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

The good...

pausing
    where stream
        pauses


                             one
                             peb
                             ble's
                             got

                             a
                             pin
                             hole
                             cave


                             holding
                             this

                             3
                             centi

                             meter
                             stone--

                             cliff
                             in hand

                             &
                             leaping
                        (from diorama, John Martone)




The bad...

FLOWERS

for Joanne

sunburn

of the toes and feet

afterwards

showers

must on a shoe

sure arm today

didn't we turn


off the television

the more fresh beach you wash the cars
                   (from SENTENCES, Robert Grenier)
________________________________

In minimalist writing there's "receptional poetics" or there's nothing. The work is received. There's the received tensions of tradition and its wonderful "dissolutions", as Frank said, like the falling pebble whose diameter is indistinguishable from the "cliff in hand", or there isn't. There's, in short, the difference between that ineffable leap from stream stillness--is the pebble in hand or the pebble alone doing the leaping?--and Grenier's always studded ordinariness. The effect in Grenier is of the dreary afternoon sunburn on a deserted beach. Which is just what it set out to do.

It's always through the eye of the pinhole, however, that great verses fall...

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

The good...

Live with me on Earth among red berries and the bluebirds
And leafy young twigs whispering
Within such little spaces, between such floors of green, such
figures in the clouds
That two of us could fill our lives with delicate wanting:

Where stars past the spruce copse mingle with fireflies
Or the dayscape flings a thousand tones of light back at the
sun—
Be any one of the colours of an Earth lover;
Walk with me and sometimes cover your shadow with mine.
                  (From "Live With Me On Earth Under the Invisible Daylight Moon", Milt Acorn)

The bad...

All green ends up eventually
churning in her left cheek.
Her mouth is a laundromat of spinning drowning herbs.
She is never in fields
but is sucking the pith out of grass.
I have noticed the very leaves from flower decorations
grow sparse in their week long performance in our house.
The garden is a dust bowl.

On our last day in Eden as we walked out
she nibbled the leaves at her breasts and crotch.
But there's none to touch
none to equal
the Chlorophyll Kiss      
                (From "Notes for the Legend of Salad Woman", Michael Ondaatje)

_____________________________________

When you mix the politics of art with Canada you get Ondaatje riding wide-hipped to Ottawa, who's not just the destroyer of haiku but perhaps the country's worst imitator of Atwood leaferies. I do recall the man being snubbed at a Lorine Niedecker centennary not too long ago. Of Acorn, however, of the redberries and birds of Earth eating out of the homeless hand, and of copse perfume and the sun's own thousand shades fluttering in the poet's eye, and of the fires along Spadina Ave and Milt's love of thundering whiskey jacks (a typically Easterner thing!),  I'll always say softly and always in deference to the man's own personal saintliness that it'd be vain and pretentious to talk about anything else here.

May the pure limbs of Acorn lead us all to a true People's Poetry.

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

The good...

see myself staggering through deep snow
lugging blocks of wood yesterday
an old man
almost falling from bodily weakness
— look down on myself from above
then front and both sides
white hair — wrinkled face and hands
it's really not very surprising
that love spoken by my voice
should be when I am listening
ridiculous
yet there it is
a foolish old man with brain on fire
stumbling through the snow
                    (from "Listening to Myself", Al Purdy)

The bad...

essorer, autoriser, liquéfier, cancaner,
the burning ice which was of course
the body between paradox
inside a tent of skin
unwrapping organs with two eyes
they call (our) planets in orbit around
lost saturday's rotisseries
and we'll all be graduate students forever
in phonetic manners metaclosure
remembering parks forget
their golf course mandates in penumbra
the homeless
settle in as antimatter at the same time
a labyrinth of flint hits syntax
as a throat tongue and six teeth form
a hebrew letter meaning aids
intellect and capital in drag
the paper occupied by paint a "had-to"
into focus drawing out to new communities
from vertigo
         (from "ATTRITIONS", Steve McCaffery)
____________________________________

Again, Al, and closer to home, and the linguicides on Canadian shores. Why bother to compare them. With the self-portrait of the artist, with real poets and hewers of verse in Ontario, as indeed with all "old men with brains on fire", all the Purdys turned to statues and looking always deep, manes ruffled in the wind,  it's always like this. Everything else, even on Canadian shores, is just vertigo and antipoetry.

The Poet turned to stone and the early-decaying poetry of Steve McCaffery: look for them and see the difference yourself.

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

The good...

I was altered in the placenta
by the dead brother before me
who built a place in the womb
knowing I was coming:
he wrote words on the walls of flesh
painting a woman inside a woman
whispering a faint lullaby
that sings in my blind heart still

The others were lumberjacks
backwoods wrestlers and farmers
their women were meek and mild
nothing of them survives
but an image inside an image
of a cookstove and the kettle boiling
— how else explain myself to myself
where does the song come from?
         (from "The Dead Poet", Al Purdy)

The bad...

