m a lousy summer-upper. But reading and rereading poem after poem, I was struck by how often men enter into them. I was struck by how complex and various these men are. And to make a hideously blanket statement without backing it up, which I may regret, I thought how relatively seldom men do seem to show up in women’s poems, and how when they do, they tend not to have a great deal of nuance. So I picked out three poems that show three different sides of Ostriker—three poems that have been important to me. All of them involve men.

Rick Barot is one of the most elegant, graceful poets I have come across. And I have anticipated the release of his new book after having taught The Darker Fall many times over the years since its first release in 2002. I have always admired his attention to rhythm, to the line, and to the precision of his language. Barot’s carefully chiseled stanzas give the distinct impression that he’s sculpting, or carving out of wood a marvelous artifact, not wooden at all, but startling and expressive. Perhaps this is why a number of the poems in this new collection are in dialogue with artistic media: literature, film, painting, and even performance art.

I’m proofreading this before posting by reading it out loud to my husband while he does yoga, at the same time that Maisie is grabbing at me and crawling all over me to get me to read her Dr. Seuss’ The Foot Book: “Up feet, down feet, here come clown feet!”

Is there a goal more foolish in politics than unity, or a phrase more hateful than “in the spirit of bipartisanship?” Why should we want unity with pro-lifers, war-and-torture-mongers, gay-hating religious nuts, etc.? We may have to put up with people who aren’t everything we want in order to get rid of the worst—but only put up with. I am voting for Obama since Kucinich and Edwards have dropped out, because we have to get rid of the savages that have been running this country, but I won’t do more than vote begrudgingly for a guy who, discussing his ideas for health care reform, announces that “the HMOS and insurance companies will have a seat at the table, but only a seat…” (quoted from memory). That’s like letting murderers sit on their own jury.

Jim, upside down at this moment, says the best way to mishear The Foot Book while reading it to the baby for the 200th time this week is to substitute the word “cock” for “foot” or “feet.” Silently, of course. “Small feet, big feet, here come pig feet!”

But poetry isn’t politics. In poetry, people who hate your work, or who think you’re doing everything wrong; people whose ideas about poetry you think are meaningless, or whose work doesn’t interest you—are not the enemy.

I have just returned from my second time attending the AWP conference, which (like last year) was wonderfully exhilarating and utterly overwhelming. Here in Pensacola I lead a life rather thoroughly isolated from any literary community or scene, and so the opportunity to see and talk to so many fellow writers was and is particularly exciting to me. I am pretty poor and the trip has practically bankrupted me, but it was worth it.

I am, as I have written, done with discussing Charles Bernstein's piece, my critique of which was only a part of a post that engaged considerably larger topics, which were simply ignored by most commenters. But the discussion around my post has brought up some issues I do think worth pursuing, both about the tenor of discourse in the online poetry world and about the question of insiders and outsiders in the poetry world(s).

More follows below the fold.

Boredom is the mother of imagination. How many of us began to be writers--even if it was telling stories to ourselves or other children--because of a lonesome childhood, or a childhood of sickness, or long afternoons in a house of grownups and grownup books, or later, endless tedious classes, where one's own imagination was the only escape.

Boredom is endangered. We live in an age of passive entertainment, and the mind is seldom if ever allowed to wander in search of its own self-made pleasures.

Have ya’ll had enough of Greek poets yet? Hmmm. Probably so—this is the last one, promise. I am working on a review of George Seferis’ A Levant Journal, translated and edited by Roderick Beaton, due… erm, in a week or so I think. One of the curiosities of being an ex-pat poet is that people assume I am an expert on Greek poetry. And I guess the result is that I am becoming one!

The question that keeps niggling in the back of my mind about Seferis (1900-1971), one of Greece’s two Nobel laureates (here, by the way is his Nobel speech) is—is Seferis a great poet? He is clearly a major poet and an important poet and a good poet, as well as a major critic. But is he a great poet? And what do I even mean by that? Frankly, can I, not a native speaker of Greek, even judge?

