Closing on my house on Monday. The whole process is a pain. It will be nice to be home-owner again.

Note to students. If you write beautifully and precisely for me I will love it. You will have 75% of the battle won.

Remind me never to get on [name deleted]'s bad side.

I was reading some criticism on Shelley recently. Don't ask why. I had picked up this Norton Critical edition with some critical studies in the back. Most are written from the 1940s to the 1960s, which is the apogee of the New Criticism, but what was striking was how New Critical positions were flouted. A constant invocation of Shelley's intentions (intentional fallacy), an urge to translate his poetry into conceptual terms (heresy of paraphrase). Little attention to language itself or to poetic form, as though Shelley had just been a social reformer who happened to write in verse rather than prose.

And this made me wonder: did the New Criticism ever filter down to the specialized study of authors? That is to say, didn't specialists on any particular author continue to do biographical, historical, textual, and ideological work beneath the radar of the official theories of the day? Or was it because Shelley was not in the New Critical mini-canon with Donne and Eliot, that specialists could ignore the critical orthodoxy?

I could say a similar thing about current studies of Lorca. Specialists in Lorca continue to do biographical, textual, and interpretive work. The more canonical the author, the more the positivist specialist model kicks in, for the normal course of criticism. There will be a small community of people interested in everything to do with their author, but relatively oblivious to theoretical considerations.

Did anyone notice that the "five star" review of a particular book on Amazon is totally sarcastic? It is signed "Poetry Hater":

You should read this book! Right in the introduction Billy Collins explains that most poetry is terrible (83%!). He explains that he likes poems that are easy to understand. I know . . . I know . . . is there really such a thing as a poem that's easy to understand?! I remember discussing poems in English class and it was like a whole bunch of confusing symbolic metaphors and similes and I was all like "this stuff SUCKS"! But this book has poems that are the best and easy to understand. They're mostly like little stories with short lines. My favorite one is a story about an old dog who finds a shoe out in the woods . . . pretty easy, right? It's called RELIGION which I don't really get (maybe that's what makes it a poem ;)) but it is a nice little story that makes you go hmmm? I haven't read any poetry in a long time because I didn't think there were easy poems like this out there but now maybe I'll try again thanks to Billy Collins. Thank you Mr. Collins! Maybe I'll become a POETRY LOVER and one day even write my own poems!

Hilarious! Without this review the book would average one star, but this brings it up to a "two-star average."

My 13-year old self says to me:

What are doing? What happened to your poetry? You became a mere professor, hiding behiind a wall of books.

My 46-year old self responds:

Yes, but this is all really your fault! You obsessed over writing the perfect poem, reworking one stanza all night. You were already a mini-professor at age 13, beginning to accumulate those books. You never just relaxed and wrote, or ran away from home. You doomed me from the start. You should have known what I know now. "Bald heads, forgetful..." You didn't seem to get that Yeats poem.

Isn't there a mystery behind every poem? A mystery you're not supposed to figure out?

Among twenty snowy mountain, the only moving thing... An old pond -- a frog jumped in. Siempre la claridad viene del cielo. As I sd to my friend because I am always talking, John I sd, which was not his name. So much depends upon the apparition of these faces in the crowd, petals on a wet black bough. Nothing in that drawer. Verde que te quiere verde. Nothing in the drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Like cellophane tape on a schoolbook. Each joining a neighbor, as though speech were a still performance. Empieza el llanto de la guitarra. Nothing in the drawer. You were wearing... Snow has fallen into the bottle of eraser fluid.

So the problem is not having "accessible" poems (or not). A poem of perfect surface clarity might be enigmatic--or a seemingly more difficult poem might not really be that mysterious after all, once you crack the code. Enigmatic luminosity in the one case. Covering up something clear (in a riddle) in the other. What proponents of "accessbility" want the poet to do is explain, in the poem itself, who John is and why I don't know his name, why the frog jumped in and what it "means," why Padgett's drawer is empty, what the red wheelbarrow "signifies," what snow has to do with white-out, what the color green "symbolizes."

The poem should "communicate" something, according to some people. Well, no. At best that's just a lazy way of talking about the phenomemon in question, a kind of imprecise shorthand; at worst, it's profoundly misleading, because what would the opposite of "communicating" be? Offering a verbal experience not wholly translatable into a communicatable message. And isn't this exactly what poetry does, withholding its actual message? The poetry is in what's not "communicated," or more precisely, in the tension between what is and is not said. I'm not making this stuff up. This is just poetic theory 101. It tends to get lost in the age of Garrison Keillor, of course.

It's never a good weekend when your student is killed by a hit-and-run driver.

more ineffability.

Isn't a solo by John Coltrane much more amazing than seeing someone bench-press 10,000 pounds, or turn themselves into a bear? Those other acts might be impossible, but what Coltrane does should be impossible too. Even more so! Not in the physical sense of moving his fingers so fact, but in the ability to come up with something that amazing. Coltrane's solo is highly meaningful, but its meaning is in itself, or in our reaction to its amazingness, which is a kind of awe that we are even alive to hear such things. That's what poetry is about, a feeling of awe in the face of human creativity. I sometimes almost see a particular light coming up from the page when I read something that has that kind of quality, that absolute luminosity. Some people call this "spiritual." I don't care whether you call it that, or whether you don't call it that, but it has nothing to do with having poetry with religious "themes." In fact, it has little to do with any sort of theme at all.

Would anyone expect the "Best American Insurance Co." to really have the best insurance? That would be a mighty big coincidence.

"USUFRUCT - The right of enjoying a thing, the property of which is vested in another, and to draw from the same all the profit, utility and advantage which it may produce, provided it be without altering the substance of the thing."

What a beatiful word and beautiful concept. Usufruct. That's our relationship to poetry.

"Hand-crafted vitreous China."

Phrase from the cardboard box in which they have brought a new urinal for the men's room in the building where I work.

You could multiply the dictionary by a thousand and still not have enough words to describe what most people think and feel in a single day.

Surely the problem of expression has almost nothing to do with the quantity of words in the dictionary! We have more than enough words in quantitative terms. Mauve. Dilapidation. Nugatory. Remediation. Perfunctory. Hostile. Ennervation. Empresario. Cashmere. Incomplete. Company. I. Bitter. Button. Stint. Marooned. Carburetor. Otherwise. Chingada. Dust. Insular. Up. Derivation. Boundary. Miniature. Box. I could go on and on. Each word is universe of meaning unto itself. Even a *small* vocabulary of 10,000 words is susceptible to a number of combination that I am too lazy to calculate right now, but it's a big, big number.

Even knowing a whole 'nother language doesn't allow you to express more than you can in your first language. Learning new words, after a certain point, doesn't allow for more expression. It just multiplies the number of choices; like giving a bored child more toys it does not address the real problem; and in fact aggravates the problem. Boredom is not a function of the lack of toys. Would Creeley's poetry express more if it moved beyond his rather limited repertory of insistent echoes? What is Basho's lexicon, in quantitative terms?

Multiplying language quantitatively is a poor solution, unworthy of a brilliant theorist and Language Poet such as Mr Piombino. You can do much better than that!

to speak of rabbits or hares running
through the countryside is an exception, but not
when looking out from a moving train: rabbits
run among bushes; the eye
exercises and slips through the gray
and sparse grass perceiving--same in
same--the agile movement
with ears, and then the tail
of the magpie
that lands in vibration.

--Olvido García Valdés [my trans.]