"The comic, in a poet like O'Hara or Wallace Stevens or Byron, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Lautréamont, Max Jacob, is a part of what is most serious for art to get to--ecstasy, freedom, completeness, dionysiac things. One can get a hint of this ecstasy, a whiff from these heights even in a small parody, in one funny line someone writes."

--Kenneth Koch, "An Interview with Jordan Davis."

That's an essential insight. Koch goes on to argue against the tedious idea of humor as "the absurd" in everyday life. I'ts not about "thinking the world sweet and finding it bitter." We can take ourselves back to the existentialist absurdism of Koch's postwar period of formation. Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Sartre. Sisyphus and Charlie Brown. Against this absurdist comic dourness place "I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut" or "I sailed the Indian Ocean for a dime." It's revolutionary. A poem in Ottava Rima featuring cartoon characters...

I don't think that the comic in Wallace Stevens is that close to Aristophanes, or Byron to Max Jacob for that matter. Yet I can see how they all converge in Koch.

Isn't Koch also funnier than the postmodern fiction writers like Barth and Barthelme? Only Sorrentino at his funniest comes close.

Classical Chinese poetry is extremely constrainty. For example, a word (character) is not repeated in the same poem. There are complex rules for repetition of tones and syntactic parallelism is obligatory in pairs of lines. Rhyme is just one of many constraints.

What I find interesting is the idea that the reader of Chinese poetry in translation is presumed to be uninterested in this aspect of the poetry. In other words, that is not a criterion (or a pleasure) that enters into play at all, in all the wonderful (and non-wonderful) translations from the Chinese into "English poetry." The idea of reproducing or reinventing a set of complex rules in English is seen as totally non-interesting. Instead we have themes, ideas, philosophy in an orientalist lyricism.

Another quality I value is languaginess. It's when you sense in a piece of writing that sense that the poet was aware of the language used. Not just the choice of words (diction), but at the level of syntax and morphology.

I like too a certain enmeshedment, or feeling that the poem is tied to a certain place and time (and language) and cannot be taken out of there. Untranslatability would be a good word for this.

Constraintiness is another one. The sense that the poem is following invisible and mysterious rules, or visible yet still enigmatic rules. Constraintiness is not the opposite of freedom. In fact, they often are found in the same vicinity.

Not all poems I appreciate will have all these qualities, or have them in the same degree. For example I might like many poems that aren't constrainty in the least. I might like an anonymous lyric poem that is not distinctively written by a particular poet, etc... These are not criteria for poetry, but names for particular kinds of aesthetic pleasures. I would argue, though, that there has to be some kind of pleasure, whatever the set of names given it.

Final Exam on Surrealism in American Poetry

Is "surrealism" a style? A method? A movement? A tone?

"We sailed the Indian Ocean for a dime."

Is that surrealism? Why do people call things surrealist that ain't?

"Who are the great poets of our time, and what are their names?"

When did having a book cover with a Magritte painting become the cliché that it now is? A Joseph Cornell box?

Is Russell Edson a surrealist? Why or why not? Why is Max Jacob a more influential model than André Breton?

What was surrealism? What wasn't it? When did it stop being what is was or wasn't?

Is Merwin a surrealist? Spicer? Wright? Ashbery? Lorca? Why is "surrealism" so boring? Why didn't Roland Barthes like it?

(Ron Padgett is not a surrealist.)

Is this a surrealist poem? Explain.

Maybe you never thought about in this particular way, but the surrealism of the New York school isn't really surrealist. It doesn't put faith in the unconscious, irrational mind. New York school poetry is all about being attentive, hyperconscious of reality. It's zany and kind of fun, not quite as vatic and self-important. It doesn't exalt dreaming at the expense of everyday reality.

When O'Hara gets vatic and oracular, you can tell he's not taking himself too seriously. As in "Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets." He knows he's not Shelley, but he allows himself to go "purple" anyway.

Of course, this doesn't prevent Auden from distrusting this aspect of Ashbery (see preface for Some Trees). Or Elizabeth Bishop complaining in a letter that O'Hara is too surrealist.

Then too you notice the preference for modern French poets who come just before surrealism. Reverdy, Apollinaire. Or those who come after, like Michel Deguy. When Kenneth Koch describes Deguy in a brief essay, he could be describing his own poetry. How it includes a lot, doesn't want to be tied down to a narrow surrealist dependence on the unconscious mind as source of sacred truth.

***

There's a new Góngora translation out from the University of Chicago Press. Apparently I think it's good, because I have a blurb on the dust-jacket, which I wrote a few months ago and promptly forgot about until someone reminded me of it today. It's an excellent blurb that will convince you to buy this book.

It should be clear to almost anyone now that Kenneth Koch is a "major" (yikes!) poet, not just a name to be mentioned along side of other New York School poets in the obligatory list. The range and depth of his work is breathtakingly ambitious and successful, in so many genres and modes. Brilliant and influential.