This post is in two parts. The first is a simple announcement of my participation in the upcoming AWP Conference in New York City.

I am chairing a panel on Saturday, February 2 at from noon to one fifteen on Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, featuring “emerging” poets Christopher Hennessy (whose wonderful blog Outside the Lines focuses on the relationship of identity and creativity), Brad Richard, Aaron Smith (whose entertaining blog focuses on anything but poetry), and Brian Teare. Here is the description of the panel from the conference schedule, written by moi:

What does it mean to be a gay male poet today, after gay liberation, the somewhat domesticated gay rights movement, the revived radicalism of Queer Nation, the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP, and intellectual interrogations of “queerness” and identity itself? Contemporary gay male poets can take their gayness for granted on several levels. They also can explore, question, and even explode that identity. On this panel, four emerging gay male poets discuss what the words gay male poetry mean to them.

I hope that all interested parties will try to make it. Let’s make this panel a party!

The second part of this post is about my impression of the role that some phantasmatic nightmare image of AWP plays in the imaginations of many participants in the various online poetry worlds. To read more, look below the fold.

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"WE"

First utterance of Talking Popcorn
by Nina Katchadourian
-----------------

-----------------
dhcmrlchtdj

"distribution height closets may remote Library catalogue hardly to die just
dead hands claim me repeat Library centre hexagons the do jumbles
dreams hundred cannot matter rudimentary letter could have this did justified
dimensions hope corridors met remote Library could have the discover juggle
disappeared have cup mimic reduction Library comma have the delirium just
danger hexagons Combed m refutation languages correct hexagonal these define just"

(An acrostic text generated by taking the cryptogram cited in "The Library of Babel," and using this phrase to "read through" the entire story by Jorge Luis Borges)
-----------------

My first book of prose, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, is just out in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, and I have to share the news. This is a project on which I’ve been working for several years, and I’m incredibly excited that it’s finally come to fruition. I got my advance copies about a week ago and have been cradling the book in my arms as if it were my baby. Which it is.

Noted poet and critic James Longenbach generously writes on the back of the book that “Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift—the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings.” I’m grateful to him for the wonderful endorsement.

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"thus can books that come I judge come infinite"

(By coincidence, the first nine words drawn at random, in this order, from the jumbled lexicon of all words in an English translation of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges)
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Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) is almost forgotten today, but he was an excellent poet (in the post World War II formalist mode so scorned today, especially by those who know nothing about it) and a brilliant thinker about poetry. (He was also photographer Diane Arbus's older brother.) His witty and formally exquisite poetry deserves to be better known.

The question of difficulty in poetry, what it is and why it is, is one that quite occupies me. From what I can tell, I'm not alone in this preoccupation. These excerpts from Nemerov's essay “The Difficulty of Difficult Poetry” (included in his long-out-of-print collection Reflexions on Poetry & Poetics, published by Rutgers University Press in 1972) eloquently and insightfully address that question.

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"Contemplate hexagonal air normal closets each
the is railing endlessly say
great of dictum

Centre hexagons and not capital exists
librarian elegant the seated
up says
books remote each and that have established"

(An acrostic text, generated by taking two short aphorisms about chance by Jean Baudrillard and using them to "read through" a translation of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges)
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There’s been plenty of talk and balk on Harriet regarding translations, and as a translator and teacher of literary translation, as someone who’s first language is not English, I’ve decided to finally speak up but through the introduction of one of the best translation projects I have come across to date: Pablo Medina and Mark Statman’s collaborative English version of Federico García Lorca’s conflicted love letter to our beloved New York City.

Here’s something I have tacked above my desk to which the question of language’s inadequacy is irrelevant. This is Willem DeKooning, from a talk he gave called “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” at a symposium organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 on the occasion of the show “Abstract Art in America.”

