Here's an idea. Every poet has three literary contexts.

(1) The immediate past. The writers imitated or admired in youth or during a formative stage.

For Lorca, that would be Rubén Darío and then Machado, for Pound, Browning or Whitman. For Creeley, Pound and Williams.

(2) The present literary moment during the writer's maturity. For Lorca that would be the avant-garde movements of the 1920s, Dalí and Buñuel. For Pound--Joyce and Stein.

(3) The "usable" parts of a more distant past. Not all parts of the literary tradition are actually usable in this way. For most of us most of the time the literary tradition is inert, not reactive.

For Pound it might be Calvacanti plus Noh drama, etc... For Lorca, the entire poetic tradition of Spain.

The first modernists were not fully modernists yet. They are 19th-century poets still. Their sucessors will be full-blown modernists in their literary formation, but by the time they reach their own maturity there will be a different situation in which modernism can no longer be the same thing, so their modernism will look like something else. Literary careers develop over long periods of time. The kid who grows up wanting to be Tennyson discovers that there is no Tennyson anymore.

So a poetic style is a layered, intertextual construction. There should be at least three temporal moments to think with respect to any poet. Think of a Pound translation of Calvalcanti, done in a style endebted to Rossetti. That makes my point more "visible." But I contend that similar things are going on even when it isn't as easy to pinpoint those three "moments" so neatly.

The fourth factor is the poet him or herself--experiences, readings, preferences. Along with the "usable past" this is the most variable ingredient, since not everyone shares the same foreign languages, the same periods, etc...

So it puzzles me when people write in more or less the same style as other people. Usually it happens when poets want to fit in a peer group, or imitate a prevailing model, and have little sense of the poetic tradition beyond the immediate past.

***

An anthologist should never put *self* into anthology. The only exception is when it is an anthology of a particular group done from the inside. So Breton would be allowed to put himself in the surrealist anthology, for example. His absence would ruin the anthology.

The mysterious
strategist,
she who lets the seasons
pass
and piles up
matches
because in her territory
it's always winter.

Cal it confirmatory bias, but I've found Frank O'Hara to be a lot more like Lorca than Robert Bly is. I don't mean that O'Hara imitates or is visibly influenced by Lorca (except in one or two poems.) It's a deeper similarity. They are the same kind of poeet. Both have a Protean sense of self; both are poets with a variety of styles and masks, involved with the best painting and music of their day. (Either could have been a concert pianist if the wind had shifted in a different direction.) Both were charismatic figures, the life of the party, with a more somber side, suspicious of the source of their own appeal. Both were intellectuals who didn't want to be seen as intellectuals. Both are condescended to by ignorant fools. Both play with "camp" elements. Both wrote texts derived from the cinema.

Bly on the other hand has nothing temperamentally or poetically in common with Lorca. Lorca is the master of many meters, forms, and genres. Bly of none. Lorca draws on the fullness of folk and popular traditions of his native language. Bly doesn't. O'Hara and Lorca are polyfaceted, complex, resonant figures. They are the greatest and most representative poets of their respective times and places.

I'm resurrecting this post from 3 years ago. I took the quiz again myself and looked at the answers. I failed miserably:

***


Reading some W.S. Merwin poems in APR, it struck me that the style was a lot like the great Rod McKuen. So here's my test: which fragments are from Merwin, which from McKuen?

a.

Who knows how many dreams
die out of season
reaching for some added darkness
or twisting upward where the sunlight
sits on haunches in the tops of trees.

b.

Not enough has been said
ever in your praise
hushed mornings
before the year turns new

c.

So you are leaving everything
the way it is
taking only your day with you

already you are out of reach...


d.


The air was bearable to me
only just because I had to breathe
but then you must have known that.

e.

You are what we believe
even if we know better
seeing is believing. . .

f.

not forgetting you
forgetting you
in the dark of the shoes
in the sounds of the stairs
in the opening door

***

More-- Merwin or McKuen?


(1)

It should have been poco
divertimento from the second
act, intermission from the dead
line, time lapse from whatever.

(2)

one fluted phrase
floating over its
wandering secret
all at once wells up
somewhere else

(3)

everything I remember
and before it before me
present at the speed of light
in the distance that I am
who keep reaching out to it

(4)

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not
and for now it seems as though
you are still summer

(5)

you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night
perfect in the dew

Night
takes off
her strangler's
stockings
and a force
alien
to my will
keeps me
from moving.
They are everywhere.
The gravediggers
of dreams.

Life
is a pyramid
that robs
its own shadow
and they still
don't know it.

I got my copy of Lola Velasco's El sueño de las piedras yesterday.

She who rests
above a landscape
of skeletons,
and wonders
how it is possible
that the universe (still) exists.



***

I checked out The Rova Improvisations from the public library. I don't own this book, for some reason.

"The music is a physical world / the sensing organ must reach into / synaesthesiac exchange of senses."

I have always wondered about those jazz piano "voicings." I have a relatively untrained harmonic ear (and mind) so I've never really understood what was going on. But a tiny bit of research over the web gave me a surprisingly simple answer.

The standard Bud Powell style voicing removes the 5th out of the chord, so basically it has a sparser sound, with the root, the third and the 7th. The 5th is not too sorely missed, because it doesn't really give the color to the chord.

The next generation, Bill Evans voicing puts the 3rd or 7th on the bottom and omits the root of the chord. (Let the bass player play it). So you'll have the 3rd, the 7th, the 5th, and maybe one more chord extension like a 6th or 9th or 11th. The tone quality is chromatic, colorful, and somewhat ambiguous and free floating because you don't actually hear the root of the chord. It's implied.

