Poetry is badly trivialized (and, in Donald Hall's way of talking, made into the "McPoem") when it's designated an April activity which poets everywhere are expected to celebrate through token acts of writing. The gesture is fake & insincere, designed to turn it into a spectator sport. It's just another way to institutionalize the poet's calling, another aspect of the "spectacle" it's become: writing class, performance & publication are, in fact, all departments in Poetry Inc. to which poets pay their dues if they want to be recognized. In fact, it dishonours the lives of poets everywhere who've had to face imprisonment, death & real alienation through self-expression (Radnóti Miklós, Joseph Brodsky,Václav Havel, José Martí, Paul Celan, García Lorca, Forugh Farrokhzad, Liu Xiaobo etc.). I will celebrate a 'poetry month' only when poets in our part of the world have to face real persecution for their work.
April will always be to me only one thing: Cancer Awareness month. I've lost to cancer too many friends, relatives & acquaintances. I won't dare for a moment to share this month with anything that has the potential to divert people's attention away from the vital issues of cancer and cancer research. Compared to this poetry (certainly as it's practiced in North America) is a frivolous pastime for people who are little able to appreciate what commitment to art really means.
24 comments:
Strange, Conrad. I don't really think much of National Poetry Month, since it can lead to bad work (but what cannot?) and because I want things to be International. But I don't see any way to argue that participation in it is a way to institutionalize oneself as a poet. It's just not considered a serious enough pursuit to serve the vague process of institutionalization.
But how can this celebratory month actually dishonor the lives of imprisoned poets? I don't see any way to make that argument, no connection at all. And if we are to avoid trivial activities in order not to dishonor such folks, what exactly would we be left to do? Should we live our lives as if ourselves imprisoned or by participating only in serious pursuits? The month has nothing to do with persecution. Primarily it's about promotion, and maybe it has some effect there.
(Of course, I'm the proprietor of the lesser known and much smaller International Pwoermd Writing Month, which, I suppose, people could claim is even more trivial. But I see this as an exercise in creativity, which will produce some good work and some not. Increasing the chances for the development of good work seems a reasonable enough goal for me. So far, I've been impressed with what Gary Barwin's produced, but that might go without saying with Gary's work, and certainly he'd be creating without this month.)
Celebratory months, however, aren't of much importance to me. I'm writing a poem a day minimum for an entire year, and actually probably have done so for the past three years without paying attention. I don't need encouragement to produce.
Turning to disease, cancer isn't something that affects people I know much. It's heart disease that kills off my family, that will probably kill off me, that will probably do so for my father and brother. Yet I'd have no interest in heart disease month. It's fine to have one, if there is one, and maybe it will encourage people to take steps to avoid some dangerous personal habits and maybe it will help raise money for research. And that will be good.
But my focus is not disease or its cures. Mine is poetry. And I'm about as serious about it as one can be, and I'm sure there are plenty of people participating in National Poetry Month (I am not except maybe by default) who are as well, and whether or not they are in danger of being persecuted for their art.
Geof
Thank you, Geof
I appreciate the time and thought you put into this: your views are well taken & always welcome here.
I've lately rethought poetry, and its cultural significance, even going so far as to equate the avant-garde with social-political activism of the Bouazizi type. In other words, I'm beginning to see poetry (the act of'making') in a purely material way as activity affecting the commons and every aspect of life in a globalized world.I reserve the avant-garde for activity that sometimes that must amount to acts of self-immolation or imprisonment or execution by fascist firing squads. A radical form of "self-valorization" that doesn't amount to theory and poetry games.
I'm virulently anti-intellectual (as you've probably surmised): tired of the academicization of something that ought to mean 'life-and-death' to us. Now, of course, in comfortable North America the very ideal of poetry I'm suggesting is almost inconceivable. And that's precisely the problem.
I suppose, I can see how these conclusions of yours have moved your thinking, but I'm still unconvinced, let's say. I think, though, that we'd have to live in a more repressive culture than we do for anyone to reach your goal for the avant-garde.
