The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again,
and I switch off the light.
On the table a tattered moth
shrugs its wings.
     I agree.
Nothing is ever quite
what we expect it to be.

—Robert Dunn

Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries.

You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn, nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not have noticed him. He was Portsmouth's second poet laureate, and an important figure within the Portsmouth poetry scene from the late 1970s to his death in 2008. But he only published a handful of poems in literary journals, and his chapbooks were printed and distributed only locally — and when he sold them himself, he charged 1 cent. (Towler tells a story of trying to pay him more, which proved impossible.) He was insistently local, insistently uncommercial.

Why I Am Not a Poet

I have a brief new essay up at The Story Prize Blog, "Why I Am Not a Poet". Here's a taste:

I care about words, structures, rhythms, resonances, patterns, allusions, borrowings, sentences, images, emotions, voices, dreams, realities, fears, anxieties, failures, yearnings, and much more, but I don't really care about telling stories. The story is a kind of vehicle, or maybe an excuse, or maybe an alibi. The conventions of the story can be followed and forsaken in ways that get me to the other things, the things I care about.

All of those things I care about are things common to poetry — some more common to poetry than to prose, I'd bet — and that is why I read poetry, but even though I read poetry, I write prose because I just don't know how to do those things unless I'm writing prose.

(I think I would rather be a poet, but I am not.)

Continue reading at The Story Prize Blog.

Reality Affects

Bonnie Nadzam's recent essay at Literary Hub, "What Should Fiction Do?", is well worth reading, despite the title. (The only accurate answer to the question in the title [which may not be Nadzam's] is: "Lots of stuff, including what it hasn't done yet...") What resonates for me in the essay is Nadzam's attention to the ways reality effects intersect with questions of identity — indeed, with the ways that fictional texts produce ideas about identity and reality. I especially loved Nadzam's discussion of how she teaches writing with such ideas in mind.

Nadzam starts right off with a bang:

An artistic practice that perpetually reinforces my sense of self is not, in my mind, an artistic practice. I’m not talking about rejecting memoir or characters “based on me.” What I mean is I don’t have the stomach for art that purports to “hold up a mirror to nature,” or for what this implies, philosophically, about selfhood and the world in which we live.

This is a statement that avant-gardes have been making since at least the beginning of the 20th century — it is the anti-mimetic school of art, a school at which I have long been a happy pupil. Ronald Sukenick, whose purposes are somewhat different to Nadzam's, wrote in Narralogues that "fiction is a matter of argument rather than of dramatic representation" and "it is the mutability of consciousness through time rather than representation that is the essential element of fiction." Sukenick proposes that all fiction, whether opaquely innovative or blockbuster entertainment, "raises issues, examines situations, meditates solutions, reflects on outcomes" and so is a sort of reasoning and reflection. "The question," he writes, "is only whether a story reflects thoughtfully, or robotically reflects the status quo with no illuminating angle of vision of its own."

Ferguson. Power.

Ferguson, Missouri. Nov. 24, 2014. (Photo by Adrees Latif/Reuters)

from "Power" by Audre Lorde:

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds

and a dead child dragging his shattered black

face off the edge of my sleep

blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders

is the only liquid for miles

and my stomach

churns at the imagined taste while

my mouth splits into dry lips

without loyalty or reason

thirsting for the wetness of his blood

as it sinks into the whiteness

of the desert where I am lost

without imagery or magic

trying to make power out of hatred and destruction

trying to heal my dying son with kisses

only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

(photo by Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

Ferguson, Missouri, USA

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics

Rain Taxi has posted my review of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. It's one of the best books I've read all year, certainly one of the best poetry anthologies I've read in a long time. Here's a sample of the review:

Reading the book, with all its diversities, can be dizzying—and it’s a glorious feeling. Rarely do anthologies capture quite so much energy of expression. No reader is likely to find all of these poems to their taste, and that is part of the fun, because as we traverse the types and tones, we are challenged to define our own tastes, desires, and identities. Who am I when I read this book? we ask. And: Who might I be?

