Ok. Now I've read Halliday's hard-hitting piece on Tate in Pleiades. Basically, the idea is that Tate's stuff doesn't stand up to the reverential treatment implicit in a critical anthology devoted to his poetry. Now usually in such anthologies you wouldn't expect to find much negative criticism at all, unless it's the type of work which aims to chronicle the critical reception of a certain poet . In a book of essays on Niedecket, for example, you wouldn't have any essays arguing that Niedecker is *just not that good a poet.* Thus the suggestion that they should have had an essay by a Tate-detractor seems odd on one level. However, we since we all know that Tate is a brilliantly light-weight poet, we need some acknowledgment that that is indeed the case,or alternatively, a more spirited defense against his detractors.

Halliday disputes the assertion that Tate's work has a lot of grief in it, but I think that is a perfectly reasonable claim; it's just that the grief is always expressed behind a particular Tatean schtick that has become all too familiar.

The problem is that he's simply written too many poems, is too prolific in proportion to the relative lack of depth and seriousness of his poetic project, too successful and prize-winning in proportion to the overall quality of his work. Halliday wants more demonstration of Tate's value to a skeptical reader, less taking-for-granted that Tate is deserving of exegesis.

I like some of Tate's work a lot, but wouldn't argue against Halliday's identifications of his weaknesses. In fact, I have said similiar things about him myself. Halliday himself likes Tate about the same as I do, I suspect.

My addictions and compulsive habits (the mentionable ones):

expresso

the acquisition of books of poetry, especially anything to do with the New York School. I own nearly every book published by Barbara Guest and James Schuyler. (Someone wrote in a comment on someone's blog: "Poets don't buy books of poetry." Could this be true? Not of any poet I know; luckily I do get a certain number of books gratis [feel free to keep those free books coming to me], but I still buy a tremendous amount.)

(time for another expresso)

blogging

publishing, seeing my name in print

poly-rhythms (want to hear my 4 against 5, Cuban bell pattern against straight 8ths?)

writing implements and notebooks

***

Overheard in my household yesterday:

"Silliman's blog is about Julia today." (Jonathan)

"What's 'the school of quietude'?" (Akiko)

"What does ''familiar premise' mean?" (Julia)

"So all of this a round-about way of saying that Julia's poetry is good because she's too young to be contaminated by this "quietude."? "Yes." (Akiko, Jonathan)

"I didn't know I was that good." (Julia)

Coming soon: What salad green are you? an amusing, time-wasting quiz that all the bloggers will take. "You are arugula. You like the shade and are not excessively fussy, although you have a peppery personality. People often confuse you with watercress. You perform best in late Spring and early Summer."

When I say, as I have been known to do, that a ten-year-old could write better poetry than many School of Quietude poets, I'm not being snide.

Of course, she wrote these poems before her tenth birthday.

I thought maybe if I could lower my expectations for art -- assume that rather than an objective standard of goodness existing "out there somewhere" I could reconcile myself to a subjective and fickle vehicle for our desires, built on shifting sands, and having more to do with our erotic needs and psychic wounds than some idea of magnificence -- then I could release some of this pain. That's good. I like this. It doesn't sound like a lowering of expectations for art, though. More of a shift to another mode of thinking. This external idea of "magnificence" doesn't sound that great anyway, why not give it up?

I like how in certain books of Spanish poetry the titles go after the poems, in parentheses. You read the poem first; then, if you want, glance down at the title, which serves more as a caption than as a (coercive) set of instructions preceding the text. A poem doesn't have to have a title either. Only if the poet feels the need to add a little something "outside" the boundaries of the text proper, some brief parenthetical explanation. It's like reading the poem first and then saying, "a good title for this poem might be...." rather than reading the title and saying "you are about to read a poem entitled ..."

Of course, if you have a really great title, this method would not work. You need to put the title in the prominent position it deserves: "No possum, No Sop, No Taters" or "That Time of Year When Butter Tastes Like Cold Water". If the title is merely perfunctory, serving to identify the poem, why do you even need it?

fewer & further: QUESTIONS FOR A HIPPOPOTAMUS

Quantities of time
situate quantities
of sound. I listen
on the other side of death.

