Dear Head Nation?

Aubergines

The aubergine craze passed me by
in a blur of purple and orange.

How can depression coincide with extreme efforts to break myself out of it? With immense, wonderful projects that might not ever get completed? I'm working on a poem now that I don't want to jinx by talking about it too much.

I could do close readings of individual poems on my blog too. If I've avoided that, it might have something to do with the notion that this is considered by many to be a fairly routine skill. For example, when reviewing a book, I'll often say that the close readings are ok, but that the book is deficient in other ways--even when I believe that the close readings are not particularly good at all. It's almost as though I were considering this to be a lower level skill, something anyone should be able to do just to merit inclusion in the conversation. Actually, I believe it is a capability that needs to be more highly valued. But in that case, I would no longer make routinized concessions that, yes, a critic has the competence to point out certain obvious things about the text. Deep analysis rather than close analysis.

Ceravolo appreciation ongeneva convention.

In honor of Gunn, I'm reposting something I wrote a little while back:

Poet A writes like this:

"Half of my youth I watched the soldiers
And saw mechanic clerk and cook
Subsumed beneath a uniform.
Grey black and Khaki was their look
Whose tool and instrument were death."

Or like this,

"Impatient all the foggy day for night
You plunged into the bar eager to loot.
A self-defeating eagerness: you're light...."

"The fog drifts slowly down the hill
And as I mount gets thicker still..."

Poet B writes like this:

"Lank potato, darkening
cabbage, tattered raspberry
canes, but the flower beds
so crammed there is
no room for weeds."

Or like this:

"But there's something going on
in those twisted brown limbs,
it starts as a need
and it takes over, a need
to push..."

"You recognize it like
the smell of the sour chemical
that gets into the sweat
of some people from
birth onward."

B seems to have a sharper eye (and ear), and writes with more immediacy and power than A. Why the redundancy of "tool and instrument," for example? Why the Audenesque rhetoric? Is it because A is writing in meter and rhyme? No, there is no intrinsic reason why meter should make a poet less energetic or alert. There is no reason why writing in free verse should free a poet up in this way either. That's just where the chips fall in this case.

Poet A is British poet long a resident of the SF Bay area. So is poet B. In fact, both poet A and poet B are Thom Gunn. He is a very-good-to-excellent poet not matter what form he is writing in. His metrical poems are not bad, but his poetry gains something significant when he abandons meter and rhyme. Why? My hypothesis is that meter pushes some poets into a rhetorical mode that prevents them from saying what they really want and need to say. It doesn't have to be this way, that's just how it happens in many cases.

Recent deaths. Thom Gunn, with whom I studied very briefly when I was very young. Claude "Fiddler" Williams, Kansas City Jazz legend.

Is it possible to read too much poetry? I would have to say yes, based on the 50 books I've read in the last few months. But the effect is like drinking too much water. Momentary saturation, but no long term health effects. I'm going back to read poems and plays, essays and novels.

I've looked over my poetry manuscript Minor Poets of the New York School and I like it very much! Not that my own opinion counts for anything, but it wouldn't be a good sign if I hated it.

Autobiography by Tony Towle. Sun, 1977.

This is the last complete book I'm going to read for a while. I'm getting disgusted with my own obsessiveness.

I'm in a pretty bad state of mind. I don't know what it is about this time of year...

Chimera Song Mosaic"If anyone is doing a panel on the Impossible Situation of Living Far from the Place You Should be Living and Having a Job that is Far from the Job that You Should be Having (in Order to be a Poet—or, let’s say, a Writer) and You Know about It, and Despite Knowing this You Continue to Exist in this State of Frustration, to Put it Mildly, and Do Not Do Anything to Help Your Situation, Despite the Nagging Feeling that You Might Be Purposely Setting Yourself Up for Failure, so that After Failing, You Can Always Say that It Wasn’t Your Fault, that You Tried, that If Only You Had Lived in a Poetic Hotspot, This Wouldn’t Be Happening . . .
Heriberto Yepez, join my panel; Chris Murry, join my panel; Nicole Cordrey, join my panel; Jonathan Mayhew, join my panel; David Hess, join my panel; Kathy Acker, join my panel; who else should join my panel? I know I must be missing someone (and it’s not deliberate at all, only a function of time lack and disorganization, just as the editors claim). Join my panel because I need someone to chair it; it probably shouldn’t be me. Join my panel so that it does not erupt into a narcissistic pity session, the kind that everyone avoids like poison so as not to be infected by that thing that breaks all poets: defeat. "

I don't know what to say...

Clamor by Ann Lauterbach. 1991.

I haven't been able to decide what I think about this book. Was I (am I) missing something?

Poetry Daily Prose Feature: August Kleinzahler on Garrison Keillor: "No Antonin Artaud with the Flapjacks, Please"

Kleinzahler's bizarre fantasy of forcing Garrison Keillor listen to Albert Ayler reveals more about the reviewer than the one reviewed:

Albert Ayler could only be a tonic for Keillor — a tonic we will force-feed him as they force-feed a goose in Perigord for foie gras — because Ayler's art is opposite to Keillor's shtick.

It's a cultural fantasy--force-feeding the middle-brow NPR with avant-garde art--that ends up reinforcing the worst stereotype of the embittered, would-be experimental poet.