Regardless of our own relationship to gender, to bodies, to love, lust, and loss, we will find ourselves somewhere within these pages, within these lines. Here are voices to hear—voices that, because of all their differences, are ineluctably human: our friends, family, neighbors, ancestors, lovers, selves.

Spring Breakers and All

Spring Breakers is a passion play and a fairy tale, a cynical scream across the shallows, a whitesploitation flick, a trip, a send-up, a gonzo splash of earnestness enacted as amorality, a post-ironic irony of indulgence, an anthem to the twilight's eternal gleaming. It's a more faithful modern adaptation of The Great Gatsby than Baz Luhrman could have ever dreamed, and dream is the operative word here, one that floats through the incantatory voiceovers repeatedly, a word that can't help dredging up that tired, tattered, beloved phrase of nationalistic mythography: The American Dream.

And that's what's at the heart of this movie: the desires that rule our great nation: money, drugs, sex, guns. (What so proudly we hail.)

It made me think of William Carlos Williams and "To Elsie", from Spring and All. The pure products of America. Go crazy.

Juxtapositions

I read these words this morning, and now they're all in my head, chatting:

*

Simply put, there is an unhealthy obsession among American law enforcement agencies (and American society at large) with stopping violence perpetrated by American Muslims, one that is wholly out of line with the numbers. There is no doubt that the events of 9/11 play into this — never mind that not one hijacker was American — but there is something much darker at work here as well. It’s the fear of a people, a culture, and a religion that most Americans do not understand and therefore see as alien and dangerous.

The fear of the “other” has wiggled its way into the core of another American generation.

—"US Law Enforcement Blatantly Ignores Right-Wing Extremists" by Matthew Harwood, Salon

*

We live at a moment when the imagination is threatened. When its possibilities are administered. When we have learned to believe that to survive harm is enough, and, sometimes, more than enough. And, certainly, given the queer-killing imaginations and impulses that surround us, the insistence “I am here” seems more than enough and, often, too much.

When I think about what has stayed with me, fed me, nurtured me, enabled me, it’s not the histories I’ve read, the reports I’ve consumed, the many articles I dutifully read and cited, or the very smart things many brilliant people have written. I return to a small cluster of names: Essex Hemphill, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Melvin Dixon, James Baldwin. I return to poets and novelists, to people whose imaginations extended mine in unexpected and still surprising ways.

In the 1970s, every lesbian was a poet, so the story goes. Poetry, Lorde teaches me, “is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

—"Kenyan Queer Cultural Production (in a report era)" by Keguro Macharia, Gukira

*

All those poems I wrote
About living in the sky
Were wrong. I live on a leaf
Of   a fern of   frost growing
Up your bedroom window
In forty below.

—James Galvin, "On First Seeing a U.S. Forest Service Aerial Photo of Where I Live", Poetry

The Movies Are Dying: A Video Poem

The Movies Are Dying: A Video Poem.

(Futzing around, I made a thing.)

Disseminations

part of Jacques Derrida's last library

Various items...

I recently saw two of the more controversial movies of last year, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty. I don't feel compelled to say much about the former — it's fine for a Steven Spielberg movie, and wanting it to be more than a Steven Spielberg movie seems to me to be an error. Yes, I would have preferred, say, Charles Burnett's Lincoln or Alex Cox's Lincoln or Cheryl Dunye's Lincoln or even Guillermo del Toro's Lincoln, but what we got is Spielberg's Lincoln, and so we should not be surprised that every moment of possible emotion is squeezed through John Williams's typically John Williams score, or that there are lots of faces making faces, or that it is a white savior movie, or that it exemplifies the tradition of quality in Hollywood cinema. What we should be surprised by is that it is not worse — it is easily, to my eyes, Spielberg's most interesting and least annoying historical film. That may have something to do with Tony Kushner's script (PDF) ... but then, Kushner wrote the execrable Munich, so who knows. In any case, the performances are generally compelling, and it's nice to see the great Thaddeus Stevens get some acknowledgement after more than a century of general abuse; Tommy Lee Jones's performance as Stevens is a hoot, and yet not a caricature. On the film's fetishization of compromise and its hatred of radicalism, I'm with Aaron Bady ("It is, in short, a barely veiled argument that radicals should get in line, be patient, be realistic"), although I also wonder what we would make of the film had it been released ten years ago in exactly the same form. An impossible question, of course, but perhaps an interesting thought experiment, given how Lincoln wrestles with the idea of "war powers".