You know those critical books published in the 80s and 90s dealing with the REPRESENTATIVE VOICES OF OUR AGE. There was usually a chapter on Ashbery (or O'Hara if the critic was a little hipper), a chapter on Adrienne Rich, one on Merrill or Merwin. Koch was not taken seriously. When I wrote a grad paper on him for Sorrentino more than twenty years ago I had the feeling of doing something new and slightly outrageous: critical prose on Kenneth Koch. Such a thing still barely exists. There is Harry Mathews on The Duplications, for example, but you couldn't imagine one of those Bloomian blurbs on a Koch book. You can imagine a Dissertation Director telling a student to take Koch out and put Ashbery or Ammons there in his stead.

It's not a lack of gravitas in the true sense. It's a lack of what people recognize as gravitas in, say, Heaney, Walcott, Merwin, Merrill, Rich, Graham, Ammons, and even Gluck or Strand. I don't want to tie that albatross around his neck. The albatross of "faux-gravitas." It doesn't fit, precisely because of his levitas. Some prefer the unexuberant, the humorless, the solemnly self-important poet. Merwin, say.

Here are some "angles of approach" that I like to use to describe various kinds of pleasure I get from poetry.

Accent, distinctiveness

Could the poem have been written by anyone, someone else? Does it have a distinctive accent or is it more "generic"? Is its distinctiveness such that it is a self-parody? Are there obvious "mannerisms"?

"The tune of a cold trunk is thin
mute cate behind glass
that I write at all is bannered
in the close grains of sight outlasted" (CC)


Poeminess

Does the poem have a definable shape to it? Is it the right length for what it is? Does it go on too long? Is it a poem or is it "passages" of poetry? How is it at beginning, at carrying on, at ending?

(I have a hard time writing poems with this quality. I don't know how to end a poem, or make it go on for very long, though I am very good at begining.)


nioi, scent

Is it suggestive? (It shouldn't tell or show, but suggest something beyond what the words say.) Does something "catch" on the mind. Or does it use explicit "statement" in an interesting way?


cantabile

Is it cantabile? Does it sing? Does it sing too much?


freedom

Does it break its own rules? Does it make all the rules irrelevant? Is it "disobedient"? (Bernadette Mayer is a good one for this quality.)

I was fooling around yesterday with some criteria for poetry yesterday. I came up with a few, like nioi, poeminess, etc... But then I thought that imaginative freedom trumped and superseded everything else. It is the criterion that makes all other criteria meaningless in the end. It's when the poem doesn't behave like it should, like a well-written poem, but instead takes you somewhere else. How soul-deadening is the idea that every good poem should be coherent or clear or have concrete visual images--or whatever.

So I'll spare you my list of criteria. Ideally, there should be a new list every day, superseding and making irrelevant yesterday's list. It's easy to lose sight of what poetry is for in the first place. When you realize that, then you know that any criterion that arrogates to itself the entire field, trying to be more significant that imaginative freedom, is the enemy.

(a)

Catalpa with a skirt
of fluted ivory bloom

oblivious to dandelion
globe to reach stars

robin intent succulent
& loam-pulsing worm

***

(b)

YOUNG ENOUGH STILL TO BE YET TRUE

But kilter askance snow is just
when mounded time
left over from when it was visible
going

Still around and nothing doing
you can't put it back into motion lacking
poem that in its stillest drops
never stops

(c)

TURRET

What is your version, raking hay, reading law
In turret, transferring documenta?

What is origin of miscellany, misdemeanour,

from whence doggerel?



Whose profile is margin

where small animals lie, toad, minnow, book of Saints,
olives.


In the first poem, there the guiding idea that precise, objective observation of nature and careful choice of words are paramount. The poetic "subject" is in the background. Yet this is ultimately a paysage moralisé. The catalpa tree is personified as an aspiring organism indifferent to the humble dandelion weeds. The ideas are in the things, but they are very prominent as ideas.

The poem seems to ask for a certain kind of "close reading." For example, the words "skirt, fluted, ivory" suggest a woman, a musical instrument, and an elephant. There is a metonymic spill-over that you might want your students to notice. Language is compressed but still very clear.

In the second poem, the snow, in its dual states (falling/fallen) is the analogue of the creative process. The words "kilter" and "askance" point to other usages of those words, not other objects in the world. "Kilter is usually only found in the phrases "out of kilter" and "off kilter," but there is no such thing as a "kilter." Similarly with "askance," which is only used in the phrase "look askance" at something/someone. The effect of "kilter askance snow" is to suggest an altered state of perception of the object in question, bringing into play notions of equilibrium and slant/bias. Notice how (a) uses a short-hand, minimal syntax but is still perfectly understandable, whereas (b) requires a little more effort.

There is also a different idea of how the poem should look as a finished product. (a) is meant to be engraved in stone. (b) reads like an entry in a notebook. Smoothing out the rough edges would destroy it.

Finally, we have a poet for whom the external world does not weigh as heavily. The physical objects are props in the poet's mental theater. The result is a kind of ethereal, "floating" style, more similar to (b) in its subjectivism, but echoing the deliberate elegance of (a). There is pleasant preciosity here, as in (a). The implied narrative in (c) is a little harder to grasp, even though the syntactic flow is less jagged.