And I can't see the connection between imprisonment for one's views and the avant-garde. Much of the time, writers are imprisoned for stated political beliefs, not the manner of their poetry-making. You are conflating the idea of dissident political action and avant-garde poetry. And there may often be such connections but they are not logically required or in practical evidence. And why would persecution be a requirement of an artist?
I just can't see that as esthetically important, and art is centrally about esthetics, not politics. I think you want a dedication to art that leads to the possibility of persecution and then the proof of status by accepting, rather avoiding, that persecution. But still this is about politics, not art.
Actually, I don't think you're anti-intellectual at all, just anti-academic or anti-crazy-intellectual. You're looking for a steadfast dedication to art, not something transitory and without substance.
Geof
Geof,
that you are serious about your craft is pretty obvious: nobody's processed, catalogued and published work as meticulously (& as generously) as you have. This sort of precision and well-articulated presentation of the materiality of work (drawing from the fecund tradition of Mac Low, Coolidge,Finlay,Saroyan, bpNichol, etc) has always been the mark of the type of poetics you, Barwin, Bok, et al practice. But it's one that's also slavishly devoted to theory &, become (imo) practically mainstream in its appeal.In fact, the fashionable 'otherness' of traditional avant-gardism has been expropriated by global capital, making the notion itself obsolete.
Yes, I am redefining the avant- garde and what seems like a conflation to you is actually a type of hybrdization of forms that's been occurring for quite some time now (at least since the 80s). By new avant-garde work I mean the very potential of work to alter the 'material' conditions of life itself: in other words, the radical, like the militant or Bouazizi political activist (and for me this Tunisian street-vendor is this century's first radical 'maker': the first to create by rebelling), is a figure between whom and the citizens of a globalized world (the "multitude")there's no appreciable difference. Remember: in the globalized world nothing makes you really different from mainstream culture. It was a point I was trying to make in another discussion about VisPo.
Distinctions are dead, such as the one you've drawn between "esthetics" and "politics". Geof, the avant-garde always been political: it's inscribed in blood. Work, whether banned or allowed to flourish, will be radical always in the sense that it is both liberatory for both poet and his audience.bpNichol was probably the last poet I know to really stir things up in Canada: he once caused quite a stir in the House of Commons with his poetry.
Only a poetry that relates this directly to existence and whose forms can no longer be separated from life and death has the right to share space with cancer awareness month.
try
Apollinaire's ca 1914 THE POET ASSASSINATED
here is a 'tad' of (from his character, Horace Togarth,
who just might have been a real person... but from what I am gleaning from GA and his 'band of merrie men):
"True glory has abandoned poetry for science, philosophy, acrobatics, philanthropy, sociology, etc.
Today's poets are only good for coming into prize money, which they do not earn since they do not work at all and most of them (except singers and a few others) have no talent and therefore no excuse. As
for those who have some kind of gift, they are even more harmful, for, if they get nothing, they will all make more noise than a regiment and din our ears with their cursed stuff. (etc)."
nice tennis-match going on... then as now....
Awesome quote, Ed
"As
for those who have some kind of gift, they are even more harmful, for, if they get nothing, they will all make more noise than a regiment and din our ears with their cursed stuff. (etc)."
Time was when the avant-garde was a nasty sort of fellow you'd never want to meet. But he was there, and giving you the dirty underside of things. As he's supposed to do.
as I was about to add Horace Togarth an invention/a device of GA's not a real person..
those guys.... back then.... invented what they needed
at the very instant that they needed it...
then 'joshed' about it....
like UBU, et cetera
Or maybe there are those of us who have no contact whatsoever with the academic or industrial apparatus of poetry, who live in places where we don't know any other poets, who are passionate about reading and writing poetry, who welcome the opportunity to help create and join in a community that is focused on one thing and one thing only: the joy of writing poetry. The poets I know are mostly completely uninstitutionalized, receive and expect no compensation and virtually no recognition for their work, and yet spend hours and hours of their time on it when they could be doing something else that would actually pay them something and earn them some status in the world. Sorry if that's not "commitment" enough for you. No, we're not persecuted. What the hell does that have to do with anything? Should we not do *anything* until all persecution of everybody ends everywhere around the globe?
