The pit of what has been said

"And yet if you go back and look at old editions of The Nation or The New Republic, which published a lot of poetry back in the day — or if you go farther back, to Reedy's Mirror or The Century magazine — and if you hunt around for a while in some of those periodicals, you'll find that most of the poetry in them is just there as decoration. It's a form of ornament, like a printer's dingbat. A little acorn with a curlicue. Or the scrollwork on a beaux-arts capital. It's just a way of creating a different look on the page, and creating the sense on the part of the reader that he's holding something that is a real Kellogg's variety pack.

"The magazine is going to have some kind of big thoughtful political piece about Teddy Roosevelt, say, and then it's going to have a bit of serialized fiction, and it's going to have some 'cuts' — that is, some art — and a few color pages tipped in, maybe, if it's The Century magazine, maybe by Maxfield Parrish, and it's going to have some poems. The long nonfiction piece comes to an end, and it's about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality and vapidity of it will stun you. 'The shades of summer's bosky hue, o'erlie thy modest floobie doo.' The editors of The Century didn't expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit, pluth. The pit of what has been said. And the lost gulls are flapping and calling — peer! peer!"

— Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, 70-71

PR for Poetry

A weird and wonderful manifesto of sorts from Stan Apps at Action Yes.

Dads going digital

My friend Sam has three poems up at the new web magazine Monsters & Dust (which also features work by Cass McCombs). They have a nice autumnal melancholy thing going on. I particularly like "Store Policy."

Whoz Side U On, Anyway?

Once there was a mountain here
then a glacier came and when
the glacier melted, the ground looked
like brains so some critics came along
to decide who was avant garde enough.
Those that weren't attacked Russia
where some structuralists were saying
everything was a structure even your mother.
Like deaf mutes in airports selling cards
saying they're deaf mutes, the avant garde
sold poems saying they're poets.
Or everyone's a poet. Or what's a poem?
Or die whitie die. Or representation =
kapitalism's whore. Meanwhile someone
writes about smacking a deer with his car,
feeling kinda bad, and that's not avant garde
so off to Russia, here's your carbine.
But then a whole class of poets
gets out of going to Russia through connections
and bands together to form the Academy of American Poets
to protest high dry-cleaning costs.
Then someone comes up with a book
that's not even in words, publishes
20 copies on butcher paper and burns them
and that's so fucking avant garde,
the sea floor rises 10,000 feet
and becomes a desert, perfect
for a school where the poet
slash critic slash professor says, Take off your clothes,
and when the students take off their clothes,
shouts, Too late! Wreck subjectivity!
Too late! The blood of Walt Disney
is on your hands! Explode syntax
allude to the renaissance metaphor
is fascism memory is a lie.
Too late too late too late.
Roses are blue, the quality of mercy
is chow mein, first thought butt-shake.
See this shoe? It's a text.
Hard not to miss attacking Russia
even with only a frozen rat to eat,
powder burns, constant concussion
so you can't even think. Hard
not to miss trying to slip a potent
image by the censors, some sort
of uplift in the end, a talking
rose or kiss made of mist.

— Dean Young

Hypothesis

Keats is still kind of the median of English-language poets: metrical but not too torqued, flashy but not "decadent," thinks poets have no personalities, talks about gods but doesn't really believe in them.

Definition of pessimism

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings.

George Packer on why poetry doesn't matter. Give the woman a chance!

Paging Kenneth Goldsmith

I just stumbled across this website, and it's really fucking weird. It's a website that provides the full text of the English subtitles for various bootleg DVDs, with no attributions as to character or stage directions or anything: just a long out-of-context transcript. The upshot is that the film, no matter what its original tone or genre, is transformed into some sort of bizarre prose poem. Here, for instance, is Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (which I just screening-logged for Notcoming). And here's The Karate Kid.

Check out Dan Chiasson's very funny and sharp review of David Lehman's The Best American Erotic Poems. Here's the money shot: 

"… precious space is devoted to John Updike’s 'Fellatio,' perhaps the worst poem ever written on any subject, which begins (reader, I kid you not): 'It is beautiful to think / that each of these clean secretaries / at night, to please her lover, takes / a fountain into her mouth.'"

Paul Muldoon Eat Your Heart Out

I am a published poet!

Sort of. Not really. At all.

I should explain: this is my friend Stefan's webzine and he asked me to contribute a travel essay about my trip to Florida. I was pressed for time so I wrote free verse instead. (Click "Floridian Poetry" to get there.)

You guys going to this? Maybe Susan can you hook you up.

PARTICIPANTS WILL INCLUDE
	Frank Bidart Rita Dove Robert Hass Lyn Hejinian Galway Kinnell Nathaniel Mackey Sharon Olds Carl Phillips Robert Pinsky Kay Ryan Gerald Stern Susan Stewart James Tate Ellen Bryant Voigt