Most chords seem to use a 7th in some way, whether a major 7th or dominant 7th. That is, they are not simply triads. Once the triad is not the basis of harmony, you can drop out one of the notes of the triad, whether the root or the 5th, and get two suprisingly different sounding approaches. You can have a richly colorful sound, but at the same time one without too many notes.

Here are two other fallacies.

The idea that poetry should wear its technique on its sleeve. That poetry that advertises its craft (Lorine Niedecker or Ronald Johnson) is more technically perfect than poetry that hides its technique. It's not that these aren't very technically adpet. wonderful poets, I'm just saying that there may be others whose poetry technique is equal, but less "at the surface."

The idea that poetry should always hide its technique, that it should always sound natural, not "artificial."

We were taught the music of poetry was a poor thing.

We considered the fraudulence of our elders.

The idea of Lorca as a kind of anti-intellectual figure is deeply wrong. (Unfortunately, he has been hero to anti-intellectuals like Bly.) In the Spanish context, he seems less erudite than the "poet-professors" of his generation. The voice that speaks in his poems is often infantilized or faux-naif. His characters speak in concrete images, not abstractions. All this creates a false perception.

Lorca was an extremely self-disciplined and rigorous creator. He systematically mastered all the poetic styles of Spanish poetry, from the medieval lyric and "romance" through the contemporary avant-garde (passing through the baroque, the nineteenth-century, modernismo). He was the master of every conceivable meter and form. He didn't like automatic writing because he really wanted that strict discpline. The idea that he just strung together unrelated "surrealist" images is just untrue.

He seems to be an inspired figure, one for whom the muse or duende is more significant than discipline and self-conscious mastery. Nothing could be more false. He worked extremely hard, with quite a bit of the basic apprentice work coming before the age of 20. Look at the Obra inédita de juventud, his juvenilia. (His first book, Libro de poemas was published when he was 22, but the volume of juvenilia I am referring to predates even this.) That most of this juvenile poetry is just derivative detritus is part of my point. In Kenneth Koch's terms, he had a tremendous "poetry base."

It reminds me a bit of Coltrane, in the sense that Coltrane was an obsessive practicer from an early age. Another figure of pure, inspired genius, supposedly What such talent really is, then, is a talent for becoming so absorbed in the work that everything else disappears. (Coltrane reportedly was so into music that he didn't know who Willie Mays was.)

FGL and JC both created numerous major works before their premature deaths, works that are inconceivable as the products of naive geniuses.

***

Something I read in Reginald Shepherd's blog recently. Where someone in his class said, "You act as if you knew more than anyone else in the room." To which his natural reply was, I do know more than anyone in the room, than everyone in the room combined, at least about poetry. And if I didn't, you would have cause to complain.

I hope I can use that in the classroom some day. That is just the perfect comeback. The idea that poetry is just subjective crap about which everyone's opinion is equally valid pervades our culture. To the statement, "I have a right to my opinion" the proper response is no, you don't have a right to an opinion about something you know nothing about. This seems harsh, but really what good is it to tolerate ignorance about an art form?

There are two equal and opposite fallacies. One is that the colloquial direct style is and should be the ideal for all poetic writing. That you should never write anything that couldn't be said. The other fallacy is that poetic language needs to mark its distance, be its own separate language. I could teach a whole course just on those two ideas and their permutations. Both are false, I suppose, and they are mutually exclusive on the face of it. Yet both are just true enough to create confusion.

It is true that a direct, colloquial style with lots of concrete visual imagery and speech rhythms will usually be pretty good. (With the caveat in the post below that this is not an easy thing to do. Some people can't even speak colloquially.) By the same token, a big part of what's bad writing is the product of the "shimmering glimmering school." In other words, the idea that putting a lot of flashy words in is a good idea. The Derek Walcott fallacy.

On the other hand, this primacy of the colloquial direct style is oppressively puritanical without the counterbalance of the opposite idea, that poetry needs to encompass and engage language beyond the immediacy of what one might verisimilarly utter in real life. Poetry is the fullness of language, not a limited selection. Styles that seem colloquial often aren't as direct as they seem, and people often can't state accurately what the diction of a poem actually is. (That is, they might not realize how elevated it is. There are many degrees of elevation. For example, when Williams speaks of "love's obscure and insatiable appetite." That's a nuggest of "literary" writing but it seems colloquial in the context of a poem about some sparrows by the iron fence post, barely seen for the dry leaves that half cover them, stirring up the leaves...

We think of a colloquial, direct style as easy to achieve, but if that were true then anybody could write as well as Eileen Myles. But this is obviously not the case. Not even Eileen Myles can write like this--all the time and at will. The directness of WCW and some modernist prose writers too is an achievement. It isn't even that easy to imitate.

I was thinking about this because Lorca's biographer commits this fallacy of tracing his poetic style to the speech of his native community. The fallacy can be seen in the fact that there is only one Lorca, and that his mature style is an achievement. He had to work through a stage of late 19th-century symbolist decadence, in his juvenilia, then a stage of elegant Andalusian preciosity, in a second stage of juvenilia. Never leaving behind this preciosity completely is also a key factor, since it creates a kind of tension. At times the preciosity occurs as a kind of camp excess, baroque flourish, Andalusian picturesqueness, or morbose pathos. A really bare-bones purity reminiscent of the medieval lyric appears too, but it is a real achievement when it does.

So to say Lorca writes the way he does because that's just the way they talk in the province of Granada is unbelievable stupid. The idea that his language just emanates from the earth.