Lorca Trivia

Roy Campbell once punched Stephen Spender at a poetry reading. Both were translators of Lorca.

There's an interesting fault-line between poets who see technique and craft as essential and those who get impatient with that. In Creeley's letter to Rothenberg on the deep he expresses a certain impatience with those who write off the engagement of the poet with the language itself. Creeley says it's not the time to do away with the technical innovations of O'Hara, Creeley himself, Williams, Ginsberg--at exactly the time when Bly was proposing to do just that.

A lot of poets who don't believe in engagement with language end up not going as far as they might have. At some point they come up against a set of serious limitations.

I think this fault-line is more significant than the avant/quietude one.

Lorca Trivia

Kenneth Koch's son-in-law Mark Statman has translated Poet in New York. Coming soon to a fine bookstore near you.

"And then I had always liked the old miracle and morality plays in which no word has any ambiguity at all. I don’t like ambiguity. I suppose it’s all right if the ambiguous things a work means are interesting and exciting, but often they’re not"

--Kenneth Koch, interview with David Shapiro

That's a pretty revealing statement. Imagine coming along in the 1950s and not liking ambiguity, that mainstay of New Critical and paleo-modernist poetics, and even deconstruction as it was practiced in the 80s. This explains a lot about why few people have written about Koch academically, even to this day. Even Frank O'Hara, no Robert Lowell himself, uses a lot of ambiguity. Ashbery too. Koch isn't fond of it.

I'm aware too that I read Koch more ironically than he in fact means to be. I think he wants to keep you guessing about his tone, so that the earnestness when it does appear is always framed by whimsy. That's another form of ambiguity.

Also, when a sophisticated, modern poet abjures ambiguity it is a different effect from a medieval play celebrating baby Jesus with no sense of irony. It's funny how I won't accept certain things in poetry when done bluntly, with no sense of style, but would accept the same thing if it were signalled to me somehow that the poet knows better but is doing it anyway. Rhyme, Shelleyan apostrophe, sentimentality, didacticism--they work in Koch but they wouldn't in a poet who hadn't worked out a way to make them work.

Lorca trivia of the day

Allen Ginsberg wrote the line

"Franco murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman"

Lorca trivia of the day

Singer-songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen named his daughter "Lorca."

About Mother Teresa--if she doesn't have to believe in God why should anyone else have to?

And--how can you be unsure of the very existence of the supreme being, yet AT THE SAME TIME claim to know his exact position on contraception, what kind of food to eat, what kind of sexual acts humans ought to perform, etc... Wouldn't that kind of detail be even more profoundly unknowable? Yet one can be a fundamentalist in the worst way, as MT was undoubtedly--and agnostic too?

I thought I didn't have that much to say about Frank O'Hara and Lorca, but now my O'Hara chapter has split off from my Koch chapter: at 50 pages it was becoming unwieldy to consider both of them together.

Writing a lot of prose, I am very aware of mannerisms that creep in.

in fact, of course, it is clear, obviously, it could be argued, ostensibly

All that metadiscursive argumentation! It is clear that I want to present certain ideas as clear, obvious, and factual, but that language must be calibrated later on, of course.

I'm also falling victim to some confirmatory bias. In my defense I'll say that I didn't quite realize how much Koch loved Lorca, so when I find increasing evidence of this, the more I research the question, I'm letting my guard down. His son-in-law has translated Poet in New York so I'm looking forward to reading that.

Anyone know anything about the composer Peter Hartman? He set an O'Hara poem to music but information about him is scarce.

It's my birthday! Let's hope Jonathan Mayhew 4.7 will be an improvement over 4.6.

I wa thinking about innumeracy and this example. Someone not knowing how to figure out a percent change in something.

It's a fairly simple concept, but the numbers can sound funny. For example, if there are two people in a restaurant, and four more walk in, the you have an increase of 200%. Three walk out, for a 50% reduction. One walks back in because she forgot her cell-phone, for a 33% increase. She leaves again, for a twenty-five percent decrease in restaurant patrons.

