If I had another lifetime, 17th century English poetry would be a good place to start. Marvellous. Everyone from Jonson and Shakespeare to Waller Rochester and Dryden. I have the same birthday as Robert Herrick. Hell, throw in the 16th too. Chapman, Wyatt...

There's an elegy to Rochester that Pound included in the ABC of Reading. It's amazing. It might be by Oldham or it might be anonymous. I'm going to have to do a bit more research. Pound says there's a single principle that makes it musical, and that the student should stare at it his whole life to figure it out. I still don't know what he was referring to though I do have a theory.

Poetry could be anything. Satire, elegy, epic. It could be sacred or profane. It could be obscene or polemical. The 18th century narrowed the scope, squeezing out even the lyric. In the 16th and 17th century, poetry was king. Prose lagged far behind. In the 18th century, even the verse was prose, as Eliot famously remarked.

I'm psyched about my Tenerife trip in May. Antonio Gamoneda is going to be there. Eduardo Milán. Some serious heavyweight poets of the Spanish-speaking world. I'm the only yanqui on the program and they're paying my way. And it's in Tenerife where I've never been.

There is no contradiction between the idea that poetry has no rules, can never be learned, and the idea that it takes a lifetime to learn anything about poetry. If there were rules it wouldn't take a lifetime.

A lifetime might be Keats', or Rimbaud's, or Spicer's, or O"Hara's.

Or it could be Sophocles'.

Some old people can't write any more. They might have thought they already learned the rules.

Some young people can't write because they don't know enough yet.

"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." Is that the first English language reference to poetry as a "craft"?

Illusory metaphor.

The idea of Lorca as a kind of anti-intellectual figure is deeply wrong. (Unfortunately, he has been hero to anti-intellectuals like Bly.) In the Spanish context, he seems less erudite than the "poet-professors" of his generation. The voice that speaks in his poems is often infantilized or faux-naif. His characters speak in concrete images, not abstractions. All this creates a false perception.

Lorca was an extremely self-disciplined and rigorous creator. He systematically mastered all the poetic styles of Spanish poetry, from the medieval lyric and "romance" through the contemporary avant-garde (passing through the baroque, the nineteenth-century, modernismo). He was the master of every conceivable meter and form. He didn't like automatic writing because he really wanted that strict discpline. The idea that he just strung together unrelated "surrealist" images is just untrue.

He seems to be an inspired figure, one for whom the muse or duende is more significant than discipline and self-conscious mastery. Nothing could be more false. He worked extremely hard, with quite a bit of the basic apprentice work coming before the age of 20. Look at the Obra inédita de juventud, his juvenilia. (His first book, Libro de poemas was published when he was 22, but the volume of juvenilia I am referring to predates even this.) That most of this juvenile poetry is just derivative detritus is part of my point. In Kenneth Koch's terms, he had a tremendous "poetry base."

It reminds me a bit of Coltrane, in the sense that Coltrane was an obsessive practicer from an early age. Another figure of pure, inspired genius, supposedly What such talent really is, then, is a talent for becoming so absorbed in the work that everything else disappears. (Coltrane reportedly was so into music that he didn't know who Willie Mays was.)

FGL and JC both created numerous major works before their premature deaths, works that are inconceivable as the products of naive geniuses.

***

Something I read in Reginald Shepherd's blog recently. Where someone in his class said, "You act as if you knew more than anyone else in the room." To which his natural reply was, I do know more than anyone in the room, than everyone in the room combined, at least about poetry. And if I didn't, you would have cause to complain.

I hope I can use that in the classroom some day. That is just the perfect comeback. The idea that poetry is just subjective crap about which everyone's opinion is equally valid pervades our culture. To the statement, "I have a right to my opinion" the proper response is no, you don't have a right to an opinion about something you know nothing about. This seems harsh, but really what good is it to tolerate ignorance about an art form?

I'm not crazy (lately) about poetry that sounds too written, work that is with a willful quality that's like bad acting. Where the "craft" is visible as "fine writing" there is probably some overwriting there. "Craft" is something to be unlearned, in that sense. I prefer the Creeley approach where he doesn't feel the need to show you how good he is at every turn. It's kind of a hard lesson because everyone wants to stand out from the crowd with marvelous writing chops. It's hard to remember how deceptively simple some of the best writing is, in Lorca, in Creeley. It's not like it's not trying hard, but that is doesn't show visible signs of effort. I always pick up those signs, somehow; that is my misfortune in that I can't enjoy a lot of poetry that's well written and I'm sure better than anything I could ever come up with, because I simply can't take that overwritten Derek Walcott effect.

***

Picked up Paul Violi's Harmatan at the Dusty Bookshelf here in town. In other poetry new there was reading last week by Irby, Roitman, and Larkin. It was nice seeing and hearing Maryrose again.

***

Kagemusha was worse than I remembered it. Kurosawa was in decline at this point of his career. I should have rented "The Spirit of the Beehive" instead.

***

I love Lorca after all. Hah! I will accept my destiny--long postponed--as a full fledged lorquista. I didn't write about him ever for the same reason that any self respecting Spanish poet has to flee Lorca with both feet as fast as possible. I do hate bad lorquistas with a passion. Few have attracted as many crappy critics!

Purity and depth.

Much as I like the Great American Songbook, I like the songs better without the words, ultimately. Compare Miles to Sinatra on "It Never Entered My Mind." I like Sinatra's version too, but... It's not like the lyricists were unskilled, but that the lyrics tell you what the song is supposed to mean, and I prefer a purely non-verbal music. I want to provide my own subtext. Miles has to be considered the best "singer" of ballads ever, having found a way to leave out the words of "Surrey with Fringe on Top" or "If I were a Bell."

I do like "A piano tinkling in the next apartment / those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant / A fairground's painted swings / These foolish things / Remind me of you." That's got to be one of the best rhymes ever.

***

As for depth, I think specialists are better generalists than "generalists" are. In other words, people who have specialized narrowly in something end up also having broader knowledge than those who set out to have broad knowledge but without specializing. I have only a few, "narrow" interests, but I tend to pursue these interests "to the bottom" and end up knowing a lot about other things in the process. Since I've lived long enough to have more than a few such interests (not interests, passions is a better word, my friend Bob Basil would point out), depth has created its own form of breadth.

So narrow specialization is not the enemy of broad knowledge after all. If I'm ignorant of a lot of things, that's just because I haven't specialized in them yet.

One of the most amazing facts about poetry as an art form is that it is written in numerous, mutually incomprehensible languages, and that its qualities are bound up with those specific linguistic forms. If you read a translation, which we all do of course, you are getting the special qualities of poetry written in English, plus a little bit the image-repertoire of another culture.

This multilinguism is a huge advantage, in terms of richness of possibilities for the art form, and a huge disadvantage because just learning one extra language requires a huge extra investment of time. Ars longa, vita breve and all that.

A woman became a foremost expert on Spanish film. She was a film scholar first and foremost, with fairly weak Spanish language ability, but this did not prevent her from becoming a respected person in this field. I could learn a lot about Mondrian without knowing any Dutch, or a Stravinsky expert without knowing Russian if I knew music, etc...