War Powers could be an alternate title for Zero Dark Thirty. I have nothing to say right now except that I found the film fascinating and deeply unsettling, but to be able to show why I think it is a devastating and subversive movie I have to wait till I can dig into its details on DVD, because so much of its meaning and effect for me came from specific shots and cuts. Some excellent writing has already been done about it, though — here are the essays that have most fit with my experience of the film:

• "Zero Dark Thirty: Perception, Reality, Perception Again, and 'The Art Defense'" by Glenn Kenny, which masterfully demonstrates why Glenn Greenwald's attack on the film as pro-torture is inaccurate and deceptive. Arguments about how all sorts of things are represented in the film can be legitimately made, I think, but Greenwald seriously distorts what is on screen to fit his thesis (which he had to do, because by the point where he actually saw the movie, he had too much of an emotional stake in the film being what he wanted it to be for him to ever say it was not what he wanted it to be).
• Manohla Dargis's review for The New York Times is a model of intelligent newspaper writing.
• "The Monitor Mentality, or A Means to an End Becomes an End in Itself: Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty" by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is a fine beginning to understanding what is actually on screen and the implications.
• "A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty" by Steven Shaviro is as insightful as we've come to expect from Shaviro. He's been writing about Kathryn Bigelow's work for many years, and his perspective is helpful. I anxiously look forward to his further writings on the film, because even with this "brief remark" he's delved more meaningfully into it than most other writers.
• Most recently, Nicholas Rombes has published "Zero Dark Thirty and the New History", which looks at the relationship between the film and concepts of history: " Zero Dark Thirty is about how some historical events remain so hot and dangerous that they cannot be treated directly; it would be like staring into the sun. Instead, such histories can only be approached in an administrative, almost bureaucratic fashion, and in such a way that suggests history remains, at the end of the day, a tangle of zero-sum stories, usually competing with each other for legitimacy."

I also recently saw Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and Detention, two interesting films that make a mess of genre expectations. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is as much a horror movie as an action movie, but a horror movie more akin to the works of David Lynch than the average splatter film. (I could have lived without all the fight scenes being sped up, however.) Detention is even better, a mad mishmash of teen comedy, absurd sci-fi, and slasher movie. For me, it was the second most consistently delightful film of last year, after Moonrise Kingdom.

I don't have much to report for recent reading here, mostly because I've been reading books such as Change and Continuity in the 1984 Elections, which is marvelous, but, well, nothing I'd recommend to get you through the long winter months. I've also just begun reading Derrida: A Biography by Benoit Peeters (god bless interlibrary loan!), which is thrilling and revelatory so far (100 pages in). I had long believed Derrida made a living well into his twenties as a construction worker, but it turns out this is just another example of one of the many mistaken beliefs I have clung to.

I very much enjoyed Adam Green's profile, "A Pickpocket's Tale: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins" at The New Yorker recently.

Also, two poems by Suzanne Buffam: "The New Experience" at The Poetry Foundation and "Ruined Interior" at Boston Review.

Finally, a new term has started at the university, so I'm back to teaching. Here are the syllabi for my classes, if you're curious: Murder, Madness, Mayhem (English Department course that I'm making into a course on dystopia and fascism this term) and Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society (Communications & Media Studies course that I've making into ... well ... something).

Farewell to a Poet

photo by Robert Giard

The L.A. Times is reporting that Adrienne Rich has died.

Her words, discovered at an early and impressionable age, changed my life.

I return to them frequently. They are a gift she has now left behind for us.

Read "Diving Into the Wreck", my favorite American poem of the last 50 years at least. Read "What Kind of Times Are These".

I remember this interview with her from 1994, which I read so many times in The Progressive that I still have some of her responses memorized.

