The "metonymy bully syndrome" is spreading! Kasey on "Limetree" has understood my point and offered his own highly nuanced treatment of the problem. He also has a good theory about why students don't understand metonymy.

Went to a poetry reading in St. Louis this evening. Left Bank Books. John Gallaher read poems full of suburban clichés--a surbubanite feeling superior to himself? His poetry left me cold. I wanted to get up and shout that poetry had to offer something more than this. Boston based Arielle Greenberg was quite good, on the other hand. Her poems were accessible and engaging. She had a feel for language, unlike John, though she seemed nervous about how she would be received in the midwest. She kept making giggling references to corn fields. The editor of Delmar told me, when I asked him, why he had not published my review of Chris Stroffolino. I wrote it years ago and forgot about it. I don't really care that they didn't publish it, but now it's kind of out of date. I'll post it on this blog soon. Do I have any St. Louis readers of this blog?

"Images of images of images. Texts erased, rewritten, torn up. Signs, figures, bodies, enclosures washed away by the waters. Stones eroded on top of stones. A place now under a cloud of dust. Dwelling place without memory, who held you? A time hungry to be swallowed up in night. You sow words and get echoes back, echoes of echoes in the uncertain dome of desolation. I would give all the air for a cry, the possesion of the kingdom for a single moan. The augurs opened the entrails of the god and fed his lacerated body to the predators."

José Angel Valente

Valente is one of the major Spanish poets. He died in the year 2000. I associate him with Beckett, in that he is a kind of "last modernist." This short prose poem, with no title, is typical of his late work. His value in the Spanish tradition is inestimable, because he brings a certain modern tradition into Spain. He greatly admired Celan and Jabès, for example. Yet for readers who have already read his influences, I wonder whether Valente might seem too obvious? The style is strikingly original in Spanish, although less so now that he has spawned so many imitators.

I've been posting irritating comments on Mike Snider's Formal Blog. He's been remarkably tolerant of me so far, perhaps because I can get inside of that mentality and debate on his terms--to some exent. In other words, assuming that one wants to write in the tradition of Auden, Larkin, Wilbur, I believe I am literate enough in this tradition to offer a cogent critique. I've read the canon of British poetry from Chaucer to Hughes. I studied with Thom Gunn for a brief time long long ago. I audited a course in contemporary British poetry from W.S. DiPiero at Stanford. I have an equally adequate background in American poetry in all traditions.

I remember a poem by Anthony Hecht on the great Lisbon earthquake, I believe it was a translation, that I read in the Davis, CA Library when I was maybe 15 years old. It was fairly long, written in heroic couplets, and quite riveting.

Certain styles of music can only be properly heard at a fairly loud volume. You can't get the power of Coltrane if you have it turned on to "background music" level. You need to have the music loud enough so that you feel it in other parts of the body, not just take it in through the ears. Hip hop needs to be even louder, of course.

Yikes, I've become the metonymy bully. Who broke into my account last night and posted that?

The concept of metonymy is difficult to explain. I think Jakobson's use of the word contiguity is rather misleading, since it implies two things laying side by side. Metonymy is a substitution of one word for another. It thus works on the axis of substitution, despite what Jakobson seems to be saying. The relation between the two terms is one of actual connection. Thus we might say "Tin Pan Alley" instead of "popular songwriters of the 1920s." (I tried to use this example, but my students are too young to have heard the expression). Many metonymies are based on places:

Nashville = country music industry
Wall Street = the stock market, the financial industry
Madison Ave = advertising
Detroit = auto manufacturing

There are also the classic cases of effect for cause, cause for effect, container for the thing contained, part for whole and whole for part. There are metonymies based on clothing: the suits, white hats, etc... I give examples of these to my students, but they seem curiously unable to generate examples of their own.

It's not clear why Jakobson thought of metonymy as involving the combination of words rather than the substitution of one expression for the other. Perhaps the idea of "contiguity" led him to make an analogy between words lying next to each other in a sentence and the relation between elements in the real world. The White House is a metonymy for the Administration, but the relation between the White House and the Administration is not analogous to the relation between a noun and a verb in a sentence, as far as I can see.

Either I am correct about this, or I am incredibly obtuse and am not getting it. The fact that I've never been able to convince another human being of this idea leads me to think I am obtuse. Yet I have never heard a satisfactory refutation of my theory either. My hunch is that Jakobson's theory made people forget what a metonymy actually is, that now, when they refer to the concept, they are referring to his article and not to real examples of metonymies in language usage. Thus my objections don't make sense to anyone else. It's like trying to argue someone out of the proposition that a dog is not the opposite of a cat.

Here's my second square, professorial, neo-formalist rant:

There's a presumption I've never understood: the idea that iambic verse is thumping and monotonous. Actually, it can be extraordinarily supple and flexible, almost infinitely variable. It only gets stiff when it is used as a sign of the poet's moral rectitude, as in J.V. Cunningham. Where did Pound get that line about "not in the sequence of the metronome"? The metronome is a device for measuring tempo, not rhythm, and the tempo of the iambic pentameter is marvellously malleable. It does stiffen up a bit with Dryden and Pope, of course, but is quite free both before and after: from Chaucer to Milton, and from Wordsworth to Browning. The Spanish "endecasílabo" is similar in its flexibility: imported from Italian poetry in the 16th century, it brought a new sort of musicality into Spanish.

The problem with some current "formalists" is they write as though Pound were correct in his metronome remark. The verse might scan, but it lacks a convincing rhythmic feel. It often sounds cramped and cranky rather than expansively Shakespearian. You don't get that forced, counting-the-syllables-on-the-fingers feel from Shakespeare that you get from the neo-formalists of today.

