From halvard at earthlink.net Sun Apr 1 14:13:23 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 14:13:23 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Conditions of Play Message-ID: Conditions of Play I. Pre-play --Prepare the ground. The playing field shall be as broad as it is wide. At its narrowest point it should be no narrower than at its widest point. From top to bottom, it should measure the same as from bottom to top. --Remove from the playing ground all obstructions that do not contribute to, that are not necessary to, that do not advance the play. --Prepare yourself. Begin training as soon as you are able. Develop skills you will need in order to play. Shunt all else to one side. Focus. II. Play --Begin to play at the beginning, or whenever there is a moment that is appropriate to your entry upon the field of play. Do not hesitate. --Use your eyes and ears to maximum effect. --Move toward the play. Do not wait for the play to come to you. --Remain silent unless called upon to speak. --When other players contribute to your play, a nod of the head is sufficient to thank them. --When it?s not your turn, wait patiently. Do not despair. III. Post-play --Return the field to the condition in which you found it. --Leave the field. Do not protest or celebrate the outcome of play. --Return all equipment not your own to the clubhouse. --Go home and rest. Prepare yourself for another day?s play. Hal Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Apr 1 19:25:58 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 19:25:58 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rhyme Definition Message-ID: <105.125cb8c.27f91306@cs.com> In a message dated 3/31/2001 1:13:51 PM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > Emily Dickinson used consonance in place of rhyme, > which was an innovation of sorts (though others > did this before her). > > --Bob G. I think Mrs. Browning preceded her in this regard. E. D. kept a picture of E. B. B. in her room, I've read. From TerryP17 at aol.com Sun Apr 1 20:24:22 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 20:24:22 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream Message-ID: In a message dated 3/30/01 5:32:24 PM, new-poetry-request at wiz.cath.vt.edu writes: >Formal poetry can't advance the craft because, by >definition, it uses known poetic devices. You >can't advance the craft by doing what's been done >before. Conventional freeverse is also knownstream, >but mainstream as well because it's the kind of >poetry most taught in colleges, most reviewed in >the wider-circulation culture magazines, most awarded, >etc. The above statement really doesn't parse and asks more questions than it answers. First of all, it implies that if one guy writes a sonnet employing "known poetic devices" then no one else can "advance" the craft, because what has gone before is now "known." Second of all, it implies that there are a finite number of forms and that new forms can't be created which is also incorrect. Taking this notion a bit further, several hundred years of advances in formal English poetry could somehow not have happened, since much of it simply employed "known poetic devices." Additionally, we must also assume that no one could have created any new formal devices since all formal devices became at some point known and inviolable for all time and not subject to alteration of any kind. This is not true at all. Ultimately, as others on this listserv have asked, what's the big deal with "advancement" anyway? I think we need to start questioning more seriously this notion that the only poem worth praising or taking seriously is today's poem because it's "new," and yesterday's poem is antique. This has, I readily concede, been the value system, such as it is, since approximately World War I. I question whether we need to spend yet another century mired in it. Which brings us to the second point. Contemporary free verse is "mainstream" because it's mostly what's taught in the academy and because it's what wins awards? I wonder how many of my Democratic friends on this board would concede that Republicans are mainstream because they won (however tenuously) both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Contemporary free verse in all its permutations is most certainly "mainstrem" on the campus, but that's because professors have decreed that it is so and have not, by and large, changed their collective mind in my adult lifetime. The general public "mainstream" isn't really connected to this stuff and couldn't name you one of these vaunted awards nor a single poet who has won one. (But a lot of them read cowboy poetry.) I suspect a statement like the one above really hinges on what the meaning of "mainstream" is. Our definitions obviously differ and will continue to do so. --Terry Ponick From TerryP17 at aol.com Sun Apr 1 20:26:49 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 20:26:49 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: New-Poetry digest, Vol 1 #131 - 11 msgs Message-ID: <7b.12724647.27f92149@aol.com> Moira-- In a message dated 3/30/01 11:20:58 PM, new-poetry-request at wiz.cath.vt.edu writes: >Terry, how about posting the review (or excerpts) or including a link to >it >when it's done? I'm sure there are others who would be interested. > >Moira Russell >Seattle, WA You bet. I do intend to post it once we get the issue out to our subscribers, which looks like shortly after Easter at this point. --Terry P From TerryP17 at aol.com Sun Apr 1 20:30:08 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 20:30:08 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: New-Poetry digest, Vol 1 #131 - 11 msgs Message-ID: <6f.135e09fb.27f92210@aol.com> Bob-- In a message dated 3/30/01 11:20:58 PM, new-poetry-request at wiz.cath.vt.edu writes: >I'm saying that those who >use only well-known poetic devices are shooting for >other virtues than advancing their craft. Michael >Jordan didn't invent any new shots or moves, but he >still became the world's best basketball player >because he made the standard shots and moves >better than anyone else.>> But Michael didn't advance his craft? Really? The mainstream in Chicago might disagree. --Terry P From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sun Apr 1 22:26:26 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2001 18:26:26 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rhyme Definition Message-ID: R.S. Gwynn wrote: >I think Mrs. Browning preceded her in this regard. E. D. kept a picture of >E. B. B. in her room, I've read. Dickinson also mentioned the Brownings specifically (Mr. and Mrs.) in that famous letter to the critic telling him what books she had "for company." Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sun Apr 1 22:41:28 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 21:41:28 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This is one of those evergreen arguments, I guess, well aired as I recall on the old CAP-L. But I suppose it's continually in need of revisiting, or we wouldn't keep revisiting it. Though I have vanishingly small interest in precise definition of "mainstream" poetry, I always blink a bit at the claim that metrical/formalist poetry has suffered some uniform eclipse in recent decades. This usually goes with the attendant argument that the rebel angels are, well, rebellious. That's a characterization that needs some qualification, at least. I don't deny that there was a kind of sea-change in mainstreamish poetry beginning around 1960, particularly as former formalists like James Wright, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine et al. began to do exciting things with free verse, and as Ginsberg & Co. began their long climb into the establishment. But that's not all that's been going on, by any means. And for all that those strands have proliferated through the present, I think that any notion of a monolithic free verse establishment--eclipsing those lonely mavericks Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, and only lately challenged by Mark Jarman et al-- doesn't hold up to very thorough scrutiny. Seems to me that metrical/formalist poetry has remained entrenched in all sorts of establishment venues, even through the wooly 1960s and indeed to the present time. A while back somebody mentioned Jed Rasula's *American Poetry Wax Museum : Reality Effects, 1940-1990*, which among other virtues includes a great deal of historical data about what poetry has been valued by the establishment. Rasula presents some very eye-opening appendices that help put these matters in perspective. He lists, for example, the winners of many major prizes during the period covered, and even sorts out which poets appear most frequently in the major anthologies. Can anyone guess who comes out on top in the "most anthologized" list? Richard Wilbur, of course, who just edges out Lowell. Followed, in order, by Ginsberg, Roethke, Bishop, Merwin, Jarrell, Dickey, Levertov, and James Wright. Hardly a monolithic list of free versers. And the top 25 also includes such names as Merrill, Nemerov, Snodgrass, R.P. Warren, Eberhart, and Hecht. This is but one way to measure establishment clout, but it's hardly an insignificant yardstick. Even though I differ with Rasula on a great many points, his scholarship is impressive, and I recommend a look at his book for anyone interested in the politics of canonization. As far as I can tell, his data shows no clearcut evidence that free verse is "what's taught in the academy and. . . what wins awards," as Terry Ponick put it. Most students of poetry these days are exposed to it via those monster teaching anthologies, practically all of which feature metrical discussion and examples quite prominently. The same was true 30 years ago when I entered college, and also 20 years ago when I began teaching. For instance, two of the most popular of these anthologies for lo these many years have been edited by those arch-enemies of formalism, X. J. Kennedy and J. F. Nims. And if you look at who was actually winning the prizes and fellowships, dominating the main teaching anthologies, attracting critical attention, and so on from WWII to the present, it's hard to support the hyperbole doled out in places like the introduction to the *Rebel Angels* anthology--a book with many poets I am quite fond of, by the way. Whatever the mainstream might be, it surely includes James Merrill no less than Robert Bly, among the elders, and Marilyn Nelson no less than Naomi Shihab Nye, among recent suggestions for canonical inclusion. Which is to say, among other things, that "mainstream" is highly limited as terminology, and that the apparently unkillable free verse v. formalism debate is as much in need of long-view analysis as ever. David Graham ________________________ > >Which brings us to the second point. Contemporary free verse is "mainstream" >because it's mostly what's taught in the academy and because it's what wins >awards? . . . . Contemporary free verse in all >its permutations is most certainly "mainstrem" on the campus, but that's >because professors have decreed that it is so and have not, by and large, >changed their collective mind in my adult lifetime. The general public >"mainstream" isn't really connected to this stuff and couldn't name you one >of these vaunted awards nor a single poet who has won one. (But a lot of them > read cowboy poetry.) I suspect a statement like the one above really hinges >on what the meaning of "mainstream" is. Our definitions obviously differ and >will continue to do so. > >--Terry Ponick >_______________________________________________ __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From Thom424 at aol.com Sun Apr 1 23:04:57 2001 From: Thom424 at aol.com (Thom424 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 23:04:57 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson/Browning Message-ID: <36.13d04cfd.27f94659@aol.com> Thomas Johnson says in his interpretive bio of ED that she was "first awakened to the immediacy of poetry by reading the poems of EB Browning." Dickinson actually wrote three elegies in memory of EBB: #363J, #593J, and a third that escapes me right now! From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 2 05:30:27 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 05:30:27 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: New-Poetry digest, Vol 1 #131 - 11 msgs References: <6f.135e09fb.27f92210@aol.com> Message-ID: <3AC846B3.7ED2@nut-n-but.net> Terry-- Michael Jordan's fans would of course claim he advanced the craft, but they would be wrong. Mark Mcgwire didn't advance the craft of hitting home runs, either. In the high jump, whoever holds the record now did not advance the craft of high jumping--but Fosbury did. (He was the first to seriously use the technique of going over with a backwards flip.) Or else we can decide that very little does not advance a craft. I've just advanced the craft of writing prose sentences with this one because the words it uses were never previously used in the order I've just used them. I have little comment on your long reply because I think I've said all I can on the subject. I will say, though, that I've taken pains to say that I do not believe that advancing the craft is the only virtue in poetry. Oh, and Republicans are of course mainstream, but so are the Democrats. Your ability to find significant differences between to two parties is what separates you from me. And cowboy poetry and rap poetry and other genres of poetry are knownstream, not mainstream, by my definition, because they are not taken seriously by the cultural establishments. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 2 05:36:49 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 05:36:49 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith References: Message-ID: <3AC84831.4BD5@nut-n-but.net> David, you may be right that formalist poetry is still mainstream. My impression is that the formalist poets getting the respect of the poetry establishments nowadays are hangovers from the days that formalist poetry was mainstream. There's also the problem for analysts of the situation of poets who write both freeverse and formal poetry. --Bob G. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 2 09:09:21 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 06:09:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith Message-ID: <20010402130921.AD25C2742@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From michael.ritchie at mail.atu.edu Mon Apr 2 11:09:37 2001 From: michael.ritchie at mail.atu.edu (Michael Karl Ritchie) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 10:09:37 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Conditions of Play Message-ID: I prefer different conditions of play: "Games" by Vasco Popa, tr. Charles Simic. Before the Game Shut one eye then the other Peek into every corner of yourself See that there are no nails no thieves See that there are no cuckoo's eggs Shut then the other eye Squat and jump Jump high high high On top of yourself Fall then with all your weight Fall for days on end deep deep deep To the bottom of your abyss Who doesn't break into pieces Who remains whole who gets up whole Plays ====================================== Floornail One is a nail the other is pliers The rest are carpenters The pliers grab the nail by the head With their teeth their arms they grab it And keep pulling and pulling Pulling it out of the floor Usually they just wring its head off It's hard pulling a nail out of the floor The carpenters then say These pliers are lousy They crush its jaw break its arms And throw them out of the window Then someone else is a floornail Another is pliers The rest are carpenters ======================================= Hide-And-Seek Someone hides from someone else Hides under his tongue The other looks for him under the earth He hides on his forehead The other looks for him in the sky He hides inside his forgetfulness The other looks for him in the grass Looks for him looks There's no place he doesn't look And looking he loses himself =========================================== Seducer One strokes the leg of a chair Until the chair moves And gives him a sweet sign with its leg Another kisses a keyhole Kisses it O how he kisses it Until the keyhole returns his kiss A third stands aside Stares at the other two Shakes shakes his head Until it falls off ========================================= Wedding Each strips his skin Each bares his own constellation Which has never seen the night Each fills his skin with rocks And plays with it Lit by his own stars Who doesn't stop till dawn Who doesn't bat an eyelid or fall Earns his own skin (This game is rarely played) ============================================= Rose Thieves Someone is a rose bush The others are wind's daughters The others are rose thieves The rose thieves sneak up to the rose One of them steals it Hides it in his heart The wind's daughters appear See the plucked beauty And run after the thieves They open their hearts one by one In one they find a heart In another so help me nothing They open and open their breasts Until they find a heart And in that heart the stolen rose ================================================ Between Games Nobody rests This one constantly shifts his eyes Hangs them on his head And whether he wants it or not starts walking backwards He puts them on the soles of his feet And whether he wants it or not returns walking on his head This one turns into an ear He hears all that won't let itself be heard But he grows bored Yearns to turn again into himself But without eyes he can't see how This one bares all his faces One after the other he throws them over the roof The last one he throws under his feet And sinks his head into his hands This one stretches his sight Stretches it from thumb to thumb Walks over it walks First slow then fast Then faster and faster That one plays with his head Juggles it in the air Meets it with his index finger Or doesn't meet it at all Nobody rests ============================== Race Some bite from the others A leg an arm or whatever Take it between their teeth Run out as fast as they can Cover it up with earth The others scatter everywhere Sniff look sniff look Dig up the whole earth The game continues at a lively pace As long as there are arms As long as there are legs As long as there is anything ================================= Seeds Someone plants someone else Plants him in his head Stamps the earth well Waits for the seed to sprout The seed empties his head Turns it into a mousehole The mice eat the seed Die all on the spot The wind moves into the empty head And begins to give birth to its own little winds ==================================== Hunter Someone enters without knocking Enters into someone's ear And comes out through the other Comes with the step of a matchstick Comes with the step of a lit matchstick Circles the head inside He's on top Someone enters without knocking Enters into someone's ear And doesn't come out through the other He's roasted =========================================== Ashes Some are nights others stars Each night sets fire to its own star And dances a black dance around it Until the star burns out Then the nights divide themselves Some become stars Others remain nights Again each night sets fire to its own star And dances a black dance around it Until the star burns out The last night becomes both star and night It sets fire to itself And dances the black dance around itself ===================================== After the Game Finally the hands grab the belly So the belly won't burst with laughter Only there's no belly One hand barely lifts itself To wipe the cold sweat from its forehead There's no forehead either The other hand reaches for the heart So the heart won't leap out of the chest But there's no heart either Both hands fall They fall idly into the lap There's no lap either In the palm of one hand Now the rain falls >From the other the grass grows What can I tell you From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 2 11:13:29 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 10:13:29 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Stallings, etc. Message-ID: In case anyone doesn't know: Poetry Daily is running a series of "poet's picks" for Nat. Poetry Month. Poets previously featured on PD have been asked to select and comment on a poem by a dead guy. Today's Poet Pick is Housman's "Loveliest of Trees," presented by A. E. Stallings. I believe you have to sign up for this service at the PD site, if you don't already receive their weekly email newsletter: http://www.poems.com ______________ "Poets' Picks" - Subscribe to our free weekly email newsletter, before you miss our special April poems! We've asked 21 poets to select a poem to be delivered to you by email Monday through Friday of each week in April - their favorites from among The Greats. Sign up now! (Note: if you already receive our weekly newsletter, you need not sign up again.) _______________ David Graham __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From rlong at jcn1.com Mon Apr 2 11:33:32 2001 From: rlong at jcn1.com (Richard Long) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 10:33:32 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] (no subject) Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20010402103109.00a0fec0@pop3.slu.edu> All Blue, Please help to pass the word along that 2River has just moved to its own domain: http://www.2River.org The old location http://www.daemen.edu/~2River over the next few weeks will gradually disappear. Since 1996, 2River has been an online site of poetry, art, and theory, quarterly publishing The 2River View and occasionally publishing individual authors in the 2River Chapbook Series. Richard Long ====== 2River http://www.2River.org editor at 2River.org From Jandhodge at aol.com Mon Apr 2 12:02:16 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 12:02:16 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rhyme Definition Message-ID: > > Emily Dickinson used consonance in place of rhyme, > > did this before her). > > > > --Bob G. > I think Mrs. Browning preceded her in this regard. E. D. kept a picture of > E. B. B. in her room, I've read. Agreed; there are occasional and usually random instances throughout English poetry, "forced" because English is relatively rthyme poor. But did anyone before Dickinson use it so consistently, making it virtually the principal structural element in the lyric? And was it not a (presumably deliberate) way to move beyond the obvious technical limitations of "pure" rhyme, and so an advancement of craft? Just asking . . . Jan From TerryP17 at aol.com Mon Apr 2 12:05:42 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 12:05:42 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mainstream, evergreen, and whatever . . . Message-ID: <32.12dc5f9a.27f9fd50@aol.com> David and Bob-- <> Fine. Actually, I don't really have a problem with this observation. I tend to object to critics lumping things they don't like into a sometimes oversimplified category and then throwing that category and everything in it into the trash. The butler in Oscar Wilde's "Importance of Being Earnest" declares to Algy, "That's the truth, pure and simple." To which Algernon declares, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple." The line is pretty funny in context, but it's also a pretty fair statement out of context, and it's what I've been trying to drive at here, however successfully or unsuccessfully. I, too, that a longer-term analysis on the "unkillable debate" is probably in order. Don't know who's up for devoting the requisite amount of time to it, however. This is not something that's easily dealt with in sound bites. Re: Michael Jordan, innovation, etc. It's obviously that I think you can innovate, have something new to say, go in a different direction within form as well as without. Doesn't matter whether the form is a sonnet or a jumper shot. We've probably clobbered this one to death, but that's where I stand, anyhow. BTW, there is so a difference between Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans want to give all your money to Michael Eisner. The Democrats want to give all your money to street people. :-) --Terry P From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 2 12:17:55 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 09:17:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Conditions of Play Message-ID: <20010402161755.C2FC836F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Mon Apr 2 12:22:37 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 12:22:37 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith Message-ID: Easy definition of mainstream: Go to your local bookstore. Check out the poetry section. Who is there? Go to your local library; look for books of poetry. Who is there? That's mainstream. If people can purchase or check out someone's work without having to perform a whole dog-and-pony show, then it's probably mainstream from the general public's perspective. (What the people think is important! How radical is that?) Of course, this may mean that the mainstream of poetry for the consumer is largely composed of dead people's poetry, but who cares about having a contemporary audience when we're having so much fun arguing over rhyme? As for the endless free verse vs. formalism: Has it occurred to anyone that some people do free verse because they're simply better at doing that than anything else, and some people write formal poetry because they're better at that than anything else? It's not necessarily some grand idea like freedom from external constriction or expanding an idea through form. Sometimes, it's just 'because I can't do it right any other way. I tried, and it looked like the dictionary threw up all over my page.' -Amber From tadrichards at prodigy.net Mon Apr 2 12:35:47 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 12:35:47 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith References: Message-ID: <013a01c0bb92$f9075300$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Amber -- this makes a lot of sense to me -- as good a definition of mainstream as I can think of. A musician should learn to play in every key. An artist should learn to draw the figure. And a poet should learn as wide a range of tools as she/he can. Not only do some poets work better in free verse and some in forms, some poems are best written in free verse (and different kinds of free verse structures), some in forms. If you can do both, you have a better chance of doing justice to a particular poem. "Well said, old mole." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 12:22 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > Easy definition of mainstream: > > Go to your local bookstore. Check out the poetry section. Who is there? Go > to your local library; look for books of poetry. Who is there? That's > mainstream. If people can purchase or check out someone's work without > having to perform a whole dog-and-pony show, then it's probably mainstream > from the general public's perspective. (What the people think is important! > How radical is that?) Of course, this may mean that the mainstream of poetry > for the consumer is largely composed of dead people's poetry, but who cares > about having a contemporary audience when we're having so much fun arguing > over rhyme? > > As for the endless free verse vs. formalism: > > Has it occurred to anyone that some people do free verse because they're > simply better at doing that than anything else, and some people write formal > poetry because they're better at that than anything else? It's not > necessarily some grand idea like freedom from external constriction or > expanding an idea through form. Sometimes, it's just 'because I can't do it > right any other way. I tried, and it looked like the dictionary threw up all > over my page.' > > -Amber > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From JforJames at aol.com Mon Apr 2 12:56:28 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 12:56:28 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Merrill's Serenade / Knopf's Nat'l Poetry Month Promo Message-ID: <22.14265fb4.27fa093c@aol.com> Reply-to: knopfwebmaster at randomhouse.com To: JforJames at aol.com The first poem is by James Merrill, from COLLECTED POEMS. Serenade Here's your letter the old portable Pecked out so passionately as to crack The larynx. I too dream of "times We'll share." Across the river: MUTUAL LIFE. Flush of skyline. Owning up to past Decorum, present insatiety, Let corporate proceedings one by one Be abstracted to mauve onionskin, Lit stories rippling upside down in thought Be stilled alike of drift and personnel, Then, only then, the lyric I-lessness At nightfall banked upon renew Today's unfolder. Whose lips part. Heard now In his original setting--voice and reeds-- As music for a god, your page Asks to be held so that the lamp shines through And stars appear instead of periods. Copyright (c) 2001 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ In conjunction with the publication of COLLECTED POEMS by James Merrill, Knopf has created a James Merrill archive on-line at http://www.aaknopf.com/jamesmerrill/ where you will find a video tour of Merrill's home in Stonington, CT, video of Merrill reading at Washington University in St. Louis, original drafts (typed and handwritten) of poems such as "Charles on Fire", "The Kimono", and "An Upward Look," an essay by J.D. McClatchy, Merrill event dates, and readers' recollections. Come take a look around. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Thanks for signing up for Knopf's Poem-a-Day, National Poetry Month, April 2001. We hope to share with you over the course of the next weeks a diverse selection of some of the best poetry being published today. We hope to defy your expectations of what poetry is and can do, to surprise you, and above all that at least one of the poems you receive this month sparks a deep reaction within you as only a poem can, poetry being perhaps the most intimate of the arts. Welcome, readers. Get ready for a month of emails containing words chosen by poets with extraordinary care. Please feel free to post your reactions to the poems you receive over the next weeks in the forum at http://www.knopfpoetry.com/studentcenter/ From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Mon Apr 2 01:53:11 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 00:53:11 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist Message-ID: There's a chilling new twist in the McCarriston case. The poet Linda McCarriston is now being investigated by the U. S. government for a civil rights violation. In addition, her department chair has pressured her to change her grading system to be more "solicitous" of certain classes of students. To see the new development, you can check the following story: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-kurtz040201.shtml Opinions, anyone? Paul Lake From JforJames at aol.com Mon Apr 2 13:50:53 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 13:50:53 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems Message-ID: <28.13683977.27fa15fd@aol.com> A goodly number of posts back, I think Amber mentioned something about her affinity for short poems. I have this first book (below) on a shelf somewher at home. As I remember it Wm. Cole anthology is chockfull of both serious & light short poems. (Cole's other anthologies may be of interest as well. I pulled these titles off a used book search site; some of them may not be readily available...tho I can imagine a decent sized public library would have one or two in its stacks.) Seems like I remember one other title, something like _Poems Eight Lines & Shorter_. Best contemporary poem in 8 lines or less anyone? There's also Robert Bly's beautiful little anthology, The Sea & the Honeycomb. Anne Carson's has a some short poem series like "The Life of Towns" in Plainwater, and another group in her book Glass, Irony, God, something the Truth About God(?). I'm probably making it up but I seem to remember a series of "Saints" too. My picks for poets who have a gift for brevity: William Bronk & Alan Dugan; then Creeley, of course. I think the serious (as opposed to light/slight) short-short poem often depends on an oblique point of view. Or maybe better said: It's both the angle and point of entry to the subject matter that make the poem more than sum of its lines would seem to add up to. Poems One Line & Longer Cole, William Poetry Brief An Anthology of Short, Short Poems Cole, William Cole, William Half Serious; An Anthology of Short Poems Pith and Vinegar: An Anthology of Short Humorous Poetry. Cole, William, ed. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 14:04:40 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 10:04:40 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems Message-ID: >Poems One Line & Longer Cole, William How would a poem one line long differ from a sentence? This seems more like trying to play "Name that Tune" with one note. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From jpl3 at lehigh.edu Mon Apr 2 14:08:58 2001 From: jpl3 at lehigh.edu (Joe Lucia) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 14:08:58 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: <28.13683977.27fa15fd@aol.com> Message-ID: <3AC8C03A.A2AF42D@lehigh.edu> JforJames at aol.com wrote: > My picks for poets who have a gift for brevity: William Bronk & Alan > Dugan; then Creeley, of course. Whole-hearted agreement to all three of those; to that list I'd add: Cid Corman James Weil (Bronk's early publisher) Lorine Niedecker I'll try to post a piece by each of these poets in the next day or two. Ammons also wrote some nice short poems. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: jpl3.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 337 bytes Desc: Card for Joe Lucia URL: From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Mon Apr 2 14:25:32 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 14:25:32 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist Message-ID: Sifting all the emotion out of this editorial, I think the civil rights charge probably does not stem out of the poem but a student's perception of the teacher, and, in fact, this student's grievances seem to have stemmed long before the poem. Is this, then, an issue of censorship or just an issue of a long-running student grudge? Honestly, I think this is about a student and a professor failing to connect. I also don't know if I care anymore, being that I find less and less use for institutional learning every moment and wonder why I did not decide to be an air conditioning repairperson who owns a lot of books instead. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Paul Lake To: New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/2/2001 1:53 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist There's a chilling new twist in the McCarriston case. The poet Linda McCarriston is now being investigated by the U. S. government for a civil rights violation. In addition, her department chair has pressured her to change her grading system to be more "solicitous" of certain classes of students. To see the new development, you can check the following story: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-kurtz040201.shtml Opinions, anyone? Paul Lake _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 2 14:24:06 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 14:24:06 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > How would a poem one line long differ from a sentence? This seems more like > trying to play "Name that Tune" with one note. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA Here's a one-line poem by Apollinaire w/o a sentence in sight, Moira. It's translated by Wm. Meredith. Singer And the single string of the trumpet marine Hal "I would like the world to know that I am a poet first and a would-be assassin last." --John W. Hinckley, Jr. Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From alsop at alsopreview.com Mon Apr 2 18:31:23 2001 From: alsop at alsopreview.com (Jaimes Alsop) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 15:31:23 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: Message-ID: <3AC8FDBB.29A8ACA@alsopreview.com> Moira Russell wrote: > >Poems One Line & Longer Cole, William > > How would a poem one line long differ from a sentence? This seems more like > trying to play "Name that Tune" with one note. > Here's a couple from the book, Moira. From johnbrehm at mindspring.com Mon Apr 2 14:34:31 2001 From: johnbrehm at mindspring.com (john brehm) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 14:34:31 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: <28.13683977.27fa15fd@aol.com> <3AC8C03A.A2AF42D@lehigh.edu> Message-ID: <009001c0bba3$9026d020$391af7a5@compaqcomputer> Here's one of Ammons' short poems THEIR SEX LIFE One failure on Top of another. Good thing he didn't teach in Alaska. Some impotent freshman might've taken offense. John Brehm ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Lucia" To: Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 2:08 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Short Poems > JforJames at aol.com wrote: > > My picks for poets who have a gift for brevity: William Bronk & Alan > > Dugan; then Creeley, of course. > > Whole-hearted agreement to all three of those; to that list I'd add: > > Cid Corman > James Weil (Bronk's early publisher) > Lorine Niedecker > > I'll try to post a piece by each of these poets in the next day or > two. Ammons also wrote some nice short poems. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 14:37:48 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 10:37:48 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems Message-ID: How is half a sentence different from a fragment? And what qualifies it as poetry? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Mon Apr 2 15:05:53 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:05:53 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith Message-ID: I somewhat disagree, but I only somewhat disagree. The precise reason why folk art is prized is because it comes from outside the tradition and can manage to do interesting things without (benefit? of) formal education. For example, some poems try to sound like children's speech and its spontaneous poetry, but most 6 year olds can't even spell iambic, much less understand what that means. Would folk artists be better if they went to the Art Institute of Chicago, or would it ruin them? Dunno. I think the conceit that you have to learn a tradition in order to break it may be a bit silly. Not learning them may be useful in terms of spawning a new sort of technique. Then again, it might not be so silly. You can learn forms to explode them, change them around, and come up with new ones. You can steal tactics from them, too. A greater understanding of metrical poetry, even if all the metrical poetry you write is execrable, may lead to a better understanding of rhythm as a device in free verse. Tangent: this brings to mind the oft-repeated complaint that formal verse is not taught. I think that poets ought to be more self-reliant about what they do. You cannot escape the 12th grade without at least knowing of one form, the sonnet, and you cannot escape forms in college unless you take virtually no classes involving poetry. If someone's going to be a poet, she probably reads poetry, and forms are pretty hard to completely avoid. It's her decision whether or not to try them herself or join a class in which she will have to attempt them. Formal poetry may not be taught or emphasized in creative writing courses, but, this being /creative/ writing, that shouldn't hinder anyone from trying it if she wants to. By college age, a poet shouldn't be unaware that forms exist, even if she isn't sure of what many of them are. There are teachers. They have offices. There are, at the very least, libraries. She can ask! An artist ought to be at least as much self-trained as academy-trained. If she can't think for herself, will she do anything good? -Amber Prentiss, apparently towing the "We Don't Need No Education" line today. -----Original Message----- From: theoldmole To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/2/2001 12:35 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith Amber -- this makes a lot of sense to me -- as good a definition of mainstream as I can think of. A musician should learn to play in every key. An artist should learn to draw the figure. And a poet should learn as wide a range of tools as she/he can. Not only do some poets work better in free verse and some in forms, some poems are best written in free verse (and different kinds of free verse structures), some in forms. If you can do both, you have a better chance of doing justice to a particular poem. "Well said, old mole." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 12:22 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > Easy definition of mainstream: > > Go to your local bookstore. Check out the poetry section. Who is there? Go > to your local library; look for books of poetry. Who is there? That's > mainstream. If people can purchase or check out someone's work without > having to perform a whole dog-and-pony show, then it's probably mainstream > from the general public's perspective. (What the people think is important! > How radical is that?) Of course, this may mean that the mainstream of poetry > for the consumer is largely composed of dead people's poetry, but who cares > about having a contemporary audience when we're having so much fun arguing > over rhyme? > > As for the endless free verse vs. formalism: > > Has it occurred to anyone that some people do free verse because they're > simply better at doing that than anything else, and some people write formal > poetry because they're better at that than anything else? It's not > necessarily some grand idea like freedom from external constriction or > expanding an idea through form. Sometimes, it's just 'because I can't do it > right any other way. I tried, and it looked like the dictionary threw up all > over my page.' > > -Amber > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 2 15:15:06 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 14:15:06 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A Farm Picture Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn, A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding, And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away. --Walt Whitman _________________________________ The Torch On my Northwest coast in the midst of the night a fisherman's group stands watching, Out on the lake that expands before them, others are spearing salmon, The canoe, a dim shadowy thing, moves across the black water, Bearing a torch ablaze at the prow. --Walt Whitman _________________________________ The White Horse The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on, and the horse looks at him in silence. They are so silent they are in another world. --D. H. Lawrence _________________________________ At the Desk I spent the entire day in official details; And it almost pulled me down like the others: I felt that tiny insane voluptuousness, Getting this done, finally finishing that. --Theodor Storm _________________________________ Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me. --Robert Frost _________________________________ Epitaph For Someone Or Other Naked I came, naked I leave the scene, And naked was my pastime in between. --J.V. Cunningham _________________________________ Why I Drink If on my theme I rightly think, There are five reasons why I drink-- Good wine, a friend, because I'm dry, Or lest I should be by and by, Or any other reason why. --Henry Aldrich _________________________________ "Faith" is a fine invention When Gentlemen can see-- But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency. --Emily Dickinson _________________________________ The Star System While you're a white-hot youth, emit the rays Which, now unmarked, shall dazzle future days. Burn for the joy of it, and waste no juice On hopes of prompt discovery. Produce! Then, white with years, live wisely and survive. Thus you may be on hand when you arrive, And, like Antares, rosily dilate, And for a time be gaseous and great. --Richard Wilbur _________________________________ The Act There were the roses, in the rain. Don't cut them, I pleaded. They won't last, she said But they're so beautiful where they are. Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said, and cut them and gave them to me in my hand. --William Carlos Williams _________________________________ A Drinking Song Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh. --William Butler Yeats __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From kellogg at duke.edu Mon Apr 2 15:15:50 2001 From: kellogg at duke.edu (David Kellogg) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:15:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > From: Paul Lake > To: New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Sent: 4/2/2001 1:53 AM > Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist > > There's a chilling new twist in the McCarriston case. The poet Linda > McCarriston is now being investigated by the U. S. government for a > civil > rights violation. In addition, her department chair has pressured her > to > change her grading system to be more "solicitous" of certain classes of > students. > > To see the new development, you can check the following story: > > http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-kurtz040201.shtml > > Opinions, anyone? Dear Paul, I have the following opinions: 1. The "new twist" in the case is not particularly chilling, because the DOE investigation isn't going to go anywhere. The USDOE is more or less obligated to look into the allegations, however groundless. Unlike universities, the DOE is _not_ morally obligated to defend free speech rights. 2. The connection made by Kurtz between the McCarriston case and _l'affaire Horowitz_ is willfully misleading and contemptible. Of _course_ McCarriston should be defended. But Horowitz's publicity stunt is a different matter altogether. 3. The link alleged between affirmative action and grade inflation is in fact broken in this case, rather than proven by it. McCarriston opposed grade inflation, the two-tiered grading system she considered had nothing to do with race, and there is no affirmative action at U of Alaska anyway. All in all, the National Review spin on the issue is typical right-wing claptrap. I'm glad they're defending McCarriston, but I think their representation of the case is problematic at best. Personally, I'm happy as hell that a poem mananged to piss off so many people, although I'm distressed that it was so poorly misread. Maybe the incident will help poets stop being jealous of Mapplethorpe and Rushdie. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg Assistant Director kellogg at acpub.duke.edu University Writing Program (919) 660-4357 Duke University FAX (919) 660-4372 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 15:20:28 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 11:20:28 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Sums up my working day nicely.... Message-ID: Work Without Hope by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Lines composed 21st February, 1825 All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair - The bees are stirring -birds are on the wing - And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From alsop at alsopreview.com Mon Apr 2 19:28:53 2001 From: alsop at alsopreview.com (Jaimes Alsop) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 16:28:53 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems References: Message-ID: <3AC90B35.8AF3AF72@alsopreview.com> Since the subject is short poems and several people have posted some, here's my all-time favourite: Toward the evening of her splendid day Those who are little children now will say (Upon finding this verse) "Who wrote it, Juliet?" And Juliet answer gently "I forget" Theodore Roethke. Speaks volumes, doesn't it? -- Jaimes Alsop The Alsop Review http://www.alsopreview.com From johnbrehm at mindspring.com Mon Apr 2 15:36:49 2001 From: johnbrehm at mindspring.com (john brehm) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:36:49 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems References: Message-ID: <00bd01c0bbac$44603a60$391af7a5@compaqcomputer> Look Down Fair Moon Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down night's nimbus floods On faces ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide, Pour down your unstinted, nimbus, sacred moon. --Walt Whitman ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Graham" To: Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 3:15 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems > > > > A Farm Picture > > Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn, > A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding, > And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away. > --Walt Whitman > _________________________________ > > The Torch > > On my Northwest coast in the midst of the night a fisherman's group stands > watching, > Out on the lake that expands before them, others are spearing salmon, > The canoe, a dim shadowy thing, moves across the black water, > Bearing a torch ablaze at the prow. > --Walt Whitman > _________________________________ > > The White Horse > > The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on, > and the horse looks at him in silence. > They are so silent they are in another world. > --D. H. Lawrence > _________________________________ > > At the Desk > > I spent the entire day in official details; > And it almost pulled me down like the others: > I felt that tiny insane voluptuousness, > Getting this done, finally finishing that. > --Theodor Storm > _________________________________ > > Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee > And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me. > --Robert Frost > _________________________________ > > Epitaph For Someone Or Other > > Naked I came, naked I leave the scene, > And naked was my pastime in between. > --J.V. Cunningham > _________________________________ > > Why I Drink > > If on my theme I rightly think, > There are five reasons why I drink-- > Good wine, a friend, because I'm dry, > Or lest I should be by and by, > Or any other reason why. > --Henry Aldrich > _________________________________ > > "Faith" is a fine invention > When Gentlemen can see-- > But Microscopes are prudent > In an Emergency. > --Emily Dickinson > _________________________________ > > The Star System > > While you're a white-hot youth, emit the rays > Which, now unmarked, shall dazzle future days. > Burn for the joy of it, and waste no juice > On hopes of prompt discovery. Produce! > > Then, white with years, live wisely and survive. > Thus you may be on hand when you arrive, > And, like Antares, rosily dilate, > And for a time be gaseous and great. > --Richard Wilbur > _________________________________ > > The Act > > There were the roses, in the rain. > Don't cut them, I pleaded. > They won't last, she said > But they're so beautiful > where they are. > Agh, we were all beautiful once, she > said, > and cut them and gave them to me > in my hand. > --William Carlos Williams > _________________________________ > > A Drinking Song > > Wine comes in at the mouth > And love comes in at the eye; > That's all we shall know for truth > Before we grow old and die. > I lift the glass to my mouth, > I look at you, and I sigh. > --William Butler Yeats > > > __________________ > David Graham > grahamd at mail.ripon.edu > __________________ > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 15:44:17 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 11:44:17 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist Message-ID: David Kellogg wrote: >Personally, I'm happy as hell that a poem mananged to piss off so many people, although I'm distressed that it was so poorly misread. Maybe the incident will help poets stop being jealous of Mapplethorpe and Rushdie. International fame, target of fatwa....International fame, target of fatwa....damn, why is it I can never choose in these kinds of situations.... Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 2 15:39:27 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 15:39:27 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mainstream, evergreen, and whatever . . . References: <32.12dc5f9a.27f9fd50@aol.com> Message-ID: <3AC8D56F.1D7D@nut-n-but.net> Nah, Terry, the Democrats want to give all your money to Eisner-clones REPRESENTING street people. As for "mainstream," it's not in my taxonomy but I think it's the best informal term for unneglected poetry that there is, so will continue to use it in informal discussions like the ones here. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 2 15:50:33 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 15:50:33 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: Message-ID: <3AC8D809.56A0@nut-n-but.net> A poem one line long would differ from a sentence in its placement on the page-- with no text fore or aft, above or below. One simple lesson taught by visual poetry is that negative space is important in poetry, sometimes crucially important. Of course, the context the one-sentence poem is in is important, too--it needs to be in a publication that's labeled in one way or another a collection of poetry. So it's like rhyme: rhyme can show up in prose, and is sometimes intentional; but it doesn't therefore make the text its in poetry; isolation of single sentences can occur in prose, too, but it doesn't make the singles sentences poems. --Bob G. From kellogg at duke.edu Mon Apr 2 15:53:18 2001 From: kellogg at duke.edu (David Kellogg) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:53:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Moira Russell wrote: > > >Personally, I'm happy as hell that a poem mananged to piss off so many > people, although I'm distressed that it was so poorly misread. Maybe the > incident will help poets stop being jealous of Mapplethorpe and Rushdie. > > International fame, target of fatwa....International fame, target of > fatwa....damn, why is it I can never choose in these kinds of situations.... Those were the days, huh? Novelist and visual artists were being reviled internationally, while Dana Gioia was asking "Can Poetry Matter?" at the exact same moment. Coincidence? I say it was nothing but scandal envy. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg Assistant Director kellogg at acpub.duke.edu University Writing Program (919) 660-4357 Duke University FAX (919) 660-4372 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ From kellogg at duke.edu Mon Apr 2 15:50:48 2001 From: kellogg at duke.edu (David Kellogg) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:50:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Piggybacking on my own message . . . On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, I wrote: > Unlike > universities, the DOE is _not_ morally obligated to defend free speech > rights. This was poorly put. Anyway, to rephrase, I might say that the DOE has the responsibility to investigate charges of racism in education in certain circumstances. This investigation should be conducted apart from the free speech question. The DOE's investigation is not necessarily a violation of free speech rights. For my part, I think McCalliston should welcome the investigation so the DOE can clear her name publicly. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg Assistant Director kellogg at acpub.duke.edu University Writing Program (919) 660-4357 Duke University FAX (919) 660-4372 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ From johnbrehm at mindspring.com Mon Apr 2 15:58:44 2001 From: johnbrehm at mindspring.com (john brehm) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:58:44 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems References: <3AC90B35.8AF3AF72@alsopreview.com> Message-ID: <00d101c0bbaf$53d4cda0$391af7a5@compaqcomputer> Love's Map Your face, more than others' faces, Maps the half-remembered places I have come to while I slept, Continents a dream kept Secret from all waking folk Until to your face I awoke And remembered then the shore And the dark interior. Donald Justice ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jaimes Alsop" To: Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 7:28 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems > Since the subject is short poems and several people have posted some, here's > my all-time favourite: > > Toward the evening of her splendid day > Those who are little children now will say > (Upon finding this verse) "Who wrote it, Juliet?" > And Juliet answer gently "I forget" > > Theodore Roethke. > > Speaks volumes, doesn't it? > > > -- > Jaimes Alsop > The Alsop Review > http://www.alsopreview.com > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Jandhodge at aol.com Mon Apr 2 16:10:00 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:10:00 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist Message-ID: << Honestly, I think this is about a student and a professor failing to connect. I also don't know if I care anymore, being that I find less and less use for institutional learning every moment and wonder why I did not decide to be an air conditioning repairperson who owns a lot of books instead. >> Amber-- Strangely, I came to the same conclusion -- after 32 years of teaching, of giving my best to a profession I once loved, and of becoming thoroughly discouraged because of exactly this kind of crap. Why anyone would teach under such conditions [other than to force some socio-political agenda on a captive audience] amazes me, and then people wonder why education (and by extension a small piece of the foundation of civilized culture) is failing. Btw, did you get the things I sent? Jan From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 2 16:15:21 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:15:21 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Sums up my working day nicely.... Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/01 2:21:58 PM Central Daylight Time, moira_russell at hotmail.com writes: > Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, Like bailing out the Titanic with a thimble. From TerryP17 at aol.com Mon Apr 2 16:15:59 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 16:15:59 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Short Poems Message-ID: <> There is a small mag in California called "Tundra" that proudly proclaims it's open to publishing only poems under 13 lines in length, which is what it defines as short--as valid a definition as any. As a result, the mag is pretty haiku heavy. There's also a fair bit of humorous verse. Tundra, as you might imagine, publishes at least 100 poets per issue. The magazine is, fortunately, platform-agnostic, and doesn't discriminate against any kind of poetry formal or otherwise just so long as it's really short. I've questioned the editor about what he hopes to contribute to the cosmos by flooding the market with so much of what I regard as ephemera, but he's cheerfully sticking to his guns as he informed me in a recent email. So much for my career as a missionary. If you want to read my comments on Tundra and a few other magazines, surf over to: http://www.edge-city.com/page2.htm Then scroll down to the entry on Tundra. If you'd rather avoid my (hopefully entertaining) fulminations, you can snailmail $21 to: Michael Dylan Welch, 248 Beach Park Boulevard, Foster City, CA 94404 This gets you 3 issues of Tundra, and also the opportunity to make your own decision on the format. --Terry P From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 16:16:31 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 12:16:31 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist Message-ID: David Kellogg wrote: >Those were the days, huh? Novelist and visual artists were being reviled >internationally, while Dana Gioia was asking "Can Poetry Matter?" at the >exact same moment. Coincidence? I say it was nothing but scandal envy. Hmmmmmm.....oh, yes, "Birthday Letters" hadn't been published yet.... Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 2 16:16:11 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:16:11 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: The Love Song of Lord Alfred Douglas Had we but world enough and time This boyness, Oscar, were no crime. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 16:18:24 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 12:18:24 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: >Secret from all waking folk >Until to your face I awoke I like the poem, but....is it just me, or does anyone else think he never would have used "folk" if he didn't need a rhyme with "awoke"? It's hard for me to beep gamely over that kind of usage. (It's just me, I know.) Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 2 16:18:04 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:18:04 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist Message-ID: <76.9209606.27fa387c@cs.com> In a message dated 4/2/01 2:56:24 PM Central Daylight Time, kellogg at duke.edu writes: > > Those were the days, huh? Novelist and visual artists were being reviled > internationally, while Dana Gioia was asking "Can Poetry Matter?" at the > exact same moment. Coincidence? I say it was nothing but scandal envy. > > Cheers, > David Really, David, this is a bit over the top. Sam Gwynn From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Mon Apr 2 16:22:04 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:22:04 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist Message-ID: Actually, my feelings about education do not stem from feelings about academic freedom, especially that of professors. I think that education has always been forcing some sort of agenda no matter what sort of people are in charge of the educational institutions. I believe that this will always continue. However, my real grievances come from elsewhere, and if you wish to correspond about that, we can, but I really don't want to spam the list with this, strangely enough. -Amber P.S. Sure did. -----Original Message----- From: Jandhodge at aol.com To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/2/2001 4:10 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist << Honestly, I think this is about a student and a professor failing to connect. I also don't know if I care anymore, being that I find less and less use for institutional learning every moment and wonder why I did not decide to be an air conditioning repairperson who owns a lot of books instead. >> Amber-- Strangely, I came to the same conclusion -- after 32 years of teaching, of giving my best to a profession I once loved, and of becoming thoroughly discouraged because of exactly this kind of crap. Why anyone would teach under such conditions [other than to force some socio-political agenda on a captive audience] amazes me, and then people wonder why education (and by extension a small piece of the foundation of civilized culture) is failing. Btw, did you get the things I sent? Jan _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 16:22:18 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 12:22:18 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Sums up my working day nicely.... Message-ID: R. S. Gwynn improvised: > > Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, >Like bailing out the Titanic with a thimble. Now Sam Coleridge is subterannean-ly musing, "nimble....bramble....amble....symbol....cymbal....dim bulb....Rimbaud...." Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Jandhodge at aol.com Mon Apr 2 16:23:04 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:23:04 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: <78.12c4a5d6.27fa39a8@aol.com> A "found poem" or merely a sign of the times? In the midst of reading the string of posted short poems, up popped this on my screen: To Start Your own Home Business... To Consolidate all Your Debts... College...for you or your family members To Start Your Home Business and prosper... Almost ANY Worthwhile Reason or need... Jan From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 2 16:26:46 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:26:46 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems In-Reply-To: <3AC8FDBB.29A8ACA@alsopreview.com> Message-ID: > In passing, I'll mention a poetry competition from a few years ago. The winning > entry was a single word > > lighght Aram Saroyan? Reminds me of eyeye I *think* that was it. Hal "What does a poet need an unlisted number for?" --George Costanza Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From kellogg at duke.edu Mon Apr 2 16:27:58 2001 From: kellogg at duke.edu (David Kellogg) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:27:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist In-Reply-To: <76.9209606.27fa387c@cs.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 2 Apr 2001 Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote: > In a message dated 4/2/01 2:56:24 PM Central Daylight Time, kellogg at duke.edu > writes: > > > > > Those were the days, huh? Novelist and visual artists were being reviled > > internationally, while Dana Gioia was asking "Can Poetry Matter?" at the > > exact same moment. Coincidence? I say it was nothing but scandal envy. > > > > Cheers, > > David > > Really, David, this is a bit over the top. > > Sam Gwynn Maybe Sam, but it has the advantage of explaining everything. :-) Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg Assistant Director kellogg at acpub.duke.edu University Writing Program (919) 660-4357 Duke University FAX (919) 660-4372 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 2 16:39:54 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:39:54 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >Secret from all waking folk > >Until to your face I awoke > > I like the poem, but....is it just me, or does anyone else think he never > would have used "folk" if he didn't need a rhyme with "awoke"? It's hard > for me to beep gamely over that kind of usage. (It's just me, I know.) Surely, though, there's no dearth of rhymes for "awoke"-- joke, poke, smoke, yolk, polk(a) . . . Hal "The bacon too carries on its modest love affair." --Tony Towle Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 2 16:44:23 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:44:23 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems In-Reply-To: <78.12c4a5d6.27fa39a8@aol.com> Message-ID: > A "found poem" or merely a sign of the times? Here's one I found just yesterday on a box of teabags: Blooming--Oolong Teabags High quality raw materials are used for this product. It has been characters of excellence the fragrant, stong and pure long mellow and fresh refreshing in taste, strong but not in puckery, pure but not in week. Hal "I would like the world to know that I am a poet first and a would-be assassin last." --John W. Hinckley, Jr. Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 2 17:41:25 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 14:41:25 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist Message-ID: <20010402214125.AE72336F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 2 17:58:41 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 17:58:41 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Philip Whalen this time: The Inspection of the Mind in June All of me that there is makes a shadow. San Francisco 14:VI:78 Hal Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Mon Apr 2 07:00:11 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 06:00:11 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston article Message-ID: Below is most of the text of the McCarriston article. Since it was published by a conservative writer and journal, the facts of the case are padded in some commentary. I've cut the first two paragraphs to get to the gist sooner. Paul Lake P.C. Hits Anchorage The Left devours its own. By Stanley Kurtz, fellow, the Hudson Institute April 2, 2001 9:15 a.m. ? . . . Linda McCarriston, a teacher in the creative-writing program of the University of Alaska at Anchorage, finalist for a national book award, past fellow at Radcliffe's prestigious Bunting Institute, stands accused of publishing a poem that amounts to racist hate speech against Native American Indians.? Not only have there been calls to censor the poem, there have been serious attempts to interfere with McCarriston's ability to teach.? And now a complaint against both McCarriston and the university has been "accepted for resolution" by the U.S. Dept. of Education's Office of Civil Rights ? a complaint that charges McCarriston with racial discrimination, as evidenced in part by the fact that she gave a non-white student a B instead of an A. All of these charges are patent nonsense.? Taken together, they constitute a threat to academic freedom far more deep and direct than even the Horowitz affair.? And remarkably, the victim in this affair is a woman of the Left ? a woman who is herself one-quarter Native American.? One of the many things that make the McCarriston affair so important is that the entire dispute is, quite literally, the criminalization of an intellectual disagreement originating in the classroom.? And the McCarriston affair also gives spectacular support to Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield's controversial claim that there is an intimate connection between grade inflation and affirmative action. The McCarriston affair began in a poetry class called, "Left Out."? The title refers to McCarriston's conviction that various poets on the Left have been unjustly excluded from the literary canon because of their politics.? All went well until the course rolled around to a discussion of the Hispanic poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca.? At that point, McCarriston suggested that Baca's life and poetry might have hit a dead end as a result of his ethnically based politics.? An aficionado of classic socialism, McCarriston believes that class solidarity can, and should, trump political division by race or ethnicity.? But McCarriston's critique of Baca's ethnic politics raised intense objections from one Diane Benson, a Native American poet and activist taking McCarriston's class.? Instead of directly engaging with her teacher's reading of Baca, Benson sat in angry silence during McCarriston's critiques of identity politics, periodically uttering the word "bulls***." All of this can be gleaned, not only from McCarriston's account, but from the numerous and impassioned letters ? written by the vast majority of students in the class ? defending McCarriston against the charges of racism now leveled against her by Diane Benson ? charges that have engulfed the Anchorage campus, and the city of Anchorage itself, in months of conflict.?? The struggle between Benson and McCarriston was confined to the classroom until last December, when Diane Benson seized upon a just-published poem by Linda McCarriston and e-mailed it around the nation and the world, accompanied by a call to "squash" the poem's harmful untruths.? Benson's message also contained an expression of grave concern at the fact that McCarriston was continuing to share her "seriously flawed opinions" about poetry and ethnicity with her students. Benson took her complaint against McCarriston's allegedly racist poem to university officials.? Then Benson organized a student demonstration against McCarriston to be held in McCarriston's own classroom.? The administration asked McCarriston to cancel that class, but she refused, whereupon the administration insisted that the demonstration take place outside the classroom.? Meanwhile, dressed as a warrior, and with an accompanying bodyguard, Diane Benson danced at the demonstration she had called against her own teacher's alleged racism, during a break in the class. The Anchorage press has been preoccupied for months with attacks by Native Americans on McCarriston's supposedly racist poem.? But what's really going on here is a classroom intellectual disagreement gone wild. As both McCarriston and many of her students maintain, Benson seized upon a poem that, under ordinary circumstances, would never have stirred a protest, simply to retaliate against McCarriston for her words in the classroom. McCarriston's poem, "Indian Girls," describes the plight of Indian women who flee their homes to escape child abuse, only to end up at downtown bars, worse for the wear.? According to Benson and other Native American critics, the poem as much as accuses all Indian men of being child abusers.? But this is simply ridiculous. "Indian Girls," is not saying that all Indian men are abusive.? McCarriston told me very clearly that she believes that sexual abuse in any culture is "a very small percentage."? McCarriston's point is that, however limited its occurrence, the reality of sexual abuse deeply shapes the relations of men and women in any culture.? I may not agree with McCarriston's feminist take on sexual abuse, but it is no more legitimate to censor her view than it would be to censor David Horowitz's ad.? If McCarriston loses her free speech in this matter, I lose mine.? More than this, McCarriston's view is not racist. Far from being a condemnation of Indian culture, McCarriston's poem is simply conveying her "Old Left" politics.? In the poem, the narrator tries to get the abused and fallen Indian women to see that she, too, has experienced something similar.? (McCarriston's poems are often about her personal struggle with sexual abuse and her recovery from alcoholism.)? In effect, the poem can be read as saying to Diane Benson, "Look, I know that Native Americans have suffered deeply.? But my people have too.? I am also a victim of abuse and alcoholism.? And many whites, like many Indians, are victims of sometimes oppressive men, and of the old patriarchal religions.? So let us join hands across our cultural differences and fight these oppressive forces together." This is the message that Linda McCarriston was trying to convey to her class.? It is the message that Diane Benson has rejected and assaulted as a threat to the politics of ethnicity that she favors.? The tragedy is that craven university administrators ? and now, perhaps, the federal government ? out of fear of offending minority sensibilities, have allowed a single angry student to transform a simple classroom difference of opinion into a profound threat to academic freedom and standards of excellence. The initial response of University of Alaska administrators to the McCarriston affair was shamefully weak.? In addition to the attempt by the administration to cancel her class, McCarriston had to deal with the efforts by Ronald Spatz, the chair of her department, to appease her critics by downplaying their calls for censorship ? and by referring complaints about the poem to higher-ups for possible action. For a moment, the tide was turned, thanks to the intervention of Alan Kors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, who helped to make Mark R. Hamilton, the president of the University of Alaska system aware of the situation. Hamilton rightly concluded that threats to investigate a professor simply for writing a poem posed a danger to academic freedom.? President Hamilton ? himself a poet ? issued a ringing defense of Linda McCarriston's intellectual freedom, and categorically demanded that all threats to "investigate" her be immediately dropped.? Hamilton also asked the chancellors at the U of A's three campuses to endorse his statement on academic freedom and disseminate it widely. President Hamilton's forthright and courageous declaration brought praise from many quarters, and has, to a degree, shifted the climate at the University of Alaska against the calls to punish or censor McCarriston for her poetry.? But for weeks after Hamilton's letter was issued, the chancellors at the U of A's three campuses offered no endorsement of his views.? Nor was the president's statement "disseminated widely," as he had ordered.? Worst of all, in the wake of President Hamilton's ringing declaration that no investigation of McCarriston is called for, the United States Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has announced its own investigation of an anonymous student's charges of racism against Linda McCarriston.? It is not difficult to guess who that student is. The OCR is investigating allegations that a minority student was treated differently by McCarriston because of her race; that her complaints of racism were ignored by McCarriston; and that, out of racism and retaliation, the student was given a grade lower than she deserved.? On the near certain assumption that the complainant here is Diane Benson, it is possible to say that these charges are sheer nonsense ? although, given the profound threat they pose to academic freedom, those charges are anything but trivial. The letters by the students in McCarriston's class make it clear that Benson was in no way treated differently by McCarriston because of her race.? The letters do describe Benson's repeated efforts to commandeer class discussion, and her fury when McCarriston tried to bring discussion back to the texts, and to her interpretations of those texts.? But this is hardly racism. As for Benson's grade, it could only have been a B, rather than an A.? (The university's grading system does not include pluses or minuses.)? Out of fourteen students in the class, seven got A's and seven B's.? With so inflated a grading system, are we now to take a B as evidence of racism?? The McCarriston affair, it seems, is much more than a threat to academic freedom.? It is also a "smoking gun" confirmation of Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield's controversial claim that grade inflation is linked to affirmative action. Of course the notion that a B instead of an A might be evidence of actionable racism makes the pressures involved in grading minority students stunningly clear.? But things don't end there.? Linda McCarriston has been directly pressured by her department chairman, Ron Spatz, to be "more solicitous" of the success of Native American students than of others whom she grades.? Because of her belief that grade inflation was depriving students in general of "the right to recognition for their excellence," McCarriston has considered creating a two tiered grading system--a transcript grade, and a "real" grade.? So without knowing it, McCarriston is proving the claims of ? and walking in the footsteps of ? Harvey C. Mansfield.? What makes this case more interesting still is that "affirmative action," in the official sense, is not at work.? The University of Alaska at Anchorage has an open admissions policy.? Nonetheless, with a local Native American population of 17 or 18 percent, and with intense competition among universities for students, there is a tremendous push to draw in more minorities ? a push that creates a kind of de facto affirmative action, even under conditions of open admissions.? That drive to enroll more minorities at the U of A explains the attempts by administrators to placate Native American demands for the punishment or censorship of Linda McCarriston.? And all of this shows that the corrupting effects of affirmative action on the core values of liberal education extends far beyond our elite, selective universities. It is difficult to catalogue the many implications of this remarkable case of political correctness.? The investigation by the OCR shows how easy the system now makes it to literally criminalize intellectual disagreements originating in the classroom.? The chilling effects on academic freedom of this federal investigation can hardly be exaggerated.? The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights was perhaps the central engine of campus P.C. during the Clinton years, and the McCarriston affair shows how important it now is to find someone to run this office who can stem the damage it is doing every day to higher education. But the most interesting thing about the McCarriston affair may be its revelation of the sheer breadth of the threat to free speech on campus.? When even a nuanced and well-meaning feminist poet on the Left gets the Horowitz treatment, we know that something truly menacing and pervasive is at work.? The liberal pundits now bashing Horowitz ought to take an honest look at what their rationalizations for campus P.C. have wrought.? The Left is now devouring its own.? And all of us are paying the price. (from National Review On Line) From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Mon Apr 2 07:07:53 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 06:07:53 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short poems Message-ID: Epigrams are by their nature short. Here's one that's stuck with me a while. This Humanist whom no belief constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained. J. V. Cunningham Any other favorite zingers? Paul Lake From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 2 18:28:49 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 18:28:49 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: Message-ID: <3AC8FD21.69C4@nut-n-but.net> > > In passing, I'll mention a poetry competition from a few years ago. > > The winning entry was a single word > > > > lighght > > Aram Saroyan? Yes. Actually, the poem got a prize from the NEA as did other poems that year, so it wasn't the single winner. Robert Duncan made the selection. There's no other poem in the Enlgish language I would rather have composed although a few others would equally liked to have composed. Saroyan also wrote, "eyeye," which I like well enough but don't consider absolutely terrific. Such pwoermds, as Geof Huth calls them, have been a staple of infraverbal poets for some forty years now; none that I know of have made a . . . mainstream anthology. One of Geof's I particularly like is "shadowl." It and the two Saroyans are visual as well as infraverbal poems though many pwoermds are are only one or the other. --Bob G. --Bob G. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 18:37:52 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 14:37:52 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Epigrams Message-ID: >Any other favorite zingers? Not zingers, exactly, but favorites. SAMSON TO HIS DELILAH Could not once blinding me, cruel, suffice? When first I look'd on thee, I lost mine eyes. -- Richard Crashaw Go tell the Lacedemonians, stranger passing by, That here, obedient to their command, we lie. -- Simonides And Pope, of course....too much Pope to quote. Ben Johnson. John Donne. Oscar Wilde, although there we're getting out of poetry into prose, or maybe prose-poetry.... Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 2 18:40:24 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:40:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: <20010402224024.8C70A274F@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 18:40:53 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 14:40:53 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: Let me then leap into immortality with the very shortest pworedm on record: . Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From katenexile at yahoo.com Mon Apr 2 18:44:28 2001 From: katenexile at yahoo.com (kate thorn) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:44:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: the china situation In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20010402103109.00a0fec0@pop3.slu.edu> Message-ID: <20010402224428.42004.qmail@web12204.mail.yahoo.com> Has anyone heard from Jago lately? I hope this situation is not adversely affecting him.---kate __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/?.refer=text From kellogg at duke.edu Mon Apr 2 19:01:44 2001 From: kellogg at duke.edu (David Kellogg) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 19:01:44 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] McCarriston case, New twist References: <20010402214125.AE72336F9@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <3AC904D8.66A57761@duke.edu> "Robert R.Cobb" wrote: > David, > > I guess that you find it amusing to "piss off so many people" with a poem. Why do you suppose "it was so poorly misread"? And, finally, what about this "incident will help poets stop being jealous of Maplethorpe and Rushdie"? Which poets? Why? Bob, I apologize if my comments seemed callous; I don't mean to dismiss anybody's felt pain, but I frankly don't understand the strong reaction against the poem. Maybe incomprehension from people like me is the problem, I don't know. By the same token, I have no idea why it was so poorly misread: perhaps because it's not all that good a poem in the first place, perhaps because of the poorly chosen word "savage" in the middle. To be honest, I don't think anything about this incident will help anybody. The attack on McCarriston is, in my view, sick, irresponsible, and characteristic of the way we on the left tend to to self-destruct; as Jim Hightower says, getting progressives organized is "like loading frogs in a wheelbarrow." I'm just as sickened by the way the National Review has used the case to further their own cause against the bogeyman PC. David Kellogg Assistant Director, University Writing Program Duke University (919) 660-4357; FAX (919) 660-4372 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 2 19:01:07 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:01:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems Message-ID: <20010402230107.B9E6E36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From wasanthony at yahoo.com Mon Apr 2 19:31:55 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:31:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Spring issue of The Salt River Review Message-ID: <20010402233155.68350.qmail@web12106.mail.yahoo.com> The Salt River Review has moved to its new home at with its 11th issue, Vol. IV, No.2, Spring, 2001 Now online, featuring: Poetry by Sam Pereira, Pamela Stewart, Greg Simon, M.T.C. Cronin, Johannes Beilharz, T.B. Rudy, Michael Bowden, Anthony Robinson, David Hopes, Deborah Finch, and Charles Clifton Fiction by Chris Orlet, Fred Marmorstein, Joan Newburger, and Max Ruback ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/?.refer=text From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 2 19:45:11 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 19:45:11 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: <20010402230107.B9E6E36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <3AC90F07.5906@nut-n-but.net> Sorry, Bob almost G, I've never seen anything quite as good as the three pwoermds I posted on a license plate. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 2 20:02:28 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 20:02:28 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems References: Message-ID: <3AC91314.1036@nut-n-but.net> Gah, you misspelled Geof's word, Moira, but now for the life of me I can't remember what it was. Pwoermd, that's it. The period is a nice poem, but--not being a word--would not be the shortest Pwoermd, it'd be the shortest poem, so far. The shortest pwoermd so far, that I know of, is a translation by jwcurry that consists of a lower-case i whose dot is a thumbprint. (The original was in Hungarian, I think, and three letters long--perhaps "ich" as in German? I don't know.) On the other hand, one might argue that it's a long poem because a thumbprint is a fairly large "word." As for your period, I've done shorter: You can't see my poem, but it's a fragment of a period, just enough of the period to identify it as a period. It is to your poem what your poem is to a sentence. Incidentally, those of you who dismiss the pwoermds I posted, consider those people, still with us, who find very conventional poems strained and ask why their author didn't just say what he wanted to clearly, in prose. Consider, that is, that you may be missing something in my selection of pwoermds that such people miss in conventional poems. --Bob G. From mackechnie at email.msn.com Mon Apr 2 20:31:14 2001 From: mackechnie at email.msn.com (Russ MacKechnie) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 20:31:14 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Moira writes: > Let me then leap into immortality with the very shortest > pworedm on record: > > . And a beaut it is, too, Moira! If I could have composed any poem in English (or any language, for that matter, given your brilliant use of a near-universal communicative device that will undoubtedly advance the craft), yours would have been the one! It is an easy matter for one to cast aside overwrought hackwork (_The Waste Land_, _Four Quartets_, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, _Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction_, and other such flotsam); not quite so simple to discard masterworks like "lighght" and "eyeye," though. What it came down to, in the final analysis, was the fact that "lighght" had been an NEA prizewinner---into the mainstream and out of innovative craft advance, if you ask me. So "." is top of the line, hands down. Can the Nobel (wretched endorsement of politicized mainstream nostalgia that it is) be far off? Amazing, though, the way those tried-and-true, nonadvancing-the-craft rhetorical devices (like . . . er . . . hyperbole) manage to survive, even when the respirator is removed? One minor correction, Moira, to your otherwise blindingly perceptive submission: Bob used the term "pwoermd," I believe, to describe the genre you have advanced by your work; could it be that your anagrammatic typo, "pworedm," was serendipitously inspired by its para-rhymed inevitable byproduct? ~ Russ ~ From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 20:43:12 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 16:43:12 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon Message-ID: >One minor correction, Moira, to >your otherwise blindingly perceptive submission: Bob used the term >"pwoermd," I believe, to describe the genre you have advanced by your >work; could it be that your anagrammatic typo, "pworedm," was >serendipitously inspired by its para-rhymed inevitable byproduct? I hasten to apologize. I was actually thinking of Pwoemreddn, the Welsh mining town -- well, I had one eye on the pwoermd and one on the grant application, to be honest about it. I look forward to a subsidy for my next work: ; Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 2 20:50:38 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 19:50:38 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Haiku Ambulance/shorty Message-ID: I confess I've never been able to resist this one by Richard Brautigan: Haiku Ambulance A piece of green pepper fell off the wooden salad bowl: so what? __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 2 20:54:57 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 19:54:57 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Another Shorty Message-ID: Almost a genre in itself, I guess, is the short poem with long title: FRAGMENT OF A SONG ON THE BEAUTIFUL WIFE OF DR. JOHN OVERALL, DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S The Dean of Paul's did search for his wife And where d'ee think he found her? Even upon Sir John Selby's bed, As flat as any flounder. --Anon, 17th C. _______ __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 2 21:03:22 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 20:03:22 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] One-line poem Message-ID: I think a one-line poem may be the hardest of all forms. Here's one of the few I've ever liked: PREMATURE EJACULATION I'm sorry this poem's already finished --William Matthews __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 2 21:12:10 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 21:12:10 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems Message-ID: <3c.9b7996d.27fa7d6a@cs.com> In a message dated 4/2/2001 5:29:32 PM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > > > In passing, I'll mention a poetry competition from a few years ago. > > > The winning entry was a single word > > > > > > lighght > > > > Aram Saroyan? > > Yes. Actually, the poem got a prize from the NEA as did > other poems that year, so it wasn't the single winner. > Robert Duncan made the selection. There's no other > poem in the Enlgish language I would rather have composed > although a few others would equally liked to have composed. > > Saroyan also wrote, "eyeye," which I like well enough > but don't consider absolutely terrific. Such pwoermds, > as Geof Huth calls them, have been a staple of infraverbal > poets for some forty years now; none that I know of have > made a . . . mainstream anthology. One of Geof's I particularly > like is "shadowl." It and the two Saroyans are visual > as well as infraverbal poems though many pwoermds are > are only one or the other. > > --Bob G. > --Bob G. > > _______________________________________________ > crarapap -- R. S. Gwynn From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 2 21:18:46 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 21:18:46 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/2001 5:41:12 PM Central Daylight Time, CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > Moira, > > It's not just you. I find it is often in the rhyming poems that I have read, > a predictability that makes the end words known before ever being read. In > fact, if they were left__________blank, filling them in may be done with ease > and little imagination. For example: > > INVITATION > Harry Behn > > Blue jay, fly to my __feeder___________! > Here's suet and raisins, so eat your _Seder_____. > Not that I care for your scratchy __whinny____, > And I like your manners least of _many___, > But when you are hungry, the __species_______ > Who ask politely, please, please, _pleasies_______, > Are much too bothered by what you _repeat___-- > So come have your breakfast, and fly _replete____! > > I would be quite surprised if any members are not readily able to fill in > the end words to this rhyming poem. Hey, it's short too, Amber, only eight > lines! > > Bob Cobb > From tadrichards at prodigy.net Mon Apr 2 21:22:17 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 21:22:17 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith References: Message-ID: <004101c0bbdc$86150e60$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> I disagree with the idea that folk art is all that unsophisticated. Most "outsider art" comes from the figure. Most folk poetry uses rhyme and meter. I don't ever think leaning more is a bad idea. "Well said, old mole." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 3:05 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > I somewhat disagree, but I only somewhat disagree. The precise reason why > folk art is prized is because it comes from outside the tradition and can > manage to do interesting things without (benefit? of) formal education. For > example, some poems try to sound like children's speech and its spontaneous > poetry, but most 6 year olds can't even spell iambic, much less understand > what that means. Would folk artists be better if they went to the Art > Institute of Chicago, or would it ruin them? Dunno. I think the conceit that > you have to learn a tradition in order to break it may be a bit silly. Not > learning them may be useful in terms of spawning a new sort of technique. > > Then again, it might not be so silly. You can learn forms to explode them, > change them around, and come up with new ones. You can steal tactics from > them, too. A greater understanding of metrical poetry, even if all the > metrical poetry you write is execrable, may lead to a better understanding > of rhythm as a device in free verse. > > Tangent: this brings to mind the oft-repeated complaint that formal verse is > not taught. I think that poets ought to be more self-reliant about what they > do. You cannot escape the 12th grade without at least knowing of one form, > the sonnet, and you cannot escape forms in college unless you take virtually > no classes involving poetry. If someone's going to be a poet, she probably > reads poetry, and forms are pretty hard to completely avoid. It's her > decision whether or not to try them herself or join a class in which she > will have to attempt them. Formal poetry may not be taught or emphasized in > creative writing courses, but, this being /creative/ writing, that shouldn't > hinder anyone from trying it if she wants to. By college age, a poet > shouldn't be unaware that forms exist, even if she isn't sure of what many > of them are. There are teachers. They have offices. There are, at the very > least, libraries. She can ask! An artist ought to be at least as much > self-trained as academy-trained. If she can't think for herself, will she do > anything good? > > -Amber Prentiss, apparently towing the "We Don't Need No Education" line > today. > -----Original Message----- > From: theoldmole > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Sent: 4/2/2001 12:35 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > > Amber -- this makes a lot of sense to me -- as good a definition of > mainstream as I can think of. > > A musician should learn to play in every key. > > An artist should learn to draw the figure. > > And a poet should learn as wide a range of tools as she/he can. Not only > do > some poets work better in free verse and some in forms, some poems are > best > written in free verse (and different kinds of free verse structures), > some > in forms. If you can do both, you have a better chance of doing justice > to a > particular poem. > > > "Well said, old mole." > Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Amber Prentiss" > To: > Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 12:22 PM > Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > > > > Easy definition of mainstream: > > > > Go to your local bookstore. Check out the poetry section. Who is > there? > Go > > to your local library; look for books of poetry. Who is there? That's > > mainstream. If people can purchase or check out someone's work without > > having to perform a whole dog-and-pony show, then it's probably > mainstream > > from the general public's perspective. (What the people think is > important! > > How radical is that?) Of course, this may mean that the mainstream of > poetry > > for the consumer is largely composed of dead people's poetry, but who > cares > > about having a contemporary audience when we're having so much fun > arguing > > over rhyme? > > > > As for the endless free verse vs. formalism: > > > > Has it occurred to anyone that some people do free verse because > they're > > simply better at doing that than anything else, and some people write > formal > > poetry because they're better at that than anything else? It's not > > necessarily some grand idea like freedom from external constriction or > > expanding an idea through form. Sometimes, it's just 'because I can't > do > it > > right any other way. I tried, and it looked like the dictionary threw > up > all > > over my page.' > > > > -Amber > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From alsop at alsopreview.com Tue Apr 3 02:03:29 2001 From: alsop at alsopreview.com (Jaimes Alsop) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 23:03:29 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: <3AC8FD21.69C4@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <3AC967B1.7BE409F0@alsopreview.com> Bob Grumman wrote: > > > In passing, I'll mention a poetry competition from a few years ago. > > The winning entry was a single word > > > > > > lighght > > > > Aram Saroyan? > > Yes. Actually, the poem got a prize from the NEA as did > other poems that year, so it wasn't the single winner. Was it, really? Thanks so much. All I had known about the poem is that then-President Ronald Reagan kicked up an almighty fuss about it at the time (which is how I heard about it) citing it as an example of how art in America had gone to rack and ruin. I hadn't seen 'eyeye' before. I'm not half as impressed with that. 'lighght' really worked for me, though. Years ago (late sixties) someone handed me a packet of Rizla cigarette papers (a popular brand in England) Inside was a folded cigarette paper on which was typed "Autumn Poem". When I unfolded the cigarette paper inside was the little slip that Rizla put in all the packets near the bottom as a warning the packet was getting low: "Only Five Leaves Left" Thirty years later and I still smile over that one. Jaimes -- Jaimes Alsop The Alsop Review http://www.alsopreview.com From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 2 22:21:10 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 22:21:10 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Let me then leap into immortality with the very shortest pworedm on record: > > . > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA That could use some cutting, Moira. I think you ran past your ending. Hal "The bacon too carries on its modest love affair." --Tony Towle Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 2 22:25:37 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 22:25:37 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Another Shorty In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Almost a genre in itself, I guess, is the short poem with long title: Such as Ashbery's Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers And in the adjacent waters, calm. Hal "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." --Samuel Butler Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From Cadaly at aol.com Tue Apr 3 00:10:29 2001 From: Cadaly at aol.com (Cadaly at aol.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 00:10:29 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: short poems Message-ID: Perhaps unsurprisingly, exceptional short poems are often written by poets who write very long poems as well: Louis Zukofsky, William Wordsworth, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams being among those not already mentioned on this thread. While I initially reacted poorly to this definition, I do find it very useful: a poem is "short" if it has fewer lines and beats than a sonnet. I teach a short "short poem" class (six weeks) every summer. There are newer short poem forms which more closely resemble: anglo saxon riddles, flash fiction, etc. Concrete poetry has already been mentioned (bp nichol sh'd b). Rgds, Catherine Daly cadaly at pacbell.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Tue Apr 3 01:37:26 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 01:37:26 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith Message-ID: I didn't intend to give the impression that it was unsophisticated, but I probably did. Oops. It is, however, way too early in the morning for me to talk much more. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: theoldmole To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/2/01 9:22 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith I disagree with the idea that folk art is all that unsophisticated. Most "outsider art" comes from the figure. Most folk poetry uses rhyme and meter. I don't ever think leaning more is a bad idea. "Well said, old mole." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 3:05 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > I somewhat disagree, but I only somewhat disagree. The precise reason why > folk art is prized is because it comes from outside the tradition and can > manage to do interesting things without (benefit? of) formal education. For > example, some poems try to sound like children's speech and its spontaneous > poetry, but most 6 year olds can't even spell iambic, much less understand > what that means. Would folk artists be better if they went to the Art > Institute of Chicago, or would it ruin them? Dunno. I think the conceit that > you have to learn a tradition in order to break it may be a bit silly. Not > learning them may be useful in terms of spawning a new sort of technique. > > Then again, it might not be so silly. You can learn forms to explode them, > change them around, and come up with new ones. You can steal tactics from > them, too. A greater understanding of metrical poetry, even if all the > metrical poetry you write is execrable, may lead to a better understanding > of rhythm as a device in free verse. > > Tangent: this brings to mind the oft-repeated complaint that formal verse is > not taught. I think that poets ought to be more self-reliant about what they > do. You cannot escape the 12th grade without at least knowing of one form, > the sonnet, and you cannot escape forms in college unless you take virtually > no classes involving poetry. If someone's going to be a poet, she probably > reads poetry, and forms are pretty hard to completely avoid. It's her > decision whether or not to try them herself or join a class in which she > will have to attempt them. Formal poetry may not be taught or emphasized in > creative writing courses, but, this being /creative/ writing, that shouldn't > hinder anyone from trying it if she wants to. By college age, a poet > shouldn't be unaware that forms exist, even if she isn't sure of what many > of them are. There are teachers. They have offices. There are, at the very > least, libraries. She can ask! An artist ought to be at least as much > self-trained as academy-trained. If she can't think for herself, will she do > anything good? > > -Amber Prentiss, apparently towing the "We Don't Need No Education" line > today. > -----Original Message----- > From: theoldmole > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Sent: 4/2/2001 12:35 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > > Amber -- this makes a lot of sense to me -- as good a definition of > mainstream as I can think of. > > A musician should learn to play in every key. > > An artist should learn to draw the figure. > > And a poet should learn as wide a range of tools as she/he can. Not only > do > some poets work better in free verse and some in forms, some poems are > best > written in free verse (and different kinds of free verse structures), > some > in forms. If you can do both, you have a better chance of doing justice > to a > particular poem. > > > "Well said, old mole." > Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Amber Prentiss" > To: > Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 12:22 PM > Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > > > > Easy definition of mainstream: > > > > Go to your local bookstore. Check out the poetry section. Who is > there? > Go > > to your local library; look for books of poetry. Who is there? That's > > mainstream. If people can purchase or check out someone's work without > > having to perform a whole dog-and-pony show, then it's probably > mainstream > > from the general public's perspective. (What the people think is > important! > > How radical is that?) Of course, this may mean that the mainstream of > poetry > > for the consumer is largely composed of dead people's poetry, but who > cares > > about having a contemporary audience when we're having so much fun > arguing > > over rhyme? > > > > As for the endless free verse vs. formalism: > > > > Has it occurred to anyone that some people do free verse because > they're > > simply better at doing that than anything else, and some people write > formal > > poetry because they're better at that than anything else? It's not > > necessarily some grand idea like freedom from external constriction or > > expanding an idea through form. Sometimes, it's just 'because I can't > do > it > > right any other way. I tried, and it looked like the dictionary threw > up > all > > over my page.' > > > > -Amber > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Apr 3 05:36:19 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 05:36:19 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon References: Message-ID: <3AC99992.1955@nut-n-but.net> Sorry to say you won't be getting any grants from the NEA for your poem. The grant to lighght was an error that happened some forty years ago and was never repeated. Poems like lighght are still not mainstream. Note how Russ can only parody my enthusiasm for poems he can't appreciate; he can say nothing whatever about why they aren't worth enthusiasm. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Apr 3 05:40:00 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 05:40:00 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: <3c.9b7996d.27fa7d6a@cs.com> Message-ID: <3AC99A70.76E8@nut-n-but.net> crarapap Not bad, RS. Do a few more as good and you may begin to understand why some of us like infraverbal poems. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Apr 3 05:50:42 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 05:50:42 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: <3AC8FD21.69C4@nut-n-but.net> <3AC967B1.7BE409F0@alsopreview.com> Message-ID: <3AC99CF2.18F9@nut-n-but.net> Whew, nice to know someone else besides me on this list likes "lighght," Jaimes. I'm sure those who think it's crap will be encouraged by the fact that so many politicians over the years have agreed with them, and that rightwing columnists still quote it as an example of NEA's crimes. --Bob G. From mbales at cybergate.net Tue Apr 3 08:37:48 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 08:37:48 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > The Love Song of Lord Alfred Douglas > RS Gwynn > Had we but world enough and time > This boyness, Oscar, were no crime. Die Professoren Ludwig Fulda Der erste hat ein Haar gespalten Un einen Vortrag daruber gehalten. Der zweit fugt es neu zusammen Und muss die Ansicht des ersten verdammen. Im buche des dritten kann man lesen, Es sei nicht das richtige Haar gewesen. The first professor split a hair And lectured as it withered there. The second fixed the hair and cursed The senseless theories of the first. The third one?s book proved, I recall, They had the wrong hair after all. mbales at cybergate.net From mbales at cybergate.net Tue Apr 3 08:37:46 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 08:37:46 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >Secret from all waking folk > >Until to your face I awoke > I like the poem, but....is it just me, or does anyone else think he > never would have used "folk" if he didn't need a rhyme with "awoke"? > It's hard for me to beep gamely over that kind of usage. << Nor would he have inverted "Until I awoke to your face" nor, perhaps have even used "awoke" -- probably would have said "Until I woke up to your face" mbales at cybergate.net From mbales at cybergate.net Tue Apr 3 08:37:47 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 08:37:47 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems In-Reply-To: <3c.9b7996d.27fa7d6a@cs.com> Message-ID: > > > > In passing, I'll mention a poetry competition from a few years > > > > ago. The winning entry was a single word: > > > > lighght > > > > > > Aram Saroyan? > > > > Yes. Actually, the poem got a prize from the NEA as did > > other poems that year, so it wasn't the single winner. > > Robert Duncan made the selection. There's no other > > poem in the Enlgish language I would rather have composed > > although a few others would equally liked to have composed. > > > > Saroyan also wrote, "eyeye," which I like well enough > > but don't consider absolutely terrific. Such pwoermds, > > as Geof Huth calls them, have been a staple of infraverbal > > poets for some forty years now; none that I know of have > > made a . . . mainstream anthology. One of Geof's I particularly > > like is "shadowl." It and the two Saroyans are visual as well as > > infraverbal poems though many pwoermds are are only one or the > > other. > crarapap > -- R. S. Gwynn Gotta go with RS Gwynn on this; these sorts of things seem like they're more on the order of crossword puzzles and acrostics than attempts to communicate meaning: very clever and all that, but clever to no particular point. mbales at cybergate.net From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Tue Apr 3 08:30:51 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 05:30:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon Message-ID: <20010403123051.E6C012753@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 3 08:41:33 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 08:41:33 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/2001 4:59:59 AM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > > Not bad, RS. Do a few more as good and you may > begin to understand why some of us like infraverbal poems. > > --Bob G. > > Okayay From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 3 08:40:27 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 08:40:27 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/2001 4:55:19 AM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > > Note how Russ can only parody my enthusiasm for > poems he can't appreciate; he can say nothing > whatever about why they aren't worth enthusiasm. Hey, I thought "crarapap" was at least as good as "lighght," Bub. It even has onomatopoeia and a pun. Rust Gwynn From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Tue Apr 3 08:48:26 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 05:48:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] One-line poem Message-ID: <20010403124826.AE22C274F@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 3 08:42:36 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 08:42:36 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems Message-ID: <5a.1361c566.27fb1f3c@cs.com> In a message dated 4/3/2001 5:04:36 AM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > Whew, nice to know someone else besides me on this > list likes "lighght," Jaimes. I'm sure those who think it's > crap will be encouraged by the fact that so many > politicians over the years have agreed with them, > and that rightwing columnists still quote it as an > example of NEA's crimes. > > --Bob G. You don't have to be a rightwinger to know shinola from that other stuff. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 3 08:45:06 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 08:45:06 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/2001 4:55:19 AM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > > Sorry to say you won't be getting any grants from the > NEA for your poem. The grant to lighght was an error > that happened some forty years ago and was never repeated. > Poems like lighght are still not mainstream. > > Note how Russ can only parody my enthusiasm for > poems he can't appreciate; he can say nothing > whatever about why they aren't worth enthusiasm. > > --Bob > G. > Maybe this wasn't directed at me. Oops. I'm sororry. -- Arse Gwynn From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Tue Apr 3 08:59:23 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 05:59:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: <20010403125923.92BC436F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 3 09:12:09 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 09:12:09 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/2001 8:09:07 AM Central Daylight Time, CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > > Sorry, Sam, > > The end words, respectively, are these: windowsill, fill, call, all, > chickadees, please, say, away! > > Good try though, Sam. I didn't think it would be this difficult! > > Bob Cobb > > --- Rsgwynn1 at cs.com > > wrote: > >In a message dated 4/2/2001 5:41:12 PM Central Daylight Time, > >CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > > > >> Moira, > >> > >> It's not just you. I find it is often in the rhyming poems that I have > >read, > >> a predictability that makes the end words known before ever being read. > > >In > >> fact, if they were left__________blank, filling them in may be done with > >ease > >> and little imagination. For example: > >> > >> INVITATION > >> Harry Behn > >> > >> Blue jay, fly to my __feeder___________! > >> Here's suet and raisins, so eat your _Seder_____. > >> Not that I care for your scratchy __whinny____, > >> And I like your manners least of _many___, > >> But when you are hungry, the __species_______ > >> Who ask politely, please, please, _pleasies_______, > >> Are much too bothered by what you _repeat___-- > >> So come have your breakfast, and fly _replete____! > >> > >> I would be quite surprised if any members are not readily able to fill > in > >> the end words to this rhyming poem. Hey, it's short too, Amber, only > eight > >> lines! > >> > >> Bob Cobb > >> Dang. And I worked so hard at it too! Back to blank verse. From gmcvay at patriot.net Tue Apr 3 09:28:34 2001 From: gmcvay at patriot.net (Gwyn McVay) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 09:28:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems In-Reply-To: <20010402224024.8C70A274F@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: INVITATION Harry Behn Blue jay, fly to my trash can! Here's suet and raisins, so eat your saturated fat. Not that I care for your scratchy feet, And I like your manners least of anyone's But when you are hungry, the panhandlers Who ask politely, please, please, spare change, Are much too bothered by what you excrete-- So come have your breakfast, and fly right! Hey, did I get any right? Is this chap related to Aphra? From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Tue Apr 3 09:42:25 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 06:42:25 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: <20010403134225.B0D2C36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From tadrichards at prodigy.net Tue Apr 3 10:03:04 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 10:03:04 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Learnin' References: Message-ID: <002301c0bc46$cdd69a60$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> I wasn't specifically talking about the learning one gets in college. "Well said, old mole." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: "'theoldmole '" Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 1:39 AM Subject: Learnin' > My entrance into college has been associated with a general decline in, > well, everything; I'm not sure that learning more (in general) is always a > good idea, at least not today. > > -Amber > -----Original Message----- > From: theoldmole > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Sent: 4/2/01 9:22 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > > I disagree with the idea that folk art is all that unsophisticated. Most > "outsider art" comes from the figure. > > Most folk poetry uses rhyme and meter. > > I don't ever think leaning more is a bad idea. > > > "Well said, old mole." > Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Amber Prentiss" > To: > Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 3:05 PM > Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > > > > I somewhat disagree, but I only somewhat disagree. The precise reason > why > > folk art is prized is because it comes from outside the tradition and > can > > manage to do interesting things without (benefit? of) formal > education. > For > > example, some poems try to sound like children's speech and its > spontaneous > > poetry, but most 6 year olds can't even spell iambic, much less > understand > > what that means. Would folk artists be better if they went to the Art > > Institute of Chicago, or would it ruin them? Dunno. I think the > conceit > that > > you have to learn a tradition in order to break it may be a bit silly. > Not > > learning them may be useful in terms of spawning a new sort of > technique. > > > > Then again, it might not be so silly. You can learn forms to explode > them, > > change them around, and come up with new ones. You can steal tactics > from > > them, too. A greater understanding of metrical poetry, even if all the > > metrical poetry you write is execrable, may lead to a better > understanding > > of rhythm as a device in free verse. > > > > Tangent: this brings to mind the oft-repeated complaint that formal > verse > is > > not taught. I think that poets ought to be more self-reliant about > what > they > > do. You cannot escape the 12th grade without at least knowing of one > form, > > the sonnet, and you cannot escape forms in college unless you take > virtually > > no classes involving poetry. If someone's going to be a poet, she > probably > > reads poetry, and forms are pretty hard to completely avoid. It's her > > decision whether or not to try them herself or join a class in which > she > > will have to attempt them. Formal poetry may not be taught or > emphasized > in > > creative writing courses, but, this being /creative/ writing, that > shouldn't > > hinder anyone from trying it if she wants to. By college age, a poet > > shouldn't be unaware that forms exist, even if she isn't sure of what > many > > of them are. There are teachers. They have offices. There are, at the > very > > least, libraries. She can ask! An artist ought to be at least as much > > self-trained as academy-trained. If she can't think for herself, will > she > do > > anything good? > > > > -Amber Prentiss, apparently towing the "We Don't Need No Education" > line > > today. > > -----Original Message----- > > From: theoldmole > > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > Sent: 4/2/2001 12:35 PM > > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > > > > Amber -- this makes a lot of sense to me -- as good a definition of > > mainstream as I can think of. > > > > A musician should learn to play in every key. > > > > An artist should learn to draw the figure. > > > > And a poet should learn as wide a range of tools as she/he can. Not > only > > do > > some poets work better in free verse and some in forms, some poems are > > best > > written in free verse (and different kinds of free verse structures), > > some > > in forms. If you can do both, you have a better chance of doing > justice > > to a > > particular poem. > > > > > > "Well said, old mole." > > Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Amber Prentiss" > > To: > > Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 12:22 PM > > Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith > > > > > > > Easy definition of mainstream: > > > > > > Go to your local bookstore. Check out the poetry section. Who is > > there? > > Go > > > to your local library; look for books of poetry. Who is there? > That's > > > mainstream. If people can purchase or check out someone's work > without > > > having to perform a whole dog-and-pony show, then it's probably > > mainstream > > > from the general public's perspective. (What the people think is > > important! > > > How radical is that?) Of course, this may mean that the mainstream > of > > poetry > > > for the consumer is largely composed of dead people's poetry, but > who > > cares > > > about having a contemporary audience when we're having so much fun > > arguing > > > over rhyme? > > > > > > As for the endless free verse vs. formalism: > > > > > > Has it occurred to anyone that some people do free verse because > > they're > > > simply better at doing that than anything else, and some people > write > > formal > > > poetry because they're better at that than anything else? It's not > > > necessarily some grand idea like freedom from external constriction > or > > > expanding an idea through form. Sometimes, it's just 'because I > can't > > do > > it > > > right any other way. I tried, and it looked like the dictionary > threw > > up > > all > > > over my page.' > > > > > > -Amber > > > _______________________________________________ > > > New-Poetry mailing list > > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From DICK at watson.ibm.com Tue Apr 3 10:31:59 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 01 10:31:59 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] this 'n' that Message-ID: <200104031433.KAA13768@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> >>Poems like lighght are still not mainstream. >> I'd say more like yellowstream >>Note how Russ can only parody my enthusiasm for >>poems he can't appreciate; he can say nothing >>whatever about why they aren't worth enthusiasm. >> >> --Bob G Lighghten up, Bob G Richard From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Tue Apr 3 11:04:15 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 10:04:15 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Ammons Redux Message-ID: I see from the invaluable Poetry Daily that A. R. Ammons's collected poems (1951-1971), long out of print, is again available. Three short ones are featured at PD today (http://www.poems.com) . For me, the best Ammons lies in his short lyrics and brief meditations. This book is a cornucopia. Like William Carlos Williams, Ammons published a great many more-(or-less)-charming doodles, but there's something rewarding, for me at least, in rummaging through them in search of the great ones. And this collected contains a lot of lyrics that the selected edition leaves out. Here's a tiny one: Bay Bank The red-winged blackbird lighting dips deep the windy bayridge reed but sends a song up reed and wind rise to. Well, it's not "Easter 1916," or even "The Wild Swans at Coole," but I'm happy to have this little lyric snapshot. For a poet who is often deliberately prosy in his longer pieces, Ammons can display a surprising sonic richness in his short poems. Reading the posts about rhyme recently, I got to thinking about how much of the pleasure I take in poetry's sounds is not limited to end-rhyme or conventional metrics. Even a minor piece like "Bay Bank" shows how nicely textured free verse can be in its music. As has been mentioned, Ammons likes to balance his cascading longer meditations with quite a few tiny poems like the above. These are mostly among his throw-aways, I think, but when he extends to 12 or 28 lines, then I think he's often at his peak. Thumbing through Ammons also can be a pleasure just for the titles. He's like Stevens in that regard--not as consistently brilliant, but often enough. Who could resist a poem titled "Uh, Philosophy"? I know I can't. Or "If Anything Will Level With You Water Will". Or "Hope's Okay." Or "Brooks and Other Notions." Or "Trouble Making Trouble." Even if the poems don't live up to their titles, Ammons pulls me in and reminds me that titles are an often squandered resource. David Graham __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Tue Apr 3 11:09:23 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 10:09:23 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pinsky Query Message-ID: Does anyone remember an abecedarium poem by Robert Pinsky? A colleague has inquired about it, and though I do have a dim memory of it, that's all I have. Title, source, or text would be most welcome--or even just confirmation that it exists! Thanks. David Graham __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From jdavis at panix.com Tue Apr 3 11:13:24 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 11:13:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Pinsky Query In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Pinsky's Four Alphabets appeared in Lingo magazine, issue #7. http://hardpress.com/newhp/lingo/lingo7.html Jordan From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Tue Apr 3 00:20:20 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 23:20:20 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Haiku Ambulance/shorty In-Reply-To: Message-ID: on 4/2/01 7:50 PM, David Graham at grahamd at mail.ripon.edu wrote: > I confess I've never been able to resist this one by Richard Brautigan: > > Haiku Ambulance > > A piece of green pepper > fell > off the wooden salad bowl: > so what? > > > __________________ > David Graham > grahamd at mail.ripon.edu > __________________ > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > I agree, David. It sums up my feeling about haiku in general. Paul Lake From moira_russell at hotmail.com Tue Apr 3 14:52:08 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 10:52:08 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Poetry Daily's Poet's Pick 4/3/01 Message-ID: Report on my first receipt of the Poetry Daily's Poet's Pick: 1) Thomas Wyatt's "They flee from me..." was chosen. Very good (one of my favorites). 2) It was printed with modern spelling and horrid punctuation. ACK! 3) Whoever Eamon Grennan is, he picked the poem but thought it referred to Anne Boleyn, which proves that he read Wyatt's "Whoso list to hunt, I know where there is an hind" too but did not remember it. 2/3, inauspicious, added to the offer of a cranberry Hanes "Beefy-T" T-shirt with their logo on it. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 3 15:26:38 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 15:26:38 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Blank verse Message-ID: I would like some comments on this specimen of American blank verse c. 1845. I have deliberately left the author's name off. You are loosed from your moorings, and are free! I am fast in my chains and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, And I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels That fly around the world; I am confined In bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, And under your protecting wing! Alas! Betwixt you and me the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O why Was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! From Jholmes at boisestate.edu Tue Apr 3 16:47:05 2001 From: Jholmes at boisestate.edu (Janet Holmes) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 14:47:05 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: Hi all--I wanted to join the conversation pre-fray, but I waited too long. Anyway, by way of the rhyme-definition discussion, I'd be interested in hearing whether Dickinson is considered a formal poet by New Formalists. Here's how she was taught to me (as a freshman at Duke)--from an essay by R.P. Blackmur reprinted in "Reading Modern Poetry"; the poem is "I got so I could hear his name--": "Nothing is more remarkable than the variety of inconsistency this effort displays. The first three stanzas are ... as good verse as Emily Dickinson ever wrote. The next two stanzas are on a different and fatigued level of sensibility, are bad verse and flat language, and have only a serial connection with the first three. The last stanza, if it is a stanza, is on still a different level of sensibility and not on a recognizable level of language at all: the level of desperate inarticulateness to which no complete response can be articulated in return. One knows from the strength of the first three stanzas what might have been meant to come after and one feels like writing the poem oneself--the basest of all critical temptations. We feel that Emily Dickinson let herself go. The accidents that provided her ability here made a contrivance which was not a poem but a private mixture of first-rate verse, bad verse, and something that is not verse at all. Yet?and this is the point?this contrivance represents in epitome the whole of her work; and whatever judgment you bring upon the epitome you will, I think, be compelled to bring upon the whole. No judgment is so persuasive as when it is disguised as a statement of facts. I think it is a fact that the failure and success of Emily Dickinson's poetry were uniformly accidental largely because of the private and eccentric nature of her relations to the business of poetry. She was neither a professional poet nor an amateur; she was a private poet who wrote indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars. Neither her personal education nor the habit of her society as she knew it ever gave her the least inkling that poetry is a rational and objective art and most so when the theme is self- expression. ... The pity of it is that the document her whole work makes shows nothing so much as that she had the themes, the insight, the observation, and the capacity for honesty, which had made the major instead of the minor fraction of her verse genuine poetry." Granted, he's talking about a poet whose Complete Poems weren't issued until four years after HOWL was published, but I suspect the opinions held today about some poets (Ashbery? Graham? whoa, McHugh?) are going to sound as (forgive me) self-satisfied and condescending in a few years as this does. Blackmur assumes he knows what Dickinson is trying to say, and judges her incapable of expressing herself properly; instead, he might have openmindedly approached the work itself presuming she was using those dashes and off-rhymes for a reason. He published this in 1952, but for all I know, formalist critics even today agree with Blackmur's belief that Dickinson's poetry was so eccentric as to be below amateur ability. If not, this may be the only point upon which they concur with Jerome Rothenberg, who places Dickinson with the "outsider" tradition in POEMS FOR THE MILLENIUM. I'm not particularly trying to draw defensive posts from formalists. I myself write quite a bit of formalist work (though I haven't applied for a membership card). But this whole discussion has a--forgive again--snippy tone to it, much like much of the new formalist poetry and criticism that's described as "funny" but is really satirical, often pointedly political, and frequently ad-hominem with its humor: whether it's funny depends on where you sit. (I suspect there are those on this list who find Blackmur's piece both valid and funny at once.) By extension, it seems to me that taxonomies invite poets not to embrace, but to ignore whole movements of poetry. This goes both ways. Here's an example--I remember a long argument on CAP-L (I think) in which Language poetry was being discussed, and its characteristics defined so narrowly that (heh) no women actually made the list: not orthodox enough. Likewise, I've watched as New Formalists duke it out as to why Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Hacker, Molly Peacock, Carolyn Kizer, Annie Finch, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and others aren't worthy of being considered among "good" formal poets. The symmetry suggests that "Women's Poetry" exists on someone's taxonomy down with "inept"--where Blackmur placed Dickinson. Nice try ladies, but learn to follow the rules. Anyone read Margo Jefferson's back-page column in the NYT Book Review on Sunday? It's about how accustomed today's readers are to being told what they like, to the point that reading a book is no longer the pleasure it once was. People know before they read a book or see a movie whether they're going to like it or not. *Writing* a poem, at least, can still be a process of discovery. I'm kind of surprised that poets don't resist taxonomies. I find them claustrophobic (wouldn't another word for schools be "pigeonholes"?) and problematic, and for poets entirely beside the point. Ducking under fire, Janet Holmes From moira_russell at hotmail.com Tue Apr 3 17:06:36 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 13:06:36 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: Janet Holmes wrote: >Here's an example--I remember a long argument on CAP-L (I think) in which >Language poetry was being discussed, and its characteristics defined so >narrowly that (heh) no women actually made the list: not orthodox enough. >Likewise, I've watched as New Formalists duke it out as to why Elizabeth >Bishop, Marilyn Hacker, Molly Peacock, Carolyn Kizer, Annie Finch, Gjertrud >Schnackenberg, and others aren't worthy of being considered among "good" >formal poets. Um, what? This isn't the experience I've had with some people I know who might be called N.F.s. Both Hacker and Peacock are represented in "Rebel Angels," for one thing. I don't buy the line that the "Formalistas" (does that remind anyone else of "Sandinistas"?) are automatically anti-woman -- R.S. Gwynn was the one who recommended I look up A.E. Stallings. I haven't seen anyone rip Elizabeth Bishop, and while Dickinson doesn't send me, when I studied her in college and grad school, she was treated with great respect, although I agree with the description of her as "outside the margin" or whatever -- she did her own thing. The dashes put me off, not the slant rhymes, but there was some critical querying a while ago about whether or not the dashes might indicate pauses for performance. Not trying to sound prickly or defensive, this just doesn't sound familiar to me at all. Of course, it could simply be I don't know the right people (or the wrong people). Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 3 17:09:09 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 17:09:09 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/01 3:49:50 PM Central Daylight Time, Jholmes at boisestate.edu writes: > He published this in 1952, but for all I know, formalist critics even today > agree with Blackmur's belief that Dickinson's poetry was so eccentric as to > be below amateur ability. If not, this may be the only point upon which they > concur with Jerome Rothenberg, who places Dickinson with the "outsider" > tradition in POEMS FOR THE MILLENIUM. > I've never heard *any* critic say anything like this, and I don't think even Blackmur is this severe. Allen Tate surely wasn't, having written one of the essays that elevated Dickinson to a secure place in the canon. Do new formalist poets claim Dickinson? You better believe it. > Here's an example--I remember a long argument on CAP-L (I think) in which > Language poetry was being discussed, and its characteristics defined so > narrowly that (heh) no women actually made the list: not orthodox enough. Anyone who's read Susan Howe knows how silly this claim is. Orthodox Language poets? That sounds like "Freethinking Southern Baptists." > Likewise, I've watched as New Formalists duke it out as to why Elizabeth > Bishop, Marilyn Hacker, Molly Peacock, Carolyn Kizer, Annie Finch, Gjertrud > Schnackenberg, and others aren't worthy of being considered among "good" > formal poets. Where did this come from? With the exception of Bishop and Kizer, who belong to earlier generations, the poets you mention are always mentioned as leaders of the NF movement (such as it is). Schnackenberg, though she disdains the NF label and has moved on to other things, probably got more favorable notice that the rest combined. Who ever said they weren't "good" formal poets? The symmetry suggests that "Women's Poetry" exists on someone's > taxonomy down with "inept"--where Blackmur placed Dickinson. Nice try ladies, > but learn to follow the rules. > I expect that this statement was generally accepted as true in 1952--you can read Kumin's new prose book to hear her complaints about being placed on a lower rung at the time. No one would argue that American poetry in 1952 was ruled by white males--both as poets and critics (with the exception of Bogan)--but I can't imagine anyone dumb enough to make such a statement today. You seem to be projecting an outmoded sexist attitude (Blackmur's) onto unnamed poets and critics of the present day. Who you talking about? From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Tue Apr 3 17:24:04 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 16:24:04 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Blank verse In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Just a guess, but I'm guessing that this is some highly cadenced prose that you've set in lines. Easy enough to do with a lot of 19th C. high rhetoric, no? David Graham >I would like some comments on this specimen of American blank verse c. 1845. >I have deliberately left the author's name off. > >You are loosed from your moorings, and are free! >I am fast in my chains and am a slave! >You move merrily before the gentle gale, >And I sadly before the bloody whip! >You are freedom's swift-winged angels >That fly around the world; I am confined >In bands of iron! O that I were free! >O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, >And under your protecting wing! Alas! >Betwixt you and me the turbid waters roll. >Go on, go on. O that I could also go! >Could I but swim! If I could fly! O why >Was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! >_______________________________________________ >New-Poetry mailing list >New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu >http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Tue Apr 3 06:13:41 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 05:13:41 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies In-Reply-To: Message-ID: on 4/3/01 4:06 PM, Moira Russell at moira_russell at hotmail.com wrote: > > Janet Holmes wrote: > >> Here's an example--I remember a long argument on CAP-L (I think) in which >> Language poetry was being discussed, and its characteristics defined so >> narrowly that (heh) no women actually made the list: not orthodox enough. >> Likewise, I've watched as New Formalists duke it out as to why Elizabeth >> Bishop, Marilyn Hacker, Molly Peacock, Carolyn Kizer, Annie Finch, Gjertrud >> Schnackenberg, and others aren't worthy of being considered among "good" >> formal poets. > > Um, what? This isn't the experience I've had with some people I know who > might be called N.F.s. Both Hacker and Peacock are represented in "Rebel > Angels," for one thing. I don't buy the line that the "Formalistas" (does > that remind anyone else of "Sandinistas"?) are automatically anti-woman -- > R.S. Gwynn was the one who recommended I look up A.E. Stallings. I haven't > seen anyone rip Elizabeth Bishop, and while Dickinson doesn't send me, when > I studied her in college and grad school, she was treated with great > respect, although I agree with the description of her as "outside the > margin" or whatever -- she did her own thing. The dashes put me off, not > the slant rhymes, but there was some critical querying a while ago about > whether or not the dashes might indicate pauses for performance. > > Not trying to sound prickly or defensive, this just doesn't sound familiar > to me at all. Of course, it could simply be I don't know the right people > (or the wrong people). > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > Even in the early days of New Formalism, I included discussions of New Formalist women like Gjertrude Schnackenberg and Mary Jo Salter in my essays and reviews. Emily Dickinson is most certainly a formal poet. Her poems are metrical and employ rhymed stanzas. The quote by Blackmur seems hopelessly condescending and dated. Dickinson is today a universally acclaimed master. Paul Lake From ade3 at columbia.edu Tue Apr 3 17:34:39 2001 From: ade3 at columbia.edu (Andrew Epstein) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 17:34:39 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Blank verse Message-ID: <02a501c0bc85$e494c080$312a3b80@ade3> David Graham is right that it's highly cadenced prose set as verse. The passage is taken from the famous apostrophe to the ships in Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of An American Slave ... Andrew Epstein -----Original Message----- From: David Graham To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Date: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 5:24 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Blank verse >Just a guess, but I'm guessing that this is some highly cadenced prose that >you've set in lines. Easy enough to do with a lot of 19th C. high >rhetoric, no? > >David Graham > > >>I would like some comments on this specimen of American blank verse c. 1845. >>I have deliberately left the author's name off. >> >>You are loosed from your moorings, and are free! >>I am fast in my chains and am a slave! >>You move merrily before the gentle gale, >>And I sadly before the bloody whip! >>You are freedom's swift-winged angels >>That fly around the world; I am confined >>In bands of iron! O that I were free! >>O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, >>And under your protecting wing! Alas! >>Betwixt you and me the turbid waters roll. >>Go on, go on. O that I could also go! >>Could I but swim! If I could fly! O why >>Was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! >>_______________________________________________ >>New-Poetry mailing list >>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu >>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > >__________________ >David Graham >grahamd at mail.ripon.edu >__________________ > > >_______________________________________________ >New-Poetry mailing list >New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu >http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From gmcvay at patriot.net Tue Apr 3 17:42:57 2001 From: gmcvay at patriot.net (Gwyn McVay) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 17:42:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>>she was a private poet who wrote indefatigably as some women cook or knit.<<< GRRRRRRRRRR!!!! Well, I write impatiently, as I used to babysit. I write sitting on the toilet, as some women plug in a tampon. I write crookedly, as some women sew. I write less frequently than I should, as some women do breast self-exams. I write madly, as some women drive the kids to soccer. Right now, I am writing with steam pouring out, as some women iron. If Blackmur weren't inconveniently dead, he would be dead meat. Gwyn From languagethief at yahoo.com Tue Apr 3 18:05:24 2001 From: languagethief at yahoo.com (The Old Mole) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 15:05:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010403220524.20236.qmail@web12204.mail.yahoo.com> INVITATION Harry Behn Blue jay, fly to my penis Here's suet and raisins, so eat your weenies Not that I care for your scratchy talons And I like your manners least of felons But when you are hungry, the perverse, Who ask politely, please, please, or worse Are much too bothered by what you pass -- So come have your breakfast, and fly up my ass! --- Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote: > In a message dated 4/3/2001 8:09:07 AM Central > Daylight Time, > CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > > > > > Sorry, Sam, > > > > The end words, respectively, are these: > windowsill, fill, call, all, > > chickadees, please, say, away! > > > > Good try though, Sam. I didn't think it would be > this difficult! > > > > Bob Cobb > > > > --- Rsgwynn1 at cs.com > > > wrote: > > >In a message dated 4/2/2001 5:41:12 PM Central > Daylight Time, > > >CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > > > > > >> Moira, > > >> > > >> It's not just you. I find it is often in the > rhyming poems that I > have > > >read, > > >> a predictability that makes the end words > known before ever being > read. > > > > >In > > >> fact, if they were left__________blank, > filling them in may be done > with > > >ease > > >> and little imagination. For example: > > >> > > >> INVITATION > > >> Harry Behn > > >> > > >> Blue jay, fly to my __feeder___________! > > >> Here's suet and raisins, so eat your > _Seder_____. > > >> Not that I care for your scratchy > __whinny____, > > >> And I like your manners least of _many___, > > >> But when you are hungry, the __species_______ > > >> Who ask politely, please, please, > _pleasies_______, > > >> Are much too bothered by what you > _repeat___-- > > >> So come have your breakfast, and fly > _replete____! > > >> > > >> I would be quite surprised if any members are > not readily able to fill > > in > > >> the end words to this rhyming poem. Hey, it's > short too, Amber, only > > eight > > >> lines! > > >> > > >> Bob Cobb > > >> > > > Dang. And I worked so hard at it too! Back to > blank verse. > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 3 18:14:10 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 18:14:10 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Blank verse Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/01 4:32:38 PM Central Daylight Time, ade3 at columbia.edu writes: > > David Graham is right that it's highly cadenced prose set as verse. The > passage is taken from the famous apostrophe to the ships in Frederick > Douglass' Narrative of the Life of An American Slave ... > > > Andrew Epstein > Yup, but I'd argue that in the original it's fairly regular verse set as prose. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Apr 3 16:18:34 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 16:18:34 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems References: Message-ID: <3ACA301A.CF1@nut-n-but.net> > > crarapap > > -- R. S. Gwynn > > Gotta go with RS Gwynn on this; these sorts of things seem like > they're more on the order of crossword puzzles and acrostics than > attempts to communicate meaning: very clever and all that, but > clever to no particular point. Good definition of them rhyme things, too--I mean, they got them jingliness and all, but what's the point? --Bob G. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Tue Apr 3 18:30:18 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 15:30:18 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] More Short Poems Message-ID: <20010403223018.4DCE436F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From moira_russell at hotmail.com Tue Apr 3 18:30:08 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 14:30:08 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Short Poems Message-ID: Note the multitalented R.S. Gwynn has given us a wporemd _and_ a sparklingly jingly rhyme thing all in one sitting. Moira Russell Seattle, WA > > > crarapap > > > -- R. S. Gwynn > > > > Gotta go with RS Gwynn on this; these sorts of things seem like > > they're more on the order of crossword puzzles and acrostics than > > attempts to communicate meaning: very clever and all that, but > > clever to no particular point. > >Good definition of them rhyme things, too--I mean, they got >them jingliness and all, but what's the point? _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Apr 3 18:00:33 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 18:00:33 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies References: Message-ID: <3ACA4801.5AAD@nut-n-but.net> >Dickinson is today a universally acclaimed master. > > Paul Lake Even Shakespeare isn't a universally-acclaimed master. --Bob G., as finicky about words as ever. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Apr 3 18:19:06 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 18:19:06 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon References: Message-ID: <3ACA4C5A.7391@nut-n-but.net> > > Note how Russ can only parody my enthusiasm for > > poems he can't appreciate; he can say nothing > > whatever about why they aren't worth enthusiasm. > > > > --Bob G. > Maybe this wasn't directed at me. Oops. I'm sororry. You're right, but no problem. As for your 'crarapap,' I grant that it has onomatopoeia; haven't found the pun yet. Of course, it doesn't work in two expressive modalities nor contain a system of juxtaphors (implicit metaphors) like "lighght" does. For the few who are interested in why I value it as highly as I do, I have an essay on minimalist poetry at http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm that discusses it. I don't explicitly reveal the juxtaphor "lighght" contains, or is, there, so will tell you here that it is the one all concrete poems contain: what the text does as print on a page acts as a metaphor for the denotation of the text. Of course, to appreciate such poems, understanding this will help you no more than understanding what rhymes are will help you appreciate rhymed poetry; you have to experience the relationship of the spelling of the word to what it denotes in a spontaneous, visceral way to appreciate it. --Bob G. From alsop at alsopreview.com Tue Apr 3 22:55:42 2001 From: alsop at alsopreview.com (Jaimes Alsop) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 19:55:42 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies References: <3ACA4801.5AAD@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <3ACA8D2E.DDD47EC9@alsopreview.com> > >Dickinson is today a universally acclaimed master. > > Well, them's the breaks, I suppose. I liked lighght but can't abide Dickinson. Except when sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas. "Oh. I heard a fly buzz when I died..." has won me more than my share of dinner invitations. And invitations back, too! I don't know nuffink about aht but I knows what I likes. -- Jaimes Alsop The Alsop Review http://www.alsopreview.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 3 22:08:21 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 22:08:21 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/2001 5:52:46 PM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > Of course, it doesn't > work in two expressive modalities nor contain > a system of juxtaphors (implicit metaphors) > like "lighght" does. "pap" is the pun in mine, also "rare" and "rear" (I said it had onomatopoeia). But what *are* the metaphors here? What am I missing? The fact that the gh's are silent and represent the eyes, the silent media through which we receive light? Help! From halvard at earthlink.net Tue Apr 3 23:00:20 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 23:00:20 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Taxonomies, etc. Message-ID: > I'm kind of surprised that poets don't resist taxonomies. I find them claustrophobic > (wouldn't another word for schools be "pigeonholes"?) and problematic, and for poets > entirely beside the point. > > Ducking under fire, Janet Holmes I'm with you, Janet. I barely recall what anything's called, and find taxonomies to verge . . . well, on taxidermy. Nothing against those that like to go around naming things. They do their taxonomies and pay what's on the meter. We can still be friends, long as they remember that all those lines are fuzzy ones. Love the blur. Love the no-man's-lands. Vive Alsace-Lorraine! Hal "Art is controversial." --Madonna Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From TerryP17 at aol.com Tue Apr 3 23:05:50 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 23:05:50 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: <6c.92e5159.27fbe98e@aol.com> Janet-- In a message dated 4/3/01 6:27:08 PM, new-poetry-request at wiz.cath.vt.edu writes: >Ducking under fire,>> <> Where did you hear this stuff? Certainly not from any of the Formalistas I hang out with, all of whom go out of the way to anthologize and promote people like Hacker, Peacock, and Finch and invite them to the annual West Chester shindig. They are considered part of the club. Ask Sam and Paul about this. Finch, I am told, sells more books than most of Story Line Press's other poets--Story Line being the main place where Formalist books are published these days. Further, two years ago, the West Chester Poetry Conference (a den of New Formalists) commissioned a new piece by New York composer Stefania de Kenessey who set some of Finch's poems to music and premiered the suite at the conference. If the Formalists hated Finch's work so much, how could this have happened on their dime? Bishop is regarded as a secular saint by many of the Formalists--I could go on, but I hope you get my point here. I am also really challenged to figure out how you got from Blackmur's dopey and embarrassing comments on Dickinson to tarring the New Formalists with anti-female bias and condescension. Not a single one the Formalists I know would share Blackmur's opinion of Dickinson or ever did. I also think it's an interesting logical leap to assume that because Blackmur's opinion of Dickinson was so wrong, therefore a critic who despises, say, Ashbery, is also totally out to lunch. Is the assumption here that any critic who criticizes any poet's work as third-rate will invariably be proved foolish and shortsighted when he or she is dead? --Terry Ponick From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Tue Apr 3 23:19:14 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 20:19:14 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: <20010404031914.7489536F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From mbales at cybergate.net Tue Apr 3 23:41:59 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 23:41:59 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies In-Reply-To: <3ACA8D2E.DDD47EC9@alsopreview.com> Message-ID: > > >Dickinson is today a universally acclaimed master.<< > Well, them's the breaks, I suppose. I liked lighght but can't abide > Dickinson. Except when sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas. > "Oh. I heard a fly buzz when I died..." has won me more than my share > of dinner invitations. And invitations back, too!