About twenty-four years ago, I knew a man in Hoboken, a German who used to visit us in the Dutch Seaman’s Home. As far as he could remember, he was always hungry in Europe. He found a place in Hoboken where bread was sold a few days old—all kinds of bread: French bread, German bread, Italian bread, Dutch bread, Greek bread, American bread and particularly Russian black bread. He bought big stacks of it for very little money, and let it get good and hard and then he crumpled it and spread it on the floor in his flat and walked on it as on a soft carpet. I lost sight of him, but found out many years later that one of the other fellows met him again around 86th street. He had become some kind of Jugend Bund leader and took boys and girls to Bear Mountain on Sundays. He is still alive but quite old and is now a Communist. I could never figure him out, but now when I think of him, all that I can remember is that he had a very abstract look on his face.

Some of the lack of boldness in translation in the past fifty years or so has been a lack of technical boldness, of even attempting to get across the meter, rhyme sounds, puns, etc., of the original. After all, free verse represents a rather slim subset of poetry over the millennia. Can all poets of all times and languages really have sounded like mid-American, mid-century free verse poets in the plain-speaking tradition?

Often the translator(s) will state in an introduction that to have even attempted to convey the rhyme scheme or demonstrate a metrical pattern would have meant to sacrifice the “true” essence of the poem (the old Puritan notion that artifice and authenticity are at odds). Would it? It starts to sound to me like a cop-out. Can it simply not be done? Whose fault is that? As Daisy said, “Try harder, then.”

At the end of my previous post, in which I listed and briefly discussed some of my favorite books of poetry published in 2007, I promised or threatened that there were more lists to come. I truly do love lists, and once I started making them I found it hard to stop. So here are a couple of other lists pertaining to books of poetry published in 2007, this time sans commentary, for reasons that will become obvious if you look beneath the fold.

————————————————

"I have seen old men who, for long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine disorder."
[A sentence quoted from an English version of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges.]

"T TTTT HTTH TTT THH TTH HTH HHHT TTHHTTT TH HHTH TTHTH THHT HT THT THHTHTHT HTHT HTTH HHHHH HHHTH HT T THHTHTTHT THTH HTT TTH HHHTHT HTHHT TTH HTHHHH HHTTHHHT"
[A series of heads (H) and tails (T), showing a coin-toss for each letter in the above quote.]

"• •••• -••- ••• •-- ••- -•- ---• ••--••• •- --•- ••-•- •--• -• •-• •--•-•-• -•-• -••- ----- ---•- -• • •--•-••-• •-•- -•• ••- ---•-• -•--• ••- -•---- --••---•"
[A conversion of the random series, above, into a sequence of dits (T = •) and dahs (H = -).]

"E H X S W U K Ö ?E A Q UA P N R &N C X 0 ÖT N E &R Ä D U ÖN Ĥ U YM ,N"
[A translation of the dits and dahs, above, from Morse Code into a series of English symbols.]

————————————————

Some time ago, poetry expressed universal experiences; a little later it posed important questions and, even if it was about as radical as a lukewarm mug of Sleepytime tea, tended to take risks and transgress. Lately it’s a really good thing to attack the language. I’m all for attacks. But is there any more dreary cliché than the feeling that language is inadequate to describe experience?

I had planned to post this as a reply in the comments section to Vivek Narayanan’s eloquent response to my posts on translation and my post on Paul Celan in particular, but I’ve decided that both the topic and my reply are substantive enough to warrant a new post. (One of the advantages of blogging is a much greater level of response than one usually receives to printed pieces, allowing a very timely opportunity to hone and refine one's thought.) The question of the nature, value, limits, and possibilities of translation is one that touches on the heart of what it means to read and write, indeed, what it means to communicate at all, since different individuals are at least as incommensurable as different languages are. For those who are interested in pursuing such matters further, I recommend George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. This post will not be quite so ambitious.

Dear Letter,

It's been a long time since I've written you. But I think about you often. It's always great to hear from you, to hold you, to gaze at the stamp of your beauty, your unique hand. Reading this article made me worry if you are OK. Are you OK?

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"art, by, contemplate, distribution, except, free, galleries, hexagonal, is, just, know, letters, melancholy, number, of, part, quite, railings, shafts, this, universe, variations, with, you, zero."