Day is a type when visible
objects change then put


on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed


The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually


concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth


Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace


copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery
       (From "That This", Susan Howe)
_______________________

The clattering of definitions is irksome to the eye and ear, and particularly to the ear: the predictable obeisance to the usual "objects", "form" and (always after Zukofsky) "music" accompanied by the fawning self-congratulations round a grand piano. One turn through the Science & Technology pages is more than enough to fill Howe's verse, reinforced always by a few choice admonitions to look "disjunctive" with lots of space. Is the poem "visible" or "form", "half truth" or "whole truth"? But "lumberjacks", "farmers" and "women" are as real in Purdy as the words of flesh of which the Purdy poem is made. As perhaps only Chris Faiers knows it best, Al's not a name but a place of fest and friendships, sturdy (decades-old) A-frames and cold lakes. Where Al lived and wrote, now worthy of writers'-residence sanctity, is the hearth of the poem, particularly the Canadian. And because Purdy's Canadian, and the poem and the place, Howe's imported linguicide can't touch it.

This is "song", man; that is just prescribed Zukofskian sheet "music".

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

The good...

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
                                          (from "A Birthday Present", Sylvia Plath)

The bad...

We thought it could all be found in The Book of Poor Text,
the shadow the boat casts, angled mast, fretted wake, indigo eye.

Windows of the blind text,
keening, parabolic nights.

And the rolling sun, sun tumbling
into then under, company of moths.

Can you hear what I'm thinking, from there, even as you sleep?
Streets of the Poor Text, where a child's gaze falls

on the corpse  of a horse beside a cart,
whimpering dog, woman's mute mouth agape

as if to say, We must move on,
we must not stop, we must not watch.
                              (from "Company of Moths", Michael Palmer)
___________________________

The voice of irrationality or life by accident: whose is better here? Palmer's, again, seeps like gas to bubble at the surface or plugs space so full of incommensurabilities the next line's as predictable as "Can you hear what I'm thinking..."Predictable as the rest. But the gift, the veil or whatever's behind it, in Plath could not have been more simply intuited because more stylistically attuned to its devastating mundaneness and cruelty, as gift. There's a world here to gather & all the distant tragedies enclosed therein (as we very well know): the conditions of a verse's ceaseless and unstinting possibility. Again, what killed Plath is precisely the "closed window" of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E text, long long after the fact. It always has just this way, by wresting the 'being' out of us, of foreclosing the past in a willfulness that amounts to linguicide.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is a linguicide and here is the second proof.

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

"My dear Lady Anne,
 I've done what I can"
                   (Rolling Stones)




The good...

On the day of breasts and small hips
the window pocked with bad rain,
rain coming on like a minister,
we coupled, so sane and insane.
We lay like spoons while the sinister
rain dropped like flies on our lips
and our glad eyes and our small hips.
                         (from "Song for a Lady", Anne Sexton)

The bad...

A voice that eludes reason, manner of insistences,
hope doubled upon oration, bubbles the turf you
won't be wanting any more in the morning

                        My name is "Interrogation Rooms"
                        My name is "Refamiliarization"
                        My name is "Standing Up and Ripping Through"

as if you could name love
without turning it into an abstraction
& killing it
                              (from "Taps", Charles Bernstein)
______________________________________

Now Bernstein's poem's already done its worst by the time you get to the refrain. How? Again, the same bubbling through (as of gas) to the surface.Yes, "bubble the turf". I can believe we're talking about 'love' in both cases here but only in order to look at "Taps" as the cause of death. Bernstein's is gas main warning to wary diggers. Yes, here's the poem so portentously murderous it killed Anne Sexton long after her time. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E kills just like this.

It's not as far-fetched as it looks. Consider. Sexton's is a pure window on loving, with or without morning. So it wasn't necessary for Bernstein to foreground "Taps" in light at all. Through the fragility and even cute mousiness of physical intimacy Sexton gives the most pleasurable song imaginable to the world, with or without names. Damn, "light" and the very name for it in Bernstein's poem fly from each other like exploding gas molecules! Anyone looking for love poetry after this is bound to be staring into nothing but noxious dusk. Epithalamiums like Anne's, on the other hand, can make the stars race because she was as clever as you, Ph.d boy, and looked as ravishing as a middle-aged Liz Taylor, with or without small hips, & could love "so sane and insane" it'd even make your own wife glad for eyes, if you weren't so busy archiving. So Anne died twice: once in her car and then on Bernstein's bubbling turf.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E kills in just this way.

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

The good...

To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And that faces dissolve like water.

To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep
While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death
Which comes every night and is called sleep.
                       (from "Ars Poetica", Jorge Luis Borges)

The bad...

I am writing now in preconceptions

Those of sex and ropes

Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the

                              imagination

And the imagination does have flesh to destroy

And the flesh has imagination to sever

The mouth is just a body filled with imagination
                                 (from "Elegy", Lyn Hejinian)
__________________________

Nothing deep-sixes the poem more than misused space. Hejinian's "Elegy" is the proof. It's in that senseless space of hers. The place of 'repetition' is in Borges peopled with spirits and waters, and the faery borders between them. Spaces are here a violation. He dreams waters and a beautifully irreal order follows; Hejinian, trying to impress Silliman and Watten only, has managed to clumsily string a venerable form through the most random word associations (which perhaps explains the need for so much notebook space). It's not surprising that imagination ends in the oral cavity. Borges, loner with little formal education, teaches more than Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together; Borges, the working-class librarian had read more than Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together; Borges, the blind poet sees more than Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together.

The "Ars Poetica" of Jorge Luis Borges, or only the two strophes cited, hold more than all the Language of Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together. Borges ends in a waking dream.