<< Have you tried "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Night" to the tune of "Fernando's Hideaway"? mbales at cybergate.net From klvarnes at home.com Wed Apr 4 00:56:13 2001 From: klvarnes at home.com (Kathrine Varnes) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 23:56:13 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Dickinson, satire, taxonomies In-Reply-To: <6c.92e5159.27fbe98e@aol.com> Message-ID: > Where did you hear this stuff? Certainly not from any of the Formalistas I > hang out with, all of whom go out of the way to anthologize and promote > people like Hacker, Peacock, and Finch and invite them to the annual West > Chester shindig. They are considered part of the club. Ask Sam and Paul about > this. Do you mean to suggest that these women are guests rather than hosts? It's just as valid to say that Hacker, Peacock, Finch promote and invite others into _their_ projects. But perhaps that's not how some people see it. I personally have had trouble -- gender-related conflicts, let's say -- with what I'd call the fringe new formalists. (I mentioned one altercation to Dana Gioia, and he basically said the fellow was a nut -- no brotherhood there.) On the other hand, I've had a highly respected old formalist tell me, quite clearly, that NO WOMEN POETS had EVER, in the history of English, written any 'masterful' blank verse. So while Janet's exact details don't match my experience, it's clear to me that she's not just making this stuff up (as some replies have implied). I would be surprised to hear that such a debate took place recently among the gang at West Chester -- but I'm not so wide-eyed to think everyone who likes rhyme isn't sexist. Would that it were so. Kathrine From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Wed Apr 4 01:04:36 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 00:04:36 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] P**m Message-ID: I was most interested to read Bob Grumman's little essay on minimalist poetry ( http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm ) recently posted here. I'm not kidding. I find this stuff intriguing, and a good window into a kind of aesthetic I know very little about. Some of the example poems Bob quoted and analyzed in his essay I do enjoy. But I confess that for the most part I don't get it. Seems to me that a lot of this stuff reaches a minim at which the commentary utterly usurps the work, and that's usually where I get off the bus--with anyone's critical analysis, I hasten to add. Let me illustrate. Here's a poem which I am about to write: A Vowal There. The muse was kind to me, I hope you'll agree. Now let me try a sample critique of this poem. This might seem, at first, a simple enough minimalist lyric. But not so. In fact, the cross-currents of meaning here are so rich, the layerings so thick, it's hard to know where to start in analysis, once you study the poem for a while. Its primary meaning is simply "avowal," the plain noun. What the poet is avowing is up to the reader to decide, but that's the point, isn't it? It's *always* up to the reader to complete a poem's avowal, which does not, in fact, exist without the participating eye and ear. And the slight rupture, the tiny space between the first letter and the rest suggests, it's quite clear, the often refractory nature of meaning-making in any poem. Our poetic avowals are never without undercurrent, fracture, internal contradiction. We could also get into the implicit critique of American mainstream poetry that this poem carries out. For to "avow," as everyone knows, has as one primary meaning "to confess." Yes, this subtle confessional poem, in its very minimalism, conducts its devastating critique of the generations of self-indulgence which followed Lowell and Snodgrass's original confessional work. Note how, by depriving this "avowal" of its first person pronoun, the poet quite deftly satirizes a whole generation of poetasters. We might continue by appreciating the rich punning on the submerged but crucial term "vowel" here, and the deft suggestion by the poet that one's vowels are actively a *part* of one's *avowals*. An *avowal* cannot be made, you see, without "a vowel," a fact made plain in the typography. Sound and sense are seamlessly united, even as their union is made precarious in the orthography. Much to ponder there. But that's not all. The first two letters here, emphasized by the space and the capital, stand for a common abbreviation ("AV"), meaning "audio visual." Now this is really rich: for what are we looking at here but a visual expression which depends equally upon its audial aspects? (Among the many audial puns, naturally, is the one on "bowel," but that's merely the most obvious one.) Neither visual nor audio alone suffice, you see: we need our audio-visual aids in order to achieve a full appreciation of poetry. And so forth--I hope it's obvious that I'm spinning this stuff out just about as quickly as I can type it. And while Bob's a lot better at this stuff than I am, plainly, my little impromptu analysis frankly doesn't strike me as all that different from serious critical attention paid to works like "lighght." I think I could concoct something similar with most of the typos and malapropisms that show up in student papers, actually. I think any of us can. And that's what bothers me, not about the work itself, which has my blessing, but about claims for its significance, which have my skepticism. I don't mind it when a poem offers me some resistance, and I certainly don't have any problem with clever or detailed critical analyses. But I sense a certain disproportion between utterance and analysis, often, in this realm. The commentary seems better than the poem. That's not an issue limited to "minimalist" poetry, of course. I often have similar problems when I read Harold Bloom. David Graham __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 02:12:51 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 02:12:51 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: In a message dated 4/3/2001 11:57:40 PM Central Daylight Time, klvarnes at home.com writes: > > Do you mean to suggest that these women are guests rather than hosts? > Somebody has to do the inviting, and it's been Mike Peich and Dana Gioia, who founded the conference and generate the funding for it and pull their hair out over it every year over it who do the inviting. Sorry, but that's not an opinion; it's history. > It's just as valid to say that Hacker, Peacock, Finch promote and invite > others into _their_ projects. But perhaps that's not how some people see > it. > I don't recall Annie Finch, as much as I respect her, inviting me to contribute to A Formal Feeling Comes. And I can produce medical evidence that I have a testosterone level lower than any poet in that anthology. I don't recall any recent anthologies with the subtitle "Guys Who Write in Form." C'mon Kathrine. "Some people"? Shades of Sen. McCarthy. > I personally have had trouble -- gender-related conflicts, let's say -- with > what I'd call the fringe new formalists. (I mentioned one altercation to > Dana Gioia, and he basically said the fellow was a nut -- no brotherhood > there.) On the other hand, I've had a highly respected old formalist tell > me, quite clearly, that NO WOMEN POETS had EVER, in the history of English, > written any 'masterful' blank verse. And who are these "fringe new formalists"? And what is a "gender-related conflict," exactly? Are you saying that someone told you that, as a woman, you didn't have the right to say so-and-so? Or are you saying that someone disagreed with something you said about gender-related issues? There would seem to be a difference here. And who was this other old jackass, this "highly respected old formalist"? Are you saying that *one* bad apple spoils the barrel? But, come to think of it, can you name a distinguished blank verse poem by a woman (outside of the contemporary era)? I have gone through the Norton Anthology of Poetry (one of the editors of which is one Mary Jo Salter, who does write distinguished blank verse) and found the following examples (total) of blank verse by women poets: Anna Laettia Barbaold, "To Mr. S. T. Coleridge" Charlotte Smith, "From Beachy Head" Felicia Dorothea Hemans, "Indian Woman's Death Song" (first 15 lines) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, From "Aurora Leigh" Gwendolyn Brooks, "the birth in a narrow room" Only Brooks and Browning could be considered major poets. Now that's out of a total of almost 2000 pages of poetry, which represents the "canon" as we know it--and, like it or not, the Norton pretty much defines the canon. While I don't much care for the unfortunate term "masterful," it would appear that women have not been drawn to blank verse particularly. It would be nice to rewrite literary history to prove otherwise, but it just can't be done. If I'm wrong, put your money where your mouth is. So what does this mean? On the one hand, not a damn thing. On the other, that women have found an "alternative tradition" in common meter, the sonnet, various lyric forms, syllabics, etc. as a way of subverting the patriarchy. I do believe that one Annie Finch wrote a book (titled, I believe, The Ghost of Meter) that mentioned Emily Dickinson (and others) in this regard. The whole thesis of Annie' Finch's book was that Dickinson subverted the patriarchy by avoiding (or eluding) the pentameter. So while Janet's exact details don't > match my experience, it's clear to me that she's not just making this stuff > up (as some replies have implied). > I have read a total of two replies to Janet's statement, at least 50% of which were from women. > I would be surprised to hear that such a debate took place recently among > the gang at West Chester -- but I'm not so wide-eyed to think everyone who > likes rhyme isn't sexist. Would that it were so. > So what? Are you wide-eyed enough to think that everyone who *doesn't* like rhyme is sexist? Would that that were so as well. Sorry, Kathrine, but I think these remarks ill-thought-out. And I personally find them unfair and largely unfounded. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 02:24:33 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 02:24:33 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] P**m Message-ID: In a message dated 4/4/2001 12:03:58 AM Central Daylight Time, grahamd at mail.ripon.edu writes: > I was most interested to read Bob Grumman's little essay on minimalist > poetry > ( http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm ) recently posted > here. I'm not kidding. I find this stuff intriguing, and a good window > into a kind of aesthetic I know very little about. Some of the example > poems Bob quoted and analyzed in his essay I do enjoy. But I confess that > for the most part I don't get it. Seems to me that a lot of this stuff > reaches a minim at which the commentary utterly usurps the work, and that's > usually where I get off the bus--with anyone's critical analysis, I hasten > to add. > > Let me illustrate. Here's a poem which I am about to write: > > A Vowal > > I think you're on to something, Mr. Graham. My own version: Ay, bow, all. This introduces several other levels: Class-consciousness (reminds me of Gilbert and Sullivan's " Bow, bow, ye low and middle classes); Freudian anal-retentive ("bow . . . all"), Moby Dick ("Ay," the first syllable of "Ahab"), Southern slang usage ("Hey, y'all."), the Robin Hood legend ("bow"), courtly love tradition ("bow"), Henry James (The Golden "bow, all"), Fraser (The Golden "bow"), and George W. Bush (if you read it backwards, it says "La wubya," a clear allusion to Bush's inverted initials and, thus, his courting of the Hispanic vote). There's more here than meets the eyeye. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 05:11:34 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 05:11:34 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] P**m References: Message-ID: <3ACAE546.57C6@nut-n-but.net> David, as I said in my post pointing people to my essay, if a person needs a commentary to appreciate a minimalist poem (or any other), either the poem doesn't work or the person lacks the visceral ability to appreciate it. All the poems I write about in my essay hit me exactly the same way that many conventional poems struck me--Frost's "Stopping by the Woods," for instance. That that poem can be commented on for pages does not lessen its value. Commentary merely puts a reaction into words, to verify, not create, appreciation. It is to be hoped it will help appreciators refine and extend their appreciation and non-appreciators learn and internalize rules for what to look for in the kind of poems discussed in order to enjoy them. Your "a vowel" is interesting but in the final analysis doesn't work as well for me as any of the poems I analyzed. I think one or two unaltered conventional words on the page will only rarely work too well as poems. I discuss "utter" as one such in my essay, and theirs Cor van den Heuvel's "tundra" (that word only in the middle of a single otherwise blank page in a collection of haiku) are the only ones I can think of offhand. Thanks for reading my essay. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 05:18:15 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 05:18:15 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon References: Message-ID: <3ACAE6D7.7F54@nut-n-but.net> "Crarapap" is the word we're discussing. I see "pap" in it, of course, but what are its two meanings? The latin "rara" is there, too, but it's not a pun for anything, it's just there. Ditto "rare." You can say it sounds like "rear," but that doesn't make it a pun. A pun has to be a single word or phrase that, in context, has two different meanings, yes? Your word combines various words and near-words but does no punning for me. As for metaphors in "lighght," the main general one is what the word does as print on a page for what it denotes as text, as explained in another post of mine. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 05:20:12 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 05:20:12 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Taxonomies, etc. References: Message-ID: <3ACAE74C.3715@nut-n-but.net> Taxonomies are, of course, clustrophobic, especially the silly one that distinguishes poets from ice-skaters. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 05:23:52 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 05:23:52 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies References: <20010404031914.7489536F9@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <3ACAE828.46C3@nut-n-but.net> > Bob G., > > In your estimation is there any "universally acclaimed master"? > > Bob C. I thought I answered that, although not absolutely directly. No, there is no universally-acclaimed master. That's because every field has iconoclasts who refuse to accept as masters others do. There's also the problem of the definition of "master." Which I won't go into. --Bob G. From mbales at cybergate.net Wed Apr 4 06:43:15 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 06:43:15 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon In-Reply-To: <3ACAE6D7.7F54@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: > ... A pun has to be a single word or > phrase that, in context, has two different meanings, yes? > Your word combines various words and near-words but does > no punning for me.<< Well, if "crarapap" is no pun, then neither is "lighght". Is the problem here merely one broad use of the notion of pun on the one hand and a narrow use of the notion of pun on the other? Can't we say that "pun" means nearly any wordplay? > As for metaphors in "lighght," the main general one is > what the word does as print on a page for what it denotes > as text, as explained in another post of mine.<< But this statement is ... empty. One could say just the same for "crarapap": that the general metaphor in "crarapap" is what the word does as print on a page for what it denotes as text. But having said that, what do we have? No more than we have having said that about "lighght". Frankly, "crararap" seems to have far more "in" it than "lighght" has: crap, rap, pap, rara. The enfolded meaning seems to be at least this: "The referenced rap is rare crap, rare pap", while the enfolded meaning of "lighght" seems to be "Hey, look! Silent letters!" Smilelies Marcus mbales at cybergate.net From mbales at cybergate.net Wed Apr 4 06:51:38 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 06:51:38 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Dickinson, satire, taxonomies In-Reply-To: References: <6c.92e5159.27fbe98e@aol.com> Message-ID: > ... I've had a highly > respected old formalist tell me, quite clearly, that NO WOMEN POETS > had EVER, in the history of English, written any 'masterful' blank > verse.<< Isn't this a self-solving problem? Quote them some. Quote us some. mbales at cybergate.net From wasanthony at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 07:32:41 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 04:32:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] P**m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010404113241.20471.qmail@web12106.mail.yahoo.com> Oh, thank you, David. I thought I was empty of chuckles at this early point in a lousy week, but you made me howl early in the a.m.. - Jim, laughing and/or coughing --- David Graham wrote: > I was most interested to read Bob Grumman's little essay on > minimalist poetry > ( http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm ) recently > posted > here. I'm not kidding. I find this stuff intriguing, and a good > window > into a kind of aesthetic I know very little about. Some of the > example > poems Bob quoted and analyzed in his essay I do enjoy. But I confess > that > for the most part I don't get it. Seems to me that a lot of this > stuff > reaches a minim at which the commentary utterly usurps the work, and > that's > usually where I get off the bus--with anyone's critical analysis, I > hasten > to add. > > Let me illustrate. Here's a poem which I am about to write: > > A Vowal > > There. The muse was kind to me, I hope you'll agree. Now let me try > a > sample critique of this poem. > > This might seem, at first, a simple enough minimalist lyric. But not > so. > In fact, the cross-currents of meaning here are so rich, the > layerings so > thick, it's hard to know where to start in analysis, once you study > the > poem for a while. > > Its primary meaning is simply "avowal," the plain noun. What the > poet is > avowing is up to the reader to decide, but that's the point, isn't > it? > It's *always* up to the reader to complete a poem's avowal, which > does not, > in fact, exist without the participating eye and ear. And the slight > rupture, the tiny space between the first letter and the rest > suggests, > it's quite clear, the often refractory nature of meaning-making in > any > poem. Our poetic avowals are never without undercurrent, fracture, > internal contradiction. > > We could also get into the implicit critique of American mainstream > poetry > that this poem carries out. For to "avow," as everyone knows, has as > one > primary meaning "to confess." Yes, this subtle confessional poem, in > its > very minimalism, conducts its devastating critique of the generations > of > self-indulgence which followed Lowell and Snodgrass's original > confessional > work. Note how, by depriving this "avowal" of its first person > pronoun, the > poet quite deftly satirizes a whole generation of poetasters. > > We might continue by appreciating the rich punning on the submerged > but > crucial term "vowel" here, and the deft suggestion by the poet that > one's > vowels are actively a *part* of one's *avowals*. An *avowal* cannot > be > made, you see, without "a vowel," a fact made plain in the > typography. > Sound and sense are seamlessly united, even as their union is made > precarious in the orthography. Much to ponder there. > > But that's not all. The first two letters here, emphasized by the > space > and the capital, stand for a common abbreviation ("AV"), meaning > "audio > visual." Now this is really rich: for what are we looking at here > but a > visual expression which depends equally upon its audial aspects? > (Among > the many audial puns, naturally, is the one on "bowel," but that's > merely > the most obvious one.) Neither visual nor audio alone suffice, you > see: > we need our audio-visual aids in order to achieve a full appreciation > of > poetry. > > And so forth--I hope it's obvious that I'm spinning this stuff out > just > about as quickly as I can type it. And while Bob's a lot better at > this > stuff than I am, plainly, my little impromptu analysis frankly > doesn't > strike me as all that different from serious critical attention paid > to > works like "lighght." I think I could concoct something similar with > most > of the typos and malapropisms that show up in student papers, > actually. I > think any of us can. And that's what bothers me, not about the work > itself, which has my blessing, but about claims for its significance, > which > have my skepticism. > > I don't mind it when a poem offers me some resistance, and I > certainly > don't have any problem with clever or detailed critical analyses. > But I > sense a certain disproportion between utterance and analysis, often, > in > this realm. The commentary seems better than the poem. > > That's not an issue limited to "minimalist" poetry, of course. I > often > have similar problems when I read Harold Bloom. > > David Graham ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From mbales at cybergate.net Wed Apr 4 08:13:02 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 08:13:02 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Call for Submissions - Front Range Review In-Reply-To: References: <3ACAE6D7.7F54@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS The Front Range Review, a new literary and art magazine published annually in Fort Collins, Colorado, is now seeking high quality fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from established and emerging writers. Manuscripts must be received between August 15th and December 1st of each year. Please see the Guid elines for Writers or send a SASE to: Blair Oliver Front Range Review English Department Front Range Community College-Larimer Campus 4616 South Shields Fort Collins, CO 80527 Guidelines for Writers Front Range Review is interested in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction of high quality from established and emerging writers. We accept submissions from August 15th until December 1st each year. A SASE must be included for response or return of submitted material.No previously published work or manuscripts already accepted for publication will be considered. Simultaneous submissions, however, are accepted. Prose writers should send only one story, essay, or self-contained novel excerpt per envelope. Poets may submit up to 5 poems. Writers who wish to submit both prose and poetry should do so under separate cover.Manuscripts must be typed, double-spaced, and paginated. The author's name should appear on each page. Include your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address on a cover letter that includes a brief bio and publication history.Please send all manuscripts and correspondence to:Blair Oliver Front Range Review English Department Front Range Community College-Larimer Campus 4616 South Shields Fort Collins, CO 80527 Rights revert to the author upon publication with the provision that Front Range Review receives credit. Call For Submissions The New Scriblerus literary magazine is issuing a call for submissions for its inaugural issue, to be published in early August, 2001. New Scriblerus accepts short fiction, excerpts from novels and dramatic works, poetry, and visual art (in limited numbers per issue). Submission deadline for this issue is June 1, 2001. New Scriblerus is a publication that exists to give voice to the unknown, unconventional, and unimaginable. Many of us have long searched and yearned for fresh, new, and exciting fiction, poetry, and art. Search no longer, for you have found your deliverance... We are interested in original works of fiction, poetry, stage or screenplays, and excerpts from longer pieces. Our editorial staff have rich interests in a broad range of genres, and our only criteria is well-written, innovative, and engaging art. We also publish original pieces of visual art in limited numbers per issue. Whether you are starting out as a writer, or have been established for some time and can't find someone to publish your innovative or unconventional piece, we are here to publish quality work that slips through the cracks of a rigid and rapidly decaying literary publishing community. All e-mail enquiries should be addressed to: newscriblerus at hotmail.com Guidelines For Submissions The Guidelines for writer submissions are as follows: All submissions should include a cover letter with the author's name, address, number and names of the submissions, and e-mail address. Send typed, unpublished material only. The simultaneous submission to Grain of material submitted to other publications is not acceptable. Do not send your only manuscript copy. A good quality, fully-legible duplicate copy is fine. Use 8 1/2 x 11 paper, one side only. Poetry may be single- spaced; fiction, double spaced; plays, standard play format. All copy must be typewritten. All non-poetry submissions should be double-spaced and single-sided with the page number and story title in the header. Do not include your name within the body of the submitted work. Poetry submissions should be single-spaced and formatted as intended. New Scriblerus will strive to preserve the formatting as submitted. All visual art submissions should be submitted on IBM-formatted disks (either CD, Zip, or 3.5" floppy) with a hard-copy facsimile in an appropriate quality resolution. If you wish to have your work returned to you, please include a SASE with adequate postage. Note that contributors from outside Canada must use an international postage coupon. All submitters will be contacted via e-mail with a response to their work. Payment for fiction will be 1/4? per word. Poetry and visual art submissions are subject to honorarium-style payment (i.e., if we can afford to, we'll pay you). New Scriblerus purchases first Canadian serial rights only. All copyrights remain with the author. Submit your entries to: New Scriblerus Department of English 3-5 Humanities Centre University of Alberta T6G 2E5 All e-mail enquiries should be addressed to: newscriblerus at hotmail.com mbales at cybergate.net From mbales at cybergate.net Wed Apr 4 08:13:03 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 08:13:03 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Submission Guidelines - Noble Poets' Newsletter In-Reply-To: References: <3ACAE6D7.7F54@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: Submission Guidelines For The Noble Poets' Newsletter The Noble Poets' Newsletter publishes an eclectic range of poetry with rich and startling imagery, unusual viewpoints, and earth/body/nature/female centered meditations. We like and publish poetry of the subterranean, the cavernous. What does this mean? This means that if the material is fully felt and explored, the poet's engagement can be felt and tasted through the words. We want poetry that goes deep (deeper than puppy dogs, butterflies, and having ice cream at grandma's house, though these subjects do warm our hearts). What we don't want: We are not interested in religious, political, or moral pontificating and dogma, and please, no greeting card verse. While we support free speech, we look for quality contributions that adhere to our guidelines for public decency. Please, no profanity, racism, violence, pornography, or sexism. Submissions are accepted year round. Reply times vary from one week to three months. We keep a three-month backlog. Accepted work appears in the next available issue. As payment, published authors receive two copies of the newsletter that features their work. Rights revert to authors upon publication, but we do appreciate acknowledgement as the first publisher of the piece(s). The newsletter is 11 X 17 double-sided, folded in half or 8.5 X 11 doubled-sided and stapled. TNPN includes poetry, artwork, and articles/essays on poetry related topics. Please submit quality free verse poetry or short articles/essays accompanied by a self addressed stamped envelope (SASE) or International Reply Coupons (for artists and writers living outside the U.S.) with the proper postage. Submissions received without proper postage, sadly, are disqualified and manuscripts are not returned. We enjoy cover letters with personality and feeling. Please tell us something about yourself and why you are submitting. Don't be afraid to try us! We are nice folks and enjoy helping poets fit with the publication. We encourage beginning writers to submit and pride ourselves on fast and humane replies/correspondances (after all, we are poets too!) The Noble Poets' Newsletter Editor- Elizabeth Florio P.O. Box 1330 Boulder Creek, CA 95006 mbales at cybergate.net From mbales at cybergate.net Wed Apr 4 08:13:02 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 08:13:02 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Call for Submissions - Bellevue Literary Review In-Reply-To: References: <3ACAE6D7.7F54@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: Bellevue Literary Review Editors: Danielle Ofri, MD PhD Jerome Lowenstein, MD Ronna Wineberg Publisher: Martin J. Blaser, MD A journal of humanity and human experience Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States, has been witness to 265 years of human drama. In this tradition we have created the Bellevue Literary Review, a forum for illuminating humanity and human experience. BLR is published by the Department of Medicine at New York University. We invite submissions of previously unpublished works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry and critical essays that touch upon relationships to the human body, illness, health and healing. We encourage creative interpretation of these themes. Submission Guidelines 1. Please limit fiction, creative nonfiction and critical essay to 5000 words. Manuscripts should be double-spaced with full author information on the first page. Please submit only one manuscript at a time. 2. Poems should be single-spaced and no longer than one page each. Submit up to 3 poems at one time. 3. Indicate fiction, creative nonfiction, essay or poetry on the outside of the envelope. 4. Deadline for fall issue is May 15, 2001. 5. No electronic or faxed submissions accepted at this time. 6. No simultaneous submissions, please. We will make an effort to reply promptly. 7. Include SASE with sufficient postage for reply. 8. BLR acquires first-time North American rights. After publication, all rights revert to the author and may be reprinted as long as appropriate acknowledgement to BLR is made. 9. Payment is in the form of copies. 10. Send manuscripts to The Bellevue Literary Review, Department of Medicine, NYU School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016. mbales at cybergate.net From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 4 08:30:06 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 05:30:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] P**m Message-ID: <20010404123006.F3A5C36FB@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Wed Apr 4 08:33:16 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 08:33:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Blank verse In-Reply-To: from "Rsgwynn1@cs.com" at Apr 3, 2001 03:26:38 pm Message-ID: <200104041233.IAA08164@dept.english.upenn.edu> According to Rsgwynn1 at cs.com: > > I would like some comments on this specimen of American blank verse c. 1845. > I have deliberately left the author's name off. I'm curious as to the motives behind this experiment: are you hoping that non-formalist writers on the list will say, this is shit, and thus be exposed as haters of Frederick Douglass? Or, are you interested in placing Douglass in the context of (general, American and/or late) Romanticism? Or in a tradition of formalist African-American poets from Wheatley to Claude McKay to, say, the Robert Hayden of "Those Winter Sundays" and the like? Or is it just a whimsical quiz? -m. > > You are loosed from your moorings, and are free! > I am fast in my chains and am a slave! > You move merrily before the gentle gale, > And I sadly before the bloody whip! > You are freedom's swift-winged angels > That fly around the world; I am confined > In bands of iron! O that I were free! > O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, > And under your protecting wing! Alas! > Betwixt you and me the turbid waters roll. > Go on, go on. O that I could also go! > Could I but swim! If I could fly! O why > Was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 4 08:41:11 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 05:41:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Taxonomies, etc. Message-ID: <20010404124111.5C976274B@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 4 08:43:24 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 05:43:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: <20010404124324.3F75936F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From michael.ritchie at mail.atu.edu Wed Apr 4 08:51:29 2001 From: michael.ritchie at mail.atu.edu (Michael Karl Ritchie) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 07:51:29 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Ducking Under Fire Message-ID: To move beyond "crapcrap," etc. maybe the list could select one Elizabeth Bishop poem each writer admires and explain why. Michael Ritchie From tadrichards at prodigy.net Wed Apr 4 08:48:43 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 08:48:43 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Submission Guidelines - Noble Poets' Newsletter References: <3ACAE6D7.7F54@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <01a901c0bd05$9518f1e0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Occupied as I was in going through my ouevre to weed out my puppy dog poems, I realized I had misread these guidelines as "no profanity, racism, violence, pornography, or sarcasm. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marcus Bales" To: ; ; Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 8:13 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Submission Guidelines - Noble Poets' Newsletter > Submission Guidelines For > The Noble Poets' Newsletter > > The Noble Poets' Newsletter publishes an eclectic range of poetry > with > rich and startling imagery, unusual viewpoints, and > earth/body/nature/female centered meditations. We like and > publish poetry > of the subterranean, the cavernous. What does this mean? This > means that > if the material is fully felt and explored, the poet's engagement can > be > felt and tasted through the words. We want poetry that goes deep > (deeper > than puppy dogs, butterflies, and having ice cream at grandma's > house, > though these subjects do warm our hearts). > > What we don't want: We are not interested in religious, political, or > moral pontificating and dogma, and please, no greeting card verse. > While > we support free speech, we look for quality contributions that > adhere to > our guidelines for public decency. Please, no profanity, racism, > violence, > pornography, or sexism. > > Submissions are accepted year round. Reply times vary from one > week to > three months. We keep a three-month backlog. Accepted work > appears in the > next available issue. As payment, published authors receive two > copies of > the newsletter that features their work. Rights revert to authors upon > publication, but we do appreciate acknowledgement as the first > publisher > of the piece(s). > > The newsletter is 11 X 17 double-sided, folded in half or > 8.5 X 11 doubled-sided and stapled. TNPN includes poetry, > artwork, and > articles/essays on poetry related topics. Please submit quality free > verse > poetry or short articles/essays accompanied by a self addressed > stamped > envelope (SASE) or International Reply Coupons (for artists and > writers > living outside the U.S.) with the proper postage. Submissions > received > without proper postage, sadly, are disqualified and manuscripts are not > returned. We enjoy cover letters with personality and feeling. Please tell > us something about yourself and why you are submitting. Don't be afraid to > try us! We are nice folks and enjoy helping poets fit with the > publication. We encourage beginning writers to submit and pride ourselves > on fast and humane replies/correspondances (after all, we are poets too!) > > > The Noble Poets' Newsletter > Editor- Elizabeth Florio > P.O. Box 1330 > Boulder Creek, CA 95006 > > > > > mbales at cybergate.net > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 09:26:54 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 09:26:54 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon Message-ID: <7c.13faea88.27fc7b1e@cs.com> In a message dated 4/4/2001 4:23:20 AM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > > "Crarapap" is the word we're discussing. I see "pap" in it, > of course, but what are its two meanings? The latin "rara" is > there, too, but it's not a pun for anything, it's just there. > Ditto "rare." You can say it sounds like "rear," but that > doesn't make it a pun. A pun has to be a single word or > phrase that, in context, has two different meanings, yes? > Your word combines various words and near-words but does > no punning for me. > I decided I was verbose, so now the poem reads "crapap." You're right about the absence of a punun. I guess I didn't have enough space to work one in. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 09:33:17 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 09:33:17 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Blank verse Message-ID: <25.13476b8e.27fc7c9d@cs.com> In a message dated 4/4/2001 7:34:44 AM Central Daylight Time, mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu writes: > > I'm curious as to the motives behind this experiment: are you hoping that > non-formalist writers on the list will say, this is shit, and thus be > exposed as haters of Frederick Douglass? Or, are you interested in > placing Douglass in the context of (general, American and/or late) > Romanticism? Or in a tradition of formalist African-American poets from > Wheatley to Claude McKay to, say, the Robert Hayden of "Those Winter > Sundays" and the like? Or is it just a whimsical quiz? -m. > Just to call attention to Douglass's imbedded versification, which is not bad b.v. for a non-poet. However, the passage is probably more striking as prose than as verse, since as verse we pay more attention to some of the minor defects in his meter. I typed it up for my American Lit class and wanted to share it. Sometimes my motives are almost pure, naughty person. From jdavis at panix.com Wed Apr 4 09:36:11 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 09:36:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Bishop In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "The Burglar of Babylon", although I see David Rothman calls it doggerel and bad poetry of the best kind, is one of my favorite Bishop poems. I guess I like the unmistakeable children's-book quality, but also the tension and confusion of the manhunt as it plays out in a stalemate for most of the poem. I wouldn't have said the verse was so bad - I thought she forestalled all the predictable qualities of ballads while keeping the reader's attention... Jordan From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Wed Apr 4 09:39:24 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 09:39:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poets and Painters (Sat., 4/7) Message-ID: <200104041339.JAA19148@dept.english.upenn.edu> Hi all, in case you happen to be in Philly this weekend, I'm giving a reading and talk w/ my brother at the Kelly Writers House (where he has a show up) and would love to see any and all of you there. Details below. -m. According to Writers House: > Hi Writers House Folk--We hope you'll join us for the third installment of > our poets and painters series. Poet Mike Magee and painter Mitch Magee will > share the spotlight as we mix readings, discussion, and a few choice snacks. > See you here on Saturday evening. > > > *****Please Join Us!***** > > The Kelly Writers House presents > > the third reading, discussion, and reception in the > > Poets and Painters Series. > > Featuring the work of: > > Painter Mitch Magee > > and > > Poet Michael Magee > > > 7:00 PM > Saturday, April 7th > Kelly Writers House > 3805 Locust Walk > > > ************************ > > Michael Magee received his PhD at Penn where he wrote a dissertation, > "Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz and Experimental Writing," and was > very active at the Writers House. His articles on American Literature > are out or forthcoming in REVIEW, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE and RARITAN; his > poems in NEW AMERICAN WRITING, CALLALOO, WASHINGTON REVIEW, LUNGFULL!, > CROSSCONNECT, IXNAY and elsewhere. He edits the poetry journal COMBO, > teaches at Wheaton College and lives in Pawtucket, RI with his wife Susanna > and their daughter Anabella. > > Mitchell Magee is a graduate of Cornell University and received a Masters of > Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has > appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions in and around New York and > he performs regularly with the improv comedy group "Monkey Dick" at the > Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York City. He lives and works in > Brooklyn. > > > ---------------------------- > The Kelly Writers House wh at dept.english.upenn.edu > 3805 Locust Walk 215-573-WRIT > Philadelphia, PA 19104 http://www.english.upenn.edu/~wh > From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 09:43:59 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 09:43:59 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon References: Message-ID: <3ACB251F.2AFA@nut-n-but.net> Now that you mention it, Marcus, "crarapap," does do something MORE as print than most words do (and the "MORE" I didn't state because I took it for granted): as print, it mimicks pap coming out of crap, so is an excellent self-definition of its denotation. It is not a pun, nor is "lighght," which I never said was a pun. > > As for metaphors in "lighght," the main general one is > > what the word does as print on a page (*beyond what > > all words do as print, which is sit on a page*) for what > > it denotes as text, as explained in another post of mine. Thanks for helping me refine my definition. Marcus: "the enfolded meaning of 'lighght' seems to be 'Hey, look! Silent letters!'" That's pretty much it, except that the auditor has to be able to see/feel the appropriateness of the silence in the case of "light" only. I'd compare it to a subtle change of key at exactly the right moment in a musical composition. Those who are not spontaneously aware of it will not be thrilled, assuming that the theme being played is otherwise nothing special; those who are aware of it, will be. --Bob G. From klvarnes at home.com Wed Apr 4 09:23:12 2001 From: klvarnes at home.com (Kathrine Varnes) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 08:23:12 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Dickinson, satire, taxonomies In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >> Do you mean to suggest that these women are guests rather than hosts? >> > Somebody has to do the inviting, and it's been Mike Peich and Dana Gioia, who > founded the conference and generate the funding for it and pull their hair > out over it every year over it who do the inviting. Sorry, but that's not an > opinion; it's history. True, of course, about West Chester. Actually, Sam, in your last post, you said some of these women were considered 'leaders' -- because of the vagaries of email, I didn't get that earlier -- but that's exactly what I meant. Annie has been consulted about whom to invite to West Chester. She's part of it, not just on a guest list. That's how Mike and Dana approach it--they think of her as a leader too. Maybe I didn't make myself clear enough. Maybe I still haven't. > >> It's just as valid to say that Hacker, Peacock, Finch promote and invite >> others into _their_ projects. But perhaps that's not how some people see >> it. >> > I don't recall Annie Finch, as much as I respect her, inviting me to > contribute to A Formal Feeling Comes. And I can produce medical evidence > that I have a testosterone level lower than any poet in that anthology. I > don't recall any recent anthologies with the subtitle "Guys Who Write in > Form." C'mon Kathrine. "Some people"? Shades of Sen. McCarthy. > But there's an RS Gwynn in An Exaltation of Forms. I really just meant "some people" -- there was no secret implication here! I didn't mean Dana, Mike, yourself, the guys at SLP, or any of the "core" group. I don't have time to reply to the middle of this -- nor am I in a position to name names. Really, I just wanted to avoid a pile on in response to Janet's post, the details of which did not match my experience. But I thought I --we-- could still honor her concern in the post. >> I would be surprised to hear that such a debate took place recently among >> the gang at West Chester -- but I'm not so wide-eyed to think everyone who >> likes rhyme isn't sexist. Would that it were so. >> > So what? Are you wide-eyed enough to think that everyone who *doesn't* like > rhyme is sexist? Absolutely not. Give me some credit. I was trying to establish a middle ground -- something between the extremes suggested by the two sides of the posts. You want to shove me into extremism anyway. Maybe this is just too hot an issue to do over email. Kathrine From DICK at watson.ibm.com Wed Apr 4 09:57:22 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 01 09:57:22 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] A question asked seriously Message-ID: <200104041358.JAA21908@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> >>the gang at West Chester -- but I'm not so wide-eyed to think everyone who >>likes rhyme isn't sexist. Would that it were so. >> >>Kathrine Would Kathrine - or anyone - care to explain how I would recognize someone who is _not_ sexist? _not_ racist? etc. Richard From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 09:48:47 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 09:48:47 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies References: <3ACA4801.5AAD@nut-n-but.net> <3ACA8D2E.DDD47EC9@alsopreview.com> Message-ID: <3ACB263F.6A54@nut-n-but.net> "Well, them's the breaks, I suppose. I liked lighght but can't abide Dickinson." Interesting. I've never liked Dickinson, either. I wonder if there's something about brain make- From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 10:05:08 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 10:05:08 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] P**m References: <20010404113241.20471.qmail@web12106.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3ACB2A13.2061@nut-n-but.net> If you liked David's "a vowel" with commentary, then you'd love Stanton A. Coblenz on Cummings: F-f-i-r-e FP ... co N fl a g r a t i o n i s ss ZZ on ...l e !! dr a .... !! ---- (this will probably not come out as transmitted on many screens, but it should come out close enough) "One stands breathless," writes the critic, "before such consumate command of form over content. Here poetry is lifted to a new elevation. One cannot admire too strongly the deftness and restraint with which the poet develops his theme to a crescendo, beginning with his evocative statement of elementary fact, then subtly suggesting the spread of the fire by the widening spaces between the letters of the craftily chosen key word 'conflagaration,' which is necessarily presented in a disordered form to indicate the confusion and terror of the catastrophe. In the consumate concluding lines, in which a lesser artist might have impaired the effect bymore specific statement, we have a typoographically created impression of chaos, suggested by a broken workd such as 'hiss' and by the skillfully misplaced letters and punctuation marks, all of which add eloquently to the complex simplicity and the dissociated unity of the whole." Coblentz goes on to boast that the poem under discussion is his. Similarly, obtuse parodists splatter paint on canvases and think they've duplicated the efforts of Pollock. I think David does a better job, both as infraverbal poet and infraverbal critic. But, he--like those who just don't get jazz, and like all of us about certain things in life--just doesn't get it. I might add that trying something new, even if it doesn't work, is ALWAYS worthy of more respect than morons like Coblentz (but not Graham) pay it. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 10:14:21 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 10:14:21 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Taxonomies, etc. References: <20010404124111.5C976274B@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <3ACB2C3D.4B82@nut-n-but.net> All keyboards are part of the formalist plot to discredit me. Robert R.Cobb wrote: > > "clustrophobic"? Oh, I get it, a gathering of neurotics. > > Bob Cobb > > --- Bob Grumman wrote: > >Taxonomies are, of course, clustrophobic, especially > >the silly one that distinguishes poets from ice-skaters. I might add in answer to another post of yours, Bob, that poems that do not have to be explained--or PRE-EXPLAINED (by which I mean unspecifically explained in advance by material revealing what poems like the given poem try to do, etc.)--are probably trvial. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 10:21:08 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 10:21:08 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies References: <20010404124324.3F75936F9@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <3ACB2DD3.5DB7@nut-n-but.net> No problem with the definition of "universally" for me, Bob: doesn't it mean "everywhere- pertaining," which would mean in this case "agreed-to by everyone?" --Bob G. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 2 16:40:37 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 12:40:37 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] help Message-ID: OK, I can't find it, but I _know_ there's a poem that begins Oh I got up and went to work and came back home and went to bed and got back up and went to work -- repeats a number of times. Then the author breaks out into: Then it was Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, the most beautiful day of the week and rhapsodes on from there. I think this is in that famous X.J. Kennedy anthology I had in boarding school (the one with the purple cover and the dead-looking tree on the cover), but I don't have that with me, and I can't find this poem anywhere. Any suggestions? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From bobnewhartfan at yahoo.com Tue Apr 3 11:17:47 2001 From: bobnewhartfan at yahoo.com (Anthony Robinson) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 08:17:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Pinsky Query In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010403151747.53704.qmail@web10501.mail.yahoo.com> Yes. I can't recall the title but it appeared in a recent Best of American Poetry--if memory serves, the Hollander-edited edition (1998?) Tony --- David Graham wrote: > Does anyone remember an abecedarium poem by Robert > Pinsky? A colleague has > inquired about it, and though I do have a dim memory > of it, that's all I > have. Title, source, or text would be most > welcome--or even just > confirmation that it exists! > > Thanks. > > David Graham > > __________________ > David Graham > grahamd at mail.ripon.edu > __________________ > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 10:22:25 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:22:25 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Bishop Message-ID: "Visits to St. Elizabeths" is one of my favorites. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 10:25:21 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 10:25:21 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: short poems References: Message-ID: <3ACB2ED1.3A00@nut-n-but.net> I've always thought of sonnets as the epitome of the short poem, which I define as being from twenty or so syllables to twenty or s lines in length. Shorter poems I call "kernular" (the "u" is intentional). Haiku are the standard kernular poem. It seems to me that haiku and the like are a single thought in length, sonnets and the like a single thought-cluster in length. Poems longer than twenty lines but under 200 lines I call mid-length poems. All other poems are long poems, for me. --Bob G. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 10:27:59 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:27:59 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: <3c.9cc054c.27fc896f@cs.com> In a message dated 4/4/2001 8:59:39 AM Central Daylight Time, klvarnes at home.com writes: > You want to shove me into > extremism anyway. Maybe this is just too hot an issue to do over email. > You're right. I suggest custard pies at twenty paces. And I will bake the pies. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 10:31:13 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:31:13 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Pinsky Query Message-ID: In a message dated 4/4/2001 9:20:41 AM Central Daylight Time, bobnewhartfan at yahoo.com writes: > Does anyone remember an abecedarium poem by Robert > > Pinsky? A colleague has > > inquired about it, and though I do have a dim memory > > of it, that's all I > > have. Title, source, or text would be most > > welcome--or even just > > confirmation that it exists! Just as a note, there's a great one by Tom Disch in Rebel Angels, "ZEWHYEXARY" From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 10:33:46 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 10:33:46 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies References: <3ACA4801.5AAD@nut-n-but.net> <3ACA8D2E.DDD47EC9@alsopreview.com> <3ACB263F.6A54@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <3ACB30CA.435A@nut-n-but.net> Bob Grumman wrote: > > "Well, them's the breaks, I suppose. I liked lighght but can't abide > Dickinson." > > Interesting. I've never liked Dickinson, either. I > wonder if there's something about brain make- This went out by mistake. I was just going to say something supoposedly light-hearted about the brain-differences of those who like Dickinson versus those who like "lighght" but decided not to, and accidentally sent rather than deleted my post. I know lots of likers of "lighght," by the way, who also like Dickinson. --Bob G. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 10:32:29 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:32:29 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] help Message-ID: In a message dated 4/4/2001 9:20:46 AM Central Daylight Time, moira_russell at hotmail.com writes: > > OK, I can't find it, but I _know_ there's a poem that begins > > Oh I got up and went to work > and came back home and went to bed > and got back up and went to work > > -- repeats a number of times. Then the author breaks out into: > > Then it was Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, > the most beautiful day of the week > > and rhapsodes on from there. I think this is in that famous X.J. Kennedy > anthology I had in boarding school (the one with the purple cover and the > dead-looking tree on the cover), but I don't have that with me, and I can't > find this poem anywhere. Any suggestions? > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA Alan Dugan's "Circle of the Daily Round" From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Wed Apr 4 10:43:53 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 09:43:53 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] P**m In-Reply-To: <3ACAE546.57C6@nut-n-but.net> References: Message-ID: Bob, disagree with my trenchant analysis if you wish, and dis my poem if you must, but please don't *misquote* my masterwork! It's NOT A vowel --as you say. That would indeed be a vulgar, sentimental poem, hardly worth my time. No, my little lyric is: A Vowal Entirely different, and much much deeper, as I hope anyone can see. Not only that, but by ignoring the capital V you misread my lyric utterly (or, should I say, "utterly"?) in ways which my little essay explains in detail. I would have expected more from a minimalist text-lover like yourself. (I wasn't kidding when I said I enjoyed your essay. Helped me to understand things, even if it helped me mostly to understand why I'm not drawn to this sort of writing.) David Graham, proud to have been raised by new-critical close readers. . . . _____________________ >David, as I said in my post pointing people to my essay, >if a person needs a commentary to appreciate a minimalist >poem (or any other), either the poem doesn't work or >the person lacks the visceral ability to appreciate it. >All the poems I write about in my essay hit me exactly >the same way that many conventional poems struck me--Frost's >"Stopping by the Woods," for instance. That that poem can >be commented on for pages does not lessen its value. >Commentary merely puts a reaction into words, to verify, >not create, appreciation. It is to be hoped it will help >appreciators refine and extend their appreciation and >non-appreciators learn and internalize rules for what >to look for in the kind of poems discussed in order to >enjoy them. > >Your "a vowel" is interesting but in the final analysis >doesn't work as well for me as any of the poems I >analyzed. I think one or two unaltered conventional >words on the page will only rarely work too well as >poems. I discuss "utter" as one such in my essay, and >theirs Cor van den Heuvel's "tundra" (that word only in >the middle of a single otherwise blank page in a collection >of haiku) are the only ones I can think of offhand. > >Thanks for reading my essay. > > --Bob G. > > __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Tue Apr 3 23:38:51 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 22:38:51 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] help In-Reply-To: Message-ID: on 4/2/01 3:40 PM, Moira Russell at moira_russell at hotmail.com wrote: > OK, I can't find it, but I _know_ there's a poem that begins > > Oh I got up and went to work > and came back home and went to bed > and got back up and went to work > > -- repeats a number of times. Then the author breaks out into: > > Then it was Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, > the most beautiful day of the week > > and rhapsodes on from there. I think this is in that famous X.J. Kennedy > anthology I had in boarding school (the one with the purple cover and the > dead-looking tree on the cover), but I don't have that with me, and I can't > find this poem anywhere. Any suggestions? > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > It's by Alan Dugan. Paul Lake From xiamin at ghostpriest.gay-robot.com Wed Apr 4 11:03:18 2001 From: xiamin at ghostpriest.gay-robot.com (Simon Raahauge DeSantis) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 11:03:18 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith In-Reply-To: ; from Amber Prentiss on Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 03:05:53PM -0400 References: Message-ID: <20010404110318.A2773@ghostpriest.gay-robot.com> On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 03:05:53PM -0400, Amber Prentiss wrote: > Tangent: this brings to mind the oft-repeated complaint that formal verse is > not taught. I think that poets ought to be more self-reliant about what they > do. You cannot escape the 12th grade without at least knowing of one form, > the sonnet, and you cannot escape forms in college unless you take virtually > no classes involving poetry. If someone's going to be a poet, she probably > reads poetry, and forms are pretty hard to completely avoid. It's her > decision whether or not to try them herself or join a class in which she > will have to attempt them. Formal poetry may not be taught or emphasized in > creative writing courses, but, this being /creative/ writing, that shouldn't > hinder anyone from trying it if she wants to. By college age, a poet > shouldn't be unaware that forms exist, even if she isn't sure of what many > of them are. There are teachers. They have offices. There are, at the very > least, libraries. She can ask! An artist ought to be at least as much > self-trained as academy-trained. If she can't think for herself, will she do > anything good? > Actually, I did manage to escape the 12th grade without knowing the sonnet. I remember we did about a week of poetry in one year of my high school English education. The only Plath I read there (Wellesley High School even) was the Bell Jar. Sure, I've read sonnets, and I know what iambic pentameter is, but I couldn't tell you the rhyme scheme without sitting there with one in front of me and counting. Nor could I actually scan it. Your milage may vary of course; I was taking level two (ie, non honors/AP) English. As far as wannabe poets reading poetry and picking up the forms, I had no idea what meter was until I learned to scan dactylic hexameter in Latin class. Before that, I thought poetry was either free verse, or it rhymed ;). (Latin poetry is not rhyming poetry) -- -Simon Raahauge DeSantis From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 11:11:11 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 11:11:11 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] P**m References: Message-ID: <3ACB398F.6EC7@nut-n-but.net> Sorry I misquoted your masterpiece, David. I do a lot of that, I have to admit. The capitalization doesn't seem that crucial to me, but the second "a"--yow! Change the "w" into "vv" and you'll have an even better poem! --Bob G. From xiamin at ghostpriest.gay-robot.com Wed Apr 4 11:36:38 2001 From: xiamin at ghostpriest.gay-robot.com (Simon Raahauge DeSantis) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 11:36:38 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Sums up my working day nicely.... In-Reply-To: ; from Moira Russell on Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 11:20:28AM -0800 References: Message-ID: <20010404113638.B2773@ghostpriest.gay-robot.com> A modern lyric (in the traditional sense) from Operation Ivy. Junkies Running Dry I always looked up at the ones who walked away choosing themselves over preset ways of looking at a future that had no room for the questions they lived for always knew i never could have walked away myself my self worth was beyond any help and i didnt care to test it against the rejection i had seen before but those i loved so much they underwent a change they're working fourty hours they got caught in the game like junkies running dry, the vulnerability they're always there on time we're never satisfied like junkies running dry this wonderful generosity a third of our lives to do what we please doesn't look that great to me in fact it doesnt even look fair they call it youthful idealism and even I would have to agree with them except some of us grow up and its still there I grow up too slow I don't wanna go but now i'm working just like everyone else but ill get out of here -- -Simon Raahauge DeSantis From TerryP17 at aol.com Wed Apr 4 11:43:14 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 11:43:14 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: New-Poetry digest, Vol 1 #143 - 13 msgs Message-ID: Kathrine-- A brief, point by point reply. I'd'a been longer, but I just noticed that Sam Gwynn stole half of my points without even telling me! <> What Sam said. Yup, Dana and Mike carry the organizational weight here. Someone like Annie is less a guest than an invited participant. Someone like Molly Peacock, would, say, be a featured reader and thus a guest. Someone has to throw the party or there is no party. You yourself could throw a party and choose your own list of guests and participants. The gender of the host (or hostess) is, I think, less relevant than who is invited. <> What Sam said. I've never been invited to read a paper at a feminist confab. I won't hold my breath waiting for an invitation either. And, come to think of it, none of my essays are in "A Formal Feeling" either. I didn't even get a footnote! But I publish plenty of women poets in Edge City. Hmmm. Double standard here? <> What Sam said. Although I appreciate, as a Washingtonian, the need sometimes to eliminate names from a public discussion. Saves on libel suits. I think we also need to be careful about tarring someone in a movement with comments allegedly made by one of its "fringe" members. Every movement eventually has a nutcase or two around the edges. To define a whole movement, club, or whatever, by what the nutcase allegedly says is, I think, merely a facile way of dissing the whole group and not really fair or helpful. If you want to be more specific offline, I'm always available. --Terry Ponick From DICK at watson.ibm.com Wed Apr 4 11:45:56 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 01 11:45:56 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Pinsky's abeced... Message-ID: <200104041547.LAA14828@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> It starts: Any Body Can Die Evidently Few Go Happily which is all I can recall, dunno' about line breaks. I thought it kind of boring - sort of like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time - interesting that you can do it, I suppose, but why bother? Richard From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Wed Apr 4 11:51:41 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:51:41 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith In-Reply-To: <20010404110318.A2773@ghostpriest.gay-robot.com> References: ; from Amber Prentiss on Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 03:05:53PM -0400 Message-ID: Back in the Ordovician period, I also escaped high school entirely ignorant of prosody. We did some Frost in 10th grade, but that's about all the poetry I remember reading, actually. But, like Simon, I learned a hell of a lot in Latin class. I don't think standards have declined, necessarily: American public high schools were as spotty then as they are now. To be honest, most of what I know about prosody I picked up on a seat-of-the-pants basis, having decided at some point in college that I wanted to try sonnets, blank verse, terza rima, ballads, etc. One college teacher had us write heroic couplets, as I recall, in a survey course, and in poetry workshop we were encouraged but not required to write in conventional forms. So, although I never experienced the freeze-out on traditional form that many rebel angels speak about--my teachers were nothing but positive toward the tradition--I was left pretty much on my own to figure out the mechanics. Just as I was mostly on my own to read any poet post-Auden. . . . which was fine with me. Things got even less prescriptive in grad school. There, too, I never heard a negative word about rhyme and meter. I worked with at least one old formalist, Joe Langland, but even he never taught metrics. Best thing he did was stress recitation and memorization. Soon as I graduated with my M.F.A., I decided that I'd better embark on a self-education project, so I spent several years devouring the usual texts and emitting several jillion lines of practice-pentameter. Though I've drifted back to free verse since then, I'm glad I learned what I did. These days, none of my undergraduate students escapes my clutch without knowing a thing or two (well, being exposed to it, anyway) about prosody and conventional form. David Graham ____________________________ >> > >Actually, I did manage to escape the 12th grade without knowing the sonnet. >I remember we did about a week of poetry in one year of my high school >English education. The only Plath I read there (Wellesley High School even) >was the Bell Jar. Sure, I've read sonnets, and I know what iambic pentameter >is, but I couldn't tell you the rhyme scheme without sitting there with one >in front of me and counting. Nor could I actually scan it. > >Your milage may vary of course; I was taking level two (ie, non honors/AP) >English. > >As far as wannabe poets reading poetry and picking up the forms, I had no >idea what meter was until I learned to scan dactylic hexameter in Latin >class. Before that, I thought poetry was either free verse, or it rhymed ;). >(Latin poetry is not rhyming poetry) >-- >-Simon Raahauge DeSantis >______________________________ __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Wed Apr 4 12:01:45 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 11:01:45 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dugan's Circle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This certainly *sounds* like Alan Dugan, but I'm not finding it in his books on the shelf. Does anyone have the exact reference? At first I confused this poem with one by Nemerov, "A Primer of the Daily Round," which begins: A peels an apple, while B kneels to God, C telephones to D, who has a hand On E's knee.... David Graham >In a message dated 4/4/2001 9:20:46 AM Central Daylight Time, >moira_russell at hotmail.com writes: > >> >> OK, I can't find it, but I _know_ there's a poem that begins >> >> Oh I got up and went to work >> and came back home and went to bed >> and got back up and went to work >> >> -- repeats a number of times. Then the author breaks out into: >> >> Then it was Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, >> the most beautiful day of the week >> >> and rhapsodes on from there. I think this is in that famous X.J. Kennedy >> anthology I had in boarding school (the one with the purple cover and the >> dead-looking tree on the cover), but I don't have that with me, and I >can't >> find this poem anywhere. Any suggestions? >> >> Moira Russell >> Seattle, WA > >Alan Dugan's "Circle of the Daily Round" __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From wasanthony at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 12:21:59 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 09:21:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies In-Reply-To: <3ACB30CA.435A@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <20010404162159.98424.qmail@web12105.mail.yahoo.com> --- Bob Grumman wrote: > Bob Grumman wrote: > > > > "Well, them's the breaks, I suppose. I liked lighght but can't > abide > > Dickinson." > > > > Interesting. I've never liked Dickinson, either. I > > wonder if there's something about brain make- > > This went out by mistake. > snip Shucks, I thought you were breaking some ground there. That truncated thought provided a moment of satori for me. I went from "brain make-" to cane-break to cornbread to the Pillsbury Bake-off. - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 12:38:38 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 12:38:38 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Dugan's Circle Message-ID: <9d.138e7e4f.27fca80e@cs.com> In a message dated 4/4/01 11:00:44 AM Central Daylight Time, grahamd at mail.ripon.edu writes: > > This certainly *sounds* like Alan Dugan, but I'm not finding it in his > books on the shelf. Does anyone have the exact reference? > I believe it's in Poems 1. From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Wed Apr 4 01:32:32 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 00:32:32 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] No Word of Farewell Message-ID: In the front section of the new (Winter) issue of Sewanee Review, there's a very good review by Leon Stokesbury of Sam Gwynn's new poetry collection_No Word of Farewell_. Paul Lake From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Wed Apr 4 12:52:21 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 11:52:21 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dugan's Circle In-Reply-To: <9d.138e7e4f.27fca80e@cs.com> Message-ID: Found it! It's in Poems 2, and the title is "On a Seven-Day Diary." Armed with the title, I discovered that it's available online: http://www.frigatezine.com/essay/countermeasures/ecm02nda.html I can't believe that Alan Dugan's work is entirely out of print. Let's start a Print Dugan grass-roots movement! David Graham >In a message dated 4/4/01 11:00:44 AM Central Daylight Time, >grahamd at mail.ripon.edu writes: > >> >> This certainly *sounds* like Alan Dugan, but I'm not finding it in his >> books on the shelf. Does anyone have the exact reference? >> > >I believe it's in Poems 1. >_______________________________________________ __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Wed Apr 4 12:55:31 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 12:55:31 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dugan's Circle Message-ID: Or you can go to your local library and look up the first line in the Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/4/2001 12:38 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Dugan's Circle In a message dated 4/4/01 11:00:44 AM Central Daylight Time, grahamd at mail.ripon.edu writes: > > This certainly *sounds* like Alan Dugan, but I'm not finding it in his > books on the shelf. Does anyone have the exact reference? > I believe it's in Poems 1. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 4 13:00:34 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 13:00:34 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Dugan's Circle Message-ID: <62.d5749b0.27fcad32@cs.com> In a message dated 4/4/01 11:50:39 AM Central Daylight Time, grahamd at mail.ripon.edu writes: > Found it! It's in Poems 2, and the title is "On a Seven-Day Diary." > Oops. I guess I was confusing it with Nemerov's too. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 4 15:04:16 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 12:04:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Taxonomies, etc. Message-ID: <20010404190416.AFB8F2742@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 4 15:07:21 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 12:07:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: <20010404190721.3832A3ED3@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From JNB17 at aol.com Wed Apr 4 15:09:14 2001 From: JNB17 at aol.com (JNB17 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 15:09:14 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Pinsky Query Message-ID: Any body can die, evidently. Few Go happily, irradiating joy, Knowledge, love. Many Need oblivion, painkillers, Quickest respite. Sweet time unafflicted, Various world: X= your zenith. John Burdick From jdavis at panix.com Wed Apr 4 15:22:08 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 15:22:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Taxonomies, etc. In-Reply-To: <20010404190416.AFB8F2742@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: > I'll take your word for this as a trivial expert. Nasty! From languagethief at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 16:00:36 2001 From: languagethief at yahoo.com (The Old Mole) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 13:00:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon In-Reply-To: <7c.13faea88.27fc7b1e@cs.com> Message-ID: <20010404200036.98416.qmail@web12202.mail.yahoo.com> Well, it may be both crap and pap, but since it's been generated electronically, it doesn't use any paper (hence "papar," misspelled and backwards), hopefully saving enough trees to populate a parc. BTW, Bob, I read your article and found it fascinating. I'm directing my workshop students to your website, because I want them to be exposed to something that's so passionate and intelligent, and so unlike my own point of view. --- Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote: > In a message dated 4/4/2001 4:23:20 AM Central > Daylight Time, > BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > > > > > "Crarapap" is the word we're discussing. I see > "pap" in it, > > of course, but what are its two meanings? The > latin "rara" is > > there, too, but it's not a pun for anything, it's > just there. > > Ditto "rare." You can say it sounds like "rear," > but that > > doesn't make it a pun. A pun has to be a single > word or > > phrase that, in context, has two different > meanings, yes? > > Your word combines various words and near-words > but does > > no punning for me. > > > I decided I was verbose, so now the poem reads > "crapap." You're right about > the absence of a punun. I guess I didn't have > enough space to work one in. > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From languagethief at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 16:02:59 2001 From: languagethief at yahoo.com (The Old Mole) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 13:02:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poets and Painters (Sat., 4/7) In-Reply-To: <200104041339.JAA19148@dept.english.upenn.edu> Message-ID: <20010404200259.56298.qmail@web12201.mail.yahoo.com> Mike -- not quite close enough to Philadelphia, but thanks for posting this -- I think it's good to know what listmembers are doing. Tad Richards --- Michael Magee wrote: > Hi all, in case you happen to be in Philly this > weekend, I'm giving a > reading and talk w/ my brother at the Kelly Writers > House (where he has a > show up) and would love to see any and all of you > there. Details > below. -m. > > According to Writers House: > > Hi Writers House Folk--We hope you'll join us for > the third installment of > > our poets and painters series. Poet Mike Magee > and painter Mitch Magee will > > share the spotlight as we mix readings, > discussion, and a few choice snacks. > > See you here on Saturday evening. > > > > > > *****Please Join Us!***** > > > > The Kelly Writers House presents > > > > the third reading, discussion, and > reception in the > > > > Poets and Painters Series. > > > > Featuring the work of: > > > > Painter Mitch Magee > > > > and > > > > Poet Michael Magee > > > > > > 7:00 PM > > Saturday, April 7th > > Kelly Writers House > > 3805 Locust Walk > > > > > > ************************ > > > > > Michael Magee received his PhD at Penn where he > wrote a dissertation, > > "Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz and > Experimental Writing," and was > > very active at the Writers House. His articles on > American Literature > > are out or forthcoming in REVIEW, CONTEMPORARY > LITERATURE and RARITAN; his > > poems in NEW AMERICAN WRITING, CALLALOO, > WASHINGTON REVIEW, LUNGFULL!, > > CROSSCONNECT, IXNAY and elsewhere. He edits the > poetry journal COMBO, > > teaches at Wheaton College and lives in Pawtucket, > RI with his wife Susanna > > and their daughter Anabella. > > > > Mitchell Magee is a graduate of Cornell University > and received a Masters of > > Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of > Chicago. His work has > > appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions in > and around New York and > > he performs regularly with the improv comedy group > "Monkey Dick" at the > > Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York City. > He lives and works in > > Brooklyn. > > > > > > ---------------------------- > > The Kelly Writers House > wh at dept.english.upenn.edu > > 3805 Locust Walk 215-573-WRIT > > Philadelphia, PA 19104 > http://www.english.upenn.edu/~wh > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From languagethief at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 16:05:42 2001 From: languagethief at yahoo.com (The Old Mole) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 13:05:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] A question asked seriously In-Reply-To: <200104041358.JAA21908@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: <20010404200542.40522.qmail@web12204.mail.yahoo.com> Probably no such person exists. Probably the best we can hope is not be crippled by, and not to hurt others with, our built-in assumptions. Tad --- DICK at watson.ibm.com wrote: > >>the gang at West Chester -- but I'm not so > wide-eyed to think everyone who > >>likes rhyme isn't sexist. Would that it were so. > >> > >>Kathrine > > Would Kathrine - or anyone - care to explain how I > would > recognize someone who is _not_ sexist? _not_ > racist? etc. > > Richard > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From halvard at earthlink.net Wed Apr 4 16:25:38 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 16:25:38 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Taxonomies, etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > I'll take your word for this as a trivial expert. > > Nasty! Au contraire, self-deprecating. The sentence means the same thing whether the last four words come first or last. Hal "The bacon too carries on its modest love affair." --Tony Towle Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 4 16:30:50 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 16:30:50 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pworedms, Pwoermds, and the Canonon References: <20010404200036.98416.qmail@web12202.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3ACB847A.653A@nut-n-but.net> Gah, old mole, you've made me seriously consider reducing my crustiness. Thanks for the kind words. Let me know what your students think. My bet is that several will think little of it but that a few will become enthusiastic. The majority will be neutral. Oh, and I have to boast that my essay is also available from Budapest as a little book in HUNGARIAN. The book also contains some of my mathemaku, untranslated. --Bob G. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 4 17:58:43 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 14:58:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Taxonomies, etc. Message-ID: <20010404215843.7377A36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From klvarnes at home.com Wed Apr 4 18:30:07 2001 From: klvarnes at home.com (Kathrine Varnes) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 17:30:07 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: surrey with the fringe on top In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > I think we also need to be careful about tarring someone in a movement with > comments allegedly made by one of its "fringe" members. Every movement > eventually has a nutcase or two around the edges. To define a whole movement, > club, or whatever, by what the nutcase allegedly says is, I think, merely a > facile way of dissing the whole group and not really fair or helpful. Yes, my point exactly -- thus the use of adjective "fringe." > I've never been invited to read a paper at a feminist confab. Neither have I. On other point: Sam, I'd be interested in a book that made a thoughtful claim about masculinity and poetry. Why not? I'd buy it. The Manly Men of Form. Metered Masculinity. Moxie, Meter and Me. Heck, I'd pay for express shipping. Yes! Pie fight! As long as you don't have one of those custard trebuchets. (Now to de-rust the tines of the tiller. Spring is on her way and she means business.) Kathrine From JforJames at aol.com Wed Apr 4 18:40:01 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 18:40:01 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: Date: 4/3/01 10:45:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: webmaster at randomhouse.com Reply-to: knopfwebmaster at randomhouse.com To: JforJames at aol.com A poem by Mary Jo Salter from her collection A KISS IN SPACE A Magnet Since she was two, it had held up her end on the door of the fridge: a plywood magnet stamped with the fingerpainted imprint of her hand. Essence-of-kid, all cheerfulness, in a pure nursery red, it stood for her signature and seemed, back then, to raise itself in greeting. When was it that it started to wave goodbye? One day some sort of scrap it had always kept in lofty view--report card, shopping list, snapshot of somebody's new baby--slipped with it, cinematically, down the door like a climber's grip, failing along a rock face. --Demagnetized, of course, by the very years that made her real hands strong. I've placed it high, supporting nothing weightier than itself, against that time I'd sense in me a fainter grasp on the little girl who never crossed the street without my finger in her fist. Copyright? 1999 by Mary Jo Salter. From JackKerouac25 at aol.com Wed Apr 4 20:39:22 2001 From: JackKerouac25 at aol.com (JackKerouac25 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 20:39:22 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Mainstream Monolith Message-ID: In a message dated 4/4/01 10:51:07 AM Central Daylight Time, grahamd at mail.ripon.edu writes: > So, although I never experienced the freeze-out on > traditional form that many rebel angels speak about--my teachers were > nothing but positive toward the tradition--I was left pretty much on my own > to figure out the mechanics. Just as I was mostly on my own to read any > poet post-Auden. . . . which was fine with me. In grad school (and as an undergraduate, for that matter), I never experienced a violent backlash or freeze-out of traditional forms. I did, however, hear numerous teachers say, "Well, you can write sonnets, but why would you want to?" The idea was that metrics and form was a certain school of thought that has moved on. I remember one professor explaining that just as we don't have any "high-Imagist" poems any more, strictly in the tradition of Lowell or Pound, we don't have any formal poems that are changing poetry and challenging the conventions of language. My thoughts have always been that metrics and form aren't a school of thought any more than, say, paint is. I mean, artists still paint using _paint_, I believe; well, some do . . . anyway. Just a few random thoughts to help me avoid grading freshman essays. Cheers. Jeff N. Jeffrey L. Newberry Adjunct Instructor Department of English and Foreign Languages University of West Florida 11000 University Parkway Pensacola, FL 32514 850.474.2923 850.473.7330 From JackKerouac25 at aol.com Wed Apr 4 20:42:18 2001 From: JackKerouac25 at aol.com (JackKerouac25 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 20:42:18 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] ABCDerium Message-ID: Has anyone read Barbara Hamby's _The Alphabet of Desire_? It's a poem of 26 abcderiums, with each successive title beginning with a consecutive letter of the alphabet. The poems are quite genius, and when I saw Hamby read last fall, she commented on how word-obsessed she became when she wrote the poems, keeping long lists of x and z words. It's an entertaining read, and I like the poetry. Has anyone read Hamby? Thoughts? Opinions? Slams? Flames? Cheers, Newberry Jeffrey L. Newberry Adjunct Instructor Department of English and Foreign Languages University of West Florida 11000 University Parkway Pensacola, FL 32514 850.474.2923 850.473.7330 From halvard at earthlink.net Wed Apr 4 23:12:34 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 23:12:34 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Taxonomies, etc. In-Reply-To: <20010404215843.7377A36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: Must have been something about the word "trivial," Bob. Hal Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. --Noam Chomsky Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > Hal, > > Thanks. Believe or not, I knew that, but what makes you conclude > the deprecating, (self or otherwise), intent. Some of > my best friends are trivial experts. > > Bob Cobb > > --- "Halvard Johnson" > > wrote: > >> > I'll take your word for this as a trivial expert. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Wed Apr 4 23:15:18 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 19:15:18 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: Bob C asked Bob G: Bob G., > > In your estimation is there any "universally acclaimed master"? >No, there is no universally-acclaimed master. That's because every field >has iconoclasts who refuse to accept as masters others do. ....And I thought it was because we hadn't yet heard from those verse-writing beings on Tau Ceti. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Wed Apr 4 23:32:16 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 19:32:16 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bishop Message-ID: "In the Waiting Room" is probably my favorite Bishop poem, although it's difficult for me to pick just one ("The Bight," "Pink Dog," "The Man-Moth," etc., are others). I ran across it in an anthology before I had ever read a book of hers, and I didn't _like_ it at first, but I couldn't get it out of my head. It's probably the best description I've seen of a certain kind of vertigo on the realizing of identity....and in formal verse, no less. I would say her work seems very simple at first, but the closer you look at it, the more depth the poems have and the more provoking they become. Her precise quality of observation certainly is something -- you get the feeling perhaps no one had ever _looked_ at things so closely before, except possibly Marianne Moore, who seemed overly drawn to the fey. No, I'd have to say on 2nd thought my _absolute_ favorite Bishop poem is "Sestina" ("September rain falls on the house..."). -- Or wait, no, "Cirque d'Hiver...." That was one of the poems which first convinced me that Bishop was something more than an interesting descriptive naturalist poet. It's hard to pick just one.... Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Wed Apr 4 23:37:51 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 19:37:51 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Really, my Favorite Bishop Poem.... Message-ID: ....has got to be "One Art." (No, I swear.) This suggestion did give me a pleasant excuse to go reading through my copy of "The Complete Poems"....although for some reason "In the Waiting Room" always leaps to mind first, I don't know why. I think because it was the first poem of hers I read which made a big Impact (at least partly because I had had that experience many times myself as a child, and was really startled to find it so well-described, in a poetry anthology studied in schools, and everything). "The Fish" is a good poem, although I'd be happy if "One Art" was substituted for at least every 3rd time "The Fish" has been anthologized (towards the end of her life Bishop was asked for permission to reprint "The Fish" yet again, and she said, "_Any_ poem but that one"). I think Randall Jarrell's admiring review of "North & South" says a lot more a lot better about Bishop than I ever could, or, at least, right at this moment (with a cold apparently turning into flu). Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Thu Apr 5 00:16:35 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 00:16:35 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: surrey with the fringe on top Message-ID: <27.13680070.27fd4ba3@cs.com> In a message dated 4/4/2001 5:31:46 PM Central Daylight Time, klvarnes at home.com writes: > > Sam, I'd be interested in a book that made a thoughtful claim about > masculinity and poetry. Why not? I'd buy it. The Manly Men of Form. > Metered Masculinity. Moxie, Meter and Me. Heck, I'd pay for express > shipping. Hmmm. How does "Iron Sam" sound? You may have something there, but I'll defer to some other soul. I don't suppose the New Formalist Guys' Calendar would get much response. From Arielpf123 at aol.com Thu Apr 5 02:20:11 2001 From: Arielpf123 at aol.com (Arielpf123 at aol.com) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 02:20:11 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Really, my Favorite Bishop Poem.... Message-ID: <5a.13812ec1.27fd689b@aol.com> I don't believe that you have me, at 2 AM, having been awakened by the dog, searching through my Complete Bishop to be sure that, yes, "Armadillo" is still my favorite Bishop poem. Like Moira, I have many favorites: "First Death in Nova Scotia," "The Filling Station," "The Moose" (maybe because I live in NH!), "At The Fish Houses"...etc. but, in the end, the poems that always seem most powerful to me are the ones whose images are burned into my brain so that ever afterward I see the world differently....and "Armadillo" is like that. I've never, though, understood quite what all the fuss about "One Art" is. Not that its not clever and skilled, but that in comparison to those I've name, it seems to be to be lesser. Pat Fargnoli From JforJames at aol.com Thu Apr 5 08:59:46 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 08:59:46 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry Message-ID: From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 5 09:38:23 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 09:38:23 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies References: Message-ID: <000901c0bdd5$b17b37a0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Uh oh -- now I'm starting to wonder what the pwoemrd-writing iconoclasts on Tau Ceti are coming up with. Tad "Well said, old mole." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 11:15 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Dickinson, satire, taxonomies > Bob C asked Bob G: Bob G., > > > > In your estimation is there any "universally acclaimed master"? > > >No, there is no universally-acclaimed master. That's because every field > >has iconoclasts who refuse to accept as masters others do. > > ....And I thought it was because we hadn't yet heard from those > verse-writing beings on Tau Ceti. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From TerryP17 at aol.com Thu Apr 5 09:43:06 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 09:43:06 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: New-Poetry digest, Vol 1 #148 - 18 msgs Message-ID: Sam and Kathrine-- <> Now we're getting somewhere. Perhaps we could rent Bly's sweat lodge for a bipartisan conference. <> Count me in on the pie fight, a stellar way to settle literary arguments. Perhaps I could drive across the river to Georgetown and ask Hillary if she'd bake cookies for dessert after the main event. --Terry Ponick From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 5 11:03:11 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 11:03:11 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry References: Message-ID: <005a01c0bde1$889c2680$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the web? It would be interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those sites. I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 8:59 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > From Museletter: > > Poetry MP3 Picks > Poetry & spoken word performance are everywhere on the Web now, in > streaming formats like RealAudio & downloadable ones like MP3. We're > introducing our library of Poetry MP3 Picks to bring you to the best > poetry recordings you can find online from poets old & new. Enjoy! And > don't forget to visit our Forum & suggest your favorite audio poem > (http://forums.about.com/ab-poetry/messages?lgnF=y&msg=11190.1) for our > weekly highlight. > http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/blmp3pick.htm > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 5 11:18:51 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 11:18:51 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Really, my Favorite Bishop Poem.... References: Message-ID: <005b01c0bde3$b9405200$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> I actually spent yesterday discussing "In the Waiting Room" with my Intro to Poetry class -- just beginning a section on contemporary or nearly contemporary American poets. It was a good class -- these aren't particularly sophisticated students, and they're new to contemporary poetry, but they got that "you are one of them" and "How had I come to be here,/like them" has a multiplicity of meanings, and expresses the various levels on which young Elizabeth -- and the speaker, remembering what it was like to be young Elizabeth -- is relating to the world. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 11:37 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Really, my Favorite Bishop Poem.... > ....has got to be "One Art." (No, I swear.) This suggestion did give me a > pleasant excuse to go reading through my copy of "The Complete > Poems"....although for some reason "In the Waiting Room" always leaps to > mind first, I don't know why. I think because it was the first poem of hers > I read which made a big Impact (at least partly because I had had that > experience many times myself as a child, and was really startled to find it > so well-described, in a poetry anthology studied in schools, and > everything). "The Fish" is a good poem, although I'd be happy if "One Art" > was substituted for at least every 3rd time "The Fish" has been anthologized > (towards the end of her life Bishop was asked for permission to reprint "The > Fish" yet again, and she said, "_Any_ poem but that one"). > > I think Randall Jarrell's admiring review of "North & South" says a lot more > a lot better about Bishop than I ever could, or, at least, right at this > moment (with a cold apparently turning into flu). > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From grahamd at vbe.com Thu Apr 5 12:13:13 2001 From: grahamd at vbe.com (David Graham) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 11:13:13 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Spoken Word Poetry Message-ID: <200104051610.f35GAc207963@mx11.mx.voyager.net> A very good question (he said, self-promotingly). I've got a few poems, with audio, in the archives at Cortland Review (http://www.cortlandreview.com/). Look under the author's "master index" for a full list of featured writers. They include audio of all their poetry, in RealAudio format. Interviews and other features, too. They also put out CD versions of their issues. It's a lively, interesting ezine. In the archives you'll also find such poets as Fred Muratori, Annie Finch, and Gray Jacobik--with photos, I might add. David Graham ________________ David Graham grahamd at vbe.com ________________ >Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the web? It would be >interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those sites. > >I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com > > > > > > Tad Richards From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 5 12:25:11 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 12:25:11 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Spoken Word Poetry References: <200104051610.f35GAc207963@mx11.mx.voyager.net> Message-ID: <013d01c0bdec$fe352080$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> I'm having a lot of trouble with the Cortland Review Site. I tried David Graham's RealAudio, and got "requested file not found." Same for Marilyn Nelson. Annie Finch's link doesn't work at all. Is it me, or them? Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Graham" To: Cc: Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 12:13 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Spoken Word Poetry > A very good question (he said, self-promotingly). I've got a few poems, > with audio, in the archives at Cortland Review > (http://www.cortlandreview.com/). Look under the author's "master index" > for a full list of featured writers. > > They include audio of all their poetry, in RealAudio format. Interviews and > other features, too. They also put out CD versions of their issues. It's a > lively, interesting ezine. > > In the archives you'll also find such poets as Fred Muratori, Annie Finch, > and Gray Jacobik--with photos, I might add. > > David Graham > > > > > ________________ > David Graham > grahamd at vbe.com > ________________ > > > >Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the web? It would be > >interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those sites. > > > >I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com > > > > > > > > > > > > Tad Richards > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Thu Apr 5 12:44:35 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 11:44:35 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Spoken Word Poetry In-Reply-To: <013d01c0bdec$fe352080$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> References: <200104051610.f35GAc207963@mx11.mx.voyager.net> Message-ID: Tad, I just tried Marilyn Nelson, and had no problem accessing the audio on my machine (an iMac with RealPlayer 7). DG >I'm having a lot of trouble with the Cortland Review Site. I tried David >Graham's RealAudio, and got "requested file not found." Same for Marilyn >Nelson. Annie Finch's link doesn't work at all. Is it me, or them? > > > > >> A very good question (he said, self-promotingly). I've got a few poems, >> with audio, in the archives at Cortland Review >> (http://www.cortlandreview.com/). Look under the author's "master index" >> for a full list of featured writers. >> >> They include audio of all their poetry, in RealAudio format. Interviews >and >> other features, too. They also put out CD versions of their issues. It's >a >> lively, interesting ezine. >> >> In the archives you'll also find such poets as Fred Muratori, Annie Finch, >> and Gray Jacobik--with photos, I might add. >> >> David Graham >> >> >> __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From jpl3 at lehigh.edu Thu Apr 5 12:51:06 2001 From: jpl3 at lehigh.edu (Joe Lucia) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 12:51:06 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Spoken Word Poetry References: <200104051610.f35GAc207963@mx11.mx.voyager.net> <013d01c0bdec$fe352080$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Message-ID: <3ACCA27A.28E5DC66@lehigh.edu> I was able to get a bunch of these files to play -- David Graham's, Fred Muratori's, Marilyn Nelson's, but not Annie Finch's or Henry Taylor's. It appeared from a quick perusal of the HTML source that for the ones that didn't work there were no embedded links to the Real Audio files. On Marilyn Nelson's page, for instance, the source contains this tag -- -- calling the file from the "real audio" link. No such tag can be found n the Finch or Taylor pages. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: jpl3.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 337 bytes Desc: Card for Joe Lucia URL: From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Thu Apr 5 14:21:14 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 20:21:14 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry References: <005a01c0bde1$889c2680$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Message-ID: <01ae01c0bdfd$3cacb160$705b4284@toshiba> First of all, hi Tad, and hello to you all. I have been away for a while and got back today. I think this is my first posting here altogether. Anyway, I love working with music, and have a couple examples of recordings on the web, http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgdevil.html http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgafter.html There is also supposed to be an entire disk at this address: http://home.pacifier.com/~shamen/ygdrasil/ but I wasn't able to get it working just now when i checked. Karen Alkalay-Gut gut22 at post.tau.ac.il http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ ----- Original Message ----- From: "theoldmole" To: Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 5:03 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the web? It would be > interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those sites. > > I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com > > > > > > Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." > The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 8:59 AM > Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > From Museletter: > > > > Poetry MP3 Picks > > Poetry & spoken word performance are everywhere on the Web now, in > > streaming formats like RealAudio & downloadable ones like MP3. We're > > introducing our library of Poetry MP3 Picks to bring you to the best > > poetry recordings you can find online from poets old & new. Enjoy! And > > don't forget to visit our Forum & suggest your favorite audio poem > > (http://forums.about.com/ab-poetry/messages?lgnF=y&msg=11190.1) for our > > weekly highlight. > > http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/blmp3pick.htm > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Thu Apr 5 14:58:23 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 14:58:23 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry Message-ID: <40.9e00b10.27fe1a4f@cs.com> In a message dated 4/5/01 10:06:38 AM Central Daylight Time, tadrichards at prodigy.net writes: > Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the web? It would be > interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those sites. > > I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com > > I have a couple at www.ablemuse.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Thu Apr 5 15:25:39 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 15:25:39 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <11.1233fb54.27fe20b3@cs.com> In a message dated 4/4/01 5:41:30 PM Central Daylight Time, JforJames at aol.com writes: > > A Magnet > > > Since she was two, it had held up her end > on the door of the fridge: a plywood magnet stamped > with the fingerpainted imprint of her hand. > Essence-of-kid, all cheerfulness, in a pure > nursery red, it stood for her signature > and seemed, back then, to raise itself in greeting. > > When was it that it started to wave goodbye? > One day some sort of scrap it had always kept > in lofty view--report card, shopping list, > snapshot of somebody's new baby--slipped > with it, cinematically, down the door > like a climber's grip, failing along a rock face. > > --Demagnetized, of course, by the very years > that made her real hands strong. I've placed it high, > supporting nothing weightier than itself, > against that time I'd sense in me a fainter > grasp on the little girl who never crossed > the street without my finger in her fist. > I like this poem quite a bit. One thing that interest me is how the pentameter get tighter as you move towards the end. Lots of anapests in the first stanza, fewer in the second, almost none in the third--a diminishing of the line itself that reflects the subject. You also get some nice sounds at the end that help the poem conclude: alliteration and the slant rhyme of "crossed" and "fist." The nice irony of "When was it when it started to wave goodbye" is wonderful. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Thu Apr 5 15:26:15 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 15:26:15 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: In a message dated 4/4/01 5:41:30 PM Central Daylight Time, JforJames at aol.com writes: > Date: 4/3/01 10:45:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time > From: webmaster at randomhouse.com > Reply-to: knopfwebmaster at randomhouse.com > To: JforJames at aol.com > > A poem by Mary Jo Salter from her collection A KISS IN SPACE > > > Incidentally, has anyone else commented on this poem? From antrobin at clipper.net Thu Apr 5 15:32:00 2001 From: antrobin at clipper.net (Anthony Robinson) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 12:32:00 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry References: <40.9e00b10.27fe1a4f@cs.com> Message-ID: <016f01c0be07$1d0b4420$92acefd8@0021936706> So do I. Tony > I have a couple at www.ablemuse.com > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From jdavis at panix.com Thu Apr 5 17:05:24 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 17:05:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Jordan Davis book / d.a.levy calendar Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 14:13:02 -0400 From: Gary Sullivan Hello Everyone, Please help me make more books. I just published: Jordan Davis _YEAH, NO_ No ISBN, $6.00 Poetry. Six new, longish poems by the author of _POEM ON A TRAIN_ (Barque Press). "In a director's chair / waiting for a movie crew // The sentence is just / as afraid of you // ... Too stoned to wrestle Big Bird ..." Of Davis's poems, Susan Wheeler remarks: "Frequently casual and talky on the surface, their underpinnings reflect a slice of a day in a sentient, reading, economic, sexual, class-rooted, spiritual self -- ... the world is precisely observed by that keenly observant self. The effect is smart and generous." "Jordan Davis," David Shapiro writes, "is one of the young poets who make me confident that poetry is busily being born. ... His poetry is full of stories, gossip, charms, observations, art criticism, and mordant innuendoes ... where the everyday drifts into exaltation." Cover and frontispiece by Will Yackulic. Author portrait by Gary Sullivan. 