Ashbery is still the man. Turn to page 43 of your copy of Where Shall I Wander and read the poem "Well-Lit Places."

"The proud, the famous, the magnficent
exude gentleness and megalomania.
Embassies are loud with the sound of cymbals and organ.
The taste of insolence is sharp, with an agreeable mingled sweetness."

Not every poem in the book is on that level. I haven't read much of it yet. I'm getting to know it gradually.

See also page 9.

What?! You don't have the book yet? Waiting for it to come out in paperback? Maybe the New York Times convinced you that, while Ashbery is important enough to put on the cover of the Book Review, you don't really need to read ANOTHER damned Ashbery book. Maybe you brought a Pinsky to an Ashbery fight once and got badly beaten.

Pack Poetry might soon join my list of favorite blogs. I just started reading it yesterday so it's not even on my blogroll yet. Some good posts about Kenneth Koch's comics and children's poetry.

***

I have a "nothing's too stupid to write down" notebook, where I jot down phrases from my internal babble:

bleeding fountain pen

wearing big hats as absurd status symbols

It is only in its imperfections than air becomes visible.

Something I learned yesterday becomes something I have always known.

You must position yourself along a continuum not of your own making.

What I read only confirms my beliefs, never changes them!

To get my handwriting small enough...

"We don't have to lock the cabinets any more. It doesn't have to be cute or pretentious."

What this notebook won't become.

Can't bear to put my name in this book.

"contempt for the academic"

"tone deftness"

doesn't look like work.

Since it costs $15 dollars to rent these shopping carts, we must hitch them to the stars.

Corey has quit the evil poetics list too. I advised Tim Yu to do so months ago. It took yet another racist incident to finally convince him. Let's leave it for the homophobic racists and the tiresome poets who use it for a captive audience. Then it can just be put out of its misery.

Another good M blog is Bill Marsh'sSan Diego Poetry Guild, An excellent post on poetry slams and the Christian right. Check it out.

{lime tree}: Shakespeare's Sonnet 71

The way I read this poem, the central figure is the paradox of false humility: it comes to say the opposite of what it ostensibly says: do not remember me after I am dead; mourn for me only as long as the surly sullen bells are ringing. The idea is that the speaker is so unworthy that the "wise world" (sarcastic alliteration: the world was "vile" only a few lines earlier) will mock the addressee for having loved him. "Remember me not," however, is an impossible command to fulfill (don't think about a white polar bear!). Don't let a little thing like our friendship get in the way of something so important as your social standing! "My poor name" is ambiguous: is he saying "poor me," I will be dead, or "poor me," I am unworthy of your love and friendship due to my low social standing?

What the poem is really saying is: "If you truly love me, you will mourn for me even though others might ridicule you for it. Reading these lines, you will realize that your concern for your worldy position is misguided."

K.S. Mohammad's {lime tree} has always been in my top two or three blogs. Hell, I even know how to spell his name after three years (I hope). If you do his exercise on sonnet 71 at home you will receive a fine education in poetic technique. The combination of solid erudition and up-to-date flarf hipness is impossible to beat. Along with Josh Corey, it is the top blog for academic poetry wonks like myself.

The only flaw in Lime Tree that I can see is that it is not updated hourly or daily. Unfortunately for us Kasey has more *important* things to do than maintain his blog.

Pierre Reverdy

Départ

L'horizon s'incline
Les jours sont plus longs
Voyage
Un coeur saute dans une cage
Un oiseau chante
Il va mourir
Une autre porte va s'ouvrir
Au fond du couloir
Où s'allume
Une étoile
Une femme brune
La lanterne du train qui part

What's great about this is you only need Jr. High School French to read it. Note the rhymes and the rhythmic phrases. I've scanned the lines for you. After the first three lines everything is divided into groups of 8 syllables (8, or 4+4, 3+5):

5
5
2
8
4
4
8
5
3
3
5
8

It's not about hard and easy. Ashbery is medium soft now; he used to be rock hard. Reverdy is transparent, yet he was not always so. Cummings used to be incomprehensbile but now he's far too comprehensible. It's as much an oversimplification to say that all greaet poetry stems from "trobar clus" as to say the opposite. Garcilaso was held up as model of limpidity but in his day was seen as obscure purveyor of Italianate modes. Grenier is "easy." Silliman is clearer than Ashbery. Guest is transparent in style yet "intellectually challenging," to use my unfortunate euphemism. Armantrout is easy of approach yet complex. Of the poets I study in my book, many are quite "easy" yet extremely difficult at the same time. A lot has to do with the viewpoint of the reader, and how these metaphors are deployed. Transparency vs. opacity. Ease vs. difficulty. Clarity vs. confusion. Softness vs. obduracy. Approachability vs. aloofness. Depending on what metaphor you choose you might get different results. I wish I could write academically like I do on the blog.