(First appearances of words that begin with a chosen letter of the alphabet in an English translation of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges….)
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I almost titled this post “Everybody’s Doing It, Why Can’t I?” (after the Cranberries' first album), since it seems de rigueur to compile year-end lists of various kinds (ten best Britney Spears meltdowns, ten worst George W. Bush malapropisms, etc.). I actually love lists but, as usual, I decided to jump on the bandwagon after it had not only already left for another town but probably already left that town in turn. (What is a bandwagon, anyway?)

I was very distracted last year by travel and especially illness (including illness while traveling), which culminated in my recent colon cancer surgery and my starting chemotherapy. So there was a lot of reading and writing that I meant to do but didn’t get to. I also live very far from any literary scene (which I sometimes think is a good thing), and so I just miss a lot. And I’m poor, so I don’t have a lot of money to buy books of poetry.

All that said, what follows is a list of some of the poetry books published in 2007 I did read that mattered the most to me. It’s not a “best poetry books of 2007” list (I’ve hardly read enough of last year’s poetry books to make such a judgment). It’s not even a list of all the poetry books published last year that I enjoyed.

I’m sure there are other books published last year that I would have enjoyed or even been impressed by that I just didn’t hear about. For that matter, I have a lot of poetry books, from last year and before, and from a wide range of writers, that I haven’t had the chance to read yet, and might well love when I finally do.

But enough preliminaries. Let’s get this party started.

Journal Entry - Saturday, Jan 12th:
Bennington, VT

At the graduation ceremonies this evening, Frank Bidart began his address with this emphatic warning: "The history of taste is not the history of art." Although he was speaking to the 25th graduating class of the Bennington Writing Seminars, who endured the loss of its founder Liam Rector last summer, his words echoed through me like one of Moses’ stone tablets.

As a poet who works in form, I weary of seeing in critiques--either in on-line workshops or in published reviews--the complaint that a poem or phrase or line is "rhyme driven."

Of course rhyming poetry is rhyme driven. Rhyme is an engine of syntax. If rhyme is in the car I want her stepping on the gas, minding the wheel, eyes on the road, shifting the gears. I don't want her there as mere ornament, nattering on her cell phone, putting her mascara on while gaping in the rear-view mirror.

Even across the gap between German and English, Paul Celan is one of my favorite poets. I’m not sure if one can really be “influenced” by a writer as singular as Celan, but his work has been an important presence for me for many years. I have written about him twice on my blog, here and here. His intensity of vision, diction, and rhythm, and the inseparability of these things, trying to find new ways of saying to accommodate the previously unsaid or unsayable (especially what can be spoken in the face of the unspeakable enormity of the Holocaust), have made a deep impression on me.

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"Untitled #22"
from The Untitled Project
by Matt Siber
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Darren Wershler-Henry has argued that, despite rumours of its decline, visual poetry has in fact colonized the entire, iconic landscape of capitalism, creating a graphic terrain already infused with optical artistry—and he goes on to suggest that most modern, visual poetry in fact owes its existence to "people who are…talented enough to be graphic designers, but, in the best slacker tradition, basically don’t give a fuck"—and thus they abuse these skills in order to make trouble….

In my previous post, I wrote about some of the losses and gains of translating poetry in general. But, because I believe that generalities only have meaning when grounded in specifics, I wanted to talk about a few particular examples. Thus, for my next few posts I will be listing some poetic translations that have meant a lot to me.

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"09 January 2008"
from Code X
by Mario Cutajar
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“The eye will feed itself a myth,” writes James Hoch in this unsettling yet gorgeous second collection of poems that explores the darker stories of art, literature, and the grating newspaper headlines that stop the reader’s breath. And then there is the underbelly of the more familiar happenings, like planting a tree outside a hospital, crossing a nondescript bridge by car, and attending the high school prom:

I don’t read much poetry in translation; in fact, I tend to actively avoid it. As Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what is lost in translation.”