24 pp. Detour 2001. Buy from SPD (www.spdbooks.org), or direct from me. If from me, send check for six bucks made out to Gary Sullivan (NOT Detour), to: Gary Sullivan 558 - 11th Street, #1B Brooklyn, NY 11215 Also, I think David Kirschenbaum mentioned this already, but he published a limited edition calendar for which I drew a portrait of d.a.levy. You can see it online & get ordering info at: http://www.theeastvillageeye.com/boog/levycal.htm Thanks, Gary From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Thu Apr 5 06:08:58 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 05:08:58 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] FIRE Message-ID: FIRE's Harvey Silverglate will be featured discussing censorship on campus on the ABC News program World News Tonight with Peter Jennings today, April 5, 2001 at 6:30 p.m. EST. www.thefire.org Maybe they'll discuss the McCarriston case. Paul Lake From DICK at watson.ibm.com Thu Apr 5 18:46:49 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 01 18:46:49 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] a review of MJ Salter's A Kiss in Space Message-ID: <200104052248.SAA25006@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> available on line at http://www.newcriterion.com -> Indexes -> 1998-1999 by - beware - William Logan. Richard From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Thu Apr 5 20:47:44 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 20:47:44 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] a review of MJ Salter's A Kiss in Space Message-ID: <92.12c7aba4.27fe6c30@cs.com> In a message dated 4/5/01 6:40:13 PM Central Daylight Time, DICK at watson.ibm.com writes: > available on line at http://www.newcriterion.com -> Indexes > -> 1998-1999 > > by - beware - William Logan. > Logan's review here is really over the top. And that's saying a lot about a critic who's over the top quite a bit. From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 5 22:23:33 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 22:23:33 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Audio Poetry References: Message-ID: <008001c0be40$9523a720$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Here's what I have so far, listmembers and former listmembers represented with audio poetry on the Internet. Sam...Ablemuse is a hard site to navigate around, and I couldn't find yours - can you give me a more specific URL? I found Anthony's. Kelly Cherry http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/9/cherry9.htm http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/7/cherry7f.htm http://www.cortlandreview.com/issuefour/cherry4.htm Alfred Corn http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/9/corn9.htm Annie Finch http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/9/finch9.htm (seems not to work) David Graham http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/8/graham8.htm http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/holiday98/graham.htm http://www.cortlandreview.com/issuefive/graham5.htm Gray Jacobik http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/7/jacobik7.htm Fred Muratori http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/7/muratori7.htm Marilyn Nelson http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/9/nelson9.htm David Slavitt http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/99/07/slavitt.htm http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/7/slavitt7.htm . Karen Alkalay-Gut http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgdevil.html http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgafter.html http://home.pacifier.com/~shamen/ygdrasil/ (this one worked fine for me) Anthony Robinson http://www.ablemuse.com/v3/arobinson.htm Tad Richards www.wordvirtual.com Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Lake" To: Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 6:08 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] FIRE > FIRE's Harvey Silverglate will be featured discussing censorship on campus > on the ABC News program World News Tonight with Peter Jennings today, April > 5, 2001 at 6:30 p.m. EST. > > www.thefire.org > > > Maybe they'll discuss the McCarriston case. > > Paul Lake > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Thu Apr 5 22:40:20 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 22:40:20 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Audio Poetry Message-ID: R. S. Gwynn http://www.ablemuse.com/v3/rsgwynn.htm From mbales at cybergate.net Fri Apr 6 05:56:00 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 05:56:00 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Amusing Musing Muse In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The Tipsy Muse Poetry Contest Topic #1: A dramatic monologue of not more than 32 lines, with an ascertainable rhyme scheme and meter, in the voice of our own Tipsy Muse. The monologue urges editors to publish more light verse. Amusing Musing Muse Marcus Bales They stand up straight and try to look so serious, Those heavy poets playing with depravity; Confessed to awful things, they act imperious -- And seem to worship at a moral cavity. It would be sad if it were not delirious: They?ve risen high because of all their gravity -- While I, although the muse of witty brevity, Am doomed to sink because of all my levity. But that you say I?m ?tipsy? so affronts And disrespects me you are lucky I?m Still talking to you. Which uncaring dunce Decided ?tipsy? best described this rhyme- And-meter muse? Change the name at once ? Or you?ll be cursed until the end of time: Although your high thoughts bubble up and burst Inside your brain, what?s versed will be your worst. Oh, I?m so mad that I could chew up nails And spit out brads! The thought that light verse must Be tipsy tinkle singularly fails To charm me: how can anybody trust Your contest when its very name entails Misjudgment so mistakenly unjust? Imagine all the clanking clunky junk I?ll hear because now poets think I?m drunk. Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word! Give back my entry, take my kiss instead. Was it my friend or enemy I heard, ?The Tipsy Muse?! You might as well have said ?Come, I will show you now just how absurd It is that there?s a thought within her head!? You?ve made it all too clear that you abhor me; Apologize, or you may whistle for me. mbales at cybergate.net From Arielpf123 at aol.com Fri Apr 6 06:33:47 2001 From: Arielpf123 at aol.com (Arielpf123 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 06:33:47 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Spoken Word Poetry Message-ID: In a message dated 4/5/01 12:11:37 PM, grahamd at vbe.com writes: << http://www.cortlandreview.com/ >> what a great site David....thanks for leading me to it....and congratulations on appearing here with your fine poems. patf From mbales at cybergate.net Fri Apr 6 07:18:12 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 07:18:12 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Surrey with a fringe on top In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > Sam, I'd be interested in a book that made a thoughtful claim > > about masculinity and poetry. Why not? I'd buy it. The Manly > > Men of Form. Metered Masculinity. Moxie, Meter and Me. > > Heck, I'd pay for express shipping. > Hmmm. How does "Iron Sam" sound? You may have > something there, but I'll defer to some other soul. I don't > suppose the New Formalist Guys' Calendar would get much > response. Why is it "The New Formalism" on the one hand but "Lang-po" and "po-biz" on the other? Is it that the New Formalists are so formal that none dare call it "New-for", or its practitioners "New-fors"? A nick-name's a curious two-fer: It can soothe and abrade like a loofa -- It makes one sound silly, Like "Lang-po" or "Willie", Or tough and yet tender, like "New-for". Now poetry's not just for poofers And women and each free-verse doofus Who whines over exes -- Real men of both sexes Can rhyme with the gang called "The New-fors". mbales at cybergate.net From fmm1 at cornell.edu Fri Apr 6 08:30:49 2001 From: fmm1 at cornell.edu (Fred Muratori) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 08:30:49 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Audio Poetry In-Reply-To: <008001c0be40$9523a720$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> References: Message-ID: <4.2.0.58.20010406082546.00ab1bf0@postoffice2.mail.cornell.edu> Tad, I've got a few more audio poems at my own site as well -- http://fmref.library.cornell.edu/spectra.html They were done some years ago, as .aiff files -- and they're just sitting my desktop Mac -- which means they may be a bit clunky to retrieve. -- Fred Muratori At 10:23 PM 4/5/01 -0400,Tad Richards wrote: >Here's what I have so far, listmembers and former listmembers represented >with audio poetry on the Internet. Sam...Ablemuse is a hard site to >navigate around, and I couldn't find yours - can you give me a more specific >URL? I found Anthony's. > ******************************************************** Fred Muratori (fmm1 at cornell.edu) Reference Services Division Olin * Kroch * Uris Libraries Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 WWW: http://fmref.library.cornell.edu/spectra.html ********************************************************* "The spaces between things keep getting bigger and more important." - John Ashbery From halvard at earthlink.net Fri Apr 6 09:19:51 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 09:19:51 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Audio Poetry In-Reply-To: <008001c0be40$9523a720$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Message-ID: For another large cache of audio files, rummage around the *Conjunctions* site for a bit: www.conjunctions.com . Hal "I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry." --John Cage Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From yakub_etc at yahoo.com Fri Apr 6 09:30:09 2001 From: yakub_etc at yahoo.com (K. Lorraine Graham) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 09:30:09 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] sound of poetry on the web In-Reply-To: <200104060947.f369l3j24630@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: mmmmm the EPC has some sound files of various poets reading their stuff, not sure who or where but they're there: www.epc.buffalo.edu adios- Lorraine _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From JforJames at aol.com Fri Apr 6 09:31:12 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 09:31:12 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Kelly Writers House - 'Program Coordinator' Wanted Message-ID: <29.12ef8627.27ff1f20@aol.com> THE KELLY WRITERS HOUSE WILL HIRE PROGRAM COORDINATOR The Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania is seeking to hire a full-time Program Coordinator, to start on July 1, 2001. A brief description of the Program Coordinator position is included below. For more information, please visit this web page linked to the Kelly Writers House web site: www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/programcoordinator.html The Kelly Writers House, founded in 1995, is both a community of writers and an innovative, collaboratively-led program space at the University of Pennsylvania. The Writers House produces a daily schedule of readings, discussions, classes, meetings, and dinners, offers internships and fellowships, and supports a range of nationally-distributed literary journals and a word and music radio show. Through these programs, the Writers House seeks to nurture and promote emerging and established writers of all kinds, from all disciplines. The Writers House Program Coordinator is responsible for scheduling and managing programs, meetings and classes at the Writers House, as well as overseeing daily administrative functions at the House. In these roles the Program Coordinator works closely with fourteen work-study students and many other student volunteers, the staff of various University of Pennsylvania departments and programs and Philadelphia arts organizations, and visiting writers and others. Qualifications for the Program Coordinator position include a BA/BS, knowledge of and enthusiasm for the full range of contemporary writing, strong interpersonal skills, demonstrated leadership abilities, administrative experience, and computer skills. The position is full-time and includes salary plus all benefits. To apply, please review the fuller description of the position at the web page given above, then send a cover letter and resume to Kerry Sherin, Director, Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, 3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6150. The deadline for applications is 5 PM on Thursday, April 26, 2001, and interviews will be held soon after, on May 2, 4 or 6. ******************************* Kerry Sherin Director Kelly Writers House 3805 Locust Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104-6150 (215) 573-9748 (215) 573-9750 (fax) ksherin at english.upenn.edu http://www.english.upenn.edu/~wh From tadrichards at prodigy.net Fri Apr 6 10:27:40 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 10:27:40 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] sound of poetry on the web References: Message-ID: <002801c0bea5$bca6c060$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> I'll work on two lists...one of listpoets on audio, the other a list of poetry audio sites in general. Keep 'em coming. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "K. Lorraine Graham" To: Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 9:30 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] sound of poetry on the web > mmmmm the EPC has some sound files of various poets reading their stuff, not > sure who or where but they're there: > > www.epc.buffalo.edu > > adios- > Lorraine > > > _________________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From JforJames at aol.com Fri Apr 6 10:58:20 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 10:58:20 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] HOW2 Message-ID: An FYI from another list: dear all, the new issue of HOW2 magazine is now online -- the following announcement comes from Ann Vickery, the magazine's new editor. special features include 3 new writing sections from Australia, the UK and the US. apologies for cross-posting to different lists. thanks very much, kate fagan The new issue of HOW2 is now online at: http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/stadler_center/how2/current/index.html This bumper issue features special sections on: "Writing Erotics" with pieces by Lissa Wolsak, Susan Clark, Carla Harryman, Kathleen Fraser, and Leslie Scalapino. A retrospective on HOW(ever) with essays by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Linda Kinnahan, Kathleen Fraser, Elisabeth Frost, and Ann Vickery. "Mina Loy: A Symposium" with essays by Peter Nicholls, Alex Goody, and Hilda Bronstein "African-American New Poetries" with papers by Harryette Mullen, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Kathy Lou Schultz There are also three feature sections of New Writing: "Postings from Britain" (ed. Caroline Bergvall) featuring Karlien van den Beukel, Tertial Longmire, Redell Olsen, Shelby Matthews, Maggie O'Sullivan, Edith Marie Pasquier, Denise Riley, and Caroline Bergvall "Australian New Writing" (ed. Deb Comerford) featuring Hazel Smith, Jacinta Aboukhater, Anita Heiss, Alison Croggon, Emma Lew, Cassie Lewis, Romaine Moreton, Aileen Kelly, Tracy Ryan, Dipti Saravanamuttu, Morgan Yasbincek, Geraldine McKenzie, and MTC Cronin. Writing from the US (ed. Renee Gladman) featuring Deborah Richards, Bhanu Kapil Rider, Dodie Bellamy, Juliana Spahr, and Aja Couchois Duncan. And not forgetting the forum on oppression and writing (ed. Nada Gordon) with Maria Damon, Chris Stroffolino, Prageeta Sharma, Ange Mlinko, Alan Sondheim, Arpine Grenier, Adeena Karasick, Cole Heinowitz, David Hess, and Brian Stefans. Plus mixed media from Anya Lewin, Lara Odell, and Anna Reckin; and interviews with Cynthia Hogue and Redell Olsen! Check out Ramez Qureshi's review of Fanny Howe's Selected Poems as well as other reviews by Marjorie Perloff, Brian Kim Stefans, Anna Reckin, Janet Bowdan, and Frances Presley. All made possible thanks to Kate Fagan (managing editor), Roberta Sims (web designer), Kathleen Fraser (founding editor/publisher), Jo Ann Wasserman (now work/book co-ordinator) and the revitalized editorial advisory board. Hope you enjoy this exciting issue, Ann Vickery (editor) From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 6 11:05:43 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 07:05:43 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Surrey with a fringe on top Message-ID: Marcus Bales queried: >Why is it "The New Formalism" on the one hand but "Lang-po" and >"po-biz" on the other? Is it that the New Formalists are so formal >that none dare call it "New-for", or its practitioners "New-fors"? I've seen "Formalistas," although maybe Neo-Quads will catch on. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 6 11:33:39 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 07:33:39 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: R.S. Gwynn invited: >And I will bake the pies. Are you sure this will not infringe upon your masculinity, er, sorry, your formality? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 6 11:36:47 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 07:36:47 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Dugan's Circle Message-ID: AHA, thanks. I want to print it out and put it up at work....on the inside of my cube, for starters. Maybe on the outside later. Hah. David Graham wrote: >Found it! It's in Poems 2, and the title is "On a Seven-Day Diary." > >Armed with the title, I discovered that it's available online: > >http://www.frigatezine.com/essay/countermeasures/ecm02nda.html Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 6 11:46:20 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 07:46:20 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] William Logan Picks a Poem Message-ID: I thought this might be interesting....does anyone else find it odd Logan starts off his commentary with how unread Drayton is? And how can you live in 2 places at once? Moira Russell Seattle, WA WILLIAM LOGAN'S POETRY MONTH PICK, 4/5/01 "Idea (Sonnet V)" by Michael Drayton Nothing but No and I, and I and No; How falls it out so strangely, you reply? I tell ye fair I'll not be answered so, With this affirming No, denying I. I say, I love, you slightly answer I; I say, You love, you pule me out a No; I say, I die, you echo me with I; Save me, I cry, you sigh me out a No; Must woe and I have naught but No and I? No I, am I, if I no more can have; Answer no more, with silence make reply, And let me take myself what I do crave: Let No and I, with I and you be so; Then answer No and I, and I and No. *William Logan comments on "Idea (Sonnet V)": "Hardly anyone reads Michael Drayton now. Many readers know "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part," sonnet 60 in the same sequence; but there are dozens of Drayton sonnets to remind us that Shakespeare worked in a medium in which there were other masters. "Since there's no help" and "Nothing but No and I" suggest why Drayton might have been considered Shakespeare's rival -- the best of his sonnets are as good as all but the most brilliant of Shakespeare's." WILLIAM LOGAN is the author of five books of poems, the most recent of which is *Night Battle* (1999). He has published two books of criticism, *All the Rage* (1998) and *Reputations of the Tongue* (1999). He has won the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Florida and in Cambridge, England. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From gray at grayjacobik.com Fri Apr 6 11:51:09 2001 From: gray at grayjacobik.com (Gray Jacobik) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 11:51:09 -0400 Subject: Fw: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry Message-ID: <008001c0beb1$6c1554c0$c5e7fc40@emilydickenson> Tad, I enjoyed "Gulf Coast Blues" especially. And I'm looking forward to exploring these other audio sites we're gathering here (and passing them along to my students, who'd much rather listen than read). I have four realplayer-linked on my website, www.grayjacobik.com. Gray ----- Original Message ----- From: theoldmole To: Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 11:03 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the web? It would be > interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those sites. > > I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com > > > > > > Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." > The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 8:59 AM > Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > From Museletter: > > > > Poetry MP3 Picks > > Poetry & spoken word performance are everywhere on the Web now, in > > streaming formats like RealAudio & downloadable ones like MP3. We're > > introducing our library of Poetry MP3 Picks to bring you to the best > > poetry recordings you can find online from poets old & new. Enjoy! And > > don't forget to visit our Forum & suggest your favorite audio poem > > (http://forums.about.com/ab-poetry/messages?lgnF=y&msg=11190.1) for our > > weekly highlight. > > http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/blmp3pick.htm > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Fri Apr 6 11:58:11 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 11:58:11 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Dickinson, satire, taxonomies Message-ID: <86.9447f74.27ff4193@cs.com> In a message dated 4/6/01 10:34:48 AM Central Daylight Time, moira_russell at hotmail.com writes: > > R.S. Gwynn invited: > > >And I will bake the pies. > > Are you sure this will not infringe upon your masculinity, er, sorry, your > formality? > > Moira Russell I didn't say they'd be *good* pies. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 6 11:59:36 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 07:59:36 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] a review of MJ Salter's A Kiss in Space Message-ID: Richard warned: >available on line at http://www.newcriterion.com -> Indexes >-> 1998-1999 >by - beware - William Logan. I actually thought he was more gentle to her ("She gives a splendid imitation of a normal wife and mother, but under her clothes there?s something unmentionable and I wish she?d let it out") than most of his victims -- er, review subjects -- such as, in the same omnibus, Rita Dove ("once there were confessional poems?now there are publicity releases") and Louise Gluck ("her story could be told only by Ovid, and it wouldn?t be pleasant"). Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From jdavis at panix.com Fri Apr 6 12:23:58 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 12:23:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] William Logan Picks a Poem In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > starts off his commentary with how unread Drayton is? And how can you live > in 2 places at once? > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Florida > and in Cambridge, England. What's odd about playing the "neglect" card? And the usual phrase for living in two places is "He divides his time..." - I LOVE that phrase.. the luxury! Jordan Davis From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 6 12:50:26 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 08:50:26 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] William Logan Picks a Poem Message-ID: Jordan asked: >What's odd about playing the "neglect" card? It just seems sort of pretentious....like, "You peons don't read this poet anymore, but if you had any REAL taste, you would be like me..." Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it based on the personality I see in his reviews. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From jdavis at panix.com Fri Apr 6 13:46:58 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 13:46:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] William Logan Picks a Poem In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It's more presumptuous than pretentious - I think you're reading it correctly - which is to say, it's absolutely in character, and therefore not odd, right? Jordan Davis On Fri, 6 Apr 2001, Moira Russell wrote: > Jordan asked: > > >What's odd about playing the "neglect" card? > > It just seems sort of pretentious....like, "You peons don't read this poet > anymore, but if you had any REAL taste, you would be like me..." Or maybe > I'm just reading too much into it based on the personality I see in his > reviews. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From halvard at earthlink.net Fri Apr 6 13:42:35 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 13:42:35 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] William Logan Picks a Poem In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > What's odd about playing the "neglect" card? And the usual phrase for > living in two places is "He divides his time..." - I LOVE that phrase.. > the luxury! > > Jordan Davis Right! And it's especially (or way) cool when people divide their time between *three* places--say, New York, London, and the south of France. Hal "Art must not look like art." --Marcel Duchamp Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 6 14:16:36 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 10:16:36 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] William Logan Picks a Poem Message-ID: >Right! And it's especially (or way) cool when people divide their time >between *three* places--say, New York, London, and the south of France. Oh, come on, you know people like that live in Hoboken. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From JforJames at aol.com Fri Apr 6 15:25:54 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 15:25:54 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Ana Castillo poem Message-ID: <38.147e05b2.27ff7242@aol.com> A poem by Ana Castillo from her collection I ASK THE IMPOSSIBLE Mi volador* Death wears the mask of a young man, color of burnt maize-- He takes my prayers to the sky-- with a rope around the waist, flies down to Earth again. Ehacatl, I call him. We laugh like macaws, I am a cloud of rain, full with him. And he--without me-- is only crazy wind. *Papantla Flyer. In an ancient sport of the Totonac, five young men dressed as macaws climb a pole. One plays the flute at the top while the other four, with one end of a rope tied to a platform at the top, the other around their waists, unreel their way to the ground in a sacred ceremony. Copyright (c) 2001 by Ana Castillo. From halvard at earthlink.net Fri Apr 6 15:31:06 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 15:31:06 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] William Logan Picks a Poem In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >Right! And it's especially (or way) cool when people divide their time > >between *three* places--say, New York, London, and the south of France. > > Oh, come on, you know people like that live in Hoboken. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA Ah, but Hoboken's rather pricey nowadays. Hal From gray at grayjacobik.com Fri Apr 6 16:30:36 2001 From: gray at grayjacobik.com (Gray Jacobik) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 16:30:36 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry References: <005a01c0bde1$889c2680$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> <01ae01c0bdfd$3cacb160$705b4284@toshiba> Message-ID: <020801c0bed8$70745760$c5e7fc40@emilydickenson> Karen, I had no problem listening to the home.pacifier disk (Ygdrasil Journal of the Poetic Arts). What a wonderful idea! You have an AMAZING voice; I found "Love Soup" mesmerizing. And how delightful to sit in my study and stare out my window and listen to an entire poetry reading accompanied by piano. You've made my day. Gray ----- Original Message ----- From: Karen Gut To: Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 2:21 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > First of all, hi Tad, and hello to you all. I have been away for a while > and got back today. I think this is my first posting here altogether. > Anyway, I love working with music, and have a couple examples of recordings > on the web, > http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgdevil.html > http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgafter.html > There is also supposed to be an entire disk at this address: > http://home.pacifier.com/~shamen/ygdrasil/ > but I wasn't able to get it working just now when i checked. > > Karen Alkalay-Gut > gut22 at post.tau.ac.il > http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "theoldmole" > To: > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 5:03 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the web? It would be > > interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those sites. > > > > I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com > > > > > > > > > > > > Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." > > The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > > of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: > > To: > > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 8:59 AM > > Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > > > > From Museletter: > > > > > > Poetry MP3 Picks > > > Poetry & spoken word performance are everywhere on the Web now, in > > > streaming formats like RealAudio & downloadable ones like MP3. We're > > > introducing our library of Poetry MP3 Picks to bring you to the best > > > poetry recordings you can find online from poets old & new. Enjoy! And > > > don't forget to visit our Forum & suggest your favorite audio poem > > > (http://forums.about.com/ab-poetry/messages?lgnF=y&msg=11190.1) for our > > > weekly highlight. > > > http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/blmp3pick.htm > > > _______________________________________________ > > > New-Poetry mailing list > > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From languagethief at yahoo.com Fri Apr 6 17:06:24 2001 From: languagethief at yahoo.com (The Old Mole) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 14:06:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry In-Reply-To: <020801c0bed8$70745760$c5e7fc40@emilydickenson> Message-ID: <20010406210624.59657.qmail@web12205.mail.yahoo.com> Echoing Gray -- when I was starting to make my list, I just played a few seconds to make sure it worked. I've since gone back and really listened, and it is wonderful. Karen gave a reading at my college a couple of years aro, and afterwards my students told me -- That's our idea of what a real poet should be like. Tad --- Gray Jacobik wrote: > Karen, > I had no problem listening to the home.pacifier disk > (Ygdrasil Journal > of the Poetic Arts). What a wonderful idea! You have > an AMAZING voice; > I found "Love Soup" mesmerizing. And how delightful > to sit in my study > and stare out my window and listen to an entire > poetry reading > accompanied by piano. You've made my day. > > Gray > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Karen Gut > To: > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 2:21 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > First of all, hi Tad, and hello to you all. I > have been away for a > while > > and got back today. I think this is my first > posting here > altogether. > > Anyway, I love working with music, and have a > couple examples of > recordings > > on the web, > > http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgdevil.html > > http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgafter.html > > There is also supposed to be an entire disk at > this address: > > http://home.pacifier.com/~shamen/ygdrasil/ > > but I wasn't able to get it working just now when > i checked. > > > > Karen Alkalay-Gut > > gut22 at post.tau.ac.il > > http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "theoldmole" > > To: > > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 5:03 PM > > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > > > > Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the > web? It would be > > > interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those > sites. > > > > > > I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Tad Richards "Well said, > old mole." > > > The Old Mole Wm. > Shakespeare, Hamlet > > > of the MoleNet Act > I, Scene 5 > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > > From: > > > To: > > > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 8:59 AM > > > Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > > > > > > > From Museletter: > > > > > > > > Poetry MP3 Picks > > > > Poetry & spoken word performance are > everywhere on the Web now, > in > > > > streaming formats like RealAudio & > downloadable ones like MP3. > We're > > > > introducing our library of Poetry MP3 Picks to > bring you to the > best > > > > poetry recordings you can find online from > poets old & new. > Enjoy! And > > > > don't forget to visit our Forum & suggest your > favorite audio > poem > > > > > (http://forums.about.com/ab-poetry/messages?lgnF=y&msg=11190.1) > for our > > > > weekly highlight. > > > > > http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/blmp3pick.htm > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > New-Poetry mailing list > > > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > > > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > New-Poetry mailing list > > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Fri Apr 6 17:47:27 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 23:47:27 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry References: <005a01c0bde1$889c2680$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> <01ae01c0bdfd$3cacb160$705b4284@toshiba> <020801c0bed8$70745760$c5e7fc40@emilydickenson> Message-ID: <012801c0bee3$2d1246c0$415a4284@toshiba> Gray, My computer balked at listening to your poems, on the other hand (told me i had a network error), so i had to make do with reading them -- wonderful poems-- i will try tomorrow on another computer to listen. and what a great website! karen ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gray Jacobik" To: Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 10:30 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > Karen, > I had no problem listening to the home.pacifier disk (Ygdrasil Journal > of the Poetic Arts). What a wonderful idea! You have an AMAZING voice; > I found "Love Soup" mesmerizing. And how delightful to sit in my study > and stare out my window and listen to an entire poetry reading > accompanied by piano. You've made my day. > > Gray > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Karen Gut > To: > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 2:21 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > First of all, hi Tad, and hello to you all. I have been away for a > while > > and got back today. I think this is my first posting here > altogether. > > Anyway, I love working with music, and have a couple examples of > recordings > > on the web, > > http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgdevil.html > > http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgafter.html > > There is also supposed to be an entire disk at this address: > > http://home.pacifier.com/~shamen/ygdrasil/ > > but I wasn't able to get it working just now when i checked. > > > > Karen Alkalay-Gut > > gut22 at post.tau.ac.il > > http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "theoldmole" > > To: > > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 5:03 PM > > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > > > > Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the web? It would be > > > interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those sites. > > > > > > I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." > > > The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > > > of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > > From: > > > To: > > > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 8:59 AM > > > Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > > > > > > > From Museletter: > > > > > > > > Poetry MP3 Picks > > > > Poetry & spoken word performance are everywhere on the Web now, > in > > > > streaming formats like RealAudio & downloadable ones like MP3. > We're > > > > introducing our library of Poetry MP3 Picks to bring you to the > best > > > > poetry recordings you can find online from poets old & new. > Enjoy! And > > > > don't forget to visit our Forum & suggest your favorite audio > poem > > > > (http://forums.about.com/ab-poetry/messages?lgnF=y&msg=11190.1) > for our > > > > weekly highlight. > > > > http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/blmp3pick.htm > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > New-Poetry mailing list > > > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > New-Poetry mailing list > > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Fri Apr 6 17:58:51 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 23:58:51 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry References: <20010406210624.59657.qmail@web12205.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <015201c0bee4$c5492520$415a4284@toshiba> Tad, Liz Magnes now lives in Brooklyn -- she's too far from me to continue with this -- but if any of you are interested... karen ----- Original Message ----- From: "The Old Mole" To: Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 11:06 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > Echoing Gray -- when I was starting to make my list, I > just played a few seconds to make sure it worked. I've > since gone back and really listened, and it is > wonderful. > > Karen gave a reading at my college a couple of years > aro, and afterwards my students told me -- That's our > idea of what a real poet should be like. > > > Tad > > > > > > --- Gray Jacobik wrote: > > Karen, > > I had no problem listening to the home.pacifier disk > > (Ygdrasil Journal > > of the Poetic Arts). What a wonderful idea! You have > > an AMAZING voice; > > I found "Love Soup" mesmerizing. And how delightful > > to sit in my study > > and stare out my window and listen to an entire > > poetry reading > > accompanied by piano. You've made my day. > > > > Gray > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: Karen Gut > > To: > > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 2:21 PM > > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > > > > First of all, hi Tad, and hello to you all. I > > have been away for a > > while > > > and got back today. I think this is my first > > posting here > > altogether. > > > Anyway, I love working with music, and have a > > couple examples of > > recordings > > > on the web, > > > http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgdevil.html > > > http://www.alsopreview.com/gut/kgafter.html > > > There is also supposed to be an entire disk at > > this address: > > > http://home.pacifier.com/~shamen/ygdrasil/ > > > but I wasn't able to get it working just now when > > i checked. > > > > > > Karen Alkalay-Gut > > > gut22 at post.tau.ac.il > > > http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > > From: "theoldmole" > > > To: > > > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 5:03 PM > > > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > > > > > > > Do any of us here have spoken word poetry on the > > web? It would be > > > > interesting to compile a mini-catalog of those > > sites. > > > > > > > > I have a couple at www.wordvirtual.com > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Tad Richards "Well said, > > old mole." > > > > The Old Mole Wm. > > Shakespeare, Hamlet > > > > of the MoleNet Act > > I, Scene 5 > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > > > From: > > > > To: > > > > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 8:59 AM > > > > Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > > > > > > > > > > From Museletter: > > > > > > > > > > Poetry MP3 Picks > > > > > Poetry & spoken word performance are > > everywhere on the Web now, > > in > > > > > streaming formats like RealAudio & > > downloadable ones like MP3. > > We're > > > > > introducing our library of Poetry MP3 Picks to > > bring you to the > > best > > > > > poetry recordings you can find online from > > poets old & new. > > Enjoy! And > > > > > don't forget to visit our Forum & suggest your > > favorite audio > > poem > > > > > > > > (http://forums.about.com/ab-poetry/messages?lgnF=y&msg=11190.1) > > for our > > > > > weekly highlight. > > > > > > > http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/blmp3pick.htm > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > > New-Poetry mailing list > > > > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > > > > > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > New-Poetry mailing list > > > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > > > > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > New-Poetry mailing list > > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. > http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From Arielpf123 at aol.com Fri Apr 6 18:12:59 2001 From: Arielpf123 at aol.com (Arielpf123 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 18:12:59 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry Message-ID: <99.1321e443.27ff996b@aol.com> Karen, I have REal Audio Player 4 but wasn't able to hear your poems....the player opened, played one note and that's all. Gray how did you get them? pat fargnoli From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Apr 6 18:19:01 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 18:19:01 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Surrey with a fringe on top References: Message-ID: <3ACE40D5.531F@nut-n-but.net> I may be wrong but I think "langpo" derived from the nickname for visual poetry, "vizpo" (or "vispo). So your poetry would have to be "formpo" which doesn't sound too hot. --Bob G. From tadrichards at prodigy.net Fri Apr 6 18:56:09 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 18:56:09 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Surrey with a fringe on top References: <3ACE40D5.531F@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <005801c0beec$d44f4ce0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> or "newfo." Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Grumman" To: Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 6:19 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Surrey with a fringe on top > I may be wrong but I think "langpo" derived from the > nickname for visual poetry, "vizpo" (or "vispo). So > your poetry would have to be "formpo" which doesn't > sound too hot. > > --Bob G. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Cadaly at aol.com Fri Apr 6 20:11:47 2001 From: Cadaly at aol.com (Cadaly at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 20:11:47 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] online audio Message-ID: I have real audio online at spokenwar.com (or did, there were some problems), freshpoetz.com (archive now), and kimera. Rgds, Catherine Daly cadaly at pacbell.net P.S. I don't have enough people signed up for my online poetry workshop to begin; we've delayed two weeks. The workshop is a fairly typical workshop, but online; this one is designed for those without advanced degrees in English or Writing, but at a fair level of adult accomplishment -- thinking about an MFA, starting to publish, etc. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 6 19:57:01 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 15:57:01 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Alan Dugan, "On a Seven Day Diary" Message-ID: Thank you, David (Graham) for going to so much effort to find the poem. I remember when Jack Driscoll read it to us in a beginning English class at Interlochen Arts Academy, we thought it was one of the weirdest things we had ever heard (he thought we needed to write about much more earthly topics than we displayed). But it suddenly started going round in my head about Wednesday in the office....I can't believe I've been remembering "Love must be the reason for the week!" as "The most beautiful day of the week!" all these years, though. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 6 23:17:24 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 19:17:24 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] just as nice-smelling.... Message-ID: Newfo'? Sounds like an abbreviation for Newfoundlander.... Neofo? Novofo? Novopo? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sat Apr 7 01:10:08 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 01:10:08 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] just as nice-smelling.... Message-ID: <85.94c7b31.27fffb30@cs.com> In a message dated 4/6/2001 10:19:06 PM Central Daylight Time, moira_russell at hotmail.com writes: > Newfo'? Sounds like an abbreviation for Newfoundlander.... > > Neofo? Novofo? Novopo? > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > New Foe. From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Sat Apr 7 01:35:20 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 07:35:20 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] just as nice-smelling.... References: <85.94c7b31.27fffb30@cs.com> Message-ID: <00b501c0bf24$8a3aa180$af5a4284@toshiba> maybe nufopo? karen alkalay-gut gut22 at post.tau.ac.il http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2001 7:10 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] just as nice-smelling.... > In a message dated 4/6/2001 10:19:06 PM Central Daylight Time, > moira_russell at hotmail.com writes: > > > Newfo'? Sounds like an abbreviation for Newfoundlander.... > > > > Neofo? Novofo? Novopo? > > > > Moira Russell > > Seattle, WA > > > New Foe. > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Sat Apr 7 01:39:26 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 07:39:26 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry References: <99.1321e443.27ff996b@aol.com> Message-ID: <00c101c0bf25$1c88dac0$af5a4284@toshiba> Pat, I couldn't hear Gray's poems. I'm trying other sites now to see exactly what my limits are and why, but i'm a bit of a novice at this, having only heard my own stuff for the first time this week (in response to Tad's call) even though its been up for almost two years. Is there any one out there who's an expert? karen gut22 at post.tau.ac.il http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2001 12:12 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > Karen, > > I have REal Audio Player 4 but wasn't able to hear your poems....the player > opened, played one note and that's all. Gray how did you get them? > > pat fargnoli > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From mbales at cybergate.net Sat Apr 7 06:27:05 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 06:27:05 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <3AC54C76.40D2@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: Daniel Zimmerman: > Why so Procrustean? Why consign > all known poetic devices to a catacomb > of ossuaries?<< Bob Grumman: > I don't feel I'm doing that. I'm not saying > poets should forsake all ("well-known," for me, not just > "known") poetic devices. I'm saying that those who > use only well-known poetic devices are shooting for > other virtues than advancing their craft. Michael > Jordan didn't invent any new shots or moves, but he > still became the world's best basketball player > because he made the standard shots and moves > better than anyone else.<< To the extent poetry is like basketball in the sense you mean it here, then, what are you trying to say about "advancing the craft"? It seems as if you are trying to say that poets ought not try to make the standard shots and moves better than anyone else but, instead, out to try to score a touchdown on the basketball court? mbales at cybergate.net From mbales at cybergate.net Sat Apr 7 06:42:18 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 06:42:18 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Moira Russell: > ... I agree with the comparison of > tonal music vs. atonal music rather than wagons and automobiles. For > one thing, wagons and automobiles are still both methods of > transportation; the idea is to get from A to B faster than you could > on foot. Tonal and atonal music, and formal and non-formal poetry, > have different foundations and aesthetics.<< Two questions: first, how are tonal and atonal music significantly enough different if they are both describably as "music", which I take as a description in the sense that cars and wagons are both "transportation; and, second, in what way do you mean (if you mean it) that formal and non-formal poetry have different foundations and aesthetics; can you give an example or two to illustrate the significant differences in foundations and aesthetics between formal and non-formal poetry? mbales at cybergate.net From wasanthony at yahoo.com Sat Apr 7 09:19:23 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 06:19:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Books at AWP? Message-ID: <20010407131923.63928.qmail@web12101.mail.yahoo.com> I'm wondering is anyone going to AWP received this message yesterday. Or is it simply going to us poor O.P. slobs? I was planning to take the usual 5 copies of a couple of books, but this sounds as if the USC bookstore is handling the bookfair. Anyway, I've asked AWP for clarification. - Jim, with 3 books o.p., one only 3 years old! > Mark Ewalt wrote: > > Hello everyone, > > The USC Bookstore will be supporting the AWP conference in Palm > Springs this spring. I'm putting the finishing touches on book orders > and I've come up with a number of authors that are either not listed > in Books In Print, or that show all of their works to be out of print. > > To make sure I've got everyone represented I'm asking all of you to > send me the citation for your latest book so I can order for the > event. Order time is rapidly diminishing so a prompt response will > better your chances of your book being on hand. Due to the > extraordinary number of authors attending I will only be ordering > attendees' latest work, and I will not be ordering books they have > edited. > > Thank you, and see you in PS! > > Mark Ewalt > The USC Bookstore > 213-740-9036 ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Apr 7 09:43:21 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2001 09:43:21 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3ACF1979.624@nut-n-but.net> > To the extent poetry is like basketball in the sense you mean it > here, then, what are you trying to say about "advancing the craft"? > It seems as if you are trying to say that poets ought not try to > make the standard shots and moves better than anyone else but, > instead, out to try to score a touchdown on the basketball court? I'm afraid I can't understand what's unclear about what I'm saying. Those whose interests and/or abilities cause them to prefer using standard moves should do so. I would expect them to try to do so better than anyone else. This would advance poetry by making improved poems available, or maybe only by making only more good poems available (if you want to argue that there are poems around that can't be bettered, which I tend to believe, myself). It would not advance the craft, in my view, because it would not make new tools available. Of course, in a sense, every poet who writes an original poem advances the craft by showing some new way of using some tool. I just feel that if you want to call that advancing the craft, the whole idea of technical innovation becomes of no descriptive value. One of the reasons I probably sound more hostile than I think I am is that this latest clash I've had with several of you is a re-run of several similar engagements I've been in, one of them about Cummings versus Frost. I kept saying that I value both but that Cummings advanced the craft, Frost didn't-- in any significant technical way. I'm not going to re-argue all that. I bring it up only as background. Frost's champions could not seem to take my opinion that he did not advance the craft of poetry technically as a condemnation of him. I do prefer Cummings to Frost, but only by a little, and I think Frost wrote many more A-1 poems than Cummings did. I definitely do NOT think anyone who values the work of Frost more than Cummings wrong--though I do think that the few who write off Cummings as a trivial letter-scatterer are every bit as foolish as those who write off Frost as trivially old-fashioned. A poet should try to make the best poems he can without worrying about being incoherent, old-fashioned, trivial, etc. It may well be that the Michael Jordan of poetry in English of the last century was Yeats, who--for me--did little or nothing to advance the craft technically. It's very possible that Shakespeare was not technically innovative, although my sense of the situation is that literary historians don't know enough to say. If so, he was still the greatest dramatist in English. In short, I am not saying poets should try to score touchdowns on the basketball court. --Bob G. From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sat Apr 7 11:46:47 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 10:46:47 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Books at AWP? In-Reply-To: <20010407131923.63928.qmail@web12101.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Jim, I think it's probably you poor slobs who are serving on panels at the AWP who got this message--normally, a local bookstore features titles by writers whose names are in the conference program. This is in addition to the AWP members' book table. In the past, it's never been *all* panelists by any means; maybe the USC Bookstore is ambitious. Or perhaps your fame has been growing without your knowledge. Levine, Komunyakaa, Kumin, Cervantes. . . . Those of us whose panels were cruelly rejected (boo hoo) will be lugging our 5 copies to the AWP book table as usual, and, more likely than not, lugging them home again. (Which suddenly gives me an idea: let me hereby announce that advance orders will be gladly accepted at my low-low-low AWP conference rate!) David Graham >I'm wondering is anyone going to AWP received this message yesterday. >Or is it simply going to us poor O.P. slobs? I was planning to take >the usual 5 copies of a couple of books, but this sounds as if the USC >bookstore is handling the bookfair. Anyway, I've asked AWP for >clarification. > >- Jim, with 3 books o.p., one only 3 years old! > >> Mark Ewalt wrote: >> >> Hello everyone, >> >> The USC Bookstore will be supporting the AWP conference in Palm >> Springs this spring. I'm putting the finishing touches on book orders >> and I've come up with a number of authors that are either not listed >> in Books In Print, or that show all of their works to be out of >print. >> >> To make sure I've got everyone represented I'm asking all of you to >> send me the citation for your latest book so I can order for the >> event. Order time is rapidly diminishing so a prompt response will >> better your chances of your book being on hand. Due to the >> extraordinary number of authors attending I will only be ordering >> attendees' latest work, and I will not be ordering books they have >> edited. >> >> Thank you, and see you in PS! >> >> Mark Ewalt >> The USC Bookstore >> 213-740-9036 > >===== >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net >Salt River Review: >"Ripples" @ >Poetserv: >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. >http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ >_______________________________________________ >New-Poetry mailing list >New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu >http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From rwilsnac at medicine.nodak.edu Sat Apr 7 13:58:47 2001 From: rwilsnac at medicine.nodak.edu (rwilsnac at medicine.nodak.edu) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2001 10:58:47 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] One more short poem Message-ID: <3.0.32.20010407105846.00f05cec@medicine.nodak.edu> My apologies for being very late to contribute to the "New Poetry Anthology of Very Short Poems." As Auden has apparently not appeared among the offerings so far, please accept the following: Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier To save your world, you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why? W. H. Auden Richard W. Wilsnack rwilsnac at medicine.nodak.edu From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sat Apr 7 12:43:28 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 11:43:28 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Heaney Online Message-ID: Seamus Heaney's new collection, *Electric Light*, is reviewed in the New York Times, available online. http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/reviews/010408.08hammert.html A very nice feature is their "first chapter" link; in this case, you can preview 7 sample poems from the new book. Also extremely valuable, I think, are all the other links available from the review page; you can access interviews, audio files, articles by and about Heaney, and reviews of Heaney's books going back to the 1970s. David Graham __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sat Apr 7 12:45:47 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 12:45:47 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] One more short poem References: <3.0.32.20010407105846.00f05cec@medicine.nodak.edu> Message-ID: <00c401c0bf82$326f9100$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Or this one about Auden -- I don't remember the author: The working man will never know What Auden means, who loves him so. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2001 1:58 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] One more short poem > My apologies for being very late to contribute to the > "New Poetry Anthology of Very Short Poems." As Auden has > apparently not appeared among the offerings so far, > please accept the following: > > Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier > > To save your world, you asked this man to die: > Would this man, could he see you now, ask why? > > W. H. Auden > > > Richard W. Wilsnack > rwilsnac at medicine.nodak.edu > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From gray at grayjacobik.com Fri Apr 6 16:51:16 2001 From: gray at grayjacobik.com (Gray Jacobik) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 16:51:16 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Question re Robert Hass Message-ID: <021401c0bf87$3323faa0$c5e7fc40@emilydickenson> Does anyone know of an article or monograph that surveys and assesses Robert Hass's achievement through his four published collections? Thanks, Gray Jacobik From xiamin at ghostpriest.gay-robot.com Sat Apr 7 13:24:59 2001 From: xiamin at ghostpriest.gay-robot.com (Simon Raahauge DeSantis) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 13:24:59 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Surrey with a fringe on top In-Reply-To: <005801c0beec$d44f4ce0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com>; from theoldmole on Fri, Apr 06, 2001 at 06:56:09PM -0400 References: <3ACE40D5.531F@nut-n-but.net> <005801c0beec$d44f4ce0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Message-ID: <20010407132459.A8568@ghostpriest.gay-robot.com> On Fri, Apr 06, 2001 at 06:56:09PM -0400, theoldmole wrote: > or "newfo." > > Or 'mofo'. Couldn't resist. -- -Simon Raahauge DeSantis From gray at grayjacobik.com Sat Apr 7 13:50:08 2001 From: gray at grayjacobik.com (Gray Jacobik) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 13:50:08 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry References: <99.1321e443.27ff996b@aol.com> Message-ID: <024401c0bf8b$306bbba0$c5e7fc40@emilydickenson> Hi Pat, I just used RealPlayer -- doesn't tell me what version I've got. Gray ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 6:12 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > Karen, > > I have REal Audio Player 4 but wasn't able to hear your poems....the player > opened, played one note and that's all. Gray how did you get them? > > pat fargnoli > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sat Apr 7 14:37:52 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 14:37:52 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry References: <99.1321e443.27ff996b@aol.com> <024401c0bf8b$306bbba0$c5e7fc40@emilydickenson> Message-ID: <014201c0bf91$dae3cfe0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> You can download a newer version of RealAudio for free. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gray Jacobik" To: Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2001 1:50 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > Hi Pat, > I just used RealPlayer -- doesn't tell me what version I've got. > > Gray > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 6:12 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MP3 Poetry > > > > Karen, > > > > I have REal Audio Player 4 but wasn't able to hear your poems....the > player > > opened, played one note and that's all. Gray how did you get them? > > > > pat fargnoli > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From mbales at cybergate.net Sat Apr 7 15:26:07 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 15:26:07 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <3ACF1979.624@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: > > To the extent poetry is like basketball in the sense you mean it > > here, then, what are you trying to say about "advancing the craft"? > > It seems as if you are trying to say that poets ought not try to > > make the standard shots and moves better than anyone else but, > > instead, out to try to score a touchdown on the basketball court? Bob Grumman: > ... Those whose interests and/or abilities cause > them to prefer using standard moves should do so. I would > expect them to try to do so better than anyone else. This > would advance poetry by making improved poems available, or > maybe only by making only more good poems available (if you > want to argue that there are poems around that can't be > bettered, which I tend to believe, myself). It would not > advance the craft, in my view, because it would not make > new tools available.<< But this would seem to claim that the ONLY way to advance ANY craft is to invent new tools, and that using old tools to make better things is not an advancement of the craft. This is a focus on the tools that casts the craftsman into the shadow, it seems to me -- a claim that the telescope is more important than the astronomer, that the mathemaku is more important than the mathemakuist. Is that what you're claiming? > Of course, in a sense, every poet who > writes an original poem advances the craft by showing some new > way of using some tool. I just feel that if you want to > call that advancing the craft, the whole idea of technical > innovation becomes of no descriptive value.<< It seems to me to be a very narrow view indeed of what "advancing the craft" means to claim that the only way to advance a craft is by means of technical innovation. Frankly, it seems to me to be completely at odds with the notion of craft and craftsmanship, and to focus on something else altogether. For example, the craft of marksmanship, it would seem from your point of view, can ONLY be advanced by inventing new guns, or metallurgical compounds, or riflings, or optics, or new tools with which to calculate the arc of the bullet from the muzzle to the target (and can we say that calculus was an advancement in musketry by that, for example?) -- and neither learning to use the weapon at any given contemporary state-of-the-tool, nor making a weapon or optics or calculators at that state, is either "craft" or "craftsmanship". Is that what you're trying to say? > One of the reasons I probably sound more hostile than I think > I am is that this latest clash I've had with several of you > is a re-run of several similar engagements I've been in, one > of them about Cummings versus Frost. I kept saying that I > value both but that Cummings advanced the craft, Frost didn't-- > in any significant technical way.<< I don't assert that you sound hostile in any way. You sound civil to me. But to say that Frost didn't advance the craft seems to be more an illustration of lack of familiarity with the range of Frost's work, from, for example, "The Telephone" to "The Subverted Flower", or from "My Butterfly" to "The Most Of It". The notion that the latter of either of those two pairings is no advance in the craft of poetry in English, as well as an advance in an individual's craftsmanship, seems to indicate such a different understanding of what "craft" is, and of what "advancing the craft" is, from my understanding of it that all I can do is ask you to explain in more detail what you mean by "craft" and "advancing the craft" that makes you think that Frost didn't "advance the craft". Can you illustrate your meaning in words of one syllable so I can understand? > ... It may well be that the Michael Jordan of poetry in English > of the last century was Yeats, who--for me--did little or > nothing to advance the craft technically.<< Once again, it seems to me that there is an advancement of craft of English poetry from "When You Are Old" to "The Circus Animals' Desertion"; from "The Stolen Child" to "The Long-legged Fly", and not merely one of advancement in Yeats's own craftsmanship. > It's very possible > that Shakespeare was not technically innovative, although my > sense of the situation is that literary historians don't know > enough to say. If so, he was still the greatest dramatist in > English. In short, I am not saying poets should try to score > touchdowns on the basketball court.<< Well, since I still don't know what you mean by "technically innovative" I can't offer an opinion about whether I agree with you about Shakespeare's technical innovativeness. But I'm interested in finding out more about what you mean so that we can compare our opinions in a more apples-to-apples way. mbales at cybergate.net From Jandhodge at aol.com Sat Apr 7 15:42:01 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 15:42:01 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] One more short poem Message-ID: <76.94ac1e5.2800c789@aol.com> Yeats wasn't too bad at this short poem stuff either, as for instance: To a Poet, Who would have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine You say, as I have often given tongue In praise of what another's said or sung, 'Twere politic to do the like by these; But was there ever dog that praised his fleas? From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sat Apr 7 15:50:06 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 15:50:06 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] One more short poem Message-ID: In a message dated 4/7/2001 2:44:38 PM Central Daylight Time, Jandhodge at aol.com writes: > > To a Poet, Who would have Me Praise Certain > Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine > > > You say, as I have often given tongue > In praise of what another's said or sung, > 'Twere politic to do the like by these; > But was there ever dog that praised his fleas? For a truly outrageous one, look at his "A Stick of Incense." From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sat Apr 7 16:25:33 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 15:25:33 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: One more short Yeats In-Reply-To: Message-ID: And for condensation of idea, it's hard to beat this one: PARNELL Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: "Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone." WBY, 1938 ___________ David Graham >In a message dated 4/7/2001 2:44:38 PM Central Daylight Time, >Jandhodge at aol.com writes: > >> >> To a Poet, Who would have Me Praise Certain >> Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine >> >> >> You say, as I have often given tongue >> In praise of what another's said or sung, >> 'Twere politic to do the like by these; >> But was there ever dog that praised his fleas? > >For a truly outrageous one, look at his "A Stick of Incense." __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From johnbrehm at mindspring.com Sat Apr 7 16:42:11 2001 From: johnbrehm at mindspring.com (john brehm) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 16:42:11 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] a question about Ammons References: <20010227182819.533EE36FA@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <006f01c0bfa3$3a6efaa0$391ef7a5@compaqcomputer> I'm trying to piece together the posts I wrote about Archie right after he died, and I wonder if I might ask your help in recalling just a couple of things. Who was it that posted the news of his death? And who offered the story about the person who called the poet out of the blue and had Archie drop his gardening work to spend an hour with him on the phone? Please backchannel to me as I'm sure other members don't need to revisit this here. johnbrehm at mindspring.com. Thanks. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Apr 7 17:05:39 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2001 17:05:39 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3ACF8123.764B@nut-n-but.net> Bob Grumman: " ... Those whose interests and/or abilities cause them to prefer using standard moves should do so. I would expect them to try to do so better than anyone else. This would advance poetry by making improved poems available, or maybe only by making only more good poems available (if you want to argue that there are poems around that can't be bettered, which I tend to believe, myself). It would not advance the craft, in my view, because it would not make new tools available. Marcus: "But this would seem to claim that the ONLY way to advance ANY craft is to invent new tools, and that using old tools to make better things is not an advancement of the craft. This is a focus on the tools that casts the craftsman into the shadow, it seems to me -- a claim that the telescope is more important than the astronomer, that the mathemaku is more important than the mathemakuist. Is that what you're claiming?" I'm having trouble with your example because you're talking about engineering advances, and I was talking about ways of doing poetry using poetic techniques, a different story. I would couple astronomers who invent new ways of finding out things from the sky like whoever figured out how to use spectrography to determine astronomical distances with poets who find new poetic devices and astronomers who used standard methods to discover new astronomical bodies with users of well-known techniques only in poetry who make superior poems with them. But I can't bring to mind enough about astronomy to be able to discuss this too intelligently. (One problem is the difference between theoretical astronomers and practical astronomers.) Let me just jump to what you later say. Me: "Of course, in a sense, every poet who writes an original poem advances the craft by showing some new way of using some tool. I just feel that if you want to call that advancing the craft, the whole idea of technical innovation becomes of no descriptive value." Marcus: "It seems to me to be a very narrow view indeed of what 'advancing the craft' means to claim that the only way to advance a craft is by means of technical innovation. Frankly, it seems to me to be completely at odds with the notion of craft and craftsmanship, and to focus on something else altogether." Okay, maybe the choice of words is wrong, I don't know. Actually, my usual boiler-plate uses "craft-extending," but that probably sounds as bad, from your point of view. > For example, the craft of marksmanship, it would seem from your > point of view, can ONLY be advanced by inventing new guns, or > metallurgical compounds, or riflings, or optics, or new tools with > which to calculate the arc of the bullet from the muzzle to the > target (and can we say that calculus was an advancement in > musketry by that, for example?) -- and neither learning to use the > weapon at any given contemporary state-of-the-tool, nor making a > weapon or optics or calculators at that state, is either "craft" or > "craftsmanship". Is that what you're trying to say? I would say inventing new kinds of guns and equipment for guns would advance the craft of gun-making; making the same sort of guns that have always been made, but making them ever-so-slightly better by, say, having a better eye for placement of sights, is improving guns but not gun-making. > I don't assert that you sound hostile in any way. > You sound civil to me. Thanks. I've popped off in the past a few times-- and "hostile" probably isn't the right word. > But to say that Frost didn't advance the craft > seems to be more an illustration of lack of > familiarity with the range of Frost's work, from, > for example, "The Telephone" to "The Subverted > Flower", or from "My Butterfly" to "The Most Of It". > The notion that the latter of either of those > two pairings is no advance in the craft of poetry in > English, as well as an advance in an individual's craftsmanship, > seems to indicate such a different understanding of what "craft" is, > and of what "advancing the craft" is, from my understanding of it > that all I can do is ask you to explain in more detail what you mean > by "craft" and "advancing the craft" that makes you think that Frost > didn't "advance the craft". Can you illustrate your meaning in words > of one syllable so I can understand? It's hard. My problem is, again, if Frost advanced the craft, then what great poet did not? I guess, having a taxonomist's mind, I want to classify, which means finding ways to distinguish large groups within a larger group from one another. I suspect it would be impossible to find a name for poets working outside received craft that would not be taken offensively by those working inside a received craft. "Received craft" itself would no doubt be taken offensively by the latter. Using Frost as an example, I would claim (after reading a lot of his work but not analyzing it) that he never invented anything like Cummings's breaking words into fragments to release interior words. Forget whether you like the results of Cummings's device (or whether Cummings was truly the first to do this regularly). The point is that a poet after Cummings can do things with Cummings's device the same way that poet can do things with rhyme and meter. Frost gave us nothing like that so far as I know, only excellent uses of known devices--the same way Cummings also gave us uses of his own new device. At best, it seems to me, we get lessons in how to use known devices maximally from Frost; from the craft-extending poet we get new devices (and lessons on how to use them). I do think the first users of new devices, the ones who show how to exploit them, are craft-extending, too, and maybe users of meter and rhyme are still finding significant new ways to exploit those devices, but I just don't see it. > > ... It may well be that the Michael Jordan of poetry in English > > of the last century was Yeats, who--for me--did little or > > nothing to advance the craft technically.<< > > Once again, it seems to me that there is an advancement of craft > of English poetry from "When You Are Old" to "The Circus Animals' > Desertion"; from "The Stolen Child" to "The Long-legged Fly", and > not merely one of advancement in Yeats's own craftsmanship. Perhaps, but I see no new technique coming into play. I see basically no more than an elimination of material that had gotten to seem superfluously poeticky. (Off the top of my head.) Are we making any progress? Maybe I should use "technique-adding" instead of "craft extending" or "craft-advancing?" The problem with that is that "technique-adding" would not apply to the first wave of people using a new technique. They aren't inventors but do advance new techniques in a way I don't think later waves (except very rarely) can. And often the inventor of a technique can't use it well, which makes the first person to use it well as important as the inventor. "Innovative-technique-using" would get it right, but it's very awkward. . . . I can't say "innovation-using" because you guys would say Frost used meter innovatively, or the like. ? --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Apr 7 17:05:39 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2001 17:05:39 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3ACF8123.764B@nut-n-but.net> Bob Grumman: " ... Those whose interests and/or abilities cause them to prefer using standard moves should do so. I would expect them to try to do so better than anyone else. This would advance poetry by making improved poems available, or maybe only by making only more good poems available (if you want to argue that there are poems around that can't be bettered, which I tend to believe, myself). It would not advance the craft, in my view, because it would not make new tools available. Marcus: "But this would seem to claim that the ONLY way to advance ANY craft is to invent new tools, and that using old tools to make better things is not an advancement of the craft. This is a focus on the tools that casts the craftsman into the shadow, it seems to me -- a claim that the telescope is more important than the astronomer, that the mathemaku is more important than the mathemakuist. Is that what you're claiming?" I'm having trouble with your example because you're talking about engineering advances, and I was talking about ways of doing poetry using poetic techniques, a different story. I would couple astronomers who invent new ways of finding out things from the sky like whoever figured out how to use spectrography to determine astronomical distances with poets who find new poetic devices and astronomers who used standard methods to discover new astronomical bodies with users of well-known techniques only in poetry who make superior poems with them. But I can't bring to mind enough about astronomy to be able to discuss this too intelligently. (One problem is the difference between theoretical astronomers and practical astronomers.) Let me just jump to what you later say. Me: "Of course, in a sense, every poet who writes an original poem advances the craft by showing some new way of using some tool. I just feel that if you want to call that advancing the craft, the whole idea of technical innovation becomes of no descriptive value." Marcus: "It seems to me to be a very narrow view indeed of what 'advancing the craft' means to claim that the only way to advance a craft is by means of technical innovation. Frankly, it seems to me to be completely at odds with the notion of craft and craftsmanship, and to focus on something else altogether." Okay, maybe the choice of words is wrong, I don't know. Actually, my usual boiler-plate uses "craft-extending," but that probably sounds as bad, from your point of view. > For example, the craft of marksmanship, it would seem from your > point of view, can ONLY be advanced by inventing new guns, or > metallurgical compounds, or riflings, or optics, or new tools with > which to calculate the arc of the bullet from the muzzle to the > target (and can we say that calculus was an advancement in > musketry by that, for example?) -- and neither learning to use the > weapon at any given contemporary state-of-the-tool, nor making a > weapon or optics or calculators at that state, is either "craft" or > "craftsmanship". Is that what you're trying to say? I would say inventing new kinds of guns and equipment for guns would advance the craft of gun-making; making the same sort of guns that have always been made, but making them ever-so-slightly better by, say, having a better eye for placement of sights, is improving guns but not gun-making. > I don't assert that you sound hostile in any way. > You sound civil to me. Thanks. I've popped off in the past a few times-- and "hostile" probably isn't the right word. > But to say that Frost didn't advance the craft > seems to be more an illustration of lack of > familiarity with the range of Frost's work, from, > for example, "The Telephone" to "The Subverted > Flower", or from "My Butterfly" to "The Most Of It". > The notion that the latter of either of those > two pairings is no advance in the craft of poetry in > English, as well as an advance in an individual's craftsmanship, > seems to indicate such a different understanding of what "craft" is, > and of what "advancing the craft" is, from my understanding of it > that all I can do is ask you to explain in more detail what you mean > by "craft" and "advancing the craft" that makes you think that Frost > didn't "advance the craft". Can you illustrate your meaning in words > of one syllable so I can understand? It's hard. My problem is, again, if Frost advanced the craft, then what great poet did not? I guess, having a taxonomist's mind, I want to classify, which means finding ways to distinguish large groups within a larger group from one another. I suspect it would be impossible to find a name for poets working outside received craft that would not be taken offensively by those working inside a received craft. "Received craft" itself would no doubt be taken offensively by the latter. Using Frost as an example, I would claim (after reading a lot of his work but not analyzing it) that he never invented anything like Cummings's breaking words into fragments to release interior words. Forget whether you like the results of Cummings's device (or whether Cummings was truly the first to do this regularly). The point is that a poet after Cummings can do things with Cummings's device the same way that poet can do things with rhyme and meter. Frost gave us nothing like that so far as I know, only excellent uses of known devices--the same way Cummings also gave us uses of his own new device. At best, it seems to me, we get lessons in how to use known devices maximally from Frost; from the craft-extending poet we get new devices (and lessons on how to use them). I do think the first users of new devices, the ones who show how to exploit them, are craft-extending, too, and maybe users of meter and rhyme are still finding significant new ways to exploit those devices, but I just don't see it. > > ... It may well be that the Michael Jordan of poetry in English > > of the last century was Yeats, who--for me--did little or > > nothing to advance the craft technically.<< > > Once again, it seems to me that there is an advancement of craft > of English poetry from "When You Are Old" to "The Circus Animals' > Desertion"; from "The Stolen Child" to "The Long-legged Fly", and > not merely one of advancement in Yeats's own craftsmanship. Perhaps, but I see no new technique coming into play. I see basically no more than an elimination of material that had gotten to seem superfluously poeticky. (Off the top of my head.) Are we making any progress? Maybe I should use "technique-adding" instead of "craft extending" or "craft-advancing?" The problem with that is that "technique-adding" would not apply to the first wave of people using a new technique. They aren't inventors but do advance new techniques in a way I don't think later waves (except very rarely) can. And often the inventor of a technique can't use it well, which makes the first person to use it well as important as the inventor. "Innovative-technique-using" would get it right, but it's very awkward. . . . I can't say "innovation-using" because you guys would say Frost used meter innovatively, or the like. ? --Bob G. From mbales at cybergate.net Sat Apr 7 18:38:14 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 18:38:14 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <3ACF8123.764B@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: > Bob Grumman: > ... Those whose interests and/or abilities cause > them to prefer using standard moves should do so. I would > expect them to try to do so better than anyone else. This > would advance poetry by making improved poems available, or > maybe only by making only more good poems available (if you > want to argue that there are poems around that can't be > bettered, which I tend to believe, myself). It would not > advance the craft, in my view, because it would not make > new tools available.<< > Marcus: "But this would seem to claim that the ONLY way to advance ANY > craft is to invent new tools, and that using old tools to make better > things is not an advancement of the craft. This is a focus on the > tools that casts the craftsman into the shadow, it seems to me -- a > claim that the telescope is more important than the astronomer, that > the mathemaku is more important than the mathemakuist. Is that what > you're claiming?" Bob Grumman: > I'm having trouble with your example because you're talking > about engineering advances, and I was talking about > ways of doing poetry using poetic techniques, a different > story.<< How is it a different story? You talk about "tools" and "techniques" and not about the outcomes, the poems on the one hand or hitting a target with a projectile on the other. Your talk of "tools" and "techniques" makes me think you are eager to talk about the poetic equivalent of "engineering advances", whatever those might be: mathemaku, perhaps, or those compressed word deals: you seem to be speaking of "tools" and "technical advances" in terms that are analogous to "engineering advances". > I would couple astronomers ... like whoever figured out > how to use spectrography to determine astronomical > distances with poets who find new poetic devices<< Well, all right -- this seems to be getting us closer to what you mean: but what is "a new poetic device" that is analogous to spectography? In other words, can you give an example of a paradigm-shifting combination of a new way to think about poetry and a new way to do poetry that makes subsequent poems that use such a combination significantly better at what you call, in the essay to which you referred us earlier, "doing the job"? > (One problem is the difference between theoretical > astronomers and practical astronomers.)<< Isn't this analogous to the difference between theoretical poets (critics) and practical ones (poets)? Bob Grumman: > Of course, in a sense, every poet who > writes an original poem advances the craft by showing some new > way of using some tool. I just feel that if you want to > call that advancing the craft, the whole idea of technical > innovation becomes of no descriptive value.<< Marcus Bales > It seems to me to be a very narrow view indeed of what > 'advancing the craft' means to claim that the only way to advance a > craft is by means of technical innovation. Frankly, it seems to me to > be completely at odds with the notion of craft and craftsmanship, and > to focus on something else altogether.<< Bob Grumman: > Okay, maybe the choice of words is wrong, I don't know. > Actually, my usual boiler-plate uses "craft-extending," > but that probably sounds as bad, from your point of view. << Well, for now I'm just trying to understand what your point of view is without committing myself; you may persuade me that your point of view is more reasonable than mine. Marcus Bales: > > For example, the craft of marksmanship, it would seem from > > your > > point of view, can ONLY be advanced by inventing new guns, or > > metallurgical compounds, or riflings, or optics, or new tools with > > which to calculate the arc of the bullet from the muzzle to the > > target (and can we say that calculus was an advancement in musketry > > by that, for example?) -- and neither learning to use the weapon at > > any given contemporary state-of-the-tool, nor making a weapon or > > optics or calculators at that state, is either "craft" or > > "craftsmanship". Is that what you're trying to say?<< Bob Grumman: > I would say inventing new kinds of guns and equipment for > guns would advance the craft of gun-making; making the > same sort of guns that have always been made, but making > them ever-so-slightly better by, say, having a better eye > for placement of sights, is improving guns but not gun-making.<< Well, then, I am even more at a loss than I was before! It seemed to me that you were saying, using the gun analogy again, that "advancing the craft" or "extending the craft" would explicitly be inventing *new* techniques, and explicitly *not* using existing techniques to make better guns -- that no one could claim to be "advancing the craft" of gun-making *unless* he or she invented some *new technique* or *new tool*. I thought you were saying that absent a new technique or tool *even if the gun were better made* there could have been *no advancement in craft* -- no advancementin the craft of gun-making. So, for example, if the standard for drilling a gun barrel were to be accurate to within one hundredth of an inch of accuracy and some gun maker were to decide to drill his or her gun barrels to within one one thousandth of an inch of accuracy, you would have to argue that there was no advance in the craft of gun-making because he or she was simply still drilling a gun barrel, albeit more accurately. And even though the gun would be more accurate, do its job better, and all-around be preferred over the older guns, you would have to say that there had been no advance in the craft. But, it seems to me, the moment that instead of merely *deciding* to apply stricter standards the gun-maker used a jig to steady his hand, *then* he would have advance the craft of gun-making. Is that right? MB: > > But to say that Frost didn't advance the craft > > seems to be more an illustration of lack of > > familiarity with the range of Frost's work, from, > > for example, "The Telephone" to "The Subverted > > Flower", or from "My Butterfly" to "The Most Of It". > > The notion that the latter of either of those > > two pairings is no advance in the craft of poetry in > > English, as well as an advance in an individual's craftsmanship, > > seems to indicate such a different understanding of what "craft" is, > > and of what "advancing the craft" is, from my understanding of it > > that all I can do is ask you to explain in more detail what you mean > > by "craft" and "advancing the craft" that makes you think that Frost > > didn't "advance the craft". Can you illustrate your meaning in words > > of one syllable so I can understand? BG: > It's hard. My problem is, again, if Frost advanced the craft, > then what great poet did not?<< Just so. But isn't that pretty much the standard by which we denote a "great poet" -- that after such a poet everyone who wrote poetry seriously had to take that poet's work into close and serious account? BG: > Using Frost as an example, I would claim (after reading a > lot of his work but not analyzing it) that he never > invented anything like Cummings's breaking words into > fragments to release interior words.<< I would argue, on the contrary, that Frost's work was more thoroughly revolutionary because he invented modern poetry: poetry that no serious reader could take as simply saying what it said and that's all. Prior to Frost many poets had been occasionally ironic or had hidden other levels of meaning in their work from time to time, but it was Frost who made ironists of us all. While one can read a Frost poem perfectly literally (as my mother in law always does) on a superficial level (and his earliest poems are more likely to be only superficial) none of us who claim to be good readers can ever trust Frost to be saying *only* what he seems to be saying on the surface. The "advancement of craft" that I see in that is just that no poet after Frost could fail to try to say more than merely the surface stuff if he or she wanted to be taken seriously as a poet. If that's not an advancement of the craft, what is? > Forget whether you > like the results of Cummings's device (or whether Cummings > was truly the first to do this regularly). The point is > that a poet after Cummings can do things with Cummings's device > the same way that poet can do things with rhyme and meter. > Frost gave us nothing like that so far as I know...<< op cit. Bob Grumman: > I do think the first users of new devices, the ones who show > how to exploit them, are craft-extending, too, and maybe users > of meter and rhyme are still finding significant new ways to > exploit those devices, but I just don't see it.<< Well, my claim for Frost as a craft-extender does not rely on his use of rhyme or meter directly. Indirectly, perhaps, his use of rhyme and meter, together with a "surface sensibility" and the "sentence sound" of natural contemporary speech, fostered the "cracker barrel poet" illusion that let him get his poems under the saddle of the horse, but it is his consistent use of levels of meaning, and often ironic ones, that re-created poetry and led to the notion that a poet *had* to claim to be saying more than just the surface meaning of his or her words. BG: > Maybe I should use "technique-adding" instead of > "craft extending" or "craft-advancing?" The problem > with that is that "technique-adding" would not apply > to the first wave of people using a new technique. > They aren't inventors but do advance new techniques > in a way I don't think later waves (except very rarely) > can. And often the inventor of a technique can't use > it well, which makes the first person to use it well > as important as the inventor. "Innovative-technique-using" > would get it right, but it's very awkward. . . . I can't > say "innovation-using" because you guys would say Frost > used meter innovatively, or the like.<< First, perhaps we can dispense with the notion of "you guys", here. I'm not sure we're not "us guys". I'm asking you to clarify what you mean, not challenging your conclusions. I may challenge your conclusions (and I may be wrong if I do), but I may not (and I may be wrong in that, too). Second, once again I don't understand what you're talking about when you say "innovative technique" -- to me this sounds like "engineering advance". It sounds as if you are referring to pretty significant things, to things that are paradigm-shifting or at least view-point-shifting, and not to relative trivialities such as spreading the typography across the page or condensing two or more words into one. After all, condensing a word isn't new at all, as CS Calverley told us: Forever CS Calverley Forever: ?tis a single word! Our rude forefathers deemed it two: Can you imagine so absurd A view? Forever! What abysms of woe The word reveals, what frenzy, what Despair! For ever (printed so) Did not. It looks, ah me! how trite and tame! It fails to sadden or appal Or solace ? it is not the same At all. O thou to whom it first occurred To solder the disjoined and dower Thy native language with a word Of power: We bless thee! Whether far or near Thy dwelling, whether dark or fair Thy kingly brow, is neither here Nor there. But in men?s hearts shall be thy throne, While the great pulse of England beats: Thou coiner of a word unknown To Keats! And nevermore must printer do As men did long ago; but run ?For? into ?ever?, bidding two Be one. Forever! Passion-fraught, it throws Oe?r the dim page a gloom, a glamour: It?s sweet, it?s strange; and I suppose It?s grammar. Forever! ?Tis a single word! And yet our fathers deemed it two; Nor am I confident they erred; Are you? mbales at cybergate.net From mbales at cybergate.net Sat Apr 7 21:56:54 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 21:56:54 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] One more short poem In-Reply-To: <00c401c0bf82$326f9100$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Message-ID: > The working man will never know > What Auden means, who loves him so. Or this one from Auden himself: To the man in the street, who I'm sorry to say Is a keen observer of life, The word "intellectual" suggests straight away A man who's untrue to his wife. mbales at cybergate.net From poetry.guide at about.com Sat Apr 7 21:51:16 2001 From: poetry.guide at about.com (Margery Snyder) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 18:51:16 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: MP3 Poetry Message-ID: I'm delurking just long enough to say thanks, everybody, for posting your audio addresses. I've collected them all to add to the list from which I'm choosing one audio poem to link to each week at About Poetry. Your suggestions of other audio poetry sites to add to our libraries -- AND video/animated/hypertext sites, AND plain old text sites, too, if the poetry is good -- are always welcome. For sites to add to your own lists, you might want to browse our collections, these two in particular: http://poetry.about.com/cs/audiopoetry/index.htm Audio Poetry Archives & Anthologies http://poetry.about.com/cs/videopoetry/index.htm Poetry Shows & Video Archives .................................... Margery Snyder Poetry Guide About--The Human Internet http://poetry.about.com .................................... ----- Original Message ----- From: "theoldmole" To: Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] sound of poetry on the web Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 10:27:40 -0400 Reply-To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu I'll work on two lists...one of listpoets on audio, the other a list of poetry audio sites in general. Keep 'em coming. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Apr 7 22:16:47 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2001 22:16:47 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3ACFCA0F.7E41@nut-n-but.net> snip to Me: "I'm having trouble with your example because you're talking about engineering advances, and I was talking about ways of doing poetry using poetic techniques, a different story. Marcus: "How is it a different story? You talk about 'tools' and 'techniques' and not about the outcomes, the poems on the one hand or hitting a target with a projectile on the other. Your talk of 'tools' and 'techniques' makes me think you are eager to talk about the poetic equivalent of 'engineering advances', whatever those might be: mathemaku, perhaps, or those compressed word deals: you seem to be speaking of 'tools' and 'technical advances' in terms that are analogous to 'engineering advances'." Fair enough. But I'm really speaking of conceptual tools. A computer is an engineering tool that has helped poets (those into cyber-poetry, hypertexutuality, etc.) but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what rhyme was when it was new, and the mixing of visual images and text in visual poetry. That kind of thing. Me: "I would couple astronomers ... like whoever figured out how to use spectrography to determine astronomical distances with poets who find new poetic devices." Marcus: "Well, all right -- this seems to be getting us closer to what you mean: but what is 'a new poetic device' that is analogous to spectography? In other words, can you give an example of a paradigm-shifting combination of a new way to think about poetry and a new way to do poetry that makes subsequent poems that use such a combination significantly better at what you call, in the essay to which you referred us earlier, 'doing the job'?" I'm not sure what I said in my essay, but what I believe is that there are new poetic devices that allow poets to be better at doing their jobs because it gives them more tools to work with. I don't want to get in "paradigm-shifts" and that sort of thing. I don't see anything as paradigm- shifting, myself. I do believe that mixing visual images and text to make visual poetry, though not entirely new to this century, is a significant innovation away from free verse, which was a significant innovation away from what I call songmode poetry (formal poetry). It is significant because obviously very overtly different--so much so that many traditionalists won't even grant that visual poetry is poetry; but significant also because yielding so many new ways of exploiting words--using their appearance on the page the way poets have long used their sound, for instance, and by giving text something to react away from or with, etc. I think the way infraverbal poets use spelling to do more than simply show pronunciation is likewise significantly different from anything previous poets were doing. Certainly, using mathematical symbols and operations, as I do in my mathemaku, is a significantly different way of doing poetry (however questionable it may turn out aesthetically). There are other innovations going on that are comparable that I know less about, but they all result in poetry that is recognizably different from even free verse, and which has strengths unknown to other poetries. > > (One problem is the difference between theoretical > > astronomers and practical astronomers.)<< > > Isn't this analogous to the difference between theoretical poets > (critics) and practical ones (poets)? I think I later make that same point. snip. Bob Grumman: "Okay, maybe the choice of words is wrong, I don't know. Actually, my usual boiler-plate uses 'craft-extending,' but that probably sounds as bad, from your point of view." Marcus: "Well, for now I'm just trying to understand what your point of view is without committing myself; you may persuade me that your point of view is more reasonable than mine." You'd be the first I ever did! Marcus: "It seemed to me that you were saying, using the gun analogy again, that "advancing the craft" or "extending the craft" would explicitly be inventing *new* techniques, and explicitly *not* using existing techniques to make better guns -- that no one could claim to be "advancing the craft" of gun-making *unless* he or she invented some *new technique* or *new tool*. I thought you were saying that absent a new technique or tool *even if the gun were better made* there could have been *no advancement in craft* -- no advancement in the craft of gun-making." I said making better guns without inventing new techniques for gun-making would be improving guns but NOT the craft of gun-making. I believe better and better use of received poetic devices can result in better poems but not extend the craft of poetry-making. I think a good analogy is one I used before: there was a standard way to high jump before Fosbury. Everyone did it more or less the same way, and high jumpers kept raising the record. I say they improved high jumping without improving the craft of high jumping. Fosbury came along with the Fosbury flop, a new way of high jumping, and advanced the craft. He didn't even get a world record, I don't believe, though I think he won the Olympics. Bu he gave jumpers a new way of high jumping that, I believe, is still considered the best way. There is a lot wrong with this analogy in the case of poetry, because it's cut and dry as to which way of jumping is better. In poetry, the equivalent of the flop would be used to make new kinds of poems that would not replace the old, only give people a wider range of poetries. > So, for example, if the standard for drilling a gun barrel were to be > accurate to within one hundredth of an inch of accuracy and some > gun maker were to decide to drill his or her gun barrels to within > one one thousandth of an inch of accuracy, you would have to > argue that there was no advance in the craft of gun-making > because he or she was simply still drilling a gun barrel, albeit more > accurately. And even though the gun would be more accurate, do > its job better, and all-around be preferred over the older guns, you > would have to say that there had been no advance in the craft. Yes. Except that I'd say, "no SIGNIFICANT advance." > But, it seems to me, the moment that instead of merely *deciding* > to apply stricter standards the gun-maker used a jig to steady his > hand, *then* he would have advanced the craft of gun-making. Is > that right? That makes sense to me, assuming the use of the jig was a new idea and alowed for the making of better guns. > MB: > > > But to say that Frost didn't advance the craft > > > seems to be more an illustration of lack of > > > familiarity with the range of Frost's work, from, > > > for example, "The Telephone" to "The Subverted > > > Flower", or from "My Butterfly" to "The Most Of It". > > > The notion that the latter of either of those > > > two pairings is no advance in the craft of poetry in > > > English, as well as an advance in an individual's craftsmanship, > > > seems to indicate such a different understanding of what "craft" is, > > > and of what "advancing the craft" is, from my understanding of it > > > that all I can do is ask you to explain in more detail what you mean > > > by "craft" and "advancing the craft" that makes you think that Frost > > > didn't "advance the craft". Can you illustrate your meaning in words > > > of one syllable so I can understand? > > BG: > > It's hard. My problem is, again, if Frost advanced the craft, > > then what great poet did not?<< I'd make that, "what GOOD poet did not"--and maybe even, "what poet not copying other poets word for word, did not, since everyone writing original poetry will do something new?" > Just so. But isn't that pretty much the standard by which we > denote a "great poet" -- that after such a poet everyone who wrote > poetry seriously had to take that poet's work into close and serious > account? Not sure about that. I'd say serious poets thereafter would be helped by studying that poet, but one can become a great poet and ignore previous great poets. Anyway, I'm concerned with what a poet adds to the poet's tool-kit. A bad poet may add tools many can use to good effect; a great poet may add no tools. I would say something like a serious would-be poet should go to many poets to see how those poets used rhyme, meter, etc., and to poets like Cummings to get additional techniques--as well as learn how to use them. > BG: > > Using Frost as an example, I would claim (after reading a > > lot of his work but not analyzing it) that he never > > invented anything like Cummings's breaking words into > > fragments to release interior words.<< > > I would argue, on the contrary, that Frost's work was more > thoroughly revolutionary because he invented modern poetry: > poetry that no serious reader could take as simply saying what it > said and that's all. Prior to Frost many poets had been > occasionally ironic or had hidden other levels of meaning in their > work from time to time, but it was Frost who made ironists of us all. No time to argue all that. Offhand I have trouble believing it but even if it were true, you're talking about point-of-view, which is personality-related, and for me all you're saying is that he, like all poets, brought a unique personality to his poetry. Anyway, you haven't said Frost invented some new technique as I claim Cummings did. Irony is not a new technique. Oh, and there are many serious poets who don't use irony. Haiku rarely does, but has multiple levels of meaning, when done effectively. > While one can read a Frost poem perfectly literally (as my mother > in law always does) on a superficial level (and his earliest poems > are more likely to be only superficial) none of us who claim to be > good readers can ever trust Frost to be saying *only* what he > seems to be saying on the surface. The "advancement of craft" that > I see in that is just that no poet after Frost could fail to try to say > more than merely the surface stuff if he or she wanted to be taken > seriously as a poet. If that's not an advancement of the craft, what > is? Sorry, but to me poets have had levels of meaning for a long time, irony being one long-used way of multiplying meaning. But I guess, as I said in my previous post, that I probably need a better term, one that means craft-extending-through- innovation or the like. So we'd have that and other means of extending craft. > BG: > > Maybe I should use "technique-adding" instead of > > "craft extending" or "craft-advancing?" The problem > > with that is that "technique-adding" would not apply > > to the first wave of people using a new technique. > > They aren't inventors but do advance new techniques > > in a way I don't think later waves (except very rarely) > > can. And often the inventor of a technique can't use > > it well, which makes the first person to use it well > > as important as the inventor. "Innovative-technique-using" > > would get it right, but it's very awkward. . . . I can't > > say "innovation-using" because you guys would say Frost > > used meter innovatively, or the like.<< > > First, perhaps we can dispense with the notion of "you guys", here. > I'm not sure we're not "us guys". I'm asking you to clarify what you > mean, not challenging your conclusions. I may challenge your > conclusions (and I may be wrong if I do), but I may not (and I may > be wrong in that, too). > > Second, once again I don't understand what you're talking about > when you say "innovative technique" -- to me this sounds like > "engineering advance". It sounds as if you are referring to pretty > significant things, to things that are paradigm-shifting or at least > view-point-shifting, and not to relative trivialities such as > spreading the typography across the page or condensing two > or more words into one. After all, condensing a word isn't > new at all, as CS Calverley told us: Amusing Calverley poem that shows he had infraverbal leanings but infraverbal poetry is much more than condensing words--it's poetry that is focused on what can be done inside words, and it doesn't discuss what can be done with words, but does with words. You can feel free not to think much of infraverbal techniques, but my point is that they are different than previous techniques in poetry, and result in recongizably different kinds of poems. Ditto scattering letters, as Cummings did. Why would you be sure these techniques are more trivial than putting words that sound similar together? --Bob G. From mbales at cybergate.net Sun Apr 8 10:14:51 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 10:14:51 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <3ACFCA0F.7E41@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: BG: > ... I'm really speaking of conceptual tools.