My fantasy text: the poem, or novel, so completely ensconced within a normal period style that it in no way transcended this style. This is a fantasy because I'd like to believe that all texts, even ostensibly mediocre ones, have a residue of excess, something that is not wholly circumscribable to an a priori definition.

I once began a novel (I only wrote 3 or 4 pages; I am no novelist) in which one of the characters is studying the work of a fictional French writer who exemplifies the "perfect" text, that is, the text with no such residue: nothing that is not explainable by a set of rigid conventions. The hero of my novel was fascinated by this perfect conventionality; it allowed him to define the ruling conventions of this writer's work as a perfect structuralist critic. Of course the critic in my novel would have gone insane.

My interest in banality is thus two-fold: I am interested in why others don't necessarily see it where I do, and in the structuralist dream of the perfectly banal, conventional text, one that doesn't exceed the convention by the slightest hair. Once a text slipped into this complete, perfect banality, it would suddenly become an object of fascination again. Boredom is impossible.

The subjective sense of feeling oneself to be "brilliant." How odd that is! It seems to be created, confirmed, by the banality surrounding oneself. Jordan is right: I don't want to set myself up as an arbiter. What I'm trying to do is examine myself, avoid falling into the trap, whatever that trap is. Seeing oneself as "mystery genius"? (Jordan's coinage).

To set myself up as enemy of banality, in my new field (mediocrity studies: the study of normal cultural expression, sort of like Thomas Kuhn's "normal science"). The dangers of this endeavor are multiple. After all, normal expressions also have their value and are inevitable. The idea that they could have been avoided seems illusory.

I share my birthday (August 24) with Robert Herrick and Jorge Luis Borges. I was just checking out the NPR Writer's Almanac Site, doing research for my period style article. Garrison Keillor epitomizes a certain sensibility, in his choice of texts.

Peevishness and spleen as my driving forces. When I am allowed to release my bile I end up being quite cheerful. When I repress my peevishness, on the other hand, I become saturnine, melancholic, and even more splenetic. From the outside I merely appear phlegmatic.

***

August Highland of m.a.g. is featuring some of my work in the Spring issue. I'll put up a link at the approprite time. I'm quite an incompetent blogger because I don't know how to put a link in the actual text of my postings. I'm sure it's not too difficult.

"Total absorption in poetry is one of the finest things in existence--
It should not make you feel guilty. Everyone is absorbed in something.
The sailor is absorbed in the sea. Poetry is the mediation of life."

Kenneth Koch, "The Art of Poetry"

I've been noticing I use the word "obviously" in my speech a lot lately. What could this mean? There is very little that is obvious or self-evident, not enough to justify my using that word so much.

***

I lost articulateness during the last 10 minutes of class today. Instead of stopping, I went overtime, since we started discussing attitudes in Spain toward the Bush war (supported by Spanish president Aznar). One of the students told me that one of the journalists killed in Iraq recently is son of Spanish Izquierda Unida ["United Left, used to be Communist Party) leader Julio Anguita.

***

I don't feel myself to be particularly articulate. I am not one of those people who can just talk and say what they mean at the first try. At times, though, I can speak with some degree of eloquence. I just lose it when I'm especially tired like right now.

I don't appear in David Hess's little tableau, for which I'm grateful (I guess), though I am partially visible in the character he calls "Marjorie Perloff." Gudding's sense of humor is too labored for my taste. He is trying to be funny; he has a "theory" of comedy for God's sake. I'm prejudiced because I used to spar with him on the poetics list back in late 1998.

I need constant intellectual stimulation. I get it mainly from the implied dialogue among bloggers. Reading becomes less solipsistic because I can publish my responses as I go along. The Buffalo poetics list once served that function for me, but became too cluttered and contentious. I've been writing this blog for 7 months, and have no plans to stop any time soon.

Where I hesitate most is posting poems on the blog, since I myself often skip over others' poems on their blogs. I can't always switch that easily between a quick, web-surfing attention span and a slow, poem-reading attention span. To read poetry I need to be out of this windowless office.

To clarify, in response to John Erhardt: the ironic citation of clichés is not an illegitimate technique. In the hand of a weaker poet, though, the clichés tend to take over, diminish rather than augment tension. Does the use of canned language lead to some weak moments even in Ashbery, Schuyler? Indubitably. In Strand, Tate, though, there is often not any poetic tension to begin with, and the clichés are not transformed or subverted quite enough to justify their use.

That is why I think of Tate as a lightweight Ashbery. It seems as though it would be easy to write like Ashbery, since we all know the clichés of our own time. Tate proves that it is not. It is sad, because I used to love his work when I was young (when he was young). The Lost Pilot, The Oblivion Ha-Ha, are superb. His writing seemed to lose energy as it absorbed that Ashbery influence.

I got the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry when it came out in 1973. Tate was the youngest poet in there. I was 13 years old. So I actually read and liked his poetry before it started to go downhill in the mid-late 1970s. I would love to hear a defense of this poetry, by the way, by someone who thinks he is still going on strong. Debate always helps me to clarify my own ideas.

