I actually have some respect for W.S. I even audited his course on contemporary British poetry many years ago. That's why I appointed him editor of the "academic" issue of Poetry.

A Modest Proposal for the Reform of Poetry Magazine.

January. Henry Gould issue. Every January would feature the work of a lesser known, but deserving poet. Preserving cultural memory.

February. Poetry Comics! edited by Gary Sullivan. There has never been a comic in Poetry, ttbomk.

March. Academic Poetry issue, edited by W.S. DiPiero and Robert Pinsky. We leave room for the old "Poetry" magazine, but only once a year.

April. Language and Post-Language Poetry issue, edited by Lyn Hejinian.

May. Visual and Sound Poetry.

June. Poets under the age of 12.

July. Translations.

August. Amateur poetry. Ditties from Church Newsletters!

September. Bad poems by famous poets. (The APR issue! )

October. Song lyrics.

November. Minor Poets of the New York School.

December. Prose: reviews, exchanges, etc...

Notice that at least 3 issues are reserved for bad poetry, so lovers of the bad should be appeased. We've quarantined the academic school into one issue, added more visual and auditory appeal, tipped the balance away from prose. This formula also allows the reader to break out of the usual rotation of Pinsky, Collins, Charles Wright, Citno, DiPiero, Sandra Gilbert, Merwin, Pinsky, Hass, Collins, DiPiero, Ashbery, Citino, DiPiero, Bidart, Pinsky...

You may think my approach is too gimmicky, but I am perfectly serious. The magazine has plenty money so the logistics shouldn't be too hard to handle. We can pay someone to scour the church newsletters in search of amateur poetry, fly Gary into Chicago to edit the Comix issue.

Lets play: What's up with your prestigious Poetry magazine

The magazine in question has not really been good for a very long time. It is rooted in the 1950s-1970s academic style. A recent feature had a series of mediocrities condescend to famous poets who were better than them. Does anyone really care whether McClatchy doesn't care for Rilke or someone I've never heard of doesn't like Whitman? That Dobyns doesn't like Frost? Dobyns shouldn't even be allowed to have an opinion about Frost! Of course William Logan hates Hopkins. William Logan hates poetry of all kinds.

Do we need a magazine featuring W.S. DiPiero in every fricking issue? Do we need mediocre light verse pantoums by A.E. Stallings? Essays by Joseph Epstein and John Simon?

They repeatedly publish the worst poets of our age, the Pinskys, the Collinses. If they go New York School they stick to Koethe and Lehman.

There are some reviews worth reading, but the prose is increasingly crowding out the poetry. Have you noticed? More prose features, letters to the editor, exchanges that are much more interesting than any poem in the magazine. (The discussion on "greatness" is downright irritating though.) Less poetry, and poetry of lesser quality. Let's promote poetry by showing how dull it can be!

I'm sure I'm being unfair. I haven't read every poem in the magazine to make sure they are all dull. If you are readiing this blog and published a good poem there in the past few years, I'm sure it just slipped through the cracks. Nothing can be perfectly dull, not even Poetry Magazine.

Thank you for playing "What's up with your prestigious poetry magazine." And apologies to Jimmy Behrle who inspired the title of my game.

Reading: Sugar Pill (Thanks Drew), The Red Gaze,. Eunoia.

My writing is echoey lately. Always. The "voice" is never mine. Let my powers of imitation fail me!

Interpretation of my dream:

1. I placed a premium on originality. I objected to the painters who shamelessly painted in the style of other painters. The dream also includes an implicit critique of Miró's self-plagiarism.

2. I was also placing a premium on technical skill. I objected to the poor draftmanship of the artist painting Mickey Mouse. I admired the technical skill of Warhol without liking his art.

3. Anger. I was angry that this kind of work was being done and accepted as valid.

4. I was looking at a catalogue, not at the paintings themselves. A lot of my experience of art is looking at reproductions rather than originals. The dream had a second-hand quality.

e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s. Thomas Fink interviews Sheila Murphy. Just up and worth reading. A beautiful interview.

The clue in the Saturday Times puzzle was "Many a blog post." That answer was supposed to be "rant." The scary part is that was the first word that occured to me for that clue.

