April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

An unhappy people in a happy world--
Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.
An unhappy people in an unhappy world--

Here are too many mirrors for misery.
A happy people in an unhappy world--
It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.
                   (from "The Auroras of Autumn", Wallace Stevens)

The bad...

Hypothesis of parasitic-push-outwards.

She sucks on his hypothesis.

Turns it in her mouth until there's a lozenge-shaped crevasse
that begins to slice sides off her tongue.

A hank of chopped silence gathers.

Verification slides his black eyes toward her
to check the effect against the ammonia.
                    (from MODESTY: LESSON NO. 2, Karen Houle)
_______________________________

Without meaning to be one Stevens's verse is philosophic; Houle's is, however, simply there, opened in front of her like the academic's connect-the-dots imitation of a favourite author. Stevens's "Auroras" is, beyond even the philosophic, a very mirroring Torah and the mystery between itself and the Master of the Universe never more reverentially problematized. Of course, it's never apparent to the readerly sense and yet the mysteries of an autumn season were never more happily read. The quickening cynicism of a people condemned to be unhappy in an unhappy land is a very jewel refracted (and never just vulgarly seen) in poetic light. By contrast, "hank of chopped silence" is a rather stupidly misappropriated sense of movement and rhythm altogether. Even in the age of différance, the stupidly misappropriated movement of a "hank of chopped silence"...

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

When your meadows lie cold, O Lord,
When the endless Angelus falls silent
In every crumbling hamlet...
Strike down your dear delicious crows
From boundless skies above
To nature's deflowered ground.

Strange armies with cries that crack,
Cold nests that winds attack.
Along yellow rivers,
Along old cross roads,
Around ditches, around holes,
Mobilize and go.
                     (from "Crows", Arthur Rimbaud)

The bad...

These high chestnut branches along Larch Street
fade above the streetlights,
                                            live without me.

A truck passes in the morning,
                                             it is full summer,
and a flock of noisy starlings leaps into the sky.

I jump from my top step,
                                             and sprawl on the lawn,
eyeglasses bouncing twice along the walk.
                                       (from "ELEGY FOUR", George Bowering)
_____________________________________

Could the dull denuded language in a Bowering elegy at least strike the ear as Eastern or something? Anything but this! In Rimbaud there's both ear and elegy, and a luxuriousness as of the world's first fresh assault. Bowering the Laureate, like all of them, is prescribed reading and strikes the eye with the gnawing ordinariness of the teen at your door, late again, holding his coke can. It's nothing ever (with bad Canadian verses) but this teen at your door. Could the "eyeglasses bouncing twice" have at least been knocked off this poet's ordinary face with force, for once? That would be some comfort. Anything but this, please! Rimbaud, however, and this bears repeating, looses on us a pissed off crow or two, tired of the rustic Angelus, and gives to my rightful hatred of Canadian ordinariness and national pietism the almost perfect fresh nest line and texture, as gift: the first perfect crack of attacking bird and sky.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

What's good...

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentlemen of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentlemen, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;
The child that sucketh long is shooting up,
The planet-ducted pelican of circles
Weans on an artery the genders strip;
Child of the short spark in a shapeless country
Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;
The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
You by the cavern over the black stairs,
Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.
Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,
Are but the roots of nettles and feathers
Over the groundwork's thrusting through a pavement
And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers, etc.
                         ("Altarwise by Owl-Light" by Dylan Thomas)

What's bad...


same as books for the blind music
for the deaf bridge always thought
to be an elevator initially collapses but you
ego subject integral identity central conscious
you begin as feel it set against the problem
you always think of as somebody else's body
bodies body's body or bodies either here
where you don't hear where not listening
it begins to be alone alive just in time to stay
waiting same as food for the ones without mouths
same as philosophy
wit
essence
presence
just a moment ago ego move end subject
same as identical amenable reliable same as
magnifying practice signifying praxis integral
horizontal vertical diagonal syllogistic monistic
mnemonic anemic but forgets nothing of the mouth
month countrified begin it all beginnings
beginning to end with the upper palate
its anger on profit its transmission it's locale
the imaginal vaginal time that it left with
Tibet in bed saying that too has a meaning
having said it understands that having seen, etc
                  ("Slightly Left of Thinking" by Steve McCaffery)
______________________________________