Make sure these books, at the very very least, are on your shelves: The Fact of a Doorframe; An Atlas of the Difficult World; On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; What is Found There.

The loss sends me into silence. Perhaps I will be able to say more later. For now, this:

I wanted to go somewhere
the brain had not yet gone
I wanted not to be
there so alone.

—from "Letters to a Young Poet" in Midnight Salvage
by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

Telluride at Dartmouth: In Darkness

This post continues to chronicle my attendance at the Telluride at Dartmouth program at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. Days 1 & 2 (A Dangerous Method and Albert Nobbs) can be found here, Day 3 (We Need to Talk About Kevin) can be found here.


I resisted In Darkness because it is a Holocaust film, and that is just about my least favorite movie genre. Nonetheless, it is a genre I'm deeply familiar with, and was the subject of the first serious film book I ever read, the original edition of Annette Insdorf's Indelible Shadows, which I discovered on my father's bookshelves when I was in high school. Soon after, I saw Schindler's List and found it deeply moving in a very adolescent way (on my part, at least, and maybe on Spielberg's). Later, I realized that Schindler's List had created a sort of emotional smugness in me -- it had made me feel good about feeling all the appropriate emotions. Spielberg is one of the greatest manipulators of emotion that the cinema has ever seen, and part of the pleasure of his action films, especially, lies in surrendering to them, allowing our emotions to be played by a virtuoso. I resist this in his films about something more serious than excitement; my loathing of The Color Purple and Munich is boundless and perhaps even a bit irrational -- indeed, I may resent the manipulation so much that I tend to perceive it as worse (cinematically and morally) than it is. At the same time, I desire great art to help us understand the Nazi era and its aftermath -- Paul Celan is my favorite 20th century poet, perhaps because so much of the power I perceive in his words derives from a struggle with (and against) the representation of atrocity. The problem is that for me it has to be great art. Plenty of subjects can withstand mediocre, ordinary, awkward, or bad art. Art that takes the Nazi years as its subject and ends up, in my estimation, to be less than great feels like a trivialization, and it infuriates me.

In any case, this is the background I brought to In Darkness, and explains why I spent the first half hour or so with my arms folded and jaw clenched -- I had pretty well decided that whatever magic spells this film tried to cast, I would resist them.

In Darkness tells the story of the final liquidation of the ghetto in Lvov, Poland, in June 1943 and of a group of Jews who hid in the city's sewers to survive. They were aided by Leopold Socha, a sewer worker, whose original goals were mercenary -- in the film, he is represented as a scavenger and thief, and tension is built early on because we fully expect him to take the Jews' money and then turn them over to the Germans for a reward. This is not what happens, though, and one path of the narrative is the story of Socha's redemption.

Had that been the primary path of the narrative, I would have hated In Darkness, because using the Holocaust as a plot device for tales of redemption seems despicable to me. (Millions of people died, and thus Our Protagonist found the goodness in his heart!) Thankfully, director Agnieszka Holland had much more on her mind in making this film than the redemption of Socha, and so the redemption of Socha becomes a powerful element of the story instead of its reason for being.

Once I saw that In Darkness was not relying on the cliché emotional moves of the Holocaust film genre, I let down my guard. The characters were complex, and few of the heroic actions unambiguously heroic. Everyone is desperate, exhausted, hungry, uncomfortable, and terrified -- these are not conditions that always bring out the best in them. We may find ourselves sharing Socha's frustrations with the refugees, sympathizing with his conflicts, his desire to be free of the people he has taken responsibility for and his desire to help them. This is a brave space for the film to open up, but it is an important one for any savior story. Inevitably, viewers want to identify with the savior; we want to think we are the sorts of people who would also be good people and risk everything to save our fellow humans. Many savior stories highlight the dangers and show how fatal missteps can be, but it is much less common for such stories to show the tensions that build between people being saved and the savior. Also, the tensions between the individuals within the group -- when they are first running through the sewers, and one woman is overcome by fright and wants to return to the ghetto, we feel her sister's rage and panic, we are pushed toward terrible thoughts: Slap her! Leave her! Save yourself! Thoughts we, if we are self-consciously decent people, push from our minds -- but they were there, and their shadows remain. We learn from In Darkness how difficult it is to be a decent person in an indecent world.