My art criticism dream: I was leafing through an art catalogue with someone else, identity unknown. The prints were of very derivative paintings, fake Miró's with typical bird and star motifs, with that typical Miró blue sky color. I was loudly complaining about how bad and derivative these paintings were. The last ones we were looking at had Mickey Mouse figures, very badly drawn, against this same Miró-like background. I started in rather pedantically and angrily about how Joe Brainard's "Nancy" drawings were much superior. Then I went on to Warhol. It was clear the other person was not a Warhol fan. "Even Andy Warhol draws much better!" I shouted. To clarify my point I went on: "I said EVEN Warhol..." I had the image of Warhol's Mao series in my mind. By this time I was with the other person in some kind of cafeteria line, and the identity of the person was a little clearer. Waking up I assumed that it was Marjorie Perloff.

I found, written into my old copy of The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara, a list of "10 best O'Hara?" I must have done this list many years ago. I know I had the book since the 1970s. Not all the poems I list are in the Selcted poems.

Poetry
Memorial Day 1950
Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)
To the Harbormaster
A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island
Mr. O'Hara's Sunday Morning Service
A Young Poet
Poem (There I Could Never be a Boy)
Naptha
A Step Away from Them

I still agree with this list, more or less, though it's missing the poem for Morton Feldman ("Who'd have thought / that snow falls") "On Rachmaninoff's Birthday,." "Biotherm," "In Memory of My Feelings," "The Day Lady Died." It's like trying to fit forty poems into a list of ten. I would put the best thirty poems of O'Hara against a comparable number of poems from any other poet of this period.

***

Here's a translation I'm working on:

As though a lantern yanked me up
from the middle of the night,
so you uncovered me, so you pointed me out.
So you drilled through my steep silences and minted
the borders of my island.
Naming me, you expose me, you place me in the bull?s-eye.
There is no place for a ruse, there is no place to hide.
I am a paralyzed target, center of your will, destiny
of your attention and your warning.
What are you waiting for?
I won?t shrink from the light.
Let what your dart decrees be done in me.

(Ana Rossetti)

While I only really need a literal version, I want something much more satisfying. This incredibly clunky version is not it. Much too preposition-y for one thing. The last line doesn't work at all. She's really saying "thy will be done," with a biblical overtone, but speaking of a pagan love god. It could be a Lorenz Hart lyric: "I'm a sentimental sap that's all / what's the use of trying not to fall. You've cooked my goose / so what's the use / 'cause you took advantage of me." I'm so hot and bothered that I don't know my elbow from me knee. So lock the doors and call me yours. What kind of car would Shakespeare drive? I really need a sort of Petrarchan vocabulary.

Translating you usually discover the strengths and weaknesess of a poet. Rossetti is a bit campy, redundant, over the top in rhetoric, sentimental, and those are the strengths).

Back to that Meghan O'Rourke article on Ashbery. It does exactly what a critical article for the general public needs to do: give specific orientation to the reader, but without condescension. The suggestions are concrete and followable, removing some barriers to comprehension (Ashbery's pronoun shifts, for example.) Compare this Joan Houlihan's response to the Hejinian bap, a response which does not fulfill any useful critical function.

The analogy I like to use is classical music. People sometimes assume that it offers some kind of "immediate" gratification, that you don't have to be trained to listen to it. Yet almost everyone who does in fact listen to it with real enjoyment grew up around it in some fashion. Even someone with as little musical talent as I possess. I have studied a few instruments, played in bands, sung in at least three choirs, been to classical concerts, heard my mother and sister play the classical repertory on the piano all through my childhood. I have enough of a background to know what it's all about, without being anything close to an expert on any aspect of it. Much less than a real musician, but in comparison with someone who hasn't had exposure at all, a great deal. I know enough to say that James Merrill is not Mozartian in any way!

Poetry is the same way. People without any background in it need exposure and possibly a bit of guidance. And many people's exposure to it is exceedingly minimal, even more minimal than the average person's exposure to classical music. That's why I love "instruction manuals" if they are done in the right way.

Answers in to Gary's question, very interesting set of responses.

Ron, helping out a student with an assignment about language poetry objects to "purify the language of the tribe" as a cliché. What he could have pointed out was that Carl Dennis uses this phrase in a way antithetical to its origin in Mallarmé's "Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe":

Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'ange
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu,
Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.

[More or less: a vile crowd of people like a multi-headed hydra having heard the angel give a purer sense to the words of the tribe, proclaimed very loudly that the spell had been imbibed in the honorless vessel of some black mixture]

This is Mallarmé's protest against people like Carl Dennis, who think poetry should speak "clearly," and who were presumably objecting to Poe on similar grounds. Anyone who associates Mallarmé with some plain-spoken Wordsworthian idea of poetic language, as Dennis seems to be doing, is deeply confused about literary history. Mon dieu.

The Instruction Manual - How to read John Ashbery. By Meghan O'Rourke