Another thing about Ashbery's clichés, is that they are usually "off." They sound weird, unfamiliar, as if the person who is using them didn't quite know their proper use. With lesser poets the same clichés are often simply "themselves."

Dana Gioia on Robert Bly:

"By propagating this sort of minimalist translation Bly has done immense damage to American poetry. Translating quickly and superficially, he not only misrepresented the work of many great poets, but also distorted some of the basic standards of poetic excellence. His slapdash method ignored both the obvious formal qualities of the originals (like rhyme and meter) and, more crucially, those subtler organizing principles such as diction, tone, rhythm, and texture that frequently gave the poems their intensity. Concentrating almost entirely on syntax and imagery, Bly reduced the complex originals into abstract visual blueprints. In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale y Machado, not only sounded alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly, and even then not like Bly at his best. But as if that weren’t bad enough, Bly consistently held up these diminished versions as models of poetic excellence worthy of emulation. In promoting his new poetics (based on his specially chosen foreign models), he set standards so low that he helped create a school of mediocrities largely ignorant of the premodern poetry in English and familiar with foreign poetry only through oversimplified translations." (Gioia 172-73).

The ironically cited cliché is itself a cliché. Ashbery still gets away with it, because he practically invented the technique and avoids falling completely into that suburban ennui tone (usually). He also uses an erudite register along with the clichés: they are just one element of his poetic language, not the predominant one. He really has an incredible range.

You can read old reviews of Frank O'Hara books, of the books he published while alive. U of Michigan P put out a book of critical essays that includes most of these reviews. The reviewers are generally obtuse, clueless. They can't hear that tone, or they devote a perfunctory paragraph to him in one of those notorious omnibus reviews. For me, O'Hara is THE poet of his age, also with an incredible range of registers.

Is reviewing better nowadays? I'm sure it is, if you take Rain Taxi into account, and some of the internet sites. I picked up my copy of Rain Taxi while buying "In Memory of My Theories." I wish the reviewer of Jordan's book had put some more time (and space) into it. It is not really an uneven collection, in terms of quality; it is only uneven in the sense of being variegated.

***

Will they cancel class tomorrow if Kansas wins national championship tonight? If so, I could have stayed at home until Wed. I told the secretaries in the office: "It's only a basketball game" and they almost took my head off. I've listened to enough a.m. sports radio in the car that I almost care.

Short Story


Not foolish the determinant. “Remember:
Kafka’s turned into,” pronounced William

the Superintendent, “and received, perhaps
unwarranted, his effectiveness . . . have needed

an activist, a scintilla being
otherwise.” Was Springtime browned leaves?

Is sprinkled? The prayers, warmer
days, late April--the school

approaching end. Peter and people
talked, co-governers of paper. Laden,

one inhumanly old Ford, unyielding
to, of, glass. Mary first. . .

***

Poetic Language

Poetic Language was tired of being exciting, the “big fuss” made about it everywhere it meant. It wanted to “pass under the radar screen” so as to recount absurdist parables in flattest, deadpan clichés. Could Bill Merwin help? Naw, he was too good a poet! So Poetic Language thought... but soon Russell, Mark, the two Charleses, and Jim “convinced him it was the right thing to do.”

Kenneth “threw his hands up in despair. . . “

***

Is James Tate an "Ashbery lite"? If I have to ask, he probably is. I read Shroud of the Gnome yesterday. Re-reading "Hush" (David St. John), a receipt fell out of the book, dated 9 August 1978, from Moe's bookstore in Berkeley. So I have had this book almost 25 years. It's the quintessential mid-70s book--

They've carried the fat man who yelled
For more butter on his lobster through the streets
Weeping.

Yet some of it holds up much better than I would have expected. The poem "For Peter Everwine," for example, and the title poem of the collection. Certainly better than most Tate, Strand, and Simic from this period.

The reviewer of Charles Simic's poems in the New York Times Book Review this morning says that Simic's style is unique, all his own, and that this fact is not even debatable. I was taken aback: whether you like his work of not, his short free verse poems in rather "flat" language (the reviewer's own adjective), that recount quasi-surrealist or absurdist anecdotes, are pretty commonplace, not dissimilar to Mark Strand, James Tate, and a host of other prize-winning poets of last 30 years. Simic almost defines the "period style" I have been writing about. What am I missing here?

I remember being surprised when I learned he was not American born; you'd think a European would bring something more to the table. Why does he writes in those American suburban clichés? One the reviewer quoted today about "the note my mother wrote me to get me out of school." I'm not saying his work has no value; he's probably in the top ten who write in this mode. I'm just surprised that it would be seen as hugely original.

I sit on a mat
and say with my own mouth
war cannot go on
I pick up a loaf
and say war must not
go on,
so decide to protest,
I go into my house
with a
sign
I see a flower
I put it on the sign
Now I'm going to my house
I have a sign about war in Iraq
I do not like war
and it must stop.

A poem my daughter Julia wrote about going to the protest last week in Forest Park.