The amount of venom you're directing at this utterly harmless event seems insane to me, and anti-intellectual only in the sense that you think your intellectualism is better than the intellectualism of some other people whose politics might not be the same as yours. Your entire argument is an intellectual one and completely fails to take into account (and in fact tramples and spits on) the feelings, the hopes, the passions of thousands of essentially powerless and innocent people.
And I'm really, really sorry for the people in your life who have lost their lives to cancer, but frankly, cancer is also primarily a first-world problem -- most people in developing nations don't live long enough to have to worry about it. If you want to alleviate the maximum suffering from physical disease in the world, cancer is about the last place you should be putting your research dollars. Oh, but I forgot. Cancer is meaningful to you personally because of your personal experience. Huh. Guess I shouldn't be so insensitive as to criticize your involvement with that cause, then, huh?
touched a nerve, eh?
why not tell us how you really feel?
try Thich Nhat Hanh's book
ANGER Wisdom for Cooling the Flames
....& speaking towards a non-intellecual intelectual-ism (via that hack-writer/poet James Joyce
look what I just found:
http://www.samvelmkrtchyan.am/ maybe Geof knows what written-language this is..
my guess Armenian
Yep, Armenian. And the country code (.am) helps confirm it.
Melissa,
firstly, thanks for stopping by & leaving a comment: greatly appreciated. I'm glad I've discovered your blog where links take me to familiar names,sites and publications.
I'd like to say I'm prepared to relent a little in the case of Eastern writing. Given its transnational & communitarian spirit (thanks mostly to people like Susumu Tagikuchi), a celebration of haiku or short verse forms modelled on National Poetry Month is appropriate & desirable. Kigo in haiku certainly make it a seasonal event, and the orchestration of poetic voices in renga gives it a definite global appeal.
But I really had the Western canon in mind when I made the institutionalization charge, and through dialogue with Geof I named the avant-garde tradition in particular as the type of poetry least of all entitled to any special monthly recognition.In fact, traditionally the avant-garde would have been properly appalled at the notion of this sort of mainstream appeal. Perhaps I should have made that clearer.
But despite the Eastern writing disclaimer, I'm prepared to stand by all my other comments regarding the silliness of designating a poetry month. Until the North American poet is prepared to sacrifice life, freedom & sanity, poetry ought never to share space with "cancer awareness".
I learned MY particular "sanity" from The Three Haicuts
tried to find the flip side (Going Crazy) of this (I have the 45 somewhere)
but here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He4S5UdQ76Y
never missed the weekly Sid Caesar show on LIVE TV
(The Show of Shows)
he/they taught me everything I now know about Poetry/Art
we went Crazy to maintain our Sanity
Imogene Coca was the 4ourth of this group...
Conrad,
Thanks for your calm, civil response to my inexcusably intemperate one. I hope I can manage to speak more rationally this time around.
I (and probably 99% of the other people involved in National Poetry Month activities) really don't know enough (or anything, actually) about avant-garde poetry to be able to speak to your position regarding it, although I have to say that given the level of your discourse on this subject I think you may want to rethink your claim to be "anti-intellectual." :)
What I do want to speak to is your assertion that National Poetry Month has no right to exist in the face of National Cancer Month. And I am speaking as someone who last year lost her father to cancer, and to one of the most horrible deaths I have ever heard of a cancer patient experiencing -- he literally screamed in agony almost continually for the last forty-eight hours of his life, no matter how much pain medication was administered to him. So it's not that I have no understanding of what a terrible thing cancer can be. I loved my father and I wish desperately that that agony could have been spared him.
But I have never given any money to cancer research or supported any fundraising or awareness-raising efforts for that cause and doubt I ever will. For one thing, as I mentioned earlier, in objective terms, cancer research is already vastly overfunded relative to its place as a killer of human beings, simply because it primarily affects the first-world inhabitants who have all the money.