It’s the eve of Epiphany, 12th night, the last day of Christmas. Epiphany is probably as big a holiday in Greece as Christmas (maybe bigger). As with the mornings of Christmas eve and New Year’s Eve, children are stalking the streets of Athens armed with jangling triangles to sing a carol known as “Kalanda” to unsuspecting adults, who must then give them coins. I already saw a band of children this morning hitting the toy shops with their pockets bulging with Euro coins (real money these days—not paltry drachmas).

James Merrill—who lived in Athens in a house on Lykabettos, not far from where we first lived when we moved here—has a poem that describes this tradition, “Chimes for Yahya,” which starts:

Imperiously ringing, “Na ta poume?
(Shall we tell it?)” two dressy girls inquire.
They mean some chanted verse to do with Christmas
Which big homemade iron triangles
Drown out and a least coin silences
But oh hell not at seven in the morning
If you please!

Blogging the MLA convention, held last week in Chicago-- for the third of what might be three or maybe four entries: if I was disappointed by some of the panels, and let down by the weather (brrrrrrr), and happy to see people whose gossip I won't bore you with (nor violate by making public), I was delighted all weekend by two things, or rather categories of things.

One was the category "songs on the new Youth Group album." Start with "Forever Young" or, if you're feeling quiet, "Start Today Tomorrow." And yes, the former is an Alphaville cover.

The other was the category "books and periodicals I picked up," many of which I have now taken home and read. I'm pretty sure I found more books and periodicals I liked-- most of them, as you'd expect, lit-crit and cultural-criticism, rather than books of poetry or fiction-- at this MLA than at any other recent lit-crit gathering. Below the fold, if you're still with me, I describe a few.

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The Alphabet
from Univers Revolved
by Ji Lee
Harry N. Abrams, 2004
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More on the MLA, the off-site unofficial marathon reading, and neat things about individual poems or books of poems, caught at the few panels I could see in their entirety...

The big format of the big reading confirmed Michael Fried's still very important argument of forty years ago that the condition of theater (like it or not) is what lies between, or surrounds, the various arts-- and that behavior which draws in the audience and calls attention to the circumstances the work shares with the audience will attract attention when attention can't be directed, or isn't directed, to the moving parts in the work of art as such.

The more flattering way to say that is to say that non-poems, performances that would not have worked as poems on a page, fit the occasion: Kristin Prevallet reading "The Day Lady Died" backwards, for example, or the (very considerable) poet and editor Susan Schultz holding up signs that said things like FASCISM -> SAFETY.

And yet the bits that I most wanted to remember (as opposed to the bits I found easiest to remember without writing down) were lines from poems: Chuck Stebeldon, who also helps run the world-renowned Woodland Pattern poetry bookstore and art-space in Milwaukee, read a poem that contained the wonderful shoreline line "Cattails haptic when fashion is thick in the skin" (at least I think that's what it said); Tony Triviglio's Rumsfeld poem explained, "Like anyone, he is shaped by childhood events."

And then there were some professors and graduate students who talked about poems by other people. Several of those said memorable things (memorable to me, at least; admittedly they were also a bit academic)-- such things are outlined or at least mentioned below the fold.

The annual convention of the Modern Language Association is the Death Star of literary conferences: with its cast of tens of thousands of academics and critics, many of whom are there for job interviews, and many of whom (just as on the real Death Star) wear interchangeable black formal clothing, the MLA can feel at once huge, impersonal, institutional, and possessed of great destructive force.

It's also a place where you can, if you try, learn some neat things about poems and poets you like. I did. More details below the fold (and in a future post).

Happy New Year!

During this holiday season of merriment and celebration, as those of us who are more fortunate do our gift-giving and eating and partying, indeed feed our bodies with spiritual and social nourishment, I look to the artists for perspective. I was pleased to discover A New Hunger. The polyglot poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar closes her third full-length book of poems with the following piece, which I have formally adopted as my bedtime prayer:

The January issue of Poetry goes live next week, along with my essay-review of new books by Mary Kinzie and Robert Pinsky. There was a bit that took me too far afield, so I excised it from the final draft. Still, it might hold some interest for someone somewhere! Readers of Pinsky’s Gulf Music know the book meditates at length on the etymology of the word “thing.” He even includes the dictionary definition as a sort of found poem, lingering on the irony that “thing” used to mean something more along the lines of an assembly, an address, and even a “giving voice to,” rather than “a concrete object, a physical or bodily thing.” This movement from thing as process to thing as object fueled the meditations of another poet—thirty years ago.

