I was eating some Fish and Chips the other day. The first french-fry I absent-mindedly put in my mouth was, by a large margin, the absolute worst item in this genre I have ever eaten. First of all, it was cold, as though it had just been in the refrigerator for an hour. Secondly, it was unbelievably sour, and when I bit into it it released some kind of cold, acidic juice into my mouth. Of course this particular french fry would have made an excellent wedge of lemon for my fish. In fact, it was an excellent lemon wedge. As a fry, however, it was very deficient. What this has to do with poetry I have no idea. I'm sure there's a lesson here somewhere.

To judge poets by their participation in communities of their peers is to judge a group of mostly very introverted people by a strange, alien criterion. Must poets be gregarious? Or is this compensatory, given that the actual activity of writing is so solitary, that it can in fact be done in complete isolation? I don't judge a novel by whether the novelist has lunch with other novelists. Of course I have suffered by having a mostly very attentuated sense of knowing other poets.

Of course there are extroverts too among our ranks.

The Duplications: Tom Beckett and Jonathan Mayhew, "Hurricane Season"

So much of reading poetry--and writing it--is ruminative and fragmented. An anxious, frustrating searching through books and magazines. The attention flags. There is not that unitary 6-hour experience of reading a novel, or the novelist's feeling of writing through a certain portion of the narrative.

I got a copy of Coltsfoot Insularity by Jess Mynes and Aaron Tieger. I'd order yours fast because there are only 150 copies printed.

It's an interesting collaboration because the style of the two poets seem to meld. I can't usually tell which poems are by which poet, except when I happen to know already from having seen the poems in my capacity as editor of The Duplications.

Other recent acquisitions:

Laura Sims, "Practice, Restraint."

Kenneth Koch's Collected.

I like a few of Sims' poem quite a bit. One in particular that I'll be getting to later. As so often is the case, I find a few poems that really catch my attention rather than thinking the entire book is consistently strong from start to finish.

My plan for the Kenneth is to read it from start to finish--something I never do with a Collected Poems.

I was thinking while driving in the car today about three or four dimensions of emotion in poetry. There's the basic feeling of the poem, its mood in simplest terms. Then, the strategy of concealment or self-dramatization by which that feeling is made manifest. Is emotion let out or "contained," for example. Is it understated or histrionic?

Also there is all the emotional freight that has to do with the actual writing and reading of the poem, that isn't part of the mood "behind" the poem. This is a kind of emotion intrinsic to the act of writing, and may or may not be consonant with the original mood of the poem. For example, exuberant self-confidence (about the act of writing) might go into the writing of an expression of elegiac despair. That is a kind of "intrinsic" emotion that I haven't seen discussed very much if at all.

There is also the emotion having to do with the expression of a very particular cultural moment, a time and place. Emotion that seems very particularized in this way. To know what it was like to be alive at a particular moment, quick as foxes on the hill, as Wallace Stevens might have said.

If there are about 9 basic emotions, about 9 varieties of each of them, about 5 or 6 basic strategies of "expression," and about 35 other emotions intrinsic to the act of writing, then the permutations seem quite overwhelming. What are the main variables to be considered. I have only just begun to think about this so please don't jump all over me right away. That would make me very "emotional."

Ron, in a comment on his own blog, mentioned how I had taken a picture of Jordan on the "SUNY-Lawrence" campus. I assume that's a deliberate joke--the State University of New York, Lawrence, Kansas campus!

Mayhew's Mood (II)

To be a ritual

it must be repeated

Each hamster was buried

in a shoe-box



They were all named George

Nice Schuyler homage here.

Some hands have a poetic conversation with a kite that they are flying. The poem has thirteen sections; the hands speak seven times, beginning and ending the sequence, and the kite's voice is heard in the remaining six sections. Each section consists of a few fragments written in very short lines of free verse.

Taken in its entirety, the sequence is an allegorical story of love and passion, control and freedom. The language is easy to read but difficult to understand, as one of my students put it. I translated it a few years ago but did nothing with it. Now I'm thinking of placing some of these fragments in magazines. I started with my own magazine, The Duplications, since I haven't been getting any submssions this month. It was to be the all female month there, but almost nobody submitted.

in class discussion today, a poem that sent mixed emotional signals. A description of an interior patio in an apartment building with noises of vacuum cleaners, saxophones played by children, Mingus's "Pork Pie Hat." The tone is whimsical and so some students took the mood to be basically contented. Yet there were also images of a black cat jumping into the void, babies crying, the setting sun committing suicide on the television antennas, as other students noted. There is an ominous melancholy tone but also a lightness of touch. Melancholy rather than desperation. Students tended to want to see it one way of the other, define its tone as either optimistic or pessimistic.

In another text read recently, a mayor of a town decides to start a municipal band. The town is devoted to the raising of chickens, and for some reason the chickens are averse to music; several chickens sicken and die. After a series of improbable events, all the townspeople have become musicians, but play out of town in order not to kill the chickens. The mayor lives in town alone and has become owner of the all the chickens. In the last paper I got a few readings of this story as a fairly straightforward denunciation of the abuse of political power. As if the story had been only: the mayor devises a scheme to steal all the chickens. Even many fairly good students want to read texts in a fairly literal-minded way. Of course, they may be right. That is, the capricious abuse of power is one thing brought into play here. Why music, though? Why chickens?

Why am I oriented toward feeling now whereas a few months ago I was more oriented toward thinking? Is that a pendulum swing or a permanent trend in that direction?

Academic Excercise

The articulation of affect in poetry is a rather complex subject. What are the basic questions? Not just what the underlying tonality or mood of the poem is, but the basic approach taken, the attitude toward the emotion, the strategies for articulation or evasion. If you took Plath, O'Hara, Ashbery, and Creeley, for example, you would find four separate and unequal strategies for expressing and/or evading the expression of affect. You might even find several strategies in a single poet.

Our emotions about poetry include the actual emotions of the poem as well as our feeling about poetry itself. The experience of being moved by a poem includes these secondary feelings of being moved by the very existence of poetry in such a moving form. For example, I might be moved that Bach existed and wrote this music I am now listening to, by the fact that I can emotionally respond to something written hundreds of years ago.

Explore some dimension of this topic in an essay of fewer than 300 words. You will be graded on your emotional articulateness and intelligence.

Surely nobody needs to be taught how to feel? The point is that students approach literature as any other academic subject, and are judged by their intellectual responses, their knowledge of the field, their interpretations, their mastery of critical language--everything except their emotional response. It's as though the reason for reading poetry in the first place were removed from serious discussion, made virtually unmentionable. Then we can complain that the students don't get it at a fundamental level, that they are not feeling literature as they should.