But more importantly: I don't think that that agony was the biggest tragedy of my father's life. He was seventy when he died, and he had lived most of his life in another terrible kind of pain -- the pain of depression, of profound anxiety, of an inability to find a meaning for his existence. I know how terrible that kind of pain is because I too suffered from it from most of my own adult life. And what relieved me of it was poetry. Both poetry itself, the challenge and the glory of the art, and the community surrounding it.
Even if cancer were cured tomorrow, we would still all die someday, and on average -- since cancer is primarily a disease of older people -- probably not all that much later than we already do. And many if not most of us in the species would still die horribly -- of hunger, of agonizing viral and bacterial infections, of massive wounds, of heart and lung diseases that cause pain and terrifying shortness of breath. Funding cancer research is about saying, "No, I don't want to die!" and ignoring that regardless, you will.
Supporting poetry, on the other hand, is about saying, "I want to live! While I can, I want to live as fully as possible! I want to make art, I want to have meaning in my existence, I want not to be seventy and dying and regretting all the years I spent bitter and miserable and wondering what the point of it all is."
So there is no way you can convince me that my, or anyone else's, Poetry Month activities are making the world a worse place, or, frankly, that National Cancer Month activities are making the world a significantly better place. Yes, some people do die prematurely of cancer and leave behind heartbroken family and friends. A lot of people also die prematurely of suicide -- and I was almost one of them. A lot of people don't die, but wish they could, or make other people wish they could. I was definitely one of those.
I'm sorry that poetry doesn't seem like a matter of life and death to you. It is for me, and many other people I know.
Best wishes,
Melissa
Gee Melissa as you pose this (to quote you):
"as I mentioned earlier, in objective terms, cancer research is already vastly overfunded relative to its place as a killer of human beings, simply because it primarily affects the first-world i"
well you just might need a re-definition of what "objectivity" (as you 'see' it) is (all) about ?
seems very emotional as I read what you say.
and heck.. what DO you call AIDS? Measles? I guess Africa is now a "1 st World" Continent?
sorry about your dad... I'll be 70 in two weeks.
I'll most likely die of my "1 st World" disease Heart Failure... brought on by our "1 st World" causes of this pox:
Greed
Anger
Ignorance
nice reply to Conrad solidly specific.
Do some reading...
Melissa,
dialogue's sometimes bound to get heated when topics as vital to us as poetry are addressed. Poets are passionate people.
Your point about cancer being a first-world disease is interesting: and one to which I may not be all that unsympathetic. Perhaps in properly global terms, as you suggest,it's something that looks frivolous in comparison to third-world suffering that doesn't get the same media or commercial attention. Perhaps "cancer research" & the whole North American fitness and preventive care apparatus have been politicized (or expropriated by world capital) in the way I've just told Geof his experimentalist or (as he would say) more "broad based" style has been expropriated. It's something I'll have to think about.
And can poetry offer relief from the insane suffering in the world (such as your father experienced)? Yes, absolutely. Of course, there are no guarantees, are there? I just finished a volume of Anne Sexton, and can't for the life of me imagine what led her to the abyss. A poetry as rich & wonderfully self-probing as hers should in itself have given her reason to live. Why didn't the great Anne Sexton have the courage to say,
"I want not to be seventy and dying and regretting all the years I spent bitter and miserable and wondering what the point of it all is."
The mystery of suffering, I guess.
Anne Sexton.
when I was at Hopkins Anne sexton accompanied by her daughter came to read at The Peabody Institute.
a small band of us skipped out on our "no cut' seminar
that day and went to hear her read...
she read a cpl of poems out of her
To Bedlam and Part way Back (as I recall... Bedlam was an insane asylum.
anyway I marked the poems that she read...
check out this book and especially
-For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further
- The Double Image
- What's That (which concludes with:
and are there and are true.
