I'd say (say!) the mustard seed quartered like silt in its own Spirit
& breathing us out
can even arouse the envy of the doughty-petalled with
molten roots
The difference between deity & the dirt, eh?
—Eaarth by name and cause!—and of all the dirty sunrises
the tallest, coral-eye
at each wrist, & so delicate a weaner can now crush her
And what wouldn't leafy signify? such as the fractious being
of cicatrices
(of Life) that rails against an endless Morder of instinct
for flight, pleasance,
and tears by design, too, and knows even to push a Cajun
root up & out, rum-thirsty!
And like the leaden-legged full of her incandescent
surprises-
yes! leggy & swollen to the knee-
it'd be right lamentable to cull out sap just by opening—ha!—
& deliver the salty most
beribboned calf of a smile, wet with work, ever to fall
on a lord's honey seas
Betrayed by a smile, and caring even less for yr fiery bees
she's any vine, with leaf, a proud valley
& Cajun tomb
—for likely to be etched is anything mythical, & what's more
mythical than the tomb?—
-Oh! j'ai l'impression que je la connais-
stately dank and eyes as colourful as envy of the molten root
below!
scintillations ah! only the terrible coal keep & that to late atoll greens
like to go
Trying to find bears for relief & depressed vines can hold you close
to these inedibles
She, this deep One into which stallions retreat like the plain at
the northerly most cold there is,
is the indubitability of every crystallitic, and yes! where the feet
have indubitably turned crystallitic
By so much dearer to thee
She's a cascade away from the likes of me, & deepens as heart, who
looks for dawn fully,
oh! peaty heart,
& lies hot under the woody detritus of several trees-of-heaven!
She who puled for thee
*Eaarth is the name environmentalist Bill McKibben gives to the planet we used to call Earth before global warming.
17 comments:
"Rail: When did that shift happen in the presentation of American poetics? How does that relate to the Myth of the Accessible Poem?
Bernstein: The issues about difficulty and accessibility, as they are often now addressed, go back, in large part, to Modernism, though there is also a much longer time frame. Attack of the Difficult Poems really means to take this on in full scale. You could say that this is the centennial of difficult poetry. A Hundred Years: Difficult and Proud. As I say in the book, the kinds of difficulties in Modernism are not singular. The number one difficulty I address has to do with the radically changing culture and society from which American poetry emerges. As radios and skyscrapers, cars and film made for a different kind of poetry, so did a shift from a poetry of the countryside to a poetry of the cities. For Anglophile conservatives, the encroachment of the vernaculars of immigrants and African-Americans, as well as the voices of women and the dispossessed, is and remains the first difficulty. As for form: the difficulty of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams—who use only everyday words you don’t have to look up and who don’t use allusions to the high literary tradition—is very different from the difficulty of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Now, is poetry more difficult because it no longer refers to Homer and classical references or is it less difficult? Those are fundamental and irresolvable problems.
What’s difficult for many of us is what’s unfamiliar: whether references, or forms, or points of view: subjectivities as much as objectivities. Some who bemoan difficulty in poetry are not particularly interested in poetry, so the argument against difficulty can seem like it’s urging poets to write poetry for the poetry phobic: those who want to swim but not get wet. There are some poets who appeal to readers who don’t like poetry. And these often can be mainstream favorites: here is a poet you can enjoy. Why, it’s almost like… prose! But the forms and expressions in poetry are no more universal than people are, than cultures are, than history is. It’s the opacity, density, particularity; the forms you can’t find anywhere else, the saying it otherwise; that some of us crave.
One time I went to a hockey game, when I was living in Buffalo, where hockey was a huge thing. I sat up at the top and thought this is very beautiful, the ice skaters crisscrossing back and forth on the ice, the patterns they made. But I had no idea what was going on with the record of the two teams, the plays, the history of the players. I didn’t say to my friend this was too difficult for me, because I understood that in order to know what was going on in one hockey game I’d have to see many more games, follow the story, the teams, know the written and unwritten rules. We don’t associate sports with difficulty, but someone like me, just coming onto a hockey game, does find it unfamiliar, refreshingly so. Those people who want to spend time with poetry, that are committed to it as an art form, learn the ropes. But the difference with hockey is that contemporary and Modernist poetry is not part of mass culture or taught in most schools, so there is little or no orientation to many coming upon formally radical Modernist or contemporary poems for the first time. It’s foreign. Poetry’s unpopularity, or anyway the unpopularity of the kind of poetry I want, is part of its cultural condition and so part of its advantage. Its unpopularity may even be popular; that’s poetic logic for you. How about saying that poetry is the research and development wing of verbal language, better understood as collaborative thinking and investigation, at least for some of the practitioners? It doesn’t necessarily express an individual author’s biographical feelings in a conventionally lyrical manner—a great deal of poetry does that, but a great deal doesn’t. The elitism is not poetry’s, but commodity culture’s, which says that value comes exclusively from the market or audience share. Forms of culture that are not immediately accessible to a mass or popular audience also matter. Difficulty is not an obstacle, it is a material means for engagement with the social real. Yes we can."
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/books/in-conversation-charles-bernstein-with-adam-fitzgerald
Thanks for the Bernstein passages, Anonymous
I agree with Bernstein that the question of "difficulty and accessibility" in poetry is for the most part irresolvable. The hockey game analogy is very good.