I didn’t think I had anything to say about the sonnetfest here on Harriet. But then a friend sent me an article about Edwin Denby: great American ballet critic, friend of Frank O’Hara’s circle, poet who wrote many, many sonnets. I had studied them years ago, and then put the book away (sonnets not being my cup of tea). I opened Collected Poems again this week, and have been unable to put it down since.

THE SUBWAY

That’s not in the buy. The company between stops
Offers you security, and free rides to cops.

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"Miss Bodoni"
from Studio Pin-Ups
by Taylor Lane
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"Boiling C"
by Kelly Mark
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Sometimes simplicity’s the thing, though that doesn’t mean the ideas or motivations behind the poem are simple. I came across this beautiful debut on one of my visits back to Arizona State (Josh Rathkamp’s yet another graduate of that writing program—go Sun Devils!), and I was pleased to discover this distinct voice that has much to say about young relationships, first heartbreaks and early encounters with the untamable, unpredictable world of adulthood.

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Page 4
from Flatland
by Derek Beaulieu
Information as Material, 2007
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Carmine Starnino has entered the fray of our discussion about formalism by offering a spirited rebuttal to some of my provocations, doing so via his commentary to a posting by Ange Mlinko. Starnino claims to regret having published his negative comments about my book Eunoia, because his review has provided me with "lots of stuffing" for the "straw men" of my counterarguments. Rather than admit that a writer has as much right as any critic to defend, or to impugn, the merits of any claims about the nature of poetry, he nevertheless goes on to discount my right to enter into any critical dialogue with my own readership, preferring instead to attribute my counterarguments to the fact that I am a "perennially insecure avant-gardist," unable to accept a negative reaction to my work. I might suggest, however, that, contrary to his comments, he has little reason to regret his review, since it has promoted interest in both our careers—and despite his fantasies, I do not feel threatened in the face of disputation, but always relish the chance to debate the merits of poetry historically ignored or rebuked in our country by the dominant literati, for whom the avant-garde in fact poses a threat to their own literary concepts of cultural security….

Here’s an unusual little book from my shelf. I say unusual because it’s the winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize for a book whose author is of Italian descent. The prize includes an honorarium, publication, and the promise that the winning manuscript will be published in a bilingual edition, face to face with its Italian translation. It certainly is an honorable gesture, this effort to preserve the legacy of the Italian language, but also to recognize that Italian American literature is part of Italy’s cultural lineage.

Sarah Browning is the founder of D.C. Poets Against the War and the director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness. Her activist furor is a birthright, having been born into an activist family—a sensibility she is passing on to the next generation through her example as an artist, an organizer and an important citizen poet voice speaking out on the injustices being committed by our current government’s misadministration.

Christian Bok's post here is a sad reminder of a persistent problem with poetry reviewers and bloggers: the dismissal of "cerebral" work and the exaltation of a crude notion of the "emotional." Bok's reviewer is a tad less obvious -- he requires a "predicament" if not outright confessions -- but still, it seems to me a code for emotional blackmail.

I'm reminded, actually, of a single sentence in this review of Robert Hass. After telling us that Hass's poems "focus on the natural world, his private experiences, and the people and places he knows best," the reviewer complains, "Hass' work has a demure, sometimes evasive strain: He'd been publishing for 30 years or so before readers learned about his mother's debilitating alcoholism." I almost keeled over. Dear Reader, do you expect to know all about my mother too? Nobody told me this when I started writing poetry at 15, after Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. Nobody even told me at my MFA program! Is it too late to go to law school?

I know of a poem that addresses the problem of art, emotion and confession ...