I will collect my MFA tips into a book. There is no "instructional manual" on writing poetry that I would actually recommend. I see a real need here, a huge void. Kind of a Wishes, Lies, and Dreams for grown-up people. This could be my ticket to fame and fortune. I already see the clichéd blurb on the back: "funny and irreverent."

e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s
" Actually, at this moment I tend to enjoy page-turner fiction, or exciting visual poetry, more than work I experience as tediously derivative or duplications of early L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Certainly avant-garde purism has become less exciting to me than it was in the 60?s to the 80?s. So much L=A type poetry has been published since then, it has evolved its own conventions that to me are sometimes unconvincing and uninteresting. Right now, almost any kind of dogmatism seems to annoy me."

This statement from the Piombino/Beckett interview resonated with me a lot. One convention from LP I'm not fond of is the "capitalism swallowed my syntax" motif.

MFA Program, Continued

Don't read nothing but contemporary American poetry.

It is extremely limiting. It really is not really all that important to know the difference between Thomas Lux, Thomas Lynch, and Thomas McGrath. I certainly don't. Which one is the funeral director? See, I don't know either.

Study the truly great ones. I will gladly supply you with names. (Sorry for the imperious Poundian tone!) Learn French to read Reverdy.

Later: more on language and voice.

The Reading Experience: Mediocre Novelists

Hey, what's wrong with adding another cog to the academic tenure machine? I see nothing wrong with studying mediocre novels that nobody would really want to read except for research purposes. It is a little "funny" that Gates would say, "it seems less important to add another white woman."

"All those white women are the same, anyway? Same old complaints about patriarchy and the terrors of middle-class existence?"

Leiter Reports: "Academic Freedom" for Larry Summers?

Leiter, by the way, has the best political slash legal issues slash philosophy blog I know of.

I finished the last chapter of my book this morning, with help from Helen Vendler, Pierre Reverdy, Frank O'Hara, and Jordan Davis.

Vendler reassured me that a chapter can be short. If I say everything I want to say in 14 pages, that's fine. Vendler doesn't even have footnotes and bibliography and she's a Harvard professor. Many of her chapters are four or five pages. While I don't share her disdain for 30-years old poets, she writes well and says what she needs to say and no more.

Reverdy came to mind as a poet that I could use as the model of the "unpretentious modern poet." Reverdy is a great poet, but he doesn't bring to bear that baggage that we associate with high modernist poetry. Think of the Poundean baggage or the Rilkean baggage as two particular examples, very different from each other. So obviously I thought next of Frank O'Hara: "My heart is in my pocket. It is Poems by Pierre Reverdy." Then I thought of Jordan's attempt to write a "poetics" statement, placing himself somewhere on a continuum of values not of his own making. Wasn't that the critical problem I was dealing with in my chapter, trying to "place" a poet who, like O'Hara, is too hip for the squares and too square for the hips, in the quaint lingo of that period which still has some application today?

I will always prefer poets like Reverdy, O'Hara, D. Shapiro, Schuyler, Creeley, Davis, and Lola Velasco, subject of my chapter, to poets like Duncan and Olson. Even if it makes me an arch-reactionary, I like a certain kind of "purity," a poetry that doesn't depend on external clutter.

[Note: I am not personally acquainted with Vendler, Reverdy, or O'Hara, much as I appreciate their help]

"I'm getting off at the next stop, you murmur.
I am moved by the memory
of your sad and white flesh
and the humble companionship of your night,
the hand that you left
forgotten in my hand
as you came from the shower
just a moment ago,
while I refused to get up.

May you have a good day,
may good fortune find you
in your small, clean house,
may life treat you with dignity."

Luis García Montero, trans. JM

This is what I mean by sentimentality.

The advice to "avoid sentimentality" is probably useless. It is like saying "avoid writing bad poems." Sentimentality is dressing up one's feelings to make them sound more literary and dignified. Take what Luis is doing to his girlfriend here. He's basically dumping her, but needs to feel good about it so he dresses it up as a pious wish. Note the use of the word small, like Hall's "tiny." Sentimentalists love small things because they are more endearing, like baby animals. "May good fortune find you in your sprawling, messy mansion" would sound sarcastic. "Humble" works the same way. The attempt to make banal events fraught with meaning is another sign: "La mano que dejaste / olvidada en mi mano / al venir de la ducha...."

This poem demonstrates the dangers of "craft" and revision. Note the following problems:

1. "All day" -- a variation on the "for days" meme.

2. The emotionally "fraught" line break. "my hand / stroking the deep / gold of your thighs." The too obviously "crafted" use of line breaks to suggest movement and change.

3. The use of the adjective "tiny" as an emotional intensifier. Another period style cliché.

4. Sentimentality.

5. Sentimentality. No emotional tension.

6. A general dullness of vocabulary. The entire scene is viewed through a gauzy, dull lens. All the life has been revised out of the poem (assuming that there was something fresh in the first version!).

7. Absence of wit. Nothing jars us to see something in a different light.

8. Did I mention sentimentality?

[9. Plus, if you came here via limetree, those Wallace Stevens lumps in the gravy. Kasey, while accepting my arguments, still likes the poem, and, indeed, it is a pleasant, likeable poem in many respects.]

Because, or despite, of all this, it is a "good poem." That is, it would pass muster in the writing workshop. All the features I list belong to the conventional practice of writing that Hall and others of his ilk have codified. It is the McPoem that Hall himself denounces.

e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s: Interview with Nick Piombino

Definitely worth reading. Go Tom. Go Nick.

THE GREAT AMERICAN PINUP: ON PINSKY: THE GREATEST ANTHOLOGIST OF THE MODERN ERA and THE FORTHCOMING SLATE COLLECTED OR SELECTED EDITED BY ROBERT PINSKY

At first I thought this guy was joking. No. How about Jerry Rothenberg? Wouldn't he be a wee bit "greater" as an anthologist than Bob Pinsky? How about Ron Silliman? Maybe a "tiny bit" more interesting an anthologist than Bob Pinsky? Donald Allen, with his groundbreaking 1960 anthology? Even Paul Hoover's Norton Postmodern book is "slightly" more innovative than anything Pinsky's ever done.

One characteristic of Pinsky's anthologies is that they include only poems ALREADY IN ANTHOLOGIES. That means he's not really even an anthologist but a plagiarist of other anthologies, a popularist of the already popular. Great anthologists make us see poetry in another light; they are acts of the imagination, not vulgarizations. Doing another Quiller-Couch 100 years later does not qualify you. Hell, I could probably even predict what poems Pinsky would select about any given topic. Would that make me the second greatest anthologist? Who's number 3, Garrison Keillor, Harold Bloom, or Billy Collins?

Sorry, too much caffeine today. I felt some righteous indignation coming on. A good rant clears the pores. Nothing personal against David's otherwise praiseworthy blog.

[UPDATE: David was a good sport about my excessive sarcasm. Jordan posted a link to this post as well.]

Good post from Conversational Reading about style. If you don't have this blog on your rotation I'd suggest adding it. It's good, though mostly about that other part of literature, you know, the part that isn't poetry.

I'm going to have to read the Ben Yagoda book Scott Esposito recommends.

A CHAMELEON ATE MY PERIOD STYLE

She was in love with a young Nazi. They sang a duet by Richard Rodgers. True, he was still only the telegraph boy. That's the period style for ya! There were certain words you weren't allowed to say, and then you said them and nothing seemed to change.

g r a p e z: Modern Major Formalists: "But he is a reactionary in the true definition of the word, and his work looks more to the past than to the present. His voice is not just elusive; it?s vague at best, chameleon more than not. If there is a formal poet of the mid to late 20th century that deserves our true devotion, I am afraid it is not Wilbur, despite his skills at craft."

Needless to say, I agree with this. I also second Greg's endorsement of Kees.

In need of some church music? Check out my sister Debbie
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