If my salary goes up 50 percent one year, and then down 50 percent the next year, I have a much lower salary than I started with.

!% of people use a certain dangerous drug in the 90s. The next decade 3% are using it. An increase of 200%. It sounds very scary. Or is that only a two percent rise (a rise in percentage, not a "percent change")?

If twice as many people do something, that's an increase of 100%. But I wonder if when people think about a number tripling they think of 200% or 300%? Or a "five-fold" increase in something? What does that mean--five times or 500%?

Words I want to use very soon in my chapter.

lithic, chthonic, syllepsis, tmesis, gnomic, hapax legomenon

There's a flavor to Greek vocabulary that isn't there in Latinate words. Even visually those ch, ph, th, gn, ic, esis clusters give your prose a certain look. It's not for the sans serif in spirit.

I want to use the phrase "hubristically shallow judgment." I fact I did use it.

Thanks to Jerry Seinfeld I now have 12,800 words in this chapter. I like the moment, though, when the word count starts shrinking rather than growing. Then you know you're closer to compleiting it, because you're taking converting the last of the disconnected phrases into actual sentences and then making the prose more concise, taking out a few digressions. I'm hoping once I have 60 pages I can bring it down to 45 again. Otherwise it will split into two chapters.

I was suprised to see Gary Snyder called a "deep image" poet in one of the secondary sources I was looking at. That's weird.

Remember when The Onion used to be funny?

Neither do I. One more of those "local man finds hole in sock" story...

I really don't get that "women in the battered women shelter can't cook dinner" story. I won't dignify that with a link even. It's not just that it's offensive, and not funny, but that I can't even understand why it's supposed to be funny in the first place. What's the joke? Who thought THAT was a good idea?

Among major movements of postwar poetry

confessional, New York School, Black Mountain," "Beat" etc...

there is a separation between one the one hand

Black Mountain, Beat, New York School, SF and Berkeley Renaisssance and, on the other hand

Confessional, "deep image, " and "academic"

That is, deep image and "confessional" poetry is placed on the other side of the divide. Confessional poetry arose out of the already academic poetry of Lowell, Snodgrass, and Berryman, as an internal revolt from within academic poetry, so it never had credibility among those in the other camp.

There is a shadow "deep image" school of Rothenberg, Kelly, and possibly Wakoski, on the "avant" side of the line. It's like the mirror image of Bly, Wright, and Merwin. I've seen accounts from both sides that simply leave out the names of the "deep image" poets on the other side. Even Antin started out as a deep image poet, if you read his book length interview with Charles Bernstein.

When deep image surrealism gets folded back into Iowa plainspokenness, it remains suspect. It turns into another mode of what used to be called "academic" poetry.

Ultimately it seems a simplification, though, to place two major movements on the other side of that invisible line. it doesn't pass the "Martian test." That is, you couldn't explain it to an extraterrestrial being who has no prior stake in the question. It also doesn't make sense to place the New York poets halfway in the academic camp, because they were influenced by Auden at one point and published with New York Trade houses.

The division does mirror my own taste. I can't stand Sexton or Snodgrass, or Bly, Kooser or Hall. That's not a justification, though.

What are your thoughts about "Little Elegy for Antonio Machado"? Just get out your Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara and look for the last poem there.

I didn't like it too much; it seemed strained in its diction, uncertain in tone. But I think the way James Wright evokes Machado's death is worse, somehow,

State police yawn in the prisons.
Antonio Machado follows the moon
Down a road of white dust,
To a cave of silent children
Under the Pyrenees.
Wine darkens in stone jars in villages.
Wine sleeps in the mouths of old men, it is a dark red color.

("Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1959")

A flawed, awkwardly worded poem by O'Hara seems more engaging than Wright's powerfully felt but "blunter" approach. I don't like the "silent children" and the "dark red color." The darkness here is the cliché deep image school darkness; that particular diction has not aged well. Of course I have to remind myself that Wright wrought this writing, that it wasn't a cliché yet when he invented this style. Still, Wright's poem made me love O'Hara's "Little Elegy" where before I had only tolerated it. O'Hara even uses the word "dark" several times.