I really couldn't care less
whether or not
Y'all undertand my "stuff"
nor that it is "difficult" or
re:sides
inside/outside
of ANY pre-scribed definition/expectation
the Bernstein passage not as "useful" (to me) as
Anons follow-up
at least
j(ust like my expensive sumi-e brush)
it has a mind of it s own
Anon N+1
Thanks, Anon N+1
I'm afraid I'm a little too thin-skinned for my own good sometimes. Criticism is still something I tend to internalize.
But at least it's mine: with "a mind of its own", too.
yeah
all of these term papers are getting a bit "old"
"The number one difficulty I address has to do with the radically changing culture and society from which American poetry emerges."
&
"For Anglophile conservatives, the encroachment of the vernacular of immigrants and African-Americans, as well as the voices of women and the dispossessed, is and remains the first difficulty. (etc)."
political correctness, all-inclusive, "party-line, rote
(in the vernacular) Horse Shit personified !
Anon N + 2
ps
I am guessing that nobody is REALLY reading this poem!
it s brilliant and there are many many lines that speak to the ancient possibilities we-all mumble-on & into.
(Mother) Earth (shldnt "Eaarth" be oneless "a'-less?)
"stately dark and eyes as colorful as envy of the molten root"
"... only the terrible coal keep & that to lateatoll greens
like to go"
"... at the northerly most cold there is"
"the leggy & swollen"
& should not "Morder" be "Murder"
like the very first rule of poeting/arting is to "murder/kill" the ego
rather than 'sape-ing The Muse
I would also have this poet "play" with use of "and" and "&" I think that the poem demands either using one or the other throughout I prefer "&"
there is/was several other lines that REALLY 'grabbedmyMe"
however, it is now past noon and time for a buddha-beer run.
(there are also soundings in some of these phrasings of, say, Ths Wyatt the Elder
I certainly appreciate the (style) behind the compsitioning of this piece...
anon N+ 4
Frum 1-anon to the other, this is fun. think of the tradition of anonymous poetry and we connect. Cheers to Mister Conrad. Miss Anonymous
Thanks, 1-anon,
I wonder how many of us would write poetry if nobody could identify us as the author.
Anon+4, thank you,
you're gracious & kind but it's more than I deserve.
O did you see this?http://donshare.blogspot.com/2011/06/i-think-that-i-shall-never-see-poem-as.html
It's fun!
And now before I appear rude, I enjoyed your poem for Elizabeth May...'the mustard seed quartered'
'and breathing us out'
'arouse the envy of the doughty-petalled'
'The difference between deity & dirt, eh?"
I dare say your work is earth rooted and that you write in the Wordsworthian tradition of free verse. I say that knowing full-well it seems a dated term, but in poetry, nothing is 'outdated' is it, now?
I have sometimes asked myself what your opinion is of the controversial ideas of Harold Bloom?
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-18106157/returning-bloom-john-ashbery.html
and this article may interest you as well.
How did your poetry readings work out ?
And not least
'... the salty most
beribboned calf of a smile' ....
Anon,
Bloom's become too mainstream for my liking: he's as my friend Ed would say more "term papers" stuff, getting older by the decade.
And he's a bit of a sexist, no? How many women has he included in his celebrated "canon"?
The Wordsworthian characterization brings a tear to my eye: I'm so happy my lines reveal the reverence of the man & his writings (all of which I've read & reread & reread: and I do mean "all"). There's also the unmistakable pull of Saint-John Perse. Unmistakable.
AWWWW, MAN ! you jus gotta bring up St-John Perse !
about the first book that I ever bought with my own $7.50
that second hard-bound EXILE !
second purchase was Winds
& of course Anabases ...
in EXILE I just found a piece of paper at his
RAINS
&, in my own hand:
& the Earth
in its winged seeds, like a poet in his thoughts
travels ...
did he write this? did I write this ?
(can hardly wait for the beer to chill so that I can "getabuzzon & call up my new Muse
& 'get-at-it'
this new Muse, I th'nk, is The Real Deal
as
She is much cuteher than the previous 37
& smarter
Anon the 21 st
Anon the 21st,
that's the one. I'll even go so far as to say—even in the age of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E butchery— it's the purest 'poetry' I've ever encountered. Some of his lines (French or in translation)can leave me breathless:
E.g. "Childhood, my love, I loved evening too: it is the hour for going out" (from "Praises")
and
"Like milch-camels, gentle beneath the shears and sewn with mauve/scars, let the hills march forth under the scheme of the harvest sky" (from "Anabasis")
This is why I rail against post-avants everywhere
yeah
and coo-does to T. S. Eliot & his translation of
Anabasis
check out his (Eliot's) Preface to the revised 1949
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc edition.
It opens:
"I AM BY no means convinced that a poem like 'Anabasis' requires a preface at all. It is better to read such six times, and dispense with a preface. But when a poem is presented in the form of {...}."
sounds a bit like your advice (read the poem'justasitis.... its-self ,yourself) in your
preface to SG...
Seems anon does well here. it''s an ancient tradition, non? Mister George Steiner, in some book I forget which __Wait real presences? talks about this business of invisible and anonymous remark, gloss, and commentary. I think one has to wonder of a name is anything more than 'proper' in this context.As for Harold Bloom, I have never read her? works. hahahaha.
Anon,
I like your anti-Bloom sense of humour and choice of literary critics: George Steiner is second only to Eliot. I remember seeing him in an "Ideas" segment, lecturing at Windsor (I think), and talking about how the future Nobel winners will never come from "writing classes": I believe he said to look for them among the young writers sitting in cafes in Eastern Europe.
A critic after my heart!
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