I forgot to put this link into the last post: Dunkin' Donuts - A more perfect pastry. By Bryan Curtis

The Conclusion of the Conclusion which means I am officially done, except for some pesky translations:

Note that Bernstein?s disdain is not for popular culture, which can be smart and edgy in its own right, but for the seemingly well-intentioned middle-brow dilution of high-culture. He suggests that we should be suspicious of the impulse to "popularize" poetry in a way that would eliminate all those elements that make it distinctive and valuable.

The Spanish situation is not identical to that in the North-American one to which Bernstein is referring. Official culture in Spain, heavily supported by the State, is devoted largely to the nostalgic commemoration of an idealized past. Nevertheless, there is some strong parallels between García Montero's "poetry of experience" and contemporary American poetry of the Billy Collins school. Most significantly, both movements succesfully position themselves at the center or mainstream of the cultural landscape and reject more avant-garde, intellectually challenging poetics. Both have profited from the erosion of the boundary between the "high" and the "middle." It is necessary to remark here that the concept of the "middle-brow" has itself undergone a shift downward: the on-line magazine Slate, for example, runs a column entitled the ?middlebrow? which has recently addressed such weighty issues as the Sports Illustrated Swim-Suit Issue, The ?Gillette Man,? the humor of Dave Barry, and quality of coffee at Dunkin Donuts. If this is the middle-brow, where has popular culture gone? Or more relevantly, does this re-definition of the term mean that anything of more intellectual weight than Dunkin Donuts is high-brow?

It is difficult to avoid the appearance of elitism when insisting that there is a significant difference between John Ashbery and Billy Collins, or between Antonio Gamoneda and Luis García Montero. Even if we accord Collins and García Montero their due, however, almost anyone would agree that their poetics is founded on an explicit rejection of the more challenging role that readers like Bernstein or myself expect from poetry. The "anti-elitist brief against difficult late modernist and postmodernist poetry fails, in my view, because it is based on a misguided defense of popular culture. Those of us who champion more challenging poetry enjoy Dave Barry and Dunkin Donuts, Comic Books and HBO serials, as much as anyone else does. The objection is not to popular taste, but to the relentless promotion of a sort of middle-brow culture of blandness.

Another familiar assumption that must be rebutted is that the assault on high culture is somehow progressive. It is true that conservative pundits inside and outside of academia sometimes use the idea of a traditional literary canon in order to promote their agenda, but does anybody believe that the study of literature helps to prop up the power of the Bush administration? If ever the political élite required the sort of legitimization provided by literary scholars, those days are long past. By the same token, the demand that literary scholarship be politically efficacious in an immediate sense is perhaps unrealistic. Even more socially relevant work has inherent limitations when it is confined to the practice of an academic discipline.

It is true that I have myself made a political statement of sorts in this book, since I have insisted on the congruence between middle-brow poetic blandness and reactionary thought, and argued that the state sponsorship of mediocrity is not beneficial to culture. My aim, however, is not to change the world but to preserve a space in it for the vibrant poetic culture that has been the mainstay of my life.

Just to show you I'm not just blogging during my sabbatical, here is the beginning of the end, the start of the conclusion to my book:


This book has attempted to address the question of why the most ambitious and intellectually challenging poetry of our time meets with so much resistance or indifference. Posed in this way, however, the question virtually answers itself: the challenging nature of the poetry I have been championing and the resistance of the culture at large are one and the same phenomenon. As I have shown in the preceding chapters, recent Spanish poetry outside of the dominant school is not lacking in quality, variety, or depth. It should also be pointed out that such poetry, the heritage of the great moderns, has never enjoyed widespread appeal. Thus the notion that we are living in an age especially recalcitrant to poetry is at best an historically inaccurate simplification.

What has changed, perhaps, is that university professors, and others belonging to the "élite," culture no longer believe the modernist paradigm of an élite culture worthy of respect and emulation. Even many highly educated people today seem to share the widespread disdain for more difficult forms of art. The waning of the modernist imperative at the end of the twentieth century has meant that the expression of indifference (or hostility) to challenging and difficult forms of art no longer carries any negative stigma. In the academic humanities, the move from literary to cultural studies has undermined the traditional privilege enjoyed by literary works deemed to be more prestigious or "high-brow." It is true that such works continue to be studied--reports of the death of the canon have been exaggerated in the popular media--but many in the field have the sense is that the study of literature is an essentially conservative enterprise left over from an earlier, less enlightened period.