What else is this, this intricate shape of air?
calling me, calling you.
then again closing KIND SIR: THESE WOODS (same book):
and opening my eyes, I am afraid of course
to look - this inward look that society scorns -
Still, I search in these woods and find nothing worse
than myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns.
this is a very brave Explorer... Anne Sexton
Berryman lept off of a bridge
Brautigan blew his brains out (left a note "messy isn't it?"
Lew Welsh went off into those hills with a revolver
DO 'check out" this Sexton book AND ALSO
TOUCHED WITH FIRE by Kay Redfield Jamison ... who also was at Hopkins
chapter Four:
THEIR LIFE A STORM WHEREON THEY RIDE ... Temperament and Imagination
both Dante AND Sexton included in this ....study.
many, many, many others
Thanks, Ed
yeah, I was going to mention Berryman, too: a brilliant talented guy like that!
Man, I would have loved to hear Sexton read her poetry. Johns Hopkins was quite the 'happening' place in poetry, eh?
Conrad:
I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense, but you'll inevitably be seen as a sour puss for dissing these "innocent" holidays.
Celebrations aren't about the serious side of things. Or at least that's how it's always seemed to me. Even when I'm invited, I tend to be distrustful. I think it's a character flaw.
Curtis,
perhaps you're right: "celebrations" aren't meant to be taken seriously. But I do take "words" seriously & the relationships between word & world they conjure up. A flaw of mine perhaps: "thinking too precisely on the event".
And even seemingly innocuous expressions like "poetry month" can reveal to me a world of unresolved tensions in contemporary poetry. A case of being a "sour puss"? Language and its symbolic processes (especially in poetry!) sometimes swirl in too much confusion for my liking.
as for me, since you were thinking to ask
I no longer celebrate ANY ..holiday
they are ALL too divisive, costly and phony-blowloney!
last holiday I celebrated was Thanksgiving until about 12 years ago I had night-mares about all them nice Indians who saved The Pilgrims' asses those first winters and then we "got even"
raped their women, murdered their men, and stole their land!
so much for celebratins!
as for the Poetry Scene... I NEVER go to readings not even when 'tis I doing the reading
I don't even go to see/hear Carlo Parelli ... perform
OH
I did once go down to The Library of Congress to see, hear, meet & introduce my self to Bob Creeley (we have had many mutual friends... but "they" wanted a $10 contribution to go in so I instead walked over to that saloon across fro Union Station ... an Irish pub I forget it s name it s still there
had a cpl of pints and some munchies...
oppps... I forgot my/the/your point ! Silly me.
something about Poetry? Celebration? Religion" Politics?
or some other suchness non-sense of
SA Horse of a Different Color ?
well
you "hit a nerve" with this post.. 25 comments
and not one single curse-word OR mi-spelling
no way you'll divert MY attention way
from the vital issues !
just spent the afternoon (re) reading some great amount of Anne sexton's poems...
found in a box ... the 1981 paper edition of her
THE COMPLETE POEMS
and, "little" book on top of that Carolyn Kizer's
KNOCK UPON SILENCE ( U of Washington Press, 1965)
(for my "money" both these poets are .... well Immortals
BOTH are to be "inhaled"
a book-mark in the complete (Sexton) poems opens
her-to-me-to-her
IT IS A SPRING AFTERNOON (from her LPVE POEMS 1969
Ed,
I agree: Sexton and Plath, too, the real deal in poetry.May we never go near where those two have been.
yeah
as with the Beats and manic Depression:
I was there
but instead of going in
I went around
dropping out and into running and (cheap) buddha-beer ...my meds of choice...
& typewrite-her ribbons...
Levrtov also a Master ....
the 4 Sexton, Levertov, Kizer, Plath, and Niedecker
"in it" for the poetry ... talk about "epics" or "epic journeys"
well
silence (really) is / the last word.
just got (I think) final version of my (coming) birthday 'shortie' done:
Full Moon
Here seventy years
Big fucking deal
sort of reveals me compared to them and those
just what a 'piss ant' I am
Kokkie
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