Such moments let the film earn its emotional rewards. Experience is different from manipulation. If 100 viewers of the film were to chart their emotional responses to it, there would be some overlaps at climactic moments, but there would be significant deviations as well.

I discovered I had fully surrendered to the film when a relatively small moment brought on uncontrollable tears. It was a simple moment of ordinary humanity: Socha allows one of the children, who has become catatonic from fear and exhaustion, to look up at the sunlight and taste the air. That's all. But up to that moment, we, too, as viewers have not had much chance to breathe -- we have spent a lot of time with the refugees in the sewers, our eyes have grown accustomed to the dark, we have experienced our own fears for their safety: our fears that Socha would give in to his worst impulses, our fears that the group would destroy itself from carelessness or weariness or frustration. We have spent enough time looking at the darkness that the sudden bright light is blinding, but it is also welcome.

It is not a simple emotional moment. Of course, the kindness of Socha is touching. But it's a small act compared to many of his others, ones that aren't as deeply affecting. We, too, have yearned for sunlight and fresh air. We have felt a sliver of what the refugees have felt -- and if we think about it, we know it is a sliver, a grain-of-sand-sized feeling compared to all the pain and fear of the refugees, and that opens up whatever capacity we have to empathize, but though we empathize, we know our empathy is not equal to their experience.

This, it seems to me, is exactly what films about atrocity should do. They should make us empathize and at the same time they should confront us with the inadequacy of our empathy. Like Celan's poems, they should strive for language while knowing that such experiences defeat language. The work should bear the scars of its impossibility. The work should not encourage us to feel good about ourselves; rather, it should show us all the terrors we contain.

In Darkness earns our joy in its characters' heroic acts because it is honest about what all those acts must overcome. The Nazis are a clear enemy, the metonym for evil. We are good at hating them and at rooting for their opposition. The Nazis are other than us, something we would never be, because we are good and decent. They're the most convenient, least controversial bad guys wherever they appear. Hating Nazis and feeling pity or even sympathy for their victims is a worthwhile feeling, but it is not a difficult or complex one, and it trivializes the agony when art encourages us to use the Nazi era for easy feelings proudly felt.

There are few easy feelings in In Darkness, and some you will not be proud to feel. We are rewarded with a mostly happy ending, an ending that is very much a relief, even perhaps a purgation in the Aristotelian sense. (There is even one moment that is an unexplained miracle.) The ending, at least in general terms, is true to history. Many other stories of escape from the Nazis did not end happily, despite even the most selfless heroism, and In Darkness includes that fact in a way that is more powerful than most other Holocaust savior films I've seen. Much of this comes from how well Holland shows us that the group is, at the end, a small one. We move from the relative largeness of the ghetto to an overfilled living room to the crowded sewers to, finally, one tiny section of the no-longer-crowded sewers. We saw how this small group was created, and we remember the faces of the people who were not able to be part of it.

Our knowledge of the refugees as individuals grows throughout the film, but we also know why it grows: the group becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. Our joy at their survival, then, is attached to, even dependent on, our knowledge of how few survived, and what it cost to survive.

For me, then, In Darkness joins a small group of films that represent the suffering of the Nazi era in a way that is complex in what it asks us to know and feel. The only film I've seen this year that even approaches it in such complexity is The Tree of Life, a work so different from In Darkness that I find them impossible to compare except in their effect on me as a viewer: leaving the theatre, I felt more aware of the potentials and limits of my own humanity. Stating it in such a way -- trying to capture rich emotions in ordinary words -- sounds like hyperbolic praise, but I am only pointing to one of the reasons we seek out art beyond entertainment or beyond aesthetic pleasure. We spend our lives trying to understand what it means to live, what it means to know history, what it means to feel. It's an impossible quest, but great art lets us know, at least for a moment, that the quest is worthwhile.

Such words are grandiose, so I will end instead with Celan:

THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.