This conception of literary study is, unfortunately, quite accurate in many cases. The defense of the "literary" per se does often seem to be the province of more conservative members of the academic profession, and in this context the promotion of a cultural studies open to the study of all forms of cultural expression is quite welcome. When an elder statesman of my field starts to defend the primacy of the literary, I sympathize with him but wince at the same time: his "literature" is not mine. I remember the academy was never very adept at reflecting the vitality of modern and contemporary poetry: the New Criticism, for example, promoted a deeply conservative version of modernism, and prestigious deconstructive critics like J. Hillis Miller have professed their belief in the sanctity of the canon, turning their attention mostly to Romantic and Victorian poetry. I remember that Harold Bloom, also a champion of the Western Canon and a purveyor of popular "greatest hits" anthologies, uses the term "school of resentment" to mask his own resentment at Feminism or Gay and Lesbian Studies, and has zero interest in the work of any significant younger poet in the United States. The conservative English Department (or Spansh Department) really is no friend to contemporary literature. I think of friends and acquaintances who write language poetry, "flarf," or experimental comics. To continue to study "literature" within the academy in the same way as it was studied in the 1950s would not help bring attention to their work.

My own approach has been to follow a third path between a conservative literary studies and a ?cultural studies? with very little interest in literature per se. Cultural studies promises to democratize the study of literature and culture by placing cultural productions of various types on an equal footing. In practice, this almost always entails a devaluation of élite culture. Since the canon still survives in reading lists and in more traditional scholarship, what tends to be squeezed out is innovative work by younger writers. My "third way," then, entails following the example of Marjorie Perloff and other critics who have studied more innovative contemporary literature within the academy, attempting to bridge the gap between scholars and poets.

One argument underlying this book is that the autonomy of poetry has a tangible value, and that the insistence on this value in not inherently conservative. I believe that the lesson we have learned in the past few years is that, in the absence of some notion of autonomous value, literature will evaluated either for its market price or for its political instrumentality. A significant work, in other words, will have either some economic value, judged by sales figures, or some wider social resonance. Often, these two scales of value exist in an uneasy relationship to each other: without some measure of popularity in the marketplace, a work can not really do the "cultural work" it is called upon to do. This means that a poem is read by only a few people, we conclude that it automatically lacks the sort of social relevance that novels and films sometimes enjoy. Even socially-conscious poetry usually lacks this kind of entry into the marketplace to make it relevant to the larger culture.

The answer, according to some, is to re-popularize poetry, to bring something called "poetry" to the attention of a wider public. Charles Bernstein, in a biting satire entitled "Against National Poetry Week as such," point out the inherent problem in such an effort. The main problem is that the effort is deeply insincere, since what is being brought to the public lacks any qualities we associate with ?poetry? :

The path taken by the Academy's National Poetry Month, and by such foundations as Lannan and the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund, have been misguided because these organizations have decided to promote not poetry but the idea of poetry, and the idea of poetry too often has meant almost no poetry at all. Time and time again we hear the official spokespersons tell us they want to support projects that give speedy and efficient access to poetry and that the biggest obstacle to this access is, indeed, poetry, which may not provide the kind of easy reading required by such mandates.

This is the genius of the new Literary Access programs: the more you dilute art, the more you appear to increase the access. But access to what? Not to anything that would give a reader or listener any strong sense that poetry matters, but rather access to a watered down version that lacks the cultural edge and the aesthetic sharpness of the best popular and mass culture. The only reason that poetry matters is that is has something different to offer, something slower on the uptake, maybe, but more intense for all that, and also something necessarily smaller in scale in terms of audience. Not better than mass culture but a crucial alternative to it.

Rounding out my the L section of my favorite blogs is Cosmopoetica, by Chris Lott. There are quite a few good ones in the M's.

My favorite L blog is Language Log, written by Mark Liberman and a team of other linguists. Geoffrey Pullum is one of the funniest writers I know of.
Language Hat is also required reading. I don't know Mr. Hat's last name so I'm putting him in the LLs.

Yes, Michael Benedikt! Too bad Ashbery is not as good a prose-poet as Michael Benedikt, whowever the hell he is. I haven't thought of him in years. Michael Benedikt of the baleful influence, Russell Edson of the baleful influence!

***

We hold translators to an impossibly low standard. A translator should not be allowed to get away with things just because it's a translation. Some of the greatest poems in the language are translations, but they are still poems of our language. Usually, the failure is rhythmical and linguistic. The language is not convincing and the rhythmic impulse is desultory. Translators of Brodsky and Milosz are particularly bad. Eastern European poetry in general has not been served well. It's read for sentimental reasons: "look, they have something to write about, unlike our crappy unpoetical suburban American reality!" I have written many invectives against translation. Not against translation itself, but against the hubris of calling a mediocre translation a "poem in English."