I recognized Bill Evan's piano playing instantaneously as I awoke to local college radio station. It's like recognizing the face of someone you know.

I expect students to react in the same way I do. I gave them some poems of Claudio Rodríguez and expected them to instantly recognize that this was the real thing. Of course, they were not at all impressed. It's like playing Coltrane for someone and having them think it's nice background music. You can't get angry, only sad.

This is the model of the poem that students were taught to write in creative writing workshops circa 1975:

The Sleeper

Long white hairs knot his fingers
which have grown into his chest like snakes.
His feet grip each other like gila-monsters.
There are toads in his ears,
boulders in his blood.
His house is floating, gasping, exploding
under the ocean of his children
who flee on insane ladders
into the dark university.

Strong, active verbs, flights of surrealist fancy, lots of animal imagery. Of course the poem looks like a cliché now, since there are so many poems written in the same vein. But this "false Latin American poem" by a poet I will call "Jim" still holds up reasonably well. It is more vigorous in language than the WSM poem I quoted yesterday. I give it 3 stars for phanopeia, taking off points for the similes in lines 2 and 3. I give 2 and a half stars for melopeia: a good "free verse poem." 1 star for logopeia: there is not a very convincing "dance of the intellect." The poem would be better without the words "long," "insane," and "dark." The adjectives weaken the force of the poem, which depends on its strong nouns and verbs. These adjective also lend a cliché quality to the text, in retrospect. Anything would be better than "dark" here. "into the ecru university."

Jim's more recent poems don't have that same vigor of expression. They are often deadpan prose poems in the mode of Russell, whom I have never appreciated. I think there is a similar evolution in Louise. Her first books had a more lively, variegated language. Is this also true of Mark and Charles?

In case you are put off by my use of first names, I will provide an interpretive key:

Bill = Merwin
Frank = O'Hara (duh, there is only one Frank!)
Jim = Tate
Russell = Edson
Louise = Glück
Mark = Strand
Charles = Simic

Who am I missing in this discussion? Stephen? Greg? Dean? The blog is working quite well as a place to work out ideas for an article I am writing. If anyone wants to help me out I'd welcome it. I'll acknowledge any help I get in a footnote.

My cognitive therapy last night was about my laziness. I said I was lazy.

--Why do say that, you've just worked a 10 hour day?
--I don't work very hard on the weekends, or even on Fridays.
--You never stop thinking, reading, writing your blog, teaching poetry to children. . .
--That's not real work. I have a stack of ungraded papers on my desk.
--You are teaching an extra class; most of those papers are from that.
--I only prepared my undergrad class for 15 minutes yesterday.
--How did the class go?
--Fine, the students responded well to the material; I asked good questions, came up with a nice reading of the play with their help.
--So what's the problem?
--My colleagues would never prepare class for only 15 minutes.
--Maybe you are more efficient or quicker to see how to teach a text after a single reading.
--It could have been a disaster! What if it hadn't worked?
--Well, what if it hadn't worked?
--Then I would have given a sub-par performance.
--That's never happened to a colleague who was meticulously prepared?
--I don't know...
--I'm sure it has. What if a colleague said he or she told you that a particular class didn't go well?
--I would say it happens to everyone!
--Then why are you singling out yourself for blame? Especially when the class did go well. You prepared to give a class the way you know best, based on your own capability and experience. The class was successful. Yet you perceive a problem here. You are a seriously fucked-up man.!


It's a lot cheaper to do it to yourself than to pay someone $75 for 50 minutes.

Blogger just ate a long post in which I performed cognitive therapy on self. Oh well, it's been a long day.

Joseph Duemer, whose excellent blog I read from time to time, is the editor or co-editor of an anthology of poems about dogs, I discovered a few weeks ago at Border's. There's nothing wrong with those thematic anthologies; in fact they can have a pleasantly aleatory quality. The 500 best poems about feet. I was trying to define what I take as the linguistic impoverishment of a certain style of America poetry, and I found this poem called "Dogs":

Many times loneliness
is someone else
an absence
then when loneliness is no longer
someone else many times
it is someone else’s dog
that you’re keeping
then when the dog disappears
and the dog’s absence
you are alone at last
and loneliness many times
is yourself
that absence
but at last it may be
that you are your own dog
hungry on the way
the one sound climbing a mountain
higher than time.

They say the average person has a (passive) vocabulary of about 50,000 words. You'd think, then, that this famous poet, whom I will call "Bill," would use more than the same 50 to write each poem.

Compare this to another poet who I will call "Frank," who fills his poems with proper names, words in other languages, gay slang and campiness, erudite vocabulary, and "cornball" surrealism. Both styles could be called "colloquial" in some sense, but they are miles apart.

Equanimity is on fire today. I usually check it about at least every 30 minutes during the morning when I'm not in class, so I am almost his simultaneous reader. I know it would be much more efficient to read it all at the end of the day, but obviously efficiency has nothing to do with it. I enjoy "bouncing" my posts off of his, and blogging in a similar rhythm, even when my posts have nothing explicitly to do with his.

To: The KU Community
From: Bob Hemenway, Chancellor

A number of you have asked me how we can best show support for our U.S.
troops who have been placed in harm's way during the Iraqi conflict. It
goes without saying that all Americans defending our freedom deserve such
support, and we should particularly keep in mind those Kansans, including KU
faculty, staff, and students, whose lives are now at risk.

Governor Sebelius has eloquently addressed the anxiety that we feel for
those who have been called to duty. She has stated, "Their morale is as
important as any strategy or piece of equipment. I hope you will join me in
finding ways to express our support and gratitude toward them." The
Governor suggests that we write letters, fly flags, and do whatever it takes
to show them they have our support. I suggest we sing out when the national
anthem is played at the Final Four, place yellow ribbons on trees, and begin
each day with a period of contemplation.