--trans. by Pierre Joris

Just Be Glad You're Not Trying to Sell a Poetry Book

I was working on a post about the BlazeVOX asking-writers-to-help-subsidize-poetry-publishing brouhaha, and its connections to the criminal idiocies of so much academic publishing, and what the idea of "legitimacy" in publishing does for us as writers and readers, but the post got long and banal and so boring that I started falling asleep while I wrote it, which is a bad sign, so I abandoned it, but I've still been keeping one eye on the discussion.

Today's post of note is from the blog of No Tell Books, a small, respected indie press:

No Tell Books' best selling title broke even after three years and is now earning a very modest profit. This is by an author whose work has appeared in places like Poetry and Best American Poetry. This title has been taught at universities. How many copies does one have to sell to be the best selling title at No Tell Books after four years? 228. That is not a typo. This number doesn't include what the author has sold herself, probably around 200 copies on her own. But the press doesn't earn money on those sales.  

So if that's a best seller, what's a flop? 74 sales after five years (again, this number doesn't include what the author sold on his own, which was maybe 50 or so). (UPDATE: Gatza states, "In general, books by new authors sell around 25 - 30 copies." Shocking? Only if you don't know the first thing about poetry publishing.)

This is the reality of poetry publishing. There are certainly presses that sell more copies. A poetry title reviewed in The New York Times can sell 2-4k copies, it is true. But small, independent presses, those small shops, usually run by one or a few people, rarely see those kinds of sales. University presses, for the most part, don't see those kinds of numbers for poetry. I attended a panel by the publisher of Grove/Atlantic and he said his press' poetry sales was around 800 per title. They publish "big-name" poets, their books are often shelved by chain bookstores, they have good distribution, a strong reputation . . . and that's what they sell. Publishing poetry is their charity--their poetry titles are subsidized by their fiction and non-fiction sales.  

I know of prose books where the publicity machine exploded spectacularly (or didn't exist), the publisher seemed to do everything possible to bury the book, and it only ever appeared at tiny bookstores in uninhabited regions of the world -- and still managed to sell over 300 copies!

I was going to say that obviously America hates poetry, but that's not true. To hate it, we'd have to pay attention to it.

New Columnists at Strange Horizons

I've been writing columns for Strange Horizons for some time now, chronicling whatever happened to be obsessing me at the moment when the column was due, for better or ill. It's a good challenge. Various other columnists have come and gone during that time, with Karen Healey and John Clute being the most recent regulars, offering diverse and fascinating stuff.

Now, two more folks have joined the roster, and they're both people I've at least been acquainted with for a while, people who I have great fondness and respect for: Vandana Singh and Genevieve Valentine. Vandana's first column appeared last week, Genevieve's this week. Great, great stuff.

We've also been asked to provide names for our columns in addition to the individual column titles. Clute's got Scores, Vandana is Diffractions, and Genevieve is Intertitles. I envy them all. (Being in such hallowed company, I'm tempted to call mine Excrement, but I'll probably come up with something slightly less accurate by Friday, when I need to settle on it...)

Also, the Reader's Award Poll results are in -- congratulations to all the winners: Theodora Goss (fiction), Marge Simon (poetry), Orrin Grey (nonfiction), and Abigail Nussbaum (reviewing). I was startled to discover I came in fourth in the reviewer category, despite publishing only two reviews last year, I'm grateful to all of you who held your noses and put my name on your ballots! I'm biased, of course, but I think SH has the best stable of reviewers in the SF world, and it's humbling to be included among them.

And here, because I expect you probably need it, is Frank O'Hara's poem "Autobiographia Literaria".

20th Century Poetry

A few days ago, Scott Esposito wrote about tackling Louis Zukofsky's A, which he said was part of an informal list a poet friend had given him in response to a question from Scott: "I want to know more about poetry–what do you recommend?" I and other sufferers of 'satiable curtiosity pleaded in the comments to the post to see the full list, and now Scott has gotten permission to share it.

It's a wonderful list because it's diverse, personal, and would allow any reader to expand her or his reading. It also presumes the reader is experienced and curious; it's not a Poetry 101 list, so there are some obvious names missing (Williams, Pound) to make way for ones the list writer is particularly passionate about. And the selections are mostly of "difficult" poetry more than people like Mary Oliver or Billy Collins.

Of course, the list could be ten or a hundred times as long, but that would be much less helpful.

I'm resisting the temptation to offer my own idiosyncratic list, partly because I'm not a poet and am not nearly as familiar with contemporary poetry as Scott's friend, so my likes and dislikes among living poets are deeply idioscyncratic, full of holes and inconsistencies (although I will say, among recent discoveries, Jennifer Moxley and Donna Stonecipher make me happy to be able to read the English language). The only inconceivable lack on the list Scott posted that I see is Paul Celan, but that's just because Celan is, to me, the 20th century poet.

Maybe it's my teacherly inclinations, but I love these sorts of lists, where folks come up with obviously incomplete and personal guides to realms that can seem imposing to people less familiar with them. Modern and contemporary poetry are definitely such realms, so three cheers for Scott and his friend for creating and sharing the list.

Today's Idea

Rummaging through some old poems
for ideas -- surely I must have had some
once? Some people have an idea a day,
others millions, still others are condemned
to spend their life inside an idea, like a
bubble chamber. And these are probably
the suspicious ones. Anyway, in poems
are no ideas. No ideas in things, either--
her name is Wichita.

--John Ashbery,
from "And the Stars Were Shining"

Bolaño and the Poetic Pose

Ron Silliman on Bolaño's poetry:

The pose of Bolaño-the-poet may well be more important – and certainly more powerful – than the fact of the poems themselves, but what might be most useful here is to note the whole notion of Bolaño posing. The unifying – indeed distinguishing – element of these poems, written in a post-Beat free verse that might be closest in English to Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Ray Bremser, is the consistency of the pose: the intellectual as tough guy but one who is, at all moments, hard as nails & deeply sentimental. Think of upper limit Jean-Paul Belmondo in the films of Godard, lower limit Charles Bukowski (not as Mickey Rourke so much as Johnny Depp or, had he lived, Heath Ledger). Imagine Kerouac mixed with Camus.

"Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies" by Heather McHugh

I've long been fond of Heather McHugh's poetry, and have even longer been fond of collage-type poems, so I was particularly delighted to read her collage-poem of cyberspeak, "Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies" in a recent issue of The New Yorker:

A beige toaster is a maggotbox.
A bit bucket is a data sink.
Farkled is a synonym for hosed.
Flamage is a weenie problem.

That's just the first stanza. I was hooked right from there, but once it continued to "In MUDs one acknowledges/ a bonk with an oif./ (There’s a cosmic bonk/oif balance.)" I was totally in thrall -- the sky turning to the color of a screaming live TV wouldn't have kept me from continuing to read. The ending achieves perfection: both hilarious and somehow, strangely, ineffably ... sad.

I probably especially enjoyed the poem because I actually understand some of the terminology -- for instance, the title makes perfect sense to me, and the last lines evoke emotion not only because their rhythm is particularly well constructed (collaged), but because they make me remember books I read years ago by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker, who, after all, wrote a novel called Wetware.

Now I just wish I had a time machine so I could go plant the poem in an issue of Omni or Asimov's in the early '80s...

(If you need a glossary, there's a handy start to one here.)

Jack Spicer and PKD

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted: "Phil and Jack", about the often-overlooked connections between Philip K. Dick and Jack Spicer. I wrote it a few months ago, but various factors out of just about anyone's control caused its publication to be delayed (it's surprisingly difficult to get long lines of poetry to wrap and indent in some types of HTML!).

The column's a little bit scattershot, but that felt appropriate. And let me just say again that if you like poetry and haven't taken a look at My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, you really owe it to yourself to do so. It's one of my favorite books of recent years.

Poetry and Stupidity

K. Silem Mohammed:

One thing you don't see much of in the magic business, I'm guessing, is magicians who fall for their own tricks. That wouldn't just be stupidity; it would be insanity. In poetry, however, it's fairly common. Draw your own conclusions.

(via Ron Silliman)