Just what's needed to evince differences between rhythms and stone cold 'thinking'. For Thomas a simple amble through apses and an abandoned abbey's "black stairs"is enough to make stars or the poet's prayers the "spark in a shapeless country" (second in lyrical efficacy only to Rilke). Here's an intertextuality the post-avants can't even imagine. The abysmal lack of heart-and wood-depth in McCaffery, on the other hand, is not to be believed: the absence, in particular, of any visible prayer wheels though blessed Tibet be mentioned. Do note the concern in both Thomas and Crane for the safety of children and the tranquility of vision, as the two are inseparable. Again, the slaughter of the innocents laid bare on cold slabs of "horizontal vertical diagonal syllogistic monistic" is never far from this type of bad: badlands of thought where mutants and offenses thrive and poetry is all but impossible.

Constellations, and sidereal influences in general, have enough nearness to real tides and affairs to stand a chance in verse. But where are the spaces (never abyssal only!) interwoven with the possibility of some sense in McCaffery that might turn it into more than chronic gibberish? I fairly believe poetry as bad as this is a pathology and a poet as bad as this a destroyer of heaven's eggs.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf

Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.

They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,

And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed

Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections

The sun beats lightning on the waves,

The waves fold thunder on the sand;

And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,

Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached

By time and the elements; but there is a line

You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it

Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses

Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

                                     (from Voyages, Hart Crane)

The bad...

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman A Dada bard

as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an

alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars

all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A

A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh- a hand-

stamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a, etc

                                         (from Eunoia, Christian Bök)

__________________________

    Vowels have never looked like tiny white coffins (for children) strewn across the hangar floor, at least not til now. The only 'A' more horrific than this is Zukofsky's (Samperi was right to note its hellishness).Take a look at them. This is a Shoah. A wise man a little more generously said, "...conceptual writing is a con, a long hit of laughing gas, a pseudo-intellectual's wet dream. Taking it seriously is dimwitted, although it can, evidently, lead to tenure, where every day is "poetry" month." And that's that.

Crane, on the other hand, can visit this without upsetting a single fragment, the urchins safe at play, language of shores falling freely between their fingers. Like a wise parent cautioning against the pseudo-doctors who save themselves the trouble of lopping off heads and feet and use children instead, he draws a line in the sand for them and gives the colours, shades and textures of real sea graves as warning. Poets like wise parents caution always against transgressions and transgressors. Crane at least died knowing what lay beyond. A sea's cruel nursing breast...

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate? . . .

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
                                                              (from the "Ninth Elegy", Rilke)

The bad...

We maintain a critical distance
from the sad spaniel gentlemen

in cravats
on the plaid duvet

at the Custom Hotel,
Los Angeles.

We are so over it.
We fly

from terminal
to terminal

almost endlessly.

We are almost
money.

We can wait
at high speed.
         ("Custom" by Rae Armantrout)
___________________________

Try capturing 'eternity' in the fall of the poet's laurel: oh! you  silly avants who've been cornered long ago and thought you'd never run out of room. Even stupid enough to think the world's been the repository of creative tensions all along: a place of fateful angels. Perse had accepted his laurels in '60 as a harbinger of precisely this. Where were you? Well, don't look now. I mean I can't even homage significant differences in this case-- breaking it down into two sides--because (besides being laughable) it'd soon turn into a staring contest and the winner would certainly go to the sturdiest brow and most penetrating eye. Nothing in the poetry is worth mentioning. But in America it just won't go to brows and insight. The look of the thing might go happily to American cute cheeks and some contrasting eye-glinting sparkle to take to the Pulitzer podium: not just the poem for which we can wait but a little eyeliner and pearls, even in mid-life. Tributes to dogs and duvet floors will carry the day at LA X. And between Rilke and Armantrout: well, cutes and sparkles win hands down every time!