I usually don't spend much time thinking about the "new formalism." Reading in Kasey's blog "Limetree" a response to Mike Snider's "formal blog" led me to reflect on this movement. The problem with much that goes under the rubric of New Formalism is not that it is metrical, but that it is not metrical enough. One mode I've seen is the "continuous pentamer." The poet writes steadily in iambic feet and simply hits the shift key whenever he or she gets to five. The enjambments are not justified; the lines are not "clean," to use Silliman's recent adjective. (I could see Kenneth Koch doing this for humorous effect, but these guys are dead serious.) There are other metrical sins: the padded line, the word used because it fits the meter even though it is not the right word, the forced rhyme, the unjustified caesura, the singsong rhythm, the line that can be scanned with some effort but doesn't sound good, the too obvious expenditure of effort, etc.... Whatever happened to "Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought / All our stitching and unstiching is for naught"?

I don't really care too much whether the formalists are politically conservative. My problem is with the amateurism. Kasey's own poem is hilarious, as is the web site "eratosphere," in which earnest amateurs get earnest advice on clunky sonnets about running over squirrels. It doesn't really bother me that poets write in strictly metrical verse. In fact I prefer Richard Wilbur to Donald Hall or Billy Collins. It's not that meter is itself conservative, but that conservatives prefer it because they think it makes them more virtuous. It's sort of a "protestant work ethic" approach that is quite foreign to the metrical tradition of Chaucer or Shakespeare or William Blake.

I like Frost and Hardy. The ideological use to which such poets are put, though, is another matter. As in, "Let's write like Thomas Hardy so we can forget that modernism ever existed."

Barbara Guest is a writer I became obsessed with around 1999. I had purchased her Selected Poems a few years before that. What drove my obsession was my initial difficulty in reading her: she seemed too ethereal, too exquisite. Since these qualities are also what attracted me in the first place, my reading was seriously ambivalent. Stepping back a bit, I can more clearly identify things I don't like in some poems (preciousness) and love, less ambivalently, the poems that don't have that quality.

It's curious that the book jacket of her first book emphasizes her maturity as a poet, the fact that this is an atypical first book of poetry. She was 40 before she really published much of anything. From our present vantage point it looks like she was in a very early stage of her writing, that there was a great deal of stylistic inconsistency (not necessarily a bad thing!). At the same time, there are early poems of hers that are not all that different from what she was writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Her poetry becomes increasingly elliptical and rarefied--sometimes to the point that I lose her. Yet I keep coming back for more. I own an almost complete set of her books, thanks to bibliofind.

Notley and Mayer don't really come out of Guest. They derive more from Berrigan, Koch, etc...

If you only read Yépez in English, you're missing out on the great "bloguerras" between the "bárbaros del norte" and the "fresas del centro." The Tijuana group is seen as barbaric and "agringados" (gringo-fied). The Mexico City writers are denigrated as perfumed "strawberries": "mesoamericanos," "defeños," or "chilangos." They (chilangos like Sifuentes and Del Valle) deny that they enjoy any centralist privilege by virtue of their residence in the Distrito Federal. They often deny the physical existence of Heriberto. (I have independent testimony that he does, in fact, exist!)

I have no real stake in this battle, though I tend to sympathize with the norteños as a matter of instinct. Always root for the underdog. [The word "defeño," by the way, comes for the initials D.F. (Distrito federal or federal district), and thus refers to residents of what in English we call "Mexico City."] A few defeños took particular offense at Heriberto's use of the term "mesoamericanos," I'm not exactly sure what connotations this has. After all, I'm just a gringo myself.

It makes a great story. If I actually understood what the story actually was I might find it less interesting.

I hope I'm not one of those "poetry bullies"! I'm certainly not going to be a blogging bully, telling people whether or not blogging should become a "scene" or defining it as "postmediatic." What I enjoy about Heriberto, my favorite bloggery theorist, is the sheer extravagance of his rhetoric. The hyperbole is the message. If blogging does change anything it is far too early to say what this change will really mean. There's nothing wrong with spinning a theoretical construct around the whole phenomenon if you find it amusing. You might even go back and read Charles Bernstein's essay on Pacman, but noone plays Pacman any more.

A reference to Pepys in Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day. It makes perfect sense. Somehow I dropped out of the English major before I read him. My interest in blogging is in the continuous present of writing.

Julia leaves half-read books strewn in every room of the house. Now mostly Childhoods of Famous Americans and Tintin. I wonder where she inherited that trait from? The biographies of children have hardly changed in 40 years. There are a few more women, African Americans, and Native Americans, but still no Frank O'Hara or John Cage.

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With my Spanish language blog I find I'm writing less Spanish on this blog. Es una lástima.

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Steve at http://languagehat.blogspot.com (link coming soon) offers consistently interesting observations about language, and has referenced Jonathan Mayhew's Blog recently in a complimentary way. I have found links to my blog on websites from Canada, Mexico, and Scotland. None yet from Spain or Argentina.

Notley and Mayer. I must discuss them together, since I like them for the same set of reasons. They take "New York School" poetry in a different direction, make it something new. Mayer's "Midwinter Day" is a great experiment in writing and living at the same time. I cannot figure out how she did it, without even "room of her own" so to speak. Alice Notley's "Disobedience" puts me in a similar frame of mind: reading this poetry I start to note an improvement in the quality and recall of my dreams. I am not saying these writers are interchangeable, simply that I read them for the same end. So I was pleased to be reading Bernadette's poetry and find references to Alice. Both are poets I have to read more of. I loved Mysteries of Small Houses and the selected Poems, but I'm sure I've missed a lot along the way. The same with Bernadette, whose "Bernadette Mayer Reader" is a good place to start.

Who next? I think I need to deal with the 4 first generation New York poets, in whatever order they suggest themselves to me.