KU will always remain a place of academic freedom for those who hold a wide
range of views, but it must also be a place of support for those whose lives
are at risk, as well as a place that honors bravery and courage.

The Campanile tolls every quarter hour in memory of KU students who gave
their lives in World War II. As we hear it ring, let the sound of the bells
continually remind us of our present-day Jayhawks, and our prayers for their
safe return.

Chancellor of KU, an English professor and author of biography of Zora Neale Hurston, sends us an email message on how we can best support the troops, those "fighting for our freedom." We can display the American flag, sing the anthem louder at basketball games. Of course we have to respect academic freedom...

Now even if you support the war, it is quite a stretch to say that the U.S. is fighting for the "freedom" of American citizens. It is intervening for U.S. strategic interests in the world, not to preserve the Bill of Rights, which Ashcroft would love to dismantle himself. We are measurably less free now than in 1999, and the Chancellor's message is an indication of this. I'm sure that those who support the war effort will be waving the flag anyway: why would they need to be told to do this? The message is meant, then, for the Kansas State Legislature. The chancellor is trying to send a message to Topeka that the University is in ideological line.

I read the play: pompous, overbearing husband, an ambitious doctor. Separated from wife--neurasthenic housewife. Conflict over custody of female dog named "Nunca." A nice twist at the end, otherwise fairly banal. I chose to teach this play because? I don't even remember. I always need to surprise myself by assigning a work I've never read myself.

***

Perloff on Merwin in "Poetic License," one of those piece-by-piece dismantlings of a poet that she does so well. Not much is left of him after she is done.

With Ken Irby in Border's yesterday afternoon. He showed me Joe LeSoeur's memoirs, "Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara," which I almost bought. It is unusual to go to Border's at 4 p.m. and NOT run into Irby.

***

The essay on the period style is taking shape. Translation ought to enrich the language. Instead, translation from the Spanish tended to create a new "poetic diction." In the 1970s, Merwin writes in a vocabulary of 500 words (maybe 1000). Edson's restricted tone and lexicon. I'd like to show with some precision how the early 1970s deep image poem turned into the mid 1970s suburban creative writing workshop poem, and led to the creation of "Dean Young."

Of course, I haven't read the one-act play I'm teaching in two hours.

413 poems is ALMOST a million. poetically speaking. Keep them flowing forth.

***

Two parallel fears. That all that I'm saying is so obvious that it will meet with yawns, or so off the wall that it won't be understood at all.

I've emailed Bob Hass to see if he is indeed the author of the mystery article. I've written 500 more words of the article on translation and period style. It has been sort of writing itself in my head the whole day.

Upper limit: Merwin
Lower limit: Bly
Somewhere in the middle: Strand

But is Merwin better than Strand? How does the Asbheryianism of the right fit it here? Goldbarth? Does it fold back into the deep image based period style, or is it its own separate thing? How about practitioners of the old period style (academic 50s), like Moss and Hall, who end up writing in the period style of the 80s?

What happens when the period style absorbs the more intellectual mode of Jorie Graham? What if there is no period style and I am simply making it all up?

I've found the Gioia essay on Bly. There is another one on Howard Moss that bears re-reading. I had remembered it as demolishing Moss, but it actually praises him--but in a way that demolishes him in my eyes. At one point he talks about how a certain Moss poems "discuss serious human issues." Anyone who can talk about poetry in such language! Poetry discusses nothing, certainly not "issues." If it does, it might be expected that they be "human" ones, not vegetable or mineral ones.

I haven't been able to locate the Hass essay on translation yet. I find his "Twentieth Century Pleasures" not devoid of interest but ultimately rather bland, sort of Pinskyesque. I get more out of Gioia's reactionary provocations.

Gioia says that since he encountered Ginsberg's poetry in the classroom of an elite private university, he could not see it as revolutionary in any way. Talk about a failure of imagination! I can imagine, reading Gioia, what it is like to be a person for whom Howard Moss is a compelling poet. I am not that person, but reading Gioia, I can put myself in that place for a moment. Otherwise, I would see Moss simply as a dull mediocrity who exemplifies a certain period style. That is one good reason for reading criticism. Gioia seems unable to imagine himself as a reader in 1959 picking up "Howl" for the first time. He also seems to think people read Ginsberg only for his ideology, not for its radical use of language.

I'm still here eleven hours later. I've taught three classes of an hour and twenty minutes each, and written 1000 words in Spanish for my essay on translation and the period style. I know I have to look at two essays, one by Dana Gioa called "The successful career of Robert Bly," the other by Robert Hass on how translation affected American poetry for the worse. I know Gioa is a Republican and all, but his demolition of Bly is truly enjoyable. Hass is also quite insightful. I just hope his essay is in a book somewhere, because I read it in a magazine many years ago and have no idea how to find it if it is not (in a book of essays). And what if he is not the author of this essay? Then I will never find it and will be plagiarizing from something I read a long time ago? Or what if if my memory invented this essay and it doesn't exist at all?

Which edition of Reverdy did F. O'H have in his pocket? asks Jordan Davis. That is a question worthy of Nabokov, who asked himself what kind of insect Gregor S. turned into.

Speaking of the period style, I just got a great idea. Heriberto suggested I write an essay for a Mexican magazine called "Alforja." I am going to write about how translations of Latin American poetry in the 1970s fed into and created the period style of "soft surrealism." I believe I coined this phrase myself in a post a few months back, but I am not sure. I saw Silliman use it a few weeks ago. I'm not sure whether he got it from me, or whether this is a phrase in common use already.

The idea is that a certain kind of translation practice led to a fairly stiff, uncolloquial and portentous style. You can see how poets like Louise Glück and James Tate wrote with a certain colloquial vigor in their first few books, before this style took them over.