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

    "I know you, monster-head! Once more face to face. We
take up the long debate where we left off.
    And you may urge your arguments like snouts low over
the water: I will leave you no rest and no respite.
    On too many frequented shores have my footsteps been
washed away before the day, on too many deserted beds has
my soul been delivered up to the cancer of silence.
    What more do you want of me, O breath of origin? And
you, what more would you drag from my living lips..."
                                                                      (from Exile, St.-John Perse)

The bad...

Word's a sentence before it's a word -- I write
Sentences -- When words are, meaning soon follows -- Where
words join, writing is -- One's writing is one writing --
Not all letters are equal -- 2 phrases yield an angle --
Eye settles in the middle of word, left of center -- Reference
is a compass -- Each day -- Performance seeks
vaudeville -- Composition as investigation -- Collage is a
false democracy -- Spelling's choices
                                                             (from FOR L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Ron Silliman)
____________________

Again, Perse's perfect mythopoeia and language fit, drinking at the same stream. And think of all the great  monsters it's foreseen: from Sidney to Proust. I've borrowed his Peregrine and made the conversions to dark exilic moods myself. With him I've made cancer-leafs and burned Jesuits with the anvil-necklace for wanting illusional peewit wives. I know who the Father really is. Why do only the great Talmudists, the great ones! get to enjoy a language fit for the Master of the Universe? La simple chose que voilà applied to skeletons and shores...? Why can't Perse be my Corman?


In Silliman's abcediary a word, phrase & sentence at a time peck in the dirt, envying the superior snouts. Not being one means he has to form the vowels with his ope lips and blow them out, a disgraceful ritual that's sometimes sputters through the beard. In fact, there's neither sense nor Sentence here if you look carefully, just the child's rambling (minus the child's imaginative vision), the sand (minus the seas). Silliman writes sentences (and nothing could be easier) while Perse breathes. In Silliman a series of equal signs to help connect the lines while Perse's "a language free of usage and pure". Silliman's banausic verse fit for advisory boards...puffing at the shores.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not



St.-John Perse

In honour of April poetry month I will post (hopefully every day for the entire month) what's hot and what's not:i.e. a good poem and a bad poem placed one under the other, with some comments on why the one's good and the other's not.

The good...

"...There has always been this clamour, there has al-
ways been this splendour.
    And like a great feat of arms on the march across the
world, like a census of peoples in exodus, like a foundation of
empires in praetorian tumult, ah! like an animation of lips
over the birth of great Books,
    This huge muffled thing loose in the world, and suddenly
growing huger like drunkenness..." (from Exile, St.-John Perse)

and the bad...

I am not chosen
but have applied for the job.
I've always wanted to be a Government
of Canada initiative. Starves his body down
so his erection will be proportionally larger
                                                          (Colin Smith from "Straw Man")
________________

Perse's poetry (even in translation: this excerpt in its original French would have made the Smith blemishes look even more laughable) is epical and yet reachable: beautifully cadenced and yet within reach of the feeling eye. But what an eye Perse requires! Not afraid of repetitions because repetitions always, even to infinity, carry something in the poet's pouch nor even of the lonely journey across the piaggia diserta of the songless world, the poem "grows". Yes, the impression it leaves is of a poem flowering even when the covers close.

Smith's offering, sadly in only one of Canada's two official languages, will always remain the "songless" and certainly not through lack of trying. Here's Kootenay writing school specimen holding up the mirror as 'twere to a very purposeful "hysterical, disavowed and disjunctive" initiative. It's what it is and Canada's just the place for it. ( I redden at it) Drunkenness here is always tantamount to smoking teenage weed.