<< All right -- but that confuses me more once again, because I don't understand any better what you mean by "conceptual tools" with regard to poetry than I understand what you mean by "advancing the craft" or "technique-extending" or "significant advance" or "innovative-technique-using". It seems that whenever I get close to understanding what you mean it turns out you mean something else. BG: > A computer is an engineering tool that has > helped poets (those into cyber-poetry, hypertexutuality, > etc.) but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking > about what rhyme was when it was new, and the mixing of > visual images and text in visual poetry. That kind of thing.<< But how is cyber-poetry, and especially hypertextuality, *not* the kind of thing "rhyme was when it was new"? Perhaps we should talk about the point of doing things such as using rhyme or hypertextuality or mixing visual images -- the outcome, the result. What's the point of writing poetry at all? Can't we say something like this: that the reason to write poetry is to communicate from the writer to the reader in a more effective way than ordinary means? And isn't that analogous to the idea that the point of something like a gun is to deliver a projectile across distance accurately to a target? If so, then, it seems to me, it doesn't matter whether the gunsmith more accurately bores his barrels using a jig or not -- if the more accurately bored barrels deliver the projectile more accurately, or further, or more reliably, or faster, or some combination of those. In that case can't we say he has "advanced the craft" irrespective of whether he has used the "conceptual tool" of saying "I'm going to demand of myself that my barrels will be bored to with one one thousandth of an inch of accuracy instead of one one hundredth" or whether he has used a physical tool, a jig for example, to achieve the same end? But in this analogy we're back, it seems to me, to the question of what it is that you call "the job" of poetry is. You elide that notion quickly in your essay, and part of my purpose here is to ask you to state clearly what "the job of poetry" is, as you see it, because that may help me to understand what you mean by "tool" and "technique" and "advance" and "extend" and "craft". BG: > I'm not sure what I said in my essay, but what I believe is > that there are new poetic devices that allow poets to > be better at doing their jobs because it gives them more > tools to work with.<< But this statement is merely an identity statement, and otherwise empty in the context. You are, in short, begging the question: you are once again eliding the notion of what "the job of poetry" is by claiming that whatever it is if poets have more tools they can get it done better. But since you don't say what "the job of poetry" is we don't know whether the tools you're proposing are appropriate to the job or not. You may be proposing hammers to install glass or glazing points to install drywall -- and all the hammers in the world won't make it any easier to glaze a window.. BG: > ... I do believe that mixing visual images > and text to make visual poetry, though not entirely new > to this century, is a significant innovation away from > free verse, which was a significant innovation away from > what I call songmode poetry (formal poetry).<< Well, "mixing visual images and text" sounds like a good description of newspaper journalism to me, right on the face of it, without any further description of what "the job" is that you are proposing be done. How do you distinguish everyday newspaper journalism from the sort of poetry that mixes visual images and text? As for "free verse", I think we all agree that that is a misnomer because the official position of free verse advocates seems always to be that each poem has a form that fits it uniquely; that every word in free verse is as carefully chosen as every word in formal verse; indeed, that there is no conceptual difference between free verse and formal verse except that the former doesn't rhyme or have a formal rhythm. Free verse writers, if I understand the position correctly, claim that they have done *nothing* differently in regards to "doing the job of poetry". They claim to be "doing the job of poetry", don't they -- delivering the projectile to the target, as it were? But your talk of "advance" and "extending", and your use of the Fosbury Flop as a metaphor, seem to argue that newer techniques or tools are *better* at "doing the job of poetry" and, thus, ought to be adopted by those who don't want to get left behind in "doing the job of poetry". And so we're back to the question of what IS the "job of poetry" that you are arguing is better done with newer techniques? BG: > It is > significant because obviously very overtly different--so > much so that many traditionalists won't even grant that > visual poetry is poetry; but significant also because > yielding so many new ways of exploiting words--using their > appearance on the page the way poets have long used their > sound, for instance, and by giving text something to react > away from or with, etc.<< I think the problem with this argument is one of priority: when it comes to the notion of words, sound is simply prior to sight. We learn the notion of "word", of sound to denote (and also connote, but at first merely denote) meaning long before we learn to read, in whatever language, or languages, we are raised in. The idea that sounds can have not just meaning but meanings; that sounds strung together have yet different and more, even changeable and ambiguous, meanings, is a profound one. But reading and writing are not necessary conditions of human speech, and so changing the typography or the layout, or adding pictures to the text -- the relationship between vision and the meaning of words -- does not seem to me to be primary in the way that sound -- the relationship between sound and meaning of words -- is primary. It seems to me, then, that using visual techniques isn't so much a matter of "advancement of craft" as it is something akin to engraving the outside of the gun barrel or inlaying the stock: it doesn't make the gun any more accurate (no better as a gun) but it makes it look prettier. BG: > I think the way infraverbal poets > use spelling to do more than simply show pronunciation > is likewise significantly different from anything previous poets > were doing.<< Once again, this seems to be mere puzzle-making, more the sort of thing that crosswords and acrostics are doing, than poetry- making. But before we can address this issue seriously we must get a clear description from you of what "the job of poetry" is sothat we can see what it is that you think that job is. Perhaps you think "the job of poetry" and "the job of puzzle-making" are the same. BG: > Certainly, using mathematical symbols and > operations, as I do in my mathemaku, is a significantly > different way of doing poetry << Significantly different from what? What is "the job of poetry" -- what is "doing poetry"? And within "the job of poetry" how is mathemaku "significantly different" in accomplishing that job from, say, a sonnet? BG: > ... There are other innovations > going on that are comparable that I know less about, but > they all result in poetry that is recognizably different > from even free verse, and which has strengths unknown to > other poetries.<< Well, I'd be interested in finding out from you what those strengths "unknown to other poetries" are that you say free verse has, or that "other innovations" have. Some apposite examples would be very useful, here. BG: > I said making better guns without inventing new techniques > for gun-making would be improving guns but NOT the > craft of gun-making.<< But what do you aver is a "new technique"? Continuing the questions about the metaphor of gun-making for poetry, is engraving the gun barrel a "new technique"? Or are you talking about things such as smoothbore vs. rifling such that no metallurgical improvements in a smoothbore are really "new techniques of gun-making" or no difference between powderpan and flintlock is really a "new technique of gun-making"? I'm still stumped by not understanding where you are going with this notion of "new technique" because I don't clearly see what you mean by "new technique" in poetry. BG: > I believe better and better use > of received poetic devices can result in better poems > but not extend the craft of poetry-making.<< Well, I may be willing to go this far with you -- if you can explain to me what you mean by "the craft of poetry-making". BG: > I think a > good analogy is one I used before: there was a standard way > to high jump before Fosbury...Fosbury came along with the > Fosbury flop, a new way of high jumping, and advanced the > craft.<< But don't you see that this analogy clearly implies a *replacement* of one technique by another in the interests of "advancement"? If you're going to claim, as you claim here, that one technique is *better* than another, that one technique should *replace* another, you can only reasonably claim that if and only if you have a way to evaluate "better" that almost everyone agrees with: the height of a bar to jump over, for example. And that means that you have to be able to so clearly articulate "the job of poetry" that almost everyone agrees with your description, and that those who take poetry as seriously as competitive athletes take high-jumping are all trying to "do the [same] job of poetry". So, then, what is "the job of poetry"? BG: > There is a lot wrong with this analogy in the case of poetry, > because it's cut and dry as to which way of jumping is > better. In poetry, the equivalent of the flop would be > used to make new kinds of poems that would not replace the > old, only give people a wider range of poetries.<< Well, again, when you talk about "advancing the craft" and such it is nearly inescapable that you are indeed talking about something pretty cut and dried in the way of "the job of poetry" and about replacement of one technique with another. If you don't want your interlocutors to think that you're advocating "advancement" within a measurable goal, and "replacement" of one technique with another, why not find a way to propose the "wider range of poetries" that doesn't advocate "advancing the craft" or the like? BG: > ... Anyway, I'm concerned > with what a poet adds to the poet's tool-kit.<< Well, here we're back to another metaphor: one that seems to assume there is one kind of poetry but many tools, as opposed to what you said above that seemed to assume there are many poetries and many tools. How are you thinking about this "poet's took-kit"? Is it more like "a glazer's tool-kit" which would differ from "a carpenter's tool-kit" which would differ from "a plumber's tool-kit"? BG: > ... You > can feel free not to think much of infraverbal techniques, > but my point is that they are different than previous > techniques in poetry, and result in recongizably > different kinds of poems. Ditto scattering letters, > as Cummings did. Why would you be sure these techniques > are more trivial than putting words that sound similar > together?<< They are not necessarily more trivial than assonance or rhyme, but without some sort of understanding about what you mean by "the job of poetry" I'm not sure we can get very far in deciding whether scattering letters "advances the craft". So, what is "the job of poetry"? mbales at cybergate.net From michael.ritchie at mail.atu.edu Sun Apr 8 09:56:56 2001 From: michael.ritchie at mail.atu.edu (Michael Karl Ritchie) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 08:56:56 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Robert Hass Message-ID: Does anyone know of an article or monograph that surveys and assesses Robert Hass's achievement through his four published collections? Thanks, Gray Jacobik Try Thomas Garnder, "Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining contemporary Poetry" Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999, where there is a chapter on Robert Hass. Michael Ritchie From michael.ritchie at mail.atu.edu Sun Apr 8 12:35:33 2001 From: michael.ritchie at mail.atu.edu (Michael Karl Ritchie) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 11:35:33 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Seamus Heaney: Electric Light Message-ID: Anybody want to comment on the Seamus Heaney poems posted from his new collection? As a classicist, I am most moved by the appearance of Virgil. Electric Light By SEAMUS HEANEY Farrar, Straus and Giroux At Toomebridge Where the flat water Came pouring over the weir out of Lough Neagh As if it had reached an edge of the flat earth And fallen shining to the continuous Present of the Bann. Where the checkpoint used to be. Where the rebel boy was hanged in '98. Where negative ions in the open air Are poetry to me. As once before The slime and silver of the fattened eel. Perch Perch on their water-perch hung in the clear Bann River Near the clay bank in alder-dapple and waver, Perch we called "grunts," little flood-slubs, runty and ready, I saw and I see in the river's glorified body That is passable through, but they're bluntly holding the pass, Under the water-roof, over the bottom, adoze, Guzzling the current, against it, all muscle and slur In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air That is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on hold In the everything flows and steady go of the world. Lupins They stood. And stood for something. Just by standing. In waiting. Unavailable. But there For sure. Sure and unbending. Rose-fingered dawn's and navy midnight's flower. Seed packets to begin with, pink and azure, Sifting lightness and small jittery promise: Lupin spires, erotics of the future, Lip-brush of the blue and earth's deep purchase. O pastel turrets, pods and tapering stalks That stood their ground for all our summer wending And even when they blanched would never balk. And none of this surpassed our understanding. Out of the Bag I All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag. He'd arrive with it, disappear to the room And by the time he'd reappear to wash Those nosy, rosy, big, soft hands of his In the scullery basin, its lined insides (The colour of a spaniel's inside lug) Were empty for all to see, the trap-sprung mouth Unsnibbed and gaping wide. Then like a hypnotist Unwinding us, he'd wind the instruments Back into their lining, tie the cloth Like an apron round itself, Darken the door and leave With the bag in his hand, a plump ark by the keel ... Until the next time came and in he'd come In his fur-lined collar that was also spaniel-coloured And go stooping up to the room again, a whiff Of disinfectant, a Dutch interior gleam Of waistcoat satin and highlights on the forceps. Getting the water ready, that was next- Not plumping hot, and not lukewarm, but soft, Sud-luscious, saved for him from the rain-butt And savoured by him afterwards, all thanks Denied as he towelled hard and fast, Then held his arms out suddenly behind him To be squired and silk-lined into the camel coat. At which point he once turned his eyes upon me, Hyperborean, beyond-the-north-wind blue, Two peepholes to the locked room I saw into Every time his name was mentioned, skimmed Milk and ice, swabbed porcelain, the white And chill of tiles, steel hooks, chrome surgery tools And blood dreeps in the sawdust where it thickened At the foot of each cold wall. And overhead The little, pendent, teat-hued infant parts Strung neatly from a line up near the ceiling- A toe, a foot and shin, an arm, a cock A bit like the rosebud in his buttonhole. II Poeta doctus Peter Levi says Sanctuaries of Asclepius (called asclepions) Were the equivalent of hospitals In ancient Greece. Or of shrines like Lourdes, Says poeta doctus Graves. Or of the cure By poetry that cannot be coerced, Say I, who realized at Epidaurus That the whole place was a sanatorium With theatre and gymnasium and baths, A site of incubation, where "incubation" Was technical and ritual, meaning sleep When epiphany occurred and you met the god ... Hatless, groggy, shadowing myself As the thurifer I was in an open air procession In Lourdes in '56 When I nearly fainted from the heat and fumes, Again I nearly fainted as I bent To pull a bunch of grass and hallucinated Doctor Kerlin at the steamed-up glass Of our scullery window, starting in to draw With his large pink index finger dot-faced men With button-spots in a straight line down their fronts And women with dot breasts, giving them all A set of droopy sausage-arms and legs That soon began to run. And then as he dipped and laved In the generous suds again, miraculum: The baby bits all came together swimming Into his soapy big hygienic hands And I myself came to, blinded with sweat, Blinking and shaky in the windless light. III Bits of the grass I pulled I posted off To one going into chemotherapy And one who had come through. I didn't want To leave the place or link up with the others. It was mid-day, mid-May, pre-tourist sunlight In the precincts of the god, The very site of the temple of Asclepius. I wanted nothing more than to lie down Under hogweed, under seeded grass And to be visited in the very eye of the day By Hygeia, his daughter, her name still clarifying The haven of light she was, the undarkening door. IV The room I came from and the rest of us all came from Stays pure reality where I stand alone, Standing the passage of time, and she's asleep In sheets put on for the doctor, wedding presents That showed up again and again, bridal And usual and useful at births and deaths. Me at the bedside, incubating for real, Peering, appearing to her as she closes And opens her eyes, then lapses back Into a faraway smile whose precinct of vision I would enter every time, to assist and be asked In that hoarsened whisper of triumph, "And what do you think Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all When I was asleep?" Bann Valley Eclogue Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus -VIRGIL, Eclogue IV POET: Bann Valley Muses, give us a song worth singing, Something that rises like the curtain in Those words And it came to pass or In the beginning. Help me to please my hedge-schoolmaster Virgil And the child that's due. Maybe, heavens, sing Better times for her and her generation. VIRGIL: Here are my words you'll have to find a place for: Carmen, ordo, nascitur, saeculum, gens. Their gist in your tongue and province should be clear Even at this stage. Poetry, order, the times, The nation, wrong and renewal, then an infant birth And a flooding away of all the old miasma. Whatever stains you, you rubbed it into yourselves: Earth mark, birth mark, mould like the bloodied mould On Romulus's ditch-back. But when the waters break Banns stream will overflow, the old markings Will avail no more to keep east bank from west. The valley will be washed like the new baby. POET: Pacatum orbem: your words are too much nearly. Even "orb" by itself. What on earth could match it? And then, last month, at noon-eclipse, wind dropped. A millennial chill, birdless and dark, prepared. A firstness steadied, a lastness, a born awareness As name dawned into knowledge: I saw the orb. VIRGIL: Eclipses won't be for this child. The cool she'll know Will be the pram hood over her vestal head. Big dog daisies will get fanked up in the spokes. She'll lie on summer evenings listening to A chug and slug going on in the milking parlour. Let her never hear close gunfire or explosions. POET: Why do I remember St. Patrick's mornings, Being sent by my mother to the railway line For the little trefoil, untouchable almost, the shamrock With its twining, binding, creepery, tough, thin roots All over the place, in the stones between the sleepers. Dew-scales shook off the leaves. Tear-ducts asperging. Child on the way, it won't be long until You land among us. Your mother's showing signs, Out for her sunset walk among big round bales. Planet earth like a teething ring suspended Hangs by its world-chain. Your pram waits in the corner. Cows are let out. They're sluicing the milk-house floor. Montana The stable door was open, the upper half, When I looked back. I was five years old And Dologhan stood watching me go off, John Dologhan, the best milker ever To come about the place. He sang "The Rose of Mooncoin" with his head to the cow's side. He would spin his table knife and when the blade Stopped with its point towards me, a bright path Opened between us like a recognition That made no sense, like my memory of him standing Behind the half door, holding up the winkers. Even then he was like an apparition, A rambler from the Free State and a gambler, All eyes as the pennies rose and slowed On Sunday mornings under Butler's Bridge And downed themselves into that tight-bunched crowd Of the pitch-and-toss school. Sunlight on far lines, On the creosoted sleepers and hot stones. And Dologhan, who'd worked in Montana once, With the whole day off, in the cool shade of the arch. The Loose Box Back at the dark end, slats angled tautly down >From a breast-high beam to the foot of the stable wall- Silked and seasoned timber of the hayrack. Marsupial brackets ... And a deep-littered silence Off odourless, untainting, fibrous horsedung. * * * On an old recording Patrick Kavanagh states That there's health and worth in any talk about The properties of land. Sandy, glarry, Mossy, heavy, cold, the actual soil Almost doesn't matter; the main thing is An inner restitution, a purchase come by By pacing it in words that make you feel You've found your feet in what "surefooted" means And in the ground of your own understanding- Like Heracles stepping in and standing under Atlas's sky-lintel, as earthed and heady As I am when I talk about the loose box. * * * And they found the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes And laid in a manger. But the plaster child in nappies, Bare baby-breasted little rigor vitae, Crook-armed, seed-nailed, nothing but gloss and chill- He wasn't right at all. And no hayrack To be seen. The solid stooping shepherds, The stiff-lugged donkey, Joseph, Mary, each Figure in the winter crib was well And truly placed. There was even real straw On the side-altar. And an out-of-scale, Too crockery, kneeling cow. And fairy lights. But no, no fodder-billowed armfuls spilling over ... At the altar rail I knelt and learnt almost Not to admit the let-down to myself. * * * Stable child, grown stabler when I read In adolescence Thomas dolens Hardy- Not, oddly enough, his Christmas Eve night-piece About the oxen in their bedded stall, But the threshing scene in Tess of the D'Urbervilles- That magnified my soul. Raving machinery, The thresher bucking sky, rut-shuddery, A headless Trojan horse expelling straw >From where the head should be, the underjaws Like staircases set champing-it hummed and slugged While the big sag and slew of the canvas belt That would cut your head off if you didn't watch Flowed from the flywheel. And comes flowing back, The whole mote-sweaty havoc and mania Of threshing day, the feeders up on top Like pyre-high Aztec priests gutting forked sheaves And paying them ungirded to the drum. Slack of gulped straw, the belly-taut of seedbags. And in the stilly night, chaff piled in ridges, Earth raw where the four wheels rocked and battled. * * * Michael Collins, ambushed at Beal na Blath, At the Pass of Flowers, the Blossom Gap, his own Bloom-drifted, soft Avernus-mouth, Has nothing to hold on to and falls again Willingly, lastly, foreknowledgeably deep Into the hay-floor that gave once in his childhood Down through the bedded mouth of the loft trapdoor, The loosening fodder-chute, the aftermath ... This has been told of Collins and retold By his biographer: One of his boy-deeds Was to enter the hidden jaws of that hay crevasse And get to his feet again and come unscathed Through a dazzle of pollen scarves to breathe the air. True or not true, the fall within his fall, That drop through the flower-floor lets him find his feet In an underworld of understanding Better than any newsreel lying-in-state Or footage of the laden gun-carriage And grim cortege could ever manage to. Or so it can be stated In the must and drift of talk about the loose box. (C) 2001 Seamus Heaney All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-374-14683-7 From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 8 13:38:23 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2001 13:38:23 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3AD0A20F.6A5E@nut-n-but.net> I'm going to snip a lot and paraphrase what you've said, Marcus. Apologies if I get things wrong, but our exchange is getting cluttered. About conceptual tools in poetry--things like rhyme, metaphor, etc, as opposed to things like paper and pencil. The techniques of cyber-poetry ARE exactly what rhyme was when new. Something a poet can use to make his poetry say more (from his point of view). The cyber-techniques are still new enough (I guess--I'm no expert in them) so that poets working with them can advance the craft by finding significantly new ways of using them. Rhyme is too old for that any longer to occur *in my opinion.* It's a simple difference between someone's doing something that we praise because of how well he does it versus someone's doing something that we praise because no one we know ever did it that way before. The point of poetry, for me, is to build works of beauty through the use of words (and whatever else we can add). The more accurately the poet says what he wants to, the better, of course. But with an artist, it is also true that the more differently he succeeds in communicating what he wants to, the better. The job of poetry, for me, is to concentrate as much beauty in as small a space as possible through the use of words and whatever else helps--without taking over for the words, which must be central for the result to be called a poem. I don't want at this time to say much more about this but to try to show what I mean, I'll say that rhymes help toward this by allowing a poet to make his artwork auditorily beautiful at the same time that it presents a beautiful expression of reality conceptually. That is, a rhyme gives you the denotation of the words involved in it PLUS their pleasingly like sound. Two pleasures in one space. More tools like rhyme give a poet more ways to do this. A visual poet, using visio-poetic techniques, can give us the pleasure of a word's denotations PLUS the pleasure of its visual appearance on the page. If the word rhymes with another word, he can give us three pleasures in one space. Another consideration (and I don't have time to get my thoughts on this organized, so please be patient if my thoughts go disconnected at times) is avoiding the over-familiar. A main reason free verse took over from rhyme is that rhymes were becoming too expected. Free verse started by being a welcome relief from rhyme in many cases. I believe that rhyme is making a comeback because (1) rhymers realize they have to try harder to avoid love/aboves and (2) because enough poems don't rhyme to make its occurence once again not too expected to be pleasurable. In short, new devices contribute to the maximization of beauty in poetry by giving poets ways to avoid over-used old techniques. A poet has two choices: to try to use a much-used technique so well, it doesn't bore his audience, or to replace it--at least sometimes--with other techniques. (One of the unfortunate aspects of all avant gardes is their tendency to want to wholly replace old techniques instead of adding to them, something I've always spoken out against, and in my own practice as a poet try to avoid doing.) For how I distinguish mixing visual images and text in poetry from newspaper journalism see my essay on taxonomy at my poetry site, URL below. Basically, I say poetry is more than captioned pictures, or illustrated texts, as journalistic visio-textual mixtures mostly are. But the latter also use poetry techniques, just as they often use rhyme and other standard poetry techniques. Oh, the main difference is that journalism is what I call informrature (when it is factual) and advocature (when it is propagandistic), not literature. My essay explains it. Free verse poets are not classiformular the way formal poets are. There are many other differences between them and formal poets. "Free verse" is no misnomer for me though I call conventional free verse "plaintext poetry" in my taxonomy to distinguish it from the free verse that language poetry, for instance, also is. > But your talk of "advance" and "extending", and your use of the > Fosbury Flop as a metaphor, Not a metaphor but an example of the kind of thing that is what I call a technical extension of a craft. You're nitpicking by deciding that because the flop is a better way of jumping higher, I mean that new techniques in poetry also result in better poetry. Poetry is different from high jumping in that it does not have one objectively judgeable purpose. Full examples of new techniques to technically advance a craft the way the poetry techniques I favor do would have to come from other arts. Jackson Pollock's drip technique is one such. The resulting paintings are different from any before; a painting can be danced out. Etc. (No, I won't start defending Pollock here--although he is one of my all-time favorite artists in any field.) The result is not a higher jump but a different jump. And the tools used have been exploited by other painters, like David Salle, who has used it with representational painting the way I hope poets of the future will use rhyme, meter, infra-verbal techniques, visio-poetic techniques, mathematical operations, and so forth, all in the same poems without thinking much about it (or concentrate on a single technique in a poem, which can also produce beauty no other way of doing poetry can) About whether sound is more primary than sight in language, who cares? I'm sure it's more primary than conceptualization, too. So should we eschew metaphor as trivial? I say making aesthetic use of the way words look on a page can be as valuable as making use of the way they sound. For me they definitely do. I know that to others it's not true. Aside from that, visual poems have sound, too. What you say about visio-poetic techniques being only able to make poems look prettier equals my saying (for purposes of argument not because I believe it) that rhyme only makes poems sound prettier. To which I add that "just" making poems look or sound prettier is important. But visio-poetic techniques at their best can be used in metaphors dependent on both the words involved and the graphics. You're pretty consistently saying no more than that you don't like the new techniques I favor. Yes, you can say that some infraverbal poems are too much mere puzzles (or as I sometimes worry myself too much items on an IQ test), but that kind of thing, I repeat, can be said about any kind of poetry: Frost's work, for instance, is just a bunch of pretty-sounding jingles. I think respect for others requires us to assume that people claiming to get something significant out of a kind of art we don't are sincere and basing their appreciation on something that the art truly does viscerally to them (and all art is in the final analysis visceral) rather than assuming that because we don't share their appreciation, they are faking it in one way or another. I do think poems are, in part, puzzles. If a poem is immediately clear, it is probably not much good. The best problems raise questions, force exploration, need reflection. A poem that is overtly a puzzle, too, can be fun, and fund should not be barred from poetry. It's all a matter of balancing the puzzle-aspect against other aspects, and deciding who your audience is. My work is mainly for more conceptual people than Rod McKuen's is, for instance. Using mathematical symbols and operations in poetry is significantly different from using only words because, uh, math looks different, establishes a different tone, requires a different thought process, allows new kinds of metaphors, etc. No examples. For examples, go to my essay. Or previous posts of mine to this discussion group. Hmmm, I seem to have run into a lot of repeated questions. Anyway, this is as far as I can go with you this time, Marcus. --Bob G. -------------- next part -------------- Bob Grumman BobGrumman at Nut-N-But.Net http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492 Comprepoetica, the Poetry-Data-Collection Site From JforJames at aol.com Sun Apr 8 14:04:28 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 14:04:28 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream Message-ID: <6c.954c36c.2802022c@aol.com> Bob & Marcus, I wonder if it wouldn't help to divide innovation into two subcategories: 1) Innovative technique 2) Innovative approach I would use innovative technique to identify specific changes in the ways words are laid down on the page, and thus affect our reading of the work. Innovative approach, more broadly, involves changing the way we apprehend (& sometimes comprehend) the poem as whole. Obviously the two bleed into one another in certain poems. But I think of Williams' radical linebreaks as an innovative technique. While his approach was innovative when he disrupted the conventional notion of what was suitable, or even sufficient, subject matter for a poem. Finnegan From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 8 14:42:42 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2001 14:42:42 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: <6c.954c36c.2802022c@aol.com> Message-ID: <3AD0B122.6BA4@nut-n-but.net> > Bob & Marcus, > I wonder if it wouldn't help to divide > innovation into two subcategories: > 1) Innovative technique > 2) Innovative approach > I would use innovative technique > to identify specific changes > in the ways words are laid down > on the page, and thus affect > our reading of the work. > Innovative approach, more broadly, > involves changing the way we > apprehend (& sometimes comprehend) > the poem as whole. Obviously the > two bleed into one another in certain > poems. But I think of Williams' > radical linebreaks as an innovative > technique. While his approach was > innovative when he disrupted the > conventional notion of what was suitable, > or even sufficient, subject matter > for a poem. > Finnegan I would agree that something along these lines would be useful. Too blank in the head to say much more right now--except that I would want to make changes in both definitions. Not sure "approach" is as good a word for what we want as there is, either, but can't think of a better. --Bob G. From gray at grayjacobik.com Sun Apr 8 15:01:48 2001 From: gray at grayjacobik.com (Gray Jacobik) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 15:01:48 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Robert Hass References: Message-ID: <02ee01c0c05e$5de4abe0$c5e7fc40@emilydickenson> Many thanks, Michael. Gray ----- Original Message ----- From: Michael Karl Ritchie To: Sent: Sunday, April 08, 2001 9:56 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Robert Hass > Does anyone know of an article or monograph that surveys and assesses > Robert Hass's achievement through his four published collections? > > Thanks, > > Gray Jacobik > > Try Thomas Garnder, "Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining contemporary Poetry" > Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999, where there is a chapter on > Robert Hass. > > Michael Ritchie > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sun Apr 8 15:35:13 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 14:35:13 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Innovation In-Reply-To: <6c.954c36c.2802022c@aol.com> Message-ID: I'll confess I've not been following this current go-round too closely, so apologies if the following is repetitious. But this distinction drawn by Finnegan has the advantage, to my eyes, of applying quite well to an arch-formalista such as Frost. He innovated in technique when he achieved a radically colloquial blank verse previously unknown to the tradition; and he innovated in approach in fashioning a modern (post-Darwinian, post-Freudian) version of pastoral, among other things. I've enjoyed teaching early Williams and Frost side by side because of their similarities as much as their differences, actually. I like Finnegan's formulation because I personally am not too interested in any concept of innovation which includes Williams but excludes Frost. Many tools in the toolkit, after all, and many babies in the bathwater hurled out by some modernists and their heirs. David Graham ______________________ >Bob & Marcus, >I wonder if it wouldn't help to divide >innovation into two subcategories: >1) Innovative technique >2) Innovative approach >I would use innovative technique >to identify specific changes >in the ways words are laid down >on the page, and thus affect >our reading of the work. >Innovative approach, more broadly, >involves changing the way we >apprehend (& sometimes comprehend) >the poem as whole. Obviously the >two bleed into one another in certain >poems. But I think of Williams' >radical linebreaks as an innovative >technique. While his approach was >innovative when he disrupted the >conventional notion of what was suitable, >or even sufficient, subject matter >for a poem. >Finnegan > __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From DICK at watson.ibm.com Sun Apr 8 15:54:46 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 01 15:54:46 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <200104081956.PAA18516@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> >>A Magnet >> >> >>Since she was two, it had held up her end >>on the door of the fridge: a plywood magnet stamped >>with the fingerpainted imprint of her hand. >>Essence-of-kid, all cheerfulness, in a pure >>nursery red, it stood for her signature >>and seemed, back then, to raise itself in greeting. >> >>When was it that it started to wave goodbye? >>One day some sort of scrap it had always kept >>in lofty view--report card, shopping list, >>snapshot of somebody's new baby--slipped >>with it, cinematically, down the door >>like a climber's grip, failing along a rock face. >> >>--Demagnetized, of course, by the very years >>that made her real hands strong. I've placed it high, >>supporting nothing weightier than itself, >>against that time I'd sense in me a fainter >>grasp on the little girl who never crossed >>the street without my finger in her fist. R.S. Gwynn wrote: >>I like this poem quite a bit. One thing that interest me is how the >>pentameter get tighter as you move towards the end. Lots of anapests in the >>first stanza, fewer in the second, almost none in the third--a diminishing of >>the line itself that reflects the subject. You also get some nice sounds at >>the end that help the poem conclude: alliteration and the slant rhyme of >>"crossed" and "fist." The nice irony of "When was it when it started to wave >>goodbye" is wonderful. and >>Incidentally, has anyone else commented on this poem? I disagree with Sam on this one. This reads like totally inoffensive prose that has been chopped into lines of 10 syllables, give or take a few depending on where the words reach the end of the line. The anapests, iambs, etc. just fall where they may, to my ear. The substance of the poem is painfully sentimental; it makes me want to suggest to Ms. Salter that children can become much more enriching as they grow. Eventually they may even provide you with grandchildren, who are unalloyed joy. (Sentimentality has its place.) I have a real problem with "plywood magnet;" I suppose she means a piece of plywood with a magnet glued onto the back, but her phrase just sounds bad. And the magnet slipping "cinematically.... like a climber's grip, failing...." seems melodramatic in the kitchen. I didn't like this one. Will the "silent majority" vote? Richard From mbales at cybergate.net Sun Apr 8 16:28:57 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 16:28:57 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <3AD0A20F.6A5E@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: BG: > About conceptual tools in poetry--things like rhyme, > metaphor, etc, as opposed to things like paper and pencil.<< All right -- rhyme and metaphor, though, are pretty old conceptual tools. Aristotle talked about poetry being metaphorical; in fact, he said that what poets do that others don't (and what poetry does that other literary efforts don't) is create metaphors; talk about one thing in terms of another. BG: > The techniques of cyber-poetry ARE exactly what rhyme was > when new.<< Well, what is it that you think rhyme was when new? You keep making these begging-the-question statements. It would be useful if you'd take a moment to define or at least illustrate something of what you mean by references such as "what rhyme was when new". BG: > Something a poet can use to make his poetry > say more (from his point of view).<< As a rhetorical technique in English, rhyme, it seems to me, when well employed, lends a certain authority to the poem by virtue of word-manipulation. It is a claim to and, when well-done, a perception of articulateness that implies authenticity at least. So, it seems to me, rhyme is the sort of tool that poets use to make a claim to be speaking authoritatively just because rhyme is a hard thing to bring off with any sort of contemporary naturalness in English. What sort of technique do you think rhyme is or was? BG: > The cyber-techniques > are still new enough (I guess--I'm no expert in them) > so that poets working with them can advance the craft > by finding significantly new ways of using them.<< What cyber-techniques, for example; how are they used, for example, and what do you mean by "advance the craft" and "significantly new"? BG: > Rhyme > is too old for that any longer to occur *in my opinion.* > It's a simple difference between someone's doing something > that we praise because of how well he does it versus > someone's doing something that we praise because no one > we know ever did it that way before.<< Is mere newness for you a virtue irrespective of any context; irrespective of any outcome? BG: > The point of poetry, for me, is to build works of beauty > through the use of words (and whatever else we can add).<< But that would mean that nearly anything could be said to be poetry if the perpetrator claims it is beautiful. Or do you have a definition of beauty handy that would keep us from having to agree with a murderer who claimed that only the blood of innocents was beautiful, and only the act of killing an innocent and using the innocent blood to write poetry was beautiful? BG: > The more accurately the poet says what he wants to, the > better, of course. But with an artist, it is also true > that the more differently he succeeds in communicating what > he wants to, the better.<< Well, this certainly opens the doors of possibility! Just how differently? Can murder, can rape, can financial skulduggery, be said each to have a beauty of its own? Why stop with importing a few mathematical symbols, or scattering consonants freely about the page? Why stop with inserting a picture into the text? BG: > The job of poetry, for me, is to concentrate as much beauty in > as small a space as possible through the use of words and > whatever else helps--without taking over for the words, which > must be central for the result to be called a poem.<< Where's the line? Is Robert Indiana's "Love" a sculpture or a poem? Is Claes Oldenberg's "Free Stamp" a sculpture or a poem? Is the list of donors carved into the glass of the display at United Way a sculpture or a poem? Is it art at all? BG: > ... I'll say that rhymes help toward this by > allowing a poet to make his artwork auditorily beautiful at > the same time that it presents a beautiful expression of > reality conceptually. That is, a rhyme gives you the > denotation of the words involved in it PLUS their pleasingly > like sound. Two pleasures in one space.<< What about the pleasure of listening to an authoritatively articulate voice? I think you haven't thought this through completely; I think you haven't really identified what is that rhyme can do, or how it can do different things in different contexts. Not every rhyme is "pleasingly like" -- Yeat's "A Stick of Incense" doesn't rhyme, it seems to me, in a way that is "pleasingly like": Whence did all hat fury come? From terran at sirius.com Sun Apr 8 16:19:03 2001 From: terran at sirius.com (shep) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 13:19:03 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem In-Reply-To: <200104081956.PAA18516@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> References: <200104081956.PAA18516@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: For what it's worth I totally agree with D Watson. Sentimental, rhythmically uninteresting, and sloppy description on the plywood magnet. -shep From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 8 16:40:31 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2001 16:40:31 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <200104081956.PAA18516@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: <3AD0CCBF.1F64@nut-n-but.net> I found the poem sort of nice but basically free verse. I didn't understand the rationale of the end-rhymes and end-consonances. I thought the refrigerator magnet a good image, and reasonably well handled. The waving hand is the one daring thing in the poem--dangerously close to the maudlin, and surrealistic! But I liked it (barely). The rest of the comparisons were too like what almost anyone would say about a child's growing older, and away, in or out of a poem to make the poem special. I think that if the "meter" really started mostly anapaests and orderedly became mostly iambs, that might be interesting. It struck me a poet could do the same thing with rhymes: start the poem rhyming vigorously the way childhood rhymes; then fade into end-consonances, then finally become entirely blank verse at the end (assuming the poem had meter). --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 8 18:05:19 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2001 18:05:19 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3AD0E09F.B7B@nut-n-but.net> > Well, what is it that you think rhyme was when new? You keep > making these begging-the-question statements. It would be useful > if you'd take a moment to define or at least illustrate something of > what you mean by references such as "what rhyme was when > new". I've been doing this all along--or I'm incapable of doing it. Marcus: "What sort of technique do you think rhyme is or was?" Interesting thought that rhyme is used to convey technical mastery, or the authority thereof. I think rhyme is in poetry to sound nice and to formalize a poem, by which I mean to indicate that a poem is of a certain classical form. This allows it to say what the form tends to say generally. You use rhymes to make readers understand, for instance, that your poem is a sonnet which, in turn, gives your poem allusions to all the sonnets ever written. I think rhyme, too, is a device to make poetry more of a challenge and thus help a poet find new ways to say things, and saying something in a new way is an important feature of poetry (see Pope). There's much more to it, and I do think that demonstration of a kind of mastery is part of it. Don't have time to write a book, though. I'm skipping yet another request for definitions from Marcus. I'm not going to write a book here for him. I said I don't know enough about cyber-poetry to be able to say what's new about it, etc. I know there ARE new things being done with it. Me: "It's a simple difference between someone's doing something that we praise because of how well he does it versus someone's doing something that we praise because no one we know ever did it that way before." > Is mere newness for you a virtue irrespective of any context; > irrespective of any outcome? You seem to be trying to catch me in various errors, which isn't hard. Why not relax and try to follow what I'm obviously saying? Which in this case was, "It's a simple difference between someone's doing something OF VALUE that we praise because of how well he does it versus someone's doing something OF VALUE that we praise because no one we know ever did it that way before." But I DO take newness as a virtue, always, because it will either (1) lead to a valuable new way of doing something or (2) show us a new thing to avoid doing because it doesn't work. > > The point of poetry, for me, is to build works of beauty > > through the use of words (and whatever else we can add). Make that VERBAL beauty. And it's not intended to be a full definition, only an answer to a question you asked, Marcus. I consider it sufficient for this discussion. For a definition of beauty, use that which causes pleasure of the senses (mainly) for the majority of people, or which a consensus of serious scholars believes does. > Well, this certainly opens the doors of possibility! Just how > differently? Can murder, can rape, can financial skulduggery, be > said each to have a beauty of its own? Why stop with importing a > few mathematical symbols, or scattering consonants freely about > the page? Why stop with inserting a picture into the text? Marcus, I'm wobbling. You're just too sharp for me. I'm about to have to admit I just don't have any idea what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, I'll keep talking, anyway. > Where's the line? Is Robert Indiana's "Love" a sculpture or a > poem? Is Claes Oldenberg's "Free Stamp" a sculpture or a poem? > Is the list of donors carved into the glass of the display at United > Way a sculpture or a poem? Is it art at all? At the borders of all definitions there are problems. I consider Indiana's artwork a visual poem. Can't bring to mind "free stamp." The list of donors is informrature, not literature or sculpture: it seeks mainly to inform rather than be beautiful. > What about the pleasure of listening to an authoritatively articulate > voice? I think you haven't thought this through completely; I think > you haven't really identified what is that rhyme can do, or how it > can do different things in different contexts. Not every rhyme is > "pleasingly like" -- Yeat's "A Stick of Incense" doesn't rhyme, it > seems to me, in a way that is "pleasingly like": > > Whence did all hat fury come? > From empty tomb or Virgin womb? > Saint Joseph thought the world would melt > But liked the way his finger smelt. Rhyme is automatically pleasurable except when too expected. Here what may cut the poem's pleasurableness is what the words mean, not how they sound. Complex poem I haven't time to analyze, but it consists of auditory pleasure and formal pleasure. That the poem observes symmetries is pleasurable (and probably for me close to what your authoritative voicing). It also uses various forms of ugliness. >Inserting a picture in the text is not a "tool like rhyme" -- it is an entirely different sort of tool: one in so different a category that I don't see where you can call it a tool of poetry at all. It's used in poetry, so it's a tool, for me. "Inserting a picture" is your phrase, not mine, by the way. That's only one way a visual poet can give his poetry a visual element of consequence, and he won't just insert the picture, he'll weave it in. > This is begging the question again: you are merely asserting that > your taxonomy is right without taking any pains to explain *why* > you think it is right; I referred you to my essay. It didn't explain it to you. Sorry. The essay is not well-written. But I think if you really tried, you could work out my explanations. But maybe this will help: I think a taxonomy is right if it makes useful distinctions. I claim my taxonomy usefully distinguishes journalism from literature. Journalism is supposed to inform, literature (in my taxonomy) to give verbal pleasure. So a news story with pictures is not visual poetry because, among other reasons, its (main) intention is to inform not give verbal pleasure (and I think a consensus of disinterested intelligent observers would agree on that description of its main intention). snip > you offer your opinions > as if they were measurements of the height of the bar that > mathemakuical poetry-jumpers had cleared, setting a new world's > record, and thumbing your nose at the plodding rhymers and free- > versers whose text-only endeavors have no mathematical symbols > in them. It would seem that you have now stated your agenda: which is to establish that I am an Enemy. All I will do is state that I don't believe I am although I sometimes answer things flippantly or badly--and AM very definitely sometimes polemical against NOT those who have different tastes in poetry than mine, or different ideas about it but only those who dismiss my kind of poetry and my ideas. How did I know you wouldn't think much of Pollock? > I am arguing that it's an important point because the relationship > between sound and meaning within a language for a native-speaker > of that language is profoundly significant in a way that the > relationship of the arrangement of words on a page, or how a word > is spelled, