The Value of The Drunk/Scoundrel in Terms of Purity/ Purgation

BY JOE WEIL

   I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the cultural stereotype of the drunk, yet charming and unforgettable Irish man. Frank Mc Court made a fortune writing about his alcoholic father, this man comprised of blarney, bone crushing loss, a stubborn pride, sentimental religiosity/ patriotism, and epic ineffectuality, a sort of travesty of Christ: full prude, and full rake. The classical Irish drunk never loses his sense of righteousness even as he is stumbling through whore houses, breaking his wife’s jaw, and his children’s hearts, and basically telling enough sad and funny tales to keep the pints flowing. (In AA they define the alchoholic as an ego maniac with an inferiority complex) If he’d been there when Christ addressed the crowd on behalf of the woman taken in adultery, he’d have offered to marry her on the spot (broad gestures of senseless acts of gallantry are this man’s meat and potatoes) or  thrown his rock and, for the price of a whiskey,  been willing to go into great scatological and theological detail as to why he felt worthy to stone the woman. He is a great figure in the hands of good writers and, if you are neither his wife nor his offspring, you can love him as a sort of disruption of the cosmic order (which in the terms of spiritual comedy, is exactly his function: he shows us what the rules are, and tests their merits and flimsiness, by breaking them). At the same time, he is a figure of purgation—what must be destroyed, expelled, or sacrificed to relieve and reenact the pressures involved in a social order’s sense of the beautiful and the good. He is scandal and abomination, and scandal and abomination are always spiritual. He is also “pure” in so far as the secret dictum of any society (and he would not be attractive as a figure if this were not so) is: “A little dose of vice, makes goodness nice.” We drink or drug or smoke or fuck, but never let it interfere with our overall sense of decorum and function. He does. He is too pure for a simple dose of naughtiness. Therefore he purifies our vices by taking them beyond the category of compromise and contingency. He tests and exceeds the limits and exposes us to our own failure to be hot or cold. “I would that thou wert hot or cold, but being luke warm, I shall spit you forth from my mouth” (John, somewhere in the beginning address to the seven churches in the book of revelations).

    Compromise and contingency are always signs that ultimate action has entered the realm of the social order, and the spiritual has been tethered to the moral/religious construct of acceptable normative behavior. In this sense, the only figure more scandalous than the epic wastrel is the saint. Saints also both test the moral order to its limits, and, by testing it, act as its highest affirmation and corrective. They “scandalize” with their virtue, provoke us by proving we are far from the kingdom of God. Saints must be killed, destroyed, offered up as sacrifices, or placed on a higher plane (which is a nice way of expelling them). They must either be expelled from the group dynamic or injected into it as a sort of inoculation against potential breakdowns in the “ideal” of that dynamic.    The proof that a prophet is genuine lies in our either turning a deaf ear or destroying him. We love prophets only in retrospect.

   Rock stars who kill themselves (Kurt Cobain) or destroy themselves (Elvis, Jimmy Morrison) are a pop culture equivalent of this mechanism of purity/purgation in terms of the mass culture, but what do we do with a figure like Keith Richard who has survived every excess and is thriving into his mid-sixties? Such a figure satisfies our attraction to purity (pure evil) while escaping the more purgative aspects of the cult of sacrifice. It is often rumored that such a figure has “sold” his soul to the devil (so that purgation is delayed rather than suspended) or, in secular terms, that he has “sold out.” I have heard both things said of Richard. He is one of the aspects of the satanic—indestructible in his excesses. There is another aspect to the satanic—the “goody two shoes” or moral prude who, though he obeys the law to the letter, seems ultimately evil—a party pooper, a Pharisee, a moral show off. Satan, in this aspect, never indulges in any of the petty aspects of vice. He does not drink, smoke, fuck, steal, or murder. His evil is “pure” in so far as it exists in the realm of pure action (intent): All his “virtue” is a suplanting against God, an act of pride, a non-servum. Whereas God requires the conversion of sinners, the prude (satan the accuser) requires that there be those he can rightly condemn and censure.

The prude needs the sinner—not to convert but to damn. One of the roles, one of the chief spiritual functions of the scoundrel and drunk in literature, film, and pop culture is to act as an arch enemy to the prude, to be our “hit man” as it were against this parody of God/saint.This mechanism of binary intimacy/antipathy (and antipathy is a form of intimacy) is so pervasive to the human group dynamic that it is played out in “real life” in the classic pathology of the drunk and his long suffering, saintly wife. A drunk in terms of literary mechanism never attacks a true saint. This would destroy his aesthetic and moral/spiritual value. If he does attack a true saint, I promise he will be redeemed, converted or neutralized by the end of the novel/play/poem/film. In stories where the drunk or scoundrel “corrupts” the saint and gets away with it, there is always a question of whether or not the saint was ever truly a saint. Part of the game is for people to wonder how a good woman like that ever got involved with such a bastard. Taking in the precepts of binary intimacy (strange attractors) it makes all the sense in the world that one extreme will seek its foil, either to define itself in high relief (to be seen more clearly by contrast), to convert the other to its ways, or to integrate into its own system those aspects of the shadow self it has disowned. This latter possibility is the symbiosis, or, rather, chemical catalysis of conversion: In literary terms, Don Quixote takes on certain aspects of Sancho Panza, and vice versa., a process for which the Spanish have coined a beautiful terminology: The Quixotification of Sancho Panza, and the Panchification of Quixote.   There is a third mechanism at work here that parodies the trinity and is the source of all comic teams: the prude (straight man), the drunk  (gag man)and the holy spirit which is the antipathy/intimacy between them. This triune works as: taken together, in relationship, they form one whole indivisible structure and dynamic which, while outside the norm, helps always to define the equilibrium of the norm. Of course, there are countless variants on these tropes: one is the Irish wastrel who breaks many hearts but forms no permanent relationships (Think the classic Irish ballad, Carrick Fergus) He functions as a sort of dream and ideal of anarchy who, by existing outside the culture, provides a sort of Aristotlean catharsis—a release, a pressure valve, a freedom from the pressures of absolute conformity. In Carrick Fergus, his life ends in ruin, and he begs to be layed down by the young men (streets of Laredo shares this aspect). In renaissance idealism, Henry the fifth, by incorporating some of the vices of Falstaff into his divine right of kingship, manages to achieve a balance of the humors—to be “good” tempered and made strong by learning the uses and energies of vice. We could amend our previous dictum to a less exact rhyme by stating: “A dose of vice, makes goodness wise.”

    IN the movie on Johnny Cash, we get the American country version, complete with a final redemption (in real life Johnny was prone to relapses) and happy send off. The American country tradition, exemplified by the honky tonk songs of great country singers like George Jones is a scotch Irish import. It’s the same man: he can drink, he can fight, he can fuck (or he always believes he can) and he seems to be pinned under the stars by a God with whom he talks directly, and with whom he struggles toward redemption. The woman often comes like grace into the picture, and in several basic flavors:

1. The prude who he brings down from her high horse while she raises him up from his lowliness, and, by the end, they have “cured” each other since the drunk has a bit of the prude in him (or the wannuh be prude) and the prude is secretly longing to be brought down a few pegs (Taming of the Shrew, Most romantic comedies, any literary construct in which something stoops and something rises so that the “mountains are brought low, and the plains raised to make straight the way of the lord”).
2.  The long suffering wife or mother who endures the drunk. Loves him unconditionally, and by prayer and unconditional love, brings about his conversion (Monica in Saint Augustine’s confessions). Here the prude is no prude, but rather a true saint, and, very often, his or her death or near death is called for in order to bring about the redemption of the sinner.
3. The hard-edged woman who knows the secret mechanism behind the drunk, who has “got his number” and who is both so beautiful and so unwilling to take his shit, that he realizes she is what he wanted all along, and changes in order to win her.
4. The woman who escapes the drunk with a new found knowledge of her own self worth and her responsibility in enabling him. In this version, the drunk either converts by being confronted and hitting bottom, or dies. He has acted as a catalyst for self realization. This is the most pervasive trope in self-help books on tough love, or “breaking the pathologies of co-dependency and addiction.” The prudishness here is both mitigated and heightened, and, if the drunk is surpassingly vital and lively, most readers or the audience will find themselves partly sympathizing with the drunk/scoundrel. This is one of the aesthetic problems of Henry The 4^th Part two. Falstaff’s liveliness seems to trump Henry’s reformation so that Henry seems cruel, a user and betrayer. Even when we know the betral is necessary, it leaves a slightly bad taste in our mouths.
5. Role reversal where the drunk reforms and the prude is either destroyed by this state of affairs or exposed as having secretly encouraged the corruption all along.
6. It is a truism in AA and NA that the enabler or co-dependent only leaves the drunk or quits playing the saint when he gets “sober.” He, in this sense has betrayed the enabler by ceasing to play the role of the evil one.

    In the second part of this essay I intend to study these mechanisms of purity/purgation, and the role of the drunk/scoundrel in terms of the social order through various literary works such as Henry The Fourth, The Basket Ball Diaries, and Irish/American songs and stories. I will then concentrate my efforts on the role of the epic drunk nere-do-well in terms of a conquered people and of a “manhood” usurped by oppressive and dominant social constructs. The Irish rogue, drunk, wastrel serves a political/literary as well as spiritual function. We will narrow 

On Simplicity and The Simplistic: A Poem by Robert Francis, and a poem by Lucille Clifton

BY JOE WEIL

When I was a young man I wanted verbal fireworks—poets like Wallace Stevens, or the French and Spanish surrealists who baffled and awed and intimidated me with their prowess. I think it is the closest a young male poet, pumped up on testosterone, and born too late and too early for any wars, could come to engaging in combat. The more complicated, or flashy, or surreal, or daring the imagery, the more I recognized it as poetry. Shakespeare didn’t disappoint. The bible thundered forth. I had been hearing or reading the bible all my life and I was stunned when people not so versed failed to recognize my biblical allusions (and being young and arrogant, secretly delighted)

    I still believe a working knowledge of  Genesis, Job, psalms, Isaiah, the Gospels, and Romans ought to be essential to MFA students, along with some dictionary, some history of biblical allusions in the works of English and American poets. We could start with Ai and work our way past Shakespeare. A computer program could be invented to scan all the works and seek out even the smallest references. Meanwhile, the odd ball assortment of fanatic scholars that helped Samuel Johnson compile his dictionary could be raised from the dead and put to work (They’ve had a long enough rest. Wake them up!). Unfortunately, poets being the vain creatures they are, hundreds of new poems would be written jammed full of biblical allusions in order to get into “The Book of Life” (I’d call it that as a tribute to John). Would that be so bad? Probably.

    At any rate (the rate at which frogs and flowers fall), I was appalled when I first ventured seriously into the New Jersey poetry scene and heard the readings of poets who were winning grants. These poems were delivered without much flourish (rightfully so), and were nothing you couldn’t see out a picture window in Princeton. In point of fact, I wrote in a journal entry for October 18^th, 1984: “In order to win a grant from the New Jersey state council On the arts, you must be A. Understated (flat) B. Sincere, yet laconic. C. Within forty miles of a picture window in Princeton, New Jersey.”

     I was out of the loop. I didn’t know Mary Oliver, or Gary Snyder, or Stephen Dunn (I did know Dunn’s early work, but not his later, more stripped down style). I didn’t know the contemplative pastoral/sexual posturing of Galway or the “sexual daring” of Sharon Olds, and, because I didn’t know these poets, I was a victim of their many competent but uninspiring imitators. There was also a little group called the US 1 poets who had gentle, but dictatorial powers at the time. I knew nothing but the Bible, and Whitman, and Stevens, and Blake, and Ginsberg, and the French/Spanish surrealists (but not via the deep imagists). I was an urban poet (working class by profession, and high modernist by inclination) and these were all suburbanites who lived a life style in which yoga, contemplative thought, and a picture window within forty miles of Princeton was not only possible, but common.

    When they would hear me read, and I was a good reader and went over well with an audience, they would give a little wince of a smile and say: “You tell wonderful stories” (translation: you are an entertainer, not a poet). The open reading at Maria Maziotti Gillan’s series became my only vindication. In 1987, Ruth Stone heard me read in the open, hugged me, held me at arms length, and pronounced me a genuine poet. Maxine Kumin heard me read my poem “the Glue Man” and came over to where I was sitting and said: “That’s a poem.” Charles Simic heard me read in an open and said: “Good work.”  Ruth Stone, Maxine Kumin, and Charles Simic didn’t have to compete with me. They were doing well without the likes of Joseph David Weil. They could be generous. Laura Boss, Sander Zulauf, and, most especially, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, supported me. Most of all, I was aided and abetted by a fellow working stiff poet, Dave Roskos—the first and best publisher I ever had.

    All this is preamble to two poems, one by Robert Francis, and the other by a poet I like as a person, but am not always enamored of as a poet: Lucille Clifton. Clifton knows me by name and has also been generous to me when she’s heard me read. She told an ex girlfriend I was a “good poet.” She didn’t have to. I am name dropping only to show how the reading scene is a little like the jazz world. You get on a bill with the head liners, and if you show some chops, they encourage you. It helps. It gives you a few moments of vindication before your junker Toyota turns back into a pumpkin.

    At any rate (the rate at which eye lashes, and the complete works of Victor Hugo fall), I have not always been enamored of Lucile Clifton’s work because I think her simplicity can be doctrinaire, and I don’t think simplicity ought to be a law. I agree with Einstein who said (sounding a little like Yogi Berra): “Things are as simple as they are and no simpler.” To insist on simplicity from the get go is as bad as insisting on complexity. You are pigeon holing the poem before it exists. You are confining it to a law it may not want to obey. When some kind person wants to apologize for a simple poem they like, they’ll lard on the adjective/adverb, “deceptively.” I have heard this said of the piano works of Robert Schumann as well as of Robert Francis, the other poet in this essay. “Deceptively” is never needed. It is redundant. “Simple” is already an adjective and I will define it for the purpose of this essay as: “the difficult and fully contrived art of not being ostentatious, flamboyant, or virtuosic, yet still giving aesthetic pleasure.” Simplicity often comes late in the lives of great artists. Brahms achieved it after a body of complex work. Yeats caught onto it. It often happens when an artist no longer has to prove anything and returns to the primal play ground of his art. Bach’s cello suites have the simplicity of pure song. They do not seem contrived (they are, and highly so). Simple is always deceptive if it is not simplistic. My definition of simplistic:

1. Purposely, and methodically reduced in verbal forces, like unto an insecure person who keeps insisting he doesn’t need anyone’s praise (and he does).
2. Contrived in the worst sense, as in certain Haiku that refuse to break the rules of haiku even when the rules cry out to be broken.
3. Insisting on its “simplicity” to the point of being dogmatic and boorish.
4. Lacking all necessary humility and all necessary arrogance, achieving the awful oxymoron of “arrogantly humble” and “humbly arrogant.”
5. Somehow managing to sound grandiose and pretentious in its “simplicity.”

    That will do for starters. We could return to Einstein’s dictum and concede that something may be simplistic when it is simpler than it really is, when it is false to its own best intentions and inner necessity, when it is phony, a fraud, a big fat fucking lie. So much of contemporary “simplicity” is a sham. I don’t blame young poets for recoiling from it. But to be fair, so much “complexity” is verbal masturbation, and not attractive verbal masturbation. To say nothing in a beautiful way is fine. To say nothing in a florid way as if simplicity were the enemy is asinine. So I am almost ready to get to the poems. But first, one last digression:

    I finally applied for a New Jersey State Council On The Arts Grant in 1988. I made the mistake of asking for the comments of the panel. Here they are:

Overt and obvious

A mix of wit and cliché

Heavy on the irony

Obviously, a student poet

    By irony they may have sensed something endemic to my poems: they are often self deprecating, and the voice is often aware of itself as a blowhard, someone who is speaking, undermining his own authority as he goes along, being both absolutely sincere, and tongue and cheek at once. I grew up being encouraged to enjoy hearing myself speak. As my grandmother said: “They’ll be plenty of time for silence when you’re dead.” Remember, these poets were looking out the window within forty miles of Princeton. They were “straightforward” and ambiguous sans irony. They were “tasteful” (always a bad sign).They liked silence, and the hard won words that arose from it. They didn’t like show offs, even when the show off was aware of himself as a show off, and using it as a technique to get at some deeper sense of speaking out. Irony wasn’t popular. They were right: I am heavy on the irony, and, although I am straight forward, I am also straight backward because I never trust what I am saying and I am shocked when anyone else does. My authority of voice rests on having no authority save that of liking to hear myself speak. I enjoy sound. I write in order not to be silent, and Elizabeth, New Jersey is a loud place. In retrospect, I must agree with them, but “heavy on the irony” isn’t necessarily bad.

    As for overt and obvious, a man in love with his own voice, a man who enjoys holding forth is always overt and obvious. I love the obvious. Falstaff is overt and obvious. I wrote a comic poetry in the older tradition of the comic being morally inferior to his audience. My effect depends on a reader or listener seeing their own “lesser” self in the poem and enjoying the naked chicanery of a highly flawed persona holding forth. I learned this through the great cowards and cheap skates: Jack Benny, and Bob Hope. My goal was to reach the stars through the cheap seats—to show how supernatural grace moves through the vapidity and suffering of flawed voices. I am a comic poet, and one of the jobs of comedy is to remind people of the obvious. In retrospect, they were right on this point too.

    A mix of wit and cliché. I think I am more humorous than witty. As for “cliché” I like sending them up, playing with the tropes of cliché in order to see how much marrow is left. Yes, once again, they were right.

    Finally, I am, obviously, a student poet. I hope I will always be a student poet. Advanced and professional means too often that one has learned how to give the prevailing aesthetic what it wants. I believe in prat falls, in floundering, in being unsure of myself. It is the one thing I have confidence in: deliberate uncertainty, the constant undermining of power.

    All this leads me to two poems that are, to my way of thinking, as simple as they are and no simpler. Both are fairly overt and obvious, and both skirt above and avoid two potential disasters of simplicity: the Hall Mark Greeting Card poem of sincere sentiment, and the clever, well structured gimmick poem based on a trick.

    First,I think Robert Francis is the greatest “minor” poet America has yet produced. I do not consider “minor” a disparagement. Minor here means someone whose first priority is absolute integrity of craft, someone who does not aim at greatness, at being “major,” but who turns again and again to the poem at hand and makes it perfect for what it is. By this definition, Elizabeth Bishop is a “minor” poet, albeit with major historical significance. She is a close second to Robert Francis for the crown of top minor poet. On a different day, with no snow on the ground, I might put her first, but, today my house is snow bound, and Francis holds sway. A little background:

  Robert Francis grew up in and lived all his life in New England. He was a contemporary of Theodore Roethke, a generation ahead of Donald Hall and Maxine Kumin, and his poems were usually metered and rhymed, a fact which shouldn’t matter except he lived all his life like a valiant squirrel in the expansive hawk shadow of New England’s other fully metered poet, Robert Frost.

    Francis is both more delicate and varied than Frost. He has his own darkness, and a startling compassion and vulnerability. His compassion reminds me of James Wright, yet, unlike Wright, it is never over done or too sentimental, and it does not depend on love of the loser or outcast. Francis lived a Spartan, hermit’s existence, though he did take his degree from Harvard and he was beloved by fellow poets. During his lifetime he became famous for not being famous. He was a highly admired “underrated” poet. This was what Donald Hall said of him on the back of his Collected Poems:

   

    “Francis is a modern American classic, better (say) than almost anyone who has been gifted with a Pulitzer or a National Book Award in recent decades. I claim him as better than John Berryman or Robert Penn Warren or Delmore Schwartz or A.R. Ammons, and these people have written beautiful poems. As with Hardy, as with Frost, as with Richard Wilbur who has learned from him, Francis must be read in bulk. He does not write long poems. The accrual of small triumphs—told in the same skeptical, tender, funny, and reticent language—makes a long poem out of this Collected Poems.”

    

   

    I disagree that he must be read in bulk. Poets enter the cannon through five or six poems; Francis would enter through “Blue Winter,” ‘Poverty Grass,” “Waxwings,” “The Pitcher,” and “The Base Stealer.” The last mentioned might be the greatest baseball poem ever written and is a technical, metrical marvel. There are thirty or forty others equally worthy, but these show up enough in anthologies, and ought to keep showing up as long as there is an America. The poem I am jotting down here would deserve to be in any anthology of Christmas poems. What I marvel at is its fearless and genuine sentiment (not sentimentality), its use of slant rhyme and envelope rhyme, and its ability to skirt the edge of Hall mark without ever falling in. It is simple in the best sense. Anything more elaborate would forsake the humility. Anything simpler (say, the normal ABAB rhyme pattern and perfect rhyme) would relegate to the level of ernest doggerel. Like the best tenors, Francis is exciting because he skirts this edge, and never hits the one wrong note, or misstep that would make him plummet. This poem is that rare creature: the genuinely superb occasional poem:

Good Night Near Christmas

And now good night. Good night to this old house

Whose breathing fires are banked for their night’s rest.

Good night to lighted windows in the west.

Good night to neighbors and to neighbors cows

Whose morning milk will be beside my door.

Good night to one star shining in. Good night

To earth, poor earth with its uncertain light,

Our little wandering planet still at war.

Good night to one unstarved and gnawing mouse

Between the inner and the outer wall.

He has a paper nest in which to crawl.

Good night to men who have no bed, no house.

This poem has all the truly child-like candor, yet solemnity of the great Christmas carols. I think of the genuine sadness in a classic song such as “Good Night Irene, Good night.” I think of “Good Night Mr. Moon,” and the “Good Night” section of Hamlet. Most of all I think how Francis manages to achieve the majesty and import of Iambic pentameter while avoiding its more overblown aspects. What saves it from a lesser status is that it never insists on its simplicity. It is ample and magical within its limits. A hall mark card would have made a big deal of how Jesus had no place to lay his head. It would never have put the poem in Iambic pentameter, and the mouse would not have been included unless he was cute. I don’t want to analyze this poem. I want to praise its gentleness and loving reticence, its effortless capturing of both the coziness and stark loneliness of the season. It is, rather miraculously, a poem of both hearth and desolation. If you list the nouns that receive adjectives, the whole meaning of the poem is almost rendered:

Old house, breathing fires, poor earth, wandering planet, unstarved and gnawing mouse. For such a little and truly simple poem, it moves as casually between the domestic and the cosmic, the small and the vast as Milton. Amazing. I will take this poem over Eliot’s “The Journey of The Magi” any day, and I admire “The Journey of The Magi” greatly. Note that this poem alludes to Christ’s birth without ever mentioning it overtly. The one star shining in, and the men who have no bed, no house gain the power and gravity of the holy birth much more effectively than a straight forward retelling. Francis counts on a previous knowledge of the story for his greater ontology, but the poem could be read with pleasure simply fot its eloquent interbreeding of the domestic and the cosmic.

     Just as Francis skirts the narrow edge of the Hallmark card, Lucille Clifton, in the poem I am posting here, comes perilously close to gimmick, to a sort of casual cleverness. The poem is a sort of Christian midrash—and it has the audacity to re-invent the idea of Mary, and also to use “Second Coming” in a world where Yeats’s far more dramatic and greater poem still prevails. Still, I think Clifton pulls it off, but barely.

Mary, rather than being a young submissive girl, is an old, somewhat cynical woman. The neat trick here (not the cleverness, but the genuine accomplishment) is how Clifton parses the difference between submission and acceptance of “come what may. Clifton also effectively creates a character in a few deft strokes, not at all common in contemporary poems. It is emphasized twice that Mary, the paragon of belief does not believe. The poem seems to hint that belief is not the most necessary quality of becoming the mother of God. Rather, it is most important to take the miracle in stride, to break through one’s no belief into the action of acceptance. Here goes:

my dream about the second coming

mary is an old woman without shoes.

she doesn’t believe it.

not when her belly starts to bubble

and leave the print of a finger where

no man touches.

not when the snow in her hair melts away.

not when the stranger she used to wait for

appears dressed in lights at her

kitchen table.

she is an old woman and

doesn’t believe it.

When something drops onto her toes one night

She calls it a fox

But she feeds it.

    There are things about this poem that annoy me: the lack of caps, the ungainly lines, the non-sentences. Clifton knows her bible well, and this older Mary is an echo of Sarah and of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth. One gets the impression that, like Sarah (whose name means she who laughs) the old woman has learned to protect herself from both miracles and the soul crushing disappointment of them never happening. She is also the embodiment of a wizened old woman who refuses to be hoodwinked, who is loathe to show any emotion except a sort of ongoing lack of trust. I’m not sure I trust “when something drops onto her toes one night.” But there is enough fable aspect to just barely pull it off, and the old woman calling that something a fox, but then feeding it, is a nice touch, a saving touch. Again it is a Christmas story, but it refuses sentiment, the usual tropes of gravitas. It is hard headed, but not hard hearted. I liked it better when I first read it this morning, and, a second reading tells me the gimmick aspect of it can soon wear thin, but the simplicity (except for the pretentious refusal to have caps, a trait I find as reprehensible as small case i) is  fully organic to the intentions. It is as simple as it is, but no simpler, and the subtle distinction between belief and acceptance is fully earned. Still, there is to this poem a sense of cleverness I worry about in “simple” poems. Is this old lady truly unbelieving, or just in denial? You can argue it either way. That’s the nice thing about ambiguity, but here’s one thing I find unarguable: Francis writes the better poem by not trying to re-invent the story, to make it his own, but, rather, by making it our own. Somehow, his take, as familiar and devoid of novelty as it is, seems fresher; that is the problem with novelty: it can only be interesting as a novelty on the first read. Simplicity, in its truest aspect, is always fresh. You can’t wear out “John Anderson My Jo, John,” or “El Hombre.” You can wear out “my dream of the second coming,” but the last couple lines pull the poem away from gimmick to true invention. It’s a close call, but the poem does give pleasure. Still, if given the choice between “making it new” and making it anciently sudden, and suddenly ancient, I will always prefer the latter. The former is more the meat and potatoes of modern grant’s committees. Their knee jerk aversion to rhyme, meter, and sentiment, would make them choose the Clifton poem. They’d be so, so wrong.

From Immortal Bird To Enervated Sky: A Brief Riff on Ode To A Nightingale and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

BY JOE WEIL

     In the beginning of Ode To A Nightingale, Keats writes: “”My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains/One minute past and Lethe-wards had sunk.” Some ninety years later, Eliot begins the “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: “Let us go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table.”

    Eliot begins with the imperative: “Let us go.” Yet “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, is the antithesis of the imperative. Eliot’s mock epic tone is further compounded by the speaker’s knowledge of his inconsequence. He is so inconsequential that he can not even fully rise to the occasion of a clown. Keats, for all the passivity of the speaker (he lies in drowsy numbness, listening to the immortal bird) is about the mystical oxymoron of passivity as pure action—to die into eternal life, to sleep in the immortal song. A lot changed in those 90 years between these two wonderful poems.

    Hemlock is a poison, the one Socrates drank. Ether, in 1909, was the anesthesia used to prepare patients for surgery. The romantics were fascinated with states of torpor, the irrationality of dream states, with trance, altered consciousness, the whole itinerary of being out of one’s rational mind— all reason suspended for the sake of the sublime. The modernists do not escape this fascination, but, for them, torpor is expressed in the anti-mystical tropes of keeping busy at inconsequence. Man is not asleep in order to receive divinity. Rather, divinity has become etherized, and man lives under the scenic terms of this enervation.

     Keats is willing to die in order to enter into communion with the nightingale. In point of fact, he makes no secret that he must die in order to be born into the world of night—the poesis of the Nightingale’s voice. He must drink the dull o[iate “to the drains.” This nightingale is timeless, the same bird Ruth listened to over two thousand years before “amid the alien corn.”To journey into the underworld “lethe-wards,” to hold covenant with the immortal, one must “die.” Abraham, when he receives the covenant from Yahweh, is put into a trance state, and the power of Yahweh moves through the severed animal parts, and ignites the holocaust. Abraham takes no active part.

    This is standard operating procedure in matters of the transcendent, and the sublime. Something happens—some aspect of the supernatural or immortal visits and is “received”

Passively—in a state of trance, of “drowsy numbness.” (think the limp hand of Adam receiving the divine spark of God the father in Michelangelo’s painting of the creation). One becomes inanimate, dead in the mortal sense, for the purpose of being reanimated as it were into the sublime. As Kenneth Burke pointed out, heaven and the eternal can be viewed as laudatory terms for death—a state of stasis, an end to history and movement. Using the Benthamite tri-partite registers we can express it as such:

Laudatory: Heaven, eternity, the immortal, the sublime, all breathing human passion far above

Neutral: death, stasis, suspension

Dislogistic: decadence, listlessness, decay, rot, uselessness, super fluidity, seediness

   In the presence of the sublime, one mimics the death-like quality of the eternal. One becomes a fitting scene for the entrance of the gods. Prufrock, on the other hand, is anything if not busy. The roles are reversed. God (the pervasive presence of evening) is asleep, and Prufrock is loathe to wake him. After all, that would be impolite, wouldn’t it? The poem is full of frenetic activities that have almost a Marx Brothers mania to them: the women come and go, there are countless visions and revisions, possible seductions that do not take place, self conscious concerns with thinning hair, a sort of manic pettiness. Even when Prufrock receives the vision and song of the mermaids, it is the one time he is almost sure of something: “I do not think that they will sing to me”( he has heard them sing to each other—a sort of mythic upgrade of the women coming and going and chatting about Michelangelo, a mythic upgrade that fails to raise the stakes, and, rather, transforms the mermaids into a bunch of self-involved society women) He has eavesdropped on the mermaids and they are no more concerned with him than the women who come and go. When he lingers in the chambers of the sea, he is not awaked by the voice of gods, but by human voices: “Till human voices wake us and we drowned.”

    In Prufrock’s universe then, meaningless social acts, the art of keeping busy has taken the place of a truly relational myth—a myth by which the eternal can fully infect the mortal with an aspect of consequence, and the terms of the mortal be raised to the level of eternity. The future is full of possibility which never comes to fruition: “In a minute there is time/for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”  Eliot alludes to Macbeth’s “There would have been time for words such as these.” He also implies: “all sound and fury, signifying nothing,” but, in this case, fury has become niggling complaint and fretting, in short, the bangless whimper of the superfluous man, a man who knows he is superfluous (I am no Hamlet) and yet is loathe to change.

    To be nothing is no barrier to mystical experience. Keats’s speaker is brought to nothing so that eternity may enter. In point of fact, it is necessary in mystical terms to become “nothing.” To be “a little something, but not really that at all” is, in a sense, far worse a fate than nothing: to be the lukewarm, the tepid modern man. In 90 years, a reversal has transpired: one goes to sleep by ceaseless activity, none of which has consequence. For Keats, “sleep” is the true activity of human consciousness. Sleep is the laudatory and transcendent, the pure “act” of man, and in his poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats, by going to sleep, eats his peach:

And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees;

To woo sweet kisses from averted faces—

Play with their fingers, touch their shoulders white

Into a pretty shrinking with a bite.”

    Both Eliot and Keats play with the mystical oxymoron of sleep as wakefulness, and wakefulness as sleep, but Eliot’s Prufrock wakens only to drown. The speaker in Ode To A Nightingale asks: “Do I wake or sleep?” “But whereas “Ode To A Nightingale is a poem in which the mortal tastes of the immortal, and permanence/impermanence share true relation, Love Song” is a poem of  very social non-relation. Stuff happens ( or is always on the verge of happening), but it is not even enough to amount to nothing. It is, rather, a little something, but not even exactly that: “That is not it at all.” One thing and then another happens, or almost happens, and none of it is of consequence. The evening which lies inert, enervated, put to sleep, can no more infect the speaker with cosmic import, then ‘talk of Michelangelo can raise the women above the level of social chit chat: “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Prufrock is not only an attempt at anti-romanticism, but anti-mysticism as well. Prufrock can not sit still, but he can not move either—except through all the petty tropes of the social construct .Both poems begin with a simulation of death, of a state of numbness.  To enter night is to enter a sort of living death, a state of unconsciousness, of altered consciousness. But the speaker in Prufrock remains fully awake to the trivial, and even his fear of being trivial becomes a fashionable fear of inconsequence. No mystical union of the mortal and the eternal takes place. There is no covenant except with distraction and inconsequence. Eliot projects this numbness then onto the cosmos itself. It is  the scenic ground zero of all that occurs. If the evening is etherized, it invokes the sense of an impending surgical procedure.  Although this procedure would seem to take place upon a living evening, it is, in reality a post mortem—an autopsy. The romanticism of night and death is muted, blasphemed against by turning away from the romantic tropes of night toward a sort of clinical image repertoire. This blaspheming against the romantic via the clinical is furthered during the whole of the poem by the sense that, whatever the operation is, it is most certainly botched.

    Keats’s poem is relational: mortal poet and immortal bird, each infecting the other with their own qualities—the bird becoming poetry, and the poet becoming the sublime forlorn. Eliot’s poem, for all its insistence on a “you and I” is non-relational. It is all about the failure to enter into true relationship, to receive a covenant. Worse still, Prufrock clings to his inconsequence since it is the one thing he can be sure of. Forlorn in his case becomes always a dividend and mild sense of disappointment.

      Eliot would seek many years later to remedy the impossibility of the modern sublime by returning to a sort of arch-conservative faith, yet, even in his late poems of faith, there is a contingent sense of alienation. One may be social, seedy, indulge in the questions of whether or not to eat a peach, but no true relation is possible. Eliot’s “love song” is all about emotional paralysis—the impossibility of “forcing the moment to its crisis.” Keats’s Nightingale is all about entering fully into the crisis of the mortal creature who can intuit immortality, but who must remain tied to the ephemeral. The mystical oxymoron of the immortal within the transient, and the transient within the immortal is still valid. Lament still has its significance. The great crisis in Eliot’s poem is that there is no crisis, only the awful, soul enervating experience of a trivial and seedy urbanity. The voice of the poem insists “there will be time” (an allusion to Macbeth’s: “There would have been time for words such as these: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace)” This is not a statement of hope, but of ennui.

     What draws these poems together is simulation of death-states in relation to the afflatus of night and song—of rising or sinking to the occasion. In Keats’s universe, the sublime is still possible. In Eliot’s, the sublime has become a form of Bovarism. Keats’s speaker can enter the apostrophic absurd. The poet can address an immortal bird. Absurdity maintains its gravitas. By the time of Prufrock, the absurd has been reduced to a sort of radical and self-aware ineffectuality. Eliot’s mastery of pastiche, of irony, of the anti-romantic and anti-mystical left succeeding poets in a bind. Prufrock is a great poem, but Eliot’s great poem is based on the tropes of greatness being dead. Williams saw Eliot as retrograde, a mere rehash of late 19^th century agnosticism, and the British stanzas. Hart Crane, a worshipper of Eliot’s technique, rebelled against the loss of the sublime, against the nihilism of Eliot by answering with his long poem, The Bridge. In Benthamite terms, Keats raises the absurd to sublimity. If the neutral term is the absurd, Eliot lowers the absurd to the level of the pedestrian and vapid. Lament becomes pathos. This may have been useful as a corrective to bad remakes of Dover Beach , but as a fashion, it had no staying power, and for a good thirty years it did become the fashion. Auden was saturated with it. Once you have torn down all the idols, being comfortably inane and sad over your tea and toast makes for a dangerous poetics. In the hands of lesser writers it led to a sort of witty and gimmicky sense of enervation and despair. The seediness of Eliot’s industrial landscape gives way to the hard boiled detective novel and, worse, the “my aren’t we empty ? Tennis anyone? Sort of drawing room comedy. Still A great poem can not be faulted for having a destructive effect. But if Samuel Johnson is right, Keats’s great poem is the greater for its moral force. To attack the tired tropes of transcendence is of great value. To affirm the core truths of existence is greater still. I admire both poems and count them among my favorites, but, if forced to choose, I choose Keats.

In Answer To Vick

The hidden qualm I find in Vicks question about ambiguity is this: writers can nuance themselves to the point where a reader or audience falls asleep. Modernism rebelled against overt meaning, and, as Vic said, left a lot out so that the reader could connect the dots. But ambiguity is not lack of clarity, or lack of meaning, or even lack of directness. Ambiguity occurrs and thrives even when a poet or song writer is being about as subtle as a sledge hammer. Take an expression like "sex, drugs, and rock and roll." It's pretty blunt. Somehow, to certain minds, it says everything without saying anything more than "sex, drugs, and rock and roll." It implies an absolute aesthetic. It implies a reduction of life to a sort of primal simplicity. It's level of ambiguity resides in the magic of trinity: One aesthetic, or concept of the beautiful and the good under three "divine" persons. The implication is that these things go together, that they are linked in such a way that you can't mention one without mentioning the other. The hearer provides the connection. The speaker utters. But suppose I say: "Potato salad, surgical equipment salesmen, and your fine assed mother giving me head in the back of a Volkswagen van." The very randomness of these things might throw a reader off, or make the reader or listener search for meanings and connections that are not controlled or preconceived by the speaker. Suppose I made a list of trinities:

The father, son, and Holy Spirit
Death, lemon ice, and my grandmother's false teeth
sex, drugs, and rock and roll
labor day, christmas, and the unforgettable tits of my Bulgarian wet nurse
a horse, a camel, and a man picking his nose at day break

The pattern of threes becomes the ruling principle, and now almost anything can be yoked to the system of threes and the reader will feel some sense of unity that can't be well defined, but is there. We are pattern seeking animals. We seek pattern more than we do cognitive meaning. If we didn't, then no new meanings would be possible. What modernism and post-modernism plays with is the energy of the disconnect, the loss of an unquestioned order of priority. This is definitely at the heart of surrealism, language poetry, and much of the new York School. By freeing language, by liberating utterance from orders of priority, many things are possible:

1. The reader will project a priority, thus creating a new order or possibility.
2. The reader will lose all sense of priority and, by losing it, gain a more acute sense of process as a value in its own right.

3. Incongruity will create its own perspective so that not knowing exactly what is being said or meant will become an aesthetic preference. Die hard modernists often despise the over determined meaning for the simple fact that the overt and the obvious bores them.
4. Strangeness will create a revolt on the part of the reader and or listener thus leading to the shock, controversy, and outrage much modernist art is hoping to achieve.

   Empson discussed seven types of ambiguity. I don't have time to delve into them, but let's just consider the ambiguity of the word "and." Conjunctions are links. They connect disparate words or concepts, but they also imply a radical disconnection as much as they link. "And" is a bridge, and a bridge is proof that there is a gap. That gap may be infinite. Many biblical narratives begin with the word "and:" 'And it came to pass..." in this case "and" implies the narrative proceeds from someone or some thing else and is connected to that thing. "And" adds, accumulates. It also serves the two extremes of the binary-- connect and disconnect. "And" is intrinsically ambigous.

    One can be direct and ambiguos. Ambiguity is not a dirth of meaning,or a confusion but a hypertrophic splintering of it into many possibilities, some of which contradict each other (the essense of irony): "I'd just love to go to bed with you and have you pre-mature ejaculate." This is an ironic or sarcastic statement. This is the sort of ambiguity that exists for thousands of years. But suppose the irony is leeched from it. Suppose the implication is that the person speaking truly does want nothing more than to go to bed with the other and have him pre-mature ejaculate. Now you are heading towards the truest ambiguity of post-modernism, the sort of power Andy Warhol wielded because his whimsical and seemingly guileless statements could be considered both ironic (tongue in cheek, wise assed) and without guile-- a sort of uber sincerity an almost autistic literalism taken to a point surpassing the skill of irony and entering the realm of the absurd: "I just adore men who can't last a minute in bed.' A New York dillitante can utter such a statement and impress her friends with her cleverness or unconventionality. Daisy Buchanan can weep over Gatsby's shirts and escape the awful fear of substance. Lack of substance, content, meaning can be a signifier of power and priviledge. The gods never have to be substantial. True power is always accessible to the arbitrary. It does and says whatever it wants without being troubled by significance. It does not serve. It pronounces, and in merely laying out the words and phrases it claims and depends on no order of priority save its own whim. This is the sort of ambiguity that can, in the hands of unskilled writers and poets, prove precious and pretentious, and infuriating. Nuance and the avoidance of meaning can become doctrinaire. I may be wrong, but I think that may be part of what troubles Vick.

a question for joe weil about ambuguity?... and anyone else

there's some old school shit about ambiguity as a real literary mechanism... and aside from the obvious... tell me something...
i know those old writers beat around the bush on purpose...
i know it was supposed to make it seem timeless and i know alot of guys emulate the unclear bible style to make what they write seem heavy...
and i know a guy like hemingway leaves out details so that you fill em in for yourself...
and i know guys like charles dickens and dostoyevsky had to look out for themselves and keep getting work and try not to go to jail ...
ambuguity...
tell me something i dont know... its been the topic of the week for me...

                                                                                                                        -vic

Body Parts Email Interview Series #1

This is the first installment of an ongoing series of interviews to take place over email. Please note: There are a gross amount of uncorrected typos. Enjoy.

 

Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 5:35pm
Greetings, Bawdy Bard.


Joe Weil
Today at 5:37pm
Greetings to you, too, oh sire!


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 5:40pm
The first question I want to ask you for this Body Parts Email Interview Series, is the following. What are your general ruminative thoughts on the interview as a literary genre? Does the interview as a literary genre extend back to any precedents pre-journalismó?


Joe Weil
Today at 5:45pm
It took off with the cult of celebrity, but its precedent (in my far from expert opinion) is the tonnage of letters between writers and their deciples during the hey dey of letter writing. It's amazing how many letters men and women with thousands of pages of novels and poems could produce. Coleridge's marginalia was a sort of answering to questions he thought the owners of books ought to be asking of the text. Journalism opted for the candid. We all know no writer is candid.


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 5:48pm
Can poetry survive the Cult of the Candid? You write on your blog about sincerity and the tension between confessionalism and abstract poetry recently. I often think that the topos of nakedness or authenticity has nothing to do with reacting to Modernism, but just exemplifies another heralding of our age. The Age of Fact. And all its sordid alibis and convenient lies. Thoughts?


Joe Weil
Today at 5:51pm
I forgot to mention the conversation books of Goethe. "great men" are always being quoted or mis-quoted. Now its Halle Berry...People like to think they want to know what a celebrity or "great writer" thinks and feels. Sincerity and the candid is a valid form of con job. You can't fake sincerity. it's already fake.


Joe Weil
Today at 5:53pm
Poetry dies a a hundred thousand deaths a day. It's got coward beat by a mile. It dies and returns. I've killed hundreds of times my self. Of cource it can survive the candid. It's like one of those blow up dummies you knock down only to see rise. It can annoy the fient hearted.


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 5:54pm
So what's a poet to do? Jettison the bloody heart?


Joe Weil
Today at 6:05pm
Not at all. Many poets don't have much of a heart to jettison. The reader ought to be adult enough to realize that Rilke wrote great advice on love, and had a disastrous love life. He was a prig and a selfish bastard. James Wright is the prince of compassion in his poems, but you wouldn't hear that from his still angry son, Franz. Sincerity is of great value if we remember the poet is performing a ritual of sincerity. he isn't dishing from the heart as much as from the tradition of heart tropes. There is poetry that is so compelling in its witness that all style is transcended. But you can't build a tradition on witness. It comes out sounding like whining. Celan... yes. A work shop poet talking about their painful divorce? Nine times out of ten it's mere therapy.


Joe Weil
Today at 6:09pm
Also remember that the first thing Celan confronted was the necessity to fabricate a style of witness. He did what any good poet does: he re-oriented us to language itself-- not subject matter, not issue, but language. There's lots of bad holocaust poetry-- bad no matter how sincere the witness or the intention.


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 6:12pm
So where or how does the poet's lie, i.e. heart tropes, redeem a lived in, mundane, everyday space of banal images and facts?

(Behind this question I think of Pessoa from "The Book of Disquiet"...

'Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel. The first begins to lie in its very structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth through lines that keep strict meters, thus lying against the nature of speech; the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality we all know never existed.

To feign is to love. Whenever I see a pretty smile or a meaningful gaze, no matter whom the smile or gaze belongs to, I always plumb to the soul of the smiling or gazing face to discover what politician wants to buy our vote or what prostitute wants us to buy her. But the politician than buys us loved at least the act of buying us, even as the prostitute loved being bought by us. Like it or not, we cannot escape universal brotherhood. We all love each other, an the lie is the kiss we exchange.')


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 6:14pm
Re: Celan. I read and feel the difference. But to a layman reader, who is perhaps curious to this "craft" called verse or poetry or fiction, what is the technical difference and guts of attending to language?


Joe Weil
Today at 6:22pm
Truths told badly are deader than a lie. If you tell an intelligent suffering person to "think positive," they are going to want to hit you. If you find a language that is not tired out-- mere short hand, mere laziness, than you have some chance of comfort.The essential message might still be "think positive" but you have found a better manner of courting that person's intelligence. This is the essence of style-- approach that is effective, not hackneyed. Literature can console, instruct, and move, but it is dangerously close to the sociopath's sentiment when it fails to rise to the occasion of anything but received ideas and cliche. A man comforted by bad self help books is not like ly to want C.S LEwis' "A Grief Observed. But I believe that some forms of suffering and joy force us out of our sleep. If not, we are doomed to mediocrity at best.


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 6:26pm
To switch the subject, I find it's very common today among poets (including us!) to knock contemporary poetry, the infrastructure of poetry aesthetics, camps, schools, MFA, the writing school world, the publication world, etc. etc. As Johnson or Eliot said, vituperation has always been a key asset to sophistication. To against the grain, can you tell me what in Contemporary Poetry Land - small or large - you find quite joyful, promising, or downright an advancement?


Joe Weil
Today at 6:38pm
The fact that we complain so much is. itself, a form of hope. As for poetry at large (and it is never really at large) more competent poetry is being written now than ever before. Great poetry is happening at about the same rate it always has because it is truly a matter of grace, not effort. The trouble with competence is one almost grows nostalgic for the truly awful poems. Awful and bad may have energy. Competence does not. I am not advocating intentionally writing bad poetry, but it certainly is sad when all the piano players know-- depending on their schools-- what notes not to play. We know what to avoid. I like to see my students risk going beyond that, and many have tried, and some have succeeded. I try not to teach an aesthetic. I try to expose students to works that succeed in many different aesthetics so that the student might find his own intention. Craft should be a way of discovering laws, not imposing them. I like when a student re-invents the wheel. that means he has reclaimed the process of discovering the wheel that was so vital. Then I have to tell him he's re-invented the wheel. Poetry is always dying. I think it should be always dying.


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 6:45pm
(On the smaller/pettier scale...) And what about the more mechanical and deadly world of readings, reader bookers, back scratchers, blurb hurlers, mini presses, baby presses, indie presses, indie presses that are in fact bought out and run by gargantuan presses, editors, prizes, grants, undiscovered poets, overdiscovered poets, underdogs, name brands - any sunshine for the young prospective writer seeking to enter this fray? this network? this majestical roof fretted with golden asslicking?


Joe Weil
Today at 7:00pm
I have students, and not all of them grads, who have poet's market memorized. They know every conferance, every poet, and they keep up. What they need to do while "keeping up" is look back. In my first year at Bignhamton, I had a great crop of poets. They knew all the latest names, but not one of them had read Whitman's "When Lilacs Last By The Door Yard Bloomed." The "scene" rests on something more permanent, something like the Irish cliffs of Moher-- the father's father, his father... etc. etc. We live in a coprorate time, a time of "careers." Everything is now, but poetry is Orphic and always turns to see its beloved disappear. Poetry must also look back.Students are getting published in major mags, and already know how to write a resume. But what is the source of their being? To what do they return? Another summer work shop with someone who has won some award? I once wrote a long essay book review published in a reputable mag about a poet named Richard Cole. Louis Simpson had written him a blurb claiming Richard Cole was the "new Whitman." It pissed me off. He was a fairly good poet, and he deserved something better than a hyperbolic blurb. he deserved a true appraisal. "Studied with" is my least favorite phrase. A young writer ought to care about how well he can write. He ought to sit on most of his stuff until it truly hatches, and also care about how well he can read. No one talks aesthetics or delays the glorified editing that passes for a work shop. He needs to learn how to cut his own throat or kiss his own ass, and not depend on experts to always do it. Nothing validates a writer except his willingness to serve the art. The poets he worships because they are successful will probably be forgotten two years after they die. Sure, keep up with the scene, but don't be a pedantic, fanatic little star fucker. It's unseemly. Hate is vital. they should learn what they hate-- and not from someone else. They should know why, too. What they love may change, but hate has great staying power.


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 7:07pm
Turning back to Whitman in a way, he was a tireless American entrepreneur - self-published, self-promoting, self-reviewing, even having the brass cajones to take Emerson's amazing response letter and emblaze it into the second edition of "Leaves of Grass." I find this somehow a promising example to lead the way into the supposedly "dark" and "doomed" Online World that cultural critics (on New York Times blogs, etc., no less) proclaim is threatening to end literary as we know it.

No less an authority than the mighty and bullish Helen Vendler has claimed that if Emily Dickinson was alive now she would be quite mortified to even go near a computer. (Note: Helen Vendler is the only Harvard faculty to my knowledge who does not "do" email. Respectfully.) That said I think it's quite off. Dickinson's spirit of distance and intimacy, her extreme tie to publishing through the means of correspondence, and simply the great illusion of warm-blooded privacy that her life tended towards seems almost embodied in the Internet.

I want to know what this model *specifically* means to you as a poet, publisher, or teacher.


Joe Weil
Today at 7:22pm
Whitman practiced shamelessness, and. thank God, it was justified by the work. He was highly comic in his earnest seeking of fame. He wrote both glowing and bad reviews of his own book! This is brio. What the writers now do is business. Yes, they promote, but literary writers (not the mass market) must always pretend they do so reluctantly and only because their greatness compels them. The promotion is tastefully rendered, thus compounding the sin of promotion by pretending it can be anything else but a form of hawking one's wares. Emily would not have kept off the internet. First, her own manner of keeping her poems shows how much she loved organizing and hoarding them. It may have been a primitive technology, but it was a technology nonetheless and she reveled in it. I think she would have relished the potential for remaining hidden even as she revealed. Helen Vendler is a terrific critic. She's also a curmudgeon. The internet is wide open. The terrible can flourish there with the great without any gate keepers. good. The gate keepers with their standards are more dangerous than some little fifteen year old kid talking about her favorite emo band. The gate keepers have kept great work out as much as they've brought great work in. The internet has no gates. Bring on the little filthy mouths and the supreme artists. i think Emily might only write on line. She was a great writer of letters. This would suit her.


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 7:27pm
So what questions do you have?


Joe Weil
Today at 7:30pm
What are your room mates wearing? I have a dream this evening that all the beautiful women in Manhattan are wearing ballet slippers, and showing just a couple inches of beatific skin. Am I right?


Joe Weil
Today at 7:31pm
I want to know why you are at Columbia and if you intend to be famous or immortal?


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 7:41pm
Simone is wearing a red spider dress. Michael is wearing a simple t-shirt with rolled up jeans. I'm wearing a polo shirt and "hang out" boxers.

(I will get back to you on the ballet slippers after we dine at this little Italian joint near us on 125th and LeSalle.)

I don't know why I'm at Columbia. An exercise in the absurd? Yes, people do invest 60 thousand dollars into graduate school. They're called lawyers. No one puts such a sum of debt toward poetry. I see it as a continuation of one of my talents: To embrace the futile, to expect great things from the unlikely. No one has attacked the MFA degree more than me. I do tend to think of it (did?) as a degree in basket-weaving. But what can I say? I go broke (big whoop, that's the story of America) and spend two years at a top school focusing on my writing, in the milieu of Manhattan, and let's hope plenty of pretty / adoring boys.

Famous or immortal? Both, please.


Joe Weil
Today at 7:42pm
But on a serious note. I watched you go from someone who devoured Hart Crane and the French symbolist s, to an avid reader of Samuel Johnson. I remember saying to you once in an aside that I thought your hero Ashbery was not only influenced by modernist French writers, but that his mind had an age of reason tint to it-- for all the "high gibberish" the critic Denis Donoghue mentions. I know Ashbery has shifted the flow of your river, but what about Johnson, and, more importantly how do they link up in your mind? Also what energies, vital energies do you get from the disparity between these two loves


Adam Fitzgerald
Today at 9:35pm
Wonderful that you said river, in relation to Ashbery and Johnson. They are poets linked by rivers, waterways, and their constant flowing eloquence of rhetoric & speech. Johnson's first poem was "London," was in the voice of a man eager to leave the city from its vanities and sorrows. When Johnson's father read it, he immediately sent it to an agéd Pope, who was of course the great poet of the 18th-century. Pope had already received the poem from Johnson himself, and so sent a gently rebuffing letter thanking Mr. Johnson Sr. for sending the piece but informing him he had already seen the piece (at this time poems were often published anonymously, and "London" earned enough early success to be rumored to be a new talent worthy of Pope). That said, Johnson did not become a great or as great a poet as Pope - but he was no less of a force, if anything, he was more consequential and effective as a writer who was the first professional man of letters (and hence his variety of travel, essay, epistolary, critical and creative writings). Johnson's great poem is "The Vanity of Human Wishes." A poem deeply loved by Ashbery, and a personal favorite of mine as well. (Turns out one of Ashbery's most famous poems, "Into the Dusk-Charged Air," which is a three/four page poem listing the rivers of the world with Joycean buoyancy, took its gimmick out of a page of Pope. Compare "Into the Dusk-Charged Air" to Pope's "Windsor-Forest." It's a remarkably gemlike little discovery, if I may be allowed to say so myself.

Ashbery is of course a romantic, the last romantic, the high romantic. He is all dream and shade and Wordsworthian variation of the mind in delight of its own energy and exuberance, as well as plangent with whimsy and loss in anticipation of its own mortality. You couldn't come further from the extraordinary grounding and lucidity of Pope and Johnson. Pope's lucidity does allow though for an apocalyptic grandeur, because he has the ability to contrast the world of tea-cups to the horrible scope of floods, planets and other such banal events. Johnson, who is not exactly midway (as Burns if not Blake was) between the 18th and 19th century, still has something opaque, incommunicable, and dark wrestling in the vast command of his language, the superlative array of his diction and the meticulous suavity of his syntax - often fluid, baroque, but also biting.

The two - Ashbery, Johnson - are in fact not too far from one another at all in my opinion. They join at the root of language, the verbal gift for phrasing, and the syntactical shuffle that comes from a powerfully entrenched appreciation of Prose (another unRomantic discipline that Ashbery through the guises of Raymond Roussel tackled). After you read the sweep and force of "Human Wishes," you won't find any of the moralizing or classicism in Ashbery. But you will find language as an onslaught, both as a defense against mortality and as a sheer pleasure. They love the coil and recesses of words, the throb and theatricality of language (remember Johnson wrote for Garrick and others quite often, though his own "Irene" was a stagebomb). In Johnson, the mind fights to bring words back to order; to balance the expansiveness of catalogues and endless mottled variety with sane diligent sense. Ashbery abandons this ploy altogether. He does not lack so much the respect for words making sense, as he simply tires of words in their ordinary relationships, their usual juxtapositions. Rimbaud and Crane and Ashbery are quite akin in this sense: they thrive whenever writing startles the reader from the somnabulance of the expected, the common, the usual lazy poetic formulas. In a writer like Johnson who is so plotting and methodical, the gift for phrase-making, the robust ability to let a sentence remain orderly in a paragraph size, as well as his trusty ear, all these gifts make him "Enlightenment" but with grandeur. The Sublime is afterall something no less intrinsic to Pope and Johnson than it is to Wordsworth or Coleridge. All see Poetry in its infinite capacity, "spreading wide my narrows hands to gather paradise" (Dickinson).

This is at least what I react to so sensitively and appreciatively in each. Johnson would recognize the powers latent in Ashbery's cascading verbalisms, but he would indite it for its peculiarity, its idiosyncrasy, its affectation namely. This is what Christopher Ricks is always grumbling about whenever Ashbery is brought up. "It's all self-indulgent, tweed, inane and wasteful." But the end of poetry is pleasure. And Ashbery's power of language, to make it both new and expressive, is at the heart of poetry's power. Invention was Johnson's choice for the greatest aspect the arts could aspire to. This is why he saw Homer first. And also why he praised Shakespeare - for not giving us simply varieties of characters, but whole new species in each individual.

That said, all writers are pathological. Anyone who argues differently is probably I would bet not a writer him/herself. No less than a formidable critic such as Archie Burnett (editor of Housman, Larkin), said once in a class that Milton could have written in any style he chose - implying that when writers are that great, their superfluous gifts allow them to take any shape, assume any style, don any garb, and become totally arbitrary in their guise. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Joyce, who is the 20th century embodiment of an amalgamate style, is ironically the most recognizable hand in the world, ultimately sounding like nobody but himself. Milton could not help but be Milton, Keats Keats, Larkin Larin, etc. etc. My point is, that we see "pathologies" as negative and destructive in the writers who cannot help the trash they compose, and "achieved", totally of the "will" in writers we treasure. Now while yes we often forget that just as any writer is bad because he does not choose or know to be better, so too does a gifted writer labor. I'm all for throwing out the Myth of the Solitary Genius. But writers can only develop their taste and gift, - they cannot change them.

Ricks believes it's all "manner" and "affectation." But Johnson is no less of a mannered and affected writer. It's simply the mainstay of English prose tradition, modeled from the Latin writers and medieval scholasticism when the language developed, can better recognize the virtues and achievements of a writer like Johnson. Ashbery, who I am the first to admit, is pathologically "cute," "abstract," "whimsical," "nonsensical" and "disjunctive." It is a detriment and sometimes his poems are like beautiful Easter Eggs that are all lovely paints on a too brittle shell, done by numbers, by an industrial assembly line (an assembly line like no one else's, mind you).

I bring this wide mesh of ramblings to mean this. Johnson and Ashbery are both pathologically rhetorical writers. They mastered their respective styles, I give them all the credit for that in the world. With Ashbery, Johnson would rebuff him as he did Thomas Gray, whom he did not have undying love for: "he has lost the light of sense in a cloud of words." But clouds are as at least as fabulous and mesmerizing to stare at as light is helpful and vivifying to live by. As 19th-century science and art chartered out for the unknown, the incomplete, the opaque, the mysterious, Kant's Sublime, so the tyranny of Pope's meticulous wit was displaced by Wordsworth's no less engrossing sentimentality, his expansiveness that is the least "coupleted" of any major English poet's poems. Johnson also did not approve of novelty. Yes it brings excitement, but it cannot but exhaust the mind which longs for the ultimate repose of truth.

Ashbery I don't think would really have qualms with Johnson. But that doesn't he mean he would ever want to write quite like him. He has been a loyal poet of the surprise, the fleeting, the temporary lift that rather than granting life repose perhaps reflects a more fundamental reality than perhaps any truth in repose could: Our never resting mind. Ah, Stevens. The real midpoint between an Enlightenment and Romantic artist, no?

As for their disparities, they teach me (and inform my poetry, I proudly hope) by their extremity. Too much sense conceals the true pleasure of poetry, which is not logic and argument, but poetic association and music. Too much nonsense tires the vitality and natural exuberance of rhetorical play. It replaces the cunning and deliberate with a ruthless dogmatism, albeit for the quirky and uncanny. Art must sin against everything except Vitality. That, you know, is writing's Holy Ghost. (Herein ends my rambling catechism.)

Suppositions Involving The Alien (Or Study in Digression) Or:

Suppose your heart
was an illegal alien
and thought it best
to hide in the open:

at the corner
awaiting
a day's labor
or parked in the family
SUV, awaiting the school
bell that rang out the day
of Mrs Thomason's brats:

all of whom had splendid teeth
and soccer lessons
and learning disabilities
and who jabbered in an English
as apallingly mysterious
as your own lack of love:

What would you do,
knowing your heart
could be caught
at any moment
and deported?

and suppose I am in chains
and my struggle against them
highlights my
perky breasts and my
aristocratic posture,
and you get an erection
beholding my misery

does this mitigate your
commitment to
ending oppression?

I am sipping an espresso
and chatting about quantum physics
loud enough so that
the table next to mine can hear.
Aren't they impressed?

Suppose a leading authority
on string theory
just happened to be having
a micro-beer—

while I said something clever
about strange attractors:

this might lead to marriage,
or a break through
in the understanding of quarks

but the heart clears the dishes

and is invisible in the open
and the children
of great men

pile into SUV's

and play in soccer matches
where no one is allowed to
win or lose,

and the stars move over the heads
of  surgical equipment salesmen,
and the form that darts
through the shadows, hoping not to be caught
"red handed"
on its way towards—what?

I do not know, dear form in the shadows,
you are cleaning my toilet,
and my leaders promise they will catch you—

and this is only just, only—

the poem breaks under an alien sky,

 where pity is rightly dead,

so said Virgil to Dante in what
circle of hell I forget, but

who am I to doubt it?
It was Virgil and he knew well
the machinery of night, the merciless force it takes
to get from point A to

Ruth amid the alien corn,

but that's beside the point

which may even be the point—

     Amen.

From The Chapter On Free Verse in Paul Fussel's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form

My notes: Poetic Meter and Poetic Form is one of those rare text books that are genuine literature, as sane and as well written as EB White's and William Strunk's The Elements of Style. I have included my glosses and commentary and will note them in parenthesis with equal signs. I will give you excerpts for a few days until the whole chapter is included. The newer version of the book does not include this free verse section, More's the pity. If you want to know the sources of your being, if you need a sure footed guide, there's none better than Paul Fussel. Stephen Dobyns has a chapter on free verse in Best Words/Best Order. It's a good read, but I'll put my money on Fussel. He's a far better prose stylist.

Free Verse

The main nineteenth- and twentieth-century departure from traditional systems of metrical regularity deserves a chapter by itself. The first problem is the very term free verse. If we are persuaded with T.S. Eliot that "there is no freedom in art," the term free verse will strike us as a flagrant oxymoron. But if free verse seems an affront to logic, the term has the merit of familiarity and is thus handier than the pedantic cadenced verse or the awkward non-metrical verse or the pretentious vers libre. We will use free verse, but we will want to be aware that free has approximately the status it has in the expression Free World. That is, free, sort of.

Whatever it is, a poetic medium must be more than a faddish relaxation of a former convention if it has served as the medium of major achievements by such undoubted modern masters as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and D.H Lawrence. Whatever it means, free verse designates the modern style (Fussel means this in terms of it being the normative mode of writing contemporary poetry), and anyone aspiring to experience the permanent masterpieces of modern poetry must achieve some understanding of its techniques.

"It is no use inventing fancy laws for free verse," says D.H. Lawrence, and we can agree. But an empirical study of thousands of free verse poems will lead any reader to some generalizations by way of definition. Like other distinguishable verse mediums, free verse-- despite its name-- follows its own more-or-less strict imperatives. Two of these are instantly obvious to ear and eye. The free verse poem establishes a texture without metrical regularity-- metrical meter is as much an anomaly in a free verse poem as want of it is in a metered poem. And most free verse poems eschew rhyme as well (this was written before spoken word which often emplys rhyme in a free verse structure. One reason Ogden Nash's poems are funny, indeed, is that they offer studiously self-conscious rhymes in an unmetrical texture where we have been taught not to expect rhyme. For example, the beginning of "The Terrible People":

People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who

haven't what they want that they really don't want it.

And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.

I don't mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it,

But I do think they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.

Other imperatives honored by many modern free verse practitioners are more mechanically typographical or orthographical: abandoning the tradition that each poetic line begins with a capital (since re-instituted by the sad fact that micro-soft insists upon it), for example; or forsaking punctuation;or exhibiting a just-folks idiosyncrasy in informal abbreviations like i.e, and etc., or like Pound's sez, shd, wd, sd, yr, cd for says, should. would, said, your, and could; or using things like "!", which would surely defeat the most resolute scanner of a standard metrical line (LOL could now be added, and any number of shortenings bred by email).

Other traditions of free verse work to determine the conduct and often the theme of the whole poem. As Theodore Roethke observes, the technique of enumeration or catalog has been standard in free verse since early Hebrew practice as in Job where the Lord runs through a catalog of items indicating Job's ignorance and weakness:

Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee or abide by thy crib?

Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? or wings and feathers
unto the ostrich?

Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with
thunder?

Dost the hawk fly by thy wisdom,and stretch her wings toward the
south?
Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high?

In the middle of the eighteenth century Christopher Smart catalogued the attributes of his cat Jeoffrey in free verse lines recalling those of the Old Testament or of Christian liturgy:

For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider
himself
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his fore-paws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the fore-paws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself,

And so on up to

For tenthly he goes in quest of food.

(Edwin Hirsch featured this work in How To Read a Poem. I hope he gave a nod to Fussel).

If the catalogs of ancient epic (think the ships in the Iliad or the shield of Achilles section in the same) seem to lie behind the heroic enumerations in the Ossianic prose-poems of Smart's contemporary James Macpherson and in Blake's loose-lined prophetic books, Whitman's enumerations intimate a sometimes astonishing equality in the things catalogued, and we get a foreshadowing of the often ironic juxtapositions of the Waste Land and the Cantos. One of Whitman's happiest near-juxtapositions:

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and
pimpled neck,...
The president holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great
secretaries

(What Fusell does not point out here is how close this technique comes to attaining the power of original metaphor by letting unlike things exist in proximity, eschewing direct comparison and letting the reader make the connection or be amused by the lack thereof. Kenneth Burke speaks of this as perspectives by incongruity. Great energy is released by not listing in logical priority, and Whitman shows his democratic bent to the umpth degree by bringing the great secretaries and the prostitutes with pimply necks into the same stanza together. This technique is at the heart of comedy - especially when the "incongruity" of things suddenly seems to make a sort of sense. Smart's comic energy comes from writing about a cat in a style usually employed for subjects of great import. The incongruity between subject and style is a prime force in all comic structures. It is also of great use when a writer is trying to make a connection between higher and lower orders of priority. To bring the great secretaries down to the level of prostitutes and to raise the prostitutes to the level of the president and his council is what Burke would call "transcendence downward." By investing the "lower" order with aspects of the higher, and by implying a connection between them, one creates metaphor and mystical oxymoron made conspicuous by its absence. This assumes that we have a culture which recognizes incongruity, which may not be true anymore. Think of T.V in which the death of a president may be sponsored by a soap commercial. But back to Fussel):

Because in free verse the length of the line is determined by feel rather than established pattern, a crucial problem for the poet is knowing when to break lines, 'I think very few people can manage free verse," says Auden. 'You need an infallible ear like D. H. Lawrence, to determine where the lines should end." (Many free verse writers now impose what Fussel would call "false form" on their free verse structures, shaping them into tercets and couplets and quatrains to give a fixed "form" to what does not merit a fixed form. This is odd, indeed, and contradicts one of the prime motives of American free verse: to release the varying energies of the unmetered line, and create greater fluidity and variance. With false form, one does not need an "infallible" ear. One does not need an ear at all, and much contemporary free verse poetry proves this by employing the very English stanzas the early modernists rebelled against. Just look at a hundred lit mags to see what I mean - phony tercets and couplets everywhere! Nothing organic to the true flow of the thought. Everything neat and box-like because this makes it easier to pretend the poem isn't prose, and editors grow anal about neatness and symmetry - even if it is false. But back to Fussel):

... two possibilities in the treatment of line-endings suggest two ultimate kinds of free verse. One kind, which John Hollander designates the oracular exhibits unvarying line integrity, often with anaphora (repetition at the beginning of each line, as in Ginsberg's Howl or much of the more formal Whitman:

Welcome are all earth's lands, each for its kind,
Welcome are lands of pine and oak,
Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig,
Welcome are lands of gold...
                       (from "Song of the Broad Axe")

The effect is that of public speaking (Anaphora is a traditional device in speech making rhetoric. Consider Martin Luther King's "I have A Dream Speech" or Robert Haydn's poem,"Frederick Douglas." Repetition is essential to the memorability of the spoken word). But if constant enjambment takes place - that is, if the sense and syntax of one line runs into the next so that a hearer would have trouble ascertaining the line breaks - we have a very different kind of free verse, a kind we can designate as meditative and ruminative or private. It is this kind of vigorously enjambed free verse which has become a common style in the last twenty years or so as a vehicle for themes that are sly or shy (or "anti-poetic") or uncertain, or quietly ironic, or furtive (And might I add, it is the normative style for bad or bland free verse prose with line breaks). W.C. Williams, Frank O'HAra, Robert Bly, Robert Creely, William S. Merwin are adepts at this style. To Whitman's line-by-line public proclamations above we can contrast Williams's run-on domestic confessional "note":

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the ice box

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


(Note that Williams stanza form is fully organic and justified even if he breaks up the sentences. Each stanza introduces a new idea or further development of the preceding idea. Workshop teachers would caution against one word lines. We have lost the energy and sprawl of Williams. Back to Fussel):

One thing notable here is the way the title itself "runs on" into the opening: the illusion is that the poem is so magically organic that not even a part traditionally considered separable can distance itself. (The poem published in Body Parts called "The Alligator in The Sewer" employs this same trick.)

(We will include more of this splendid chapter tomorrow. A point I would add is the potential free verse has of isolating words or clauses so that not only the line, but sentence structure is given new and often startling impetus. Our most conventional magazines now favor a medium line in a poem no more than a page long. They want it clean, and neat, and visually appealing. Some questions: Should one always choose symmetry and order over ungainliness and what I might call a "vital" ugliness? I think not. More tomorrow).

Getting Rejected

I've just had a batch of poems rejected from anderbo on line. Figures. I get rejected until someone hears me read. The great thing about this is that rejection happened in 8 hours-- no time to delude myself into thinking they were weighing my work. They probably reject poems about dandelions on sight.I also sent them an Ars Poetica (always a mistake)Actually, I didn't send it. My girlfriend did. I didn't even pick the poems. (Yes, I'm trying to put the blame elsewhere).I'm too lazy to let a couple of snots reject me. Who knows? I hope the mother fuckers at anderbo die on the gallows. Knowing my luck, they'll have poems represented in Best American poetry. Well, they don't have my poems to kick around anymore! I'll post them tomorrow and you can all decide why they were rejected-- or not. That's up to you. Please do so. In the meantime, I'll give you the web address for the pricks and perhaps you'll have better luck. If you do, I don't want to know.I'll hate you. They like "regular poems-- nothing experimental." So I guess that means I must be experimental (I like that. The alternative is the poems were shit). Perhaps dandelions were too adventurous for the blessed assholes. In the poem, I compare the dandelion in its fuzzy spore state to the heads of old ladies. I am gleefully kicking them in a field and watching the spores explode. The old ladies cry: "Touch me!" Oh well... Good thing this is a computer, or you would see tears blotching my letters. Amen. Here's the online site:

anderbo.com

A Dragon Remembers While Awaiting St. George

Things I'd dearly love to see
before I die:
the knees
of the Land O Lakes Maiden
pushed up and transformed into breasts,
and the girl splashing her legs
from a bucket of milk
in that movie by Bunuel,
and a full solar eclipse
or truly copper colored hair,
or the corner of Dewey and Rahway Ave,
just across from Turtle and Hughes mufflers
where I would stand as a child
and wait for my father's bus,
and the green yellow light that glows
from the windows of buses,
and one girl wearing my blue flannel shirt
her black hair wet, her fingers prodding
a Bach Coral from my cheap guitar,
her foot, with the bubble gum pink scar
on the left pinkie toe
shining forth from her dark tan
as she taps out the song on the torn linoleum;
and to spin dizzy under the Horse Chestnuts in full bloom,
or the mimosas, or any blossoming thing,
or to stand holding you on a frozen lake,
in mid-winter, through four layers of coat,
sweater, flannel, thermal underwear,
and your breath, and your breath, and your breath,
and mine, too, causing great puffs of smoke to rise:
to see and to stare and to let things pass,
except I never do--
having always been a dragon, a great hoarder of treasure,
and so let George come, with his holy sword,
with his lust to slay evil, with his white steed,
his humorless zeal, that philistine, that
enemy of the sensual, let him come with his
talent for lopping off heads,
I'll put on a show, maybe graze him with a fang,
remind him of his flesh, burn off an eye brow or two,
then lay down with great drama in a pool of my own blood.
It's the least that I can do.

What a Poem Does Instead of What it "Means"

As a writer, as someone who is tinkering around with the composition of poems, you should be more concerned with what a poem "does" than with what it "means." Meaning is paraphrase, and any good poem surpasses its paraphrase. It can not surpass what it "does," for what it does is what it is. Does it rhyme? Does it use short lines, long lines? Is the line important to the success or failure of the poem (despite endless blather about the "line" in poetry, most free verse is, indeed, prose with line breaks). Does the poem effect you emotionally or intellectually, or in some brackish water between the emotional and intellectual? Is it letting you enter it's activity or does it remain aloof, and, if so, is the aloofness accidental (a failure on the part of the poet to make herself clear) or is it strategic? Does the poem end up somewhere else than from where it first embarked? Are its images consistent with a mood, or does it show conflicting moods through its imagery? If there is a single "meaning" then is that meaning too obvious for your tastes?

This last question leads us from the poem to the reader. What is the reader doing? We all carry a preconceived notion of "poem" in our minds, some sort of ill defined yet stringent template. The mind makes a decision almost instantly when encountering a new aesthetic wrinkle. The neurons either fire off in favor of the new possibility, or they refuse to fire, and we refuse to fire for many reasons. I will name three here:

1. We've seen this sort of thing in another form before, and, even though it is new, it feels old and tired to us.
2. We are comfortable in our boundaries as to what a poem can be, and we will not admit this new upstart to the club.
3. We don't have enough information yet about what a poem can be, and so we can't process this new wrinkle.

I will give you three reasons why the neurons might fire off and aesthetic pleasure occur:

1. The poem is doing something new, yet it touches some part of us that says "that's just so - exactly" and we are excited, as if this newness also were the ancient return of the seasons - a new fall or spring or winter. This is what I call the great accomplishment of the "anciently sudden" and "suddenly ancient." The thing isn't just "new," not just novel - it seems inevitable, as if we should have always known it. My god, why didn't I think of that? Truly original (as opposed to merely novel) work always has this feeling of inevitability. Not everyone responds to it. Many readers are incapable of trusting the new because they yearn for something that anchors them to a tradition. They are limited (all readers are limited). Others only like something if it is new (but they, too, are limited. and will like the poem only because it is novel, which may be as bad as disliking it because it is new). Great poems touch both the strings of our hard wiring (our ur poem - our ideal), and those new strings which the brain seeks to grow - the new synapse, the new way of firing off.

An intelligent reader picks up a new poem with all the curiosity of an ape looking at a new stone. Will it be a good weapon for cracking bone and sucking out marrow? Will it be good for something? If not, perhaps its unique color is enough for the pleasure it gives.

A reader needs to examine his or her aesthetics, to know what he or she gets pleasure from, before judging the poem before him. Often, it is not the poem, but the reader who is limited. Just as often, the poem sets off an alarm of previous boredom or disdain. It's cliched, it talks about fairies, "I don't get it" whatever. An editor from Barrow Street said: "We don't like poems that use I and my." He qualified this by adding: "Of course, good poems are written using I." The editor was giving useful information. He was saying this rule was one enforced by aesthetic preference - an intentional aesthetic. We will become a better reader if we know our intentional limits (I don't read rhymed poetry, etc, etc). We will become great readers and critics if we know are unintentional limits.

So the effective way to read a peer's work is to: 1, gather as much information as possible as to what the poem is doing or attempting to do. and 2: know ones aesthetic boundaries, both intentional and unintentional.

In a work shop, intentional boundaries should be the exclusive to the teacher. Unfortunately this is not the case, and the participants often impose intentional rules that have no place. Learn to inhabit the poet's intention and limits - not your own. You can do this by examining why you may like or dislike a poem as much as by examining the poem. This is just and confers dignity upon the poet's intentions. Know your own limits-- especially the unintended ones. You can learn what you don't like, and avoid it in your own poetry. You can also learn what gives you pleasure and attempt to incorporate it into your work. So, when you ask what a poem is doing, try to figure out its intended and unintended effects. Remember this rule: when reading anything, we are also reading and revising, or failing to read and revise ourselves.