In each case, the choice to write this way and not that way is palpable in every word, every punctuation mark. You would not confuse poet (a) with poet (b) or (c). It's not just the style that's individuated, but the entire approach to language, self, and world. It's not that their language expresses a world view, but that the poem instantiates an attitude toward this complex triangle, a theory of what poetry is supposed to do.

You might prefer (a), (b), or (c) or none of the above. These aren't the only three ways of writing, but three among many, many aesthetic options available at any given time.

NOTE: Authors are revealed in the first comment if they are not obvious to you.

I know this is not very recent, but I didn't have a blog in 1995:

When the Academy of American Poets announced it was giving Merwin the Tanning Prize, some said Merwin's best work was behind him, that since his 1967 book, "The Lice," a gloomy volume about the destruction of nature, his work had become obscure and abstract. (The critic Helen Vendler once called Merwin "a lesser Eliot," and his poems "elusive pallors.") In addition, Merwin is a chancellor of the academy; the judges -- the late James Merrill, J. D. McClatchy and Carolyn Kizer -- were all friends of Merwin's.

Initially, Kizer wanted the prize to go to Gwendolyn Brooks, an African-American. "My qualm was it would look like the white male establishment handing around prizes to each other." But James Merrill was chairman of the jury. "We wanted to find a real master," he said last fall. "Gwendolyn Brooks would be very distinguished. But somehow I don't think she's a master." Kizer, herself a potential candidate for chancellor, was outnumbered and eventually voted with the rest. "I revere him," says Kizer. "Thank God it was Merwin, who has such enormous stature.".

Yeah, thank God it was Merwin, and not some OTHER white-male poet of lesser "stature." "Somehow" it's hard to see Brooks as a "MASTER." I wonder why that is? Not tall enough, maybe? It's a good thing that these Chancellors of the Academy have such a strong sense of ethics. Otherwise we would have them giving $10,000 prizes out to their friends. We couldn't have that.

Unless it is a canonical novel from before the 20th century, (or a super-canonical novel like Proust's), there will be only one translation into English of a given novel. Maybe two. Contrast that with the number of translations of Lorca's Romancero gitano or Poeta en Nueva York. My point is that with poetry the existence of multiple competing translations is a given, for almost any poet who is part of the poetry-in-translation canon. Baudelaire, Li Po, Basho, Neruda, etc...

Translation is seen as integral part of any poet's basic training. Who has not translated? The same couldn't really be said for novelists, ttbomk. Novelists don't have time to translate other people's novels.

The translation of prose is considered more or less transparent. That is, the book review might mention the translator and quality of version, but might not mention it. It is not the focus of the review. On the other hand, when someone brings out a new Duino Elegies, the point has to be how satsifactory (or not) the translation is.

Faux-naif formalism

"No one explains me because
There is nothing to explain.
It's all right here
Very clear.
O for my reputation's sake
To be difficult, and opaque!"


"We went to church, obeyed the laws
And voted on election day.
The peaceful farms surrounded us
The battles far away."

I'm not saying that Sam Hamill's press publishes a lot of bad poetry, but...

(Well, that's the conclusion you could draw, actually.)

I'll stop once the School of Quietude admits that it EXISTS. All those disengenuous denials are getting on my nerves... This is the evidence, and I could go on and on. I haven't even started in on Mary Oliver yet.

Rod McKuen-esque

(also from Copper Canyon Press)

"How do we come to be here next to each other
in the night
Where are the stars that show us to our love..."

"When you have nothing to say,
the sadness of things
speaks for you."

"Only now
I see that you
are the end of spring
cloud passing..."

"God comes to us,
or should come to us, all"

"The fog is the body it can't quite be
these evenings of early August,
coming together"

"What the beloved wants
Is to burn more brightly,
To have more life."

"It is like the moment
after I say goodbye.
We become ourselves
for a slow moment
I want to lengthen
between us."

"Being without
You was almost more than I
Could bear."

"These things I had once. This brightness, softness, sweetness
She gave me once to my keeping.
Piece of this true sun."

I have to think Rod is the most influential poet in America, based on this evidence. Sure, I cooked the books, put my thumb on the scale, but it only took me a few minutes to do it.

They take comfort in cardboard,
in people pissing in their neighbor's yard.
Was it this I was mentioning to you
as we walked through their habitat?

In people pissing in their neighbor's yard
menace is kept a footfall away.
As we walked through their habitat
we took care to disturb.

Menace is kept a footfall away.
Long hair or short hair makes no difference.
We took care to disturb
the residue.

Long hair or short hair makes no difference.
I taught someone the mispronunciation of a word, once.
The residue,
There is nothing to do about the residue.

I taught someone the mispronunciation of a word, once.
She repeated it until it became correct.
There is nothing to do about the residue.
But you already knew that.

She repeated it until it became correct:
"They take comfort in cardboard."
But you already knew that.
Was it this I was mentioning to you?