Music arises
from a silent well;
it is the farmwork of air
in tympani of fire

and it has entered me. Now
music is my thought.

--A. Gamoneda

To return to work written much earlier and revise it suggests a peculiar relationship to time. I'm thinking of Antonio Gamoneda's book "Reescritura," a book consisting entirely of poems he has revised, spanning his entire career. He claims he finds no difference between "words that hesitate in doubt for an hour ... or for fifty years." The effect is to impose a certain uniformity of style on the earlier works, making them seem more like "Gamoneda" before he was Gamoneda--mostly by the elimination of extraneous discursive or ornamental material. (The loss, if there is one, is of historicity.)

If Gamoneda had not gone on to write great works, these earlier texts would have been forgotten anyway. That is, we are interested in them because they are by "Gamoneda." The book is in essence a selected poems arguing for a continuity in his work that might not be visible without these revisions.

Although I still try to publish poems I wrote many years ago I never revise them: it would be like going back and, impossibly, undoing mistakes in one's life.

***

I've been thinking about the unity of references in contemporary Spanish poets I admire. That is, they all seem to be reading from a common code-book. They use similar references and a common language to talk about poetry. The poets I don't admire so much have a different code book. I'm not sure how to translate this insight into an article. I guess what I'm trying to get at is why a certain Heideggerian vocabulary became so central to so many poets at the same time. Is it because of Valente? Is it just because European poets of a certain type all admire Celan and Jabès anyway?

I have new books by Concha García and Jorge Riechmann-- plus a recording of a reading by Antonio Gamoneda that I somehow missed last year when I was in Spain. I'm kind of depressed that I never made plans to go to Madrid this year. I'm not sure why I didn't. Perhaps financial anxiety about having to buy a car before too long.

I'm adding Stephen Vincent to the blog-roll. I keep thinking of people I don't have there yet.

Read about an interview
with a gorilla, tarantulas in
a tutu, a pencil that feels
sorry for itself, and a star
that makes people calm down.
Read Julia Mayhew's poems, they're cool.
So cool, I almost missed my subway stop!

When I was about 11, I auditioned for a major part in an opera--or operetta of some kind--about the Mormon socialist experiment in Orderville Utah. (A little known fact is that Mormon doctrine prescribes a sort of communal socialism as the ideal form of economic organization.) Anyway, the audition was quite grueling, and my throat hurt afterwards. Although I could match the pitches fine, my voice was starting to change and the range was slightly too high for comfort. I got the part, I think, since I was the only one available for it, but a few days later my older sister told me that production was cancelled because they were going to charge an exorbitant fee for the performance rights. I was both disappointed and somewhat relieved, I think. I haven't thought of this experience in years. It's not part of my normal narrative of my life, but a kind of anomaly. When I remember it, which is rarely, I wonder whether it really happened or whether anyone else remembers it. It does have sort of dream-like quality.

This doesn't feel like work. I'm checking my email, going to pick up my daughter's trumpet from the repair shop. All of a sudden I get some miraculously non-spam emails. The translations that were just sent back from APR are solicited by an online journal. I cut and paste a bit, send an email attachment and acceptance is mine in 24 hours. The mail comes with books from Spain. I email some questions to the poet who sent me them. I put in motion a hundred small projects, maybe one of which will lead to something down the road. I want to get the big stuff out of the way--the critical monograph that is the currency in academia--so I can reconstruct my c.v. out of the ephemera that is my daily life. A few poems or translations appearing here or there, a book review or two, an interview. If only I could be paid for some of this! Aside from the fragmentation and lack of tangible rewards, the other problem is in assessing how much any of this adds up to. A book that will receive 5 reviews in scholarly journals vs. a blog for which I get feedback of some kind every single day? The blog is my lifeline to other people. The publisher of my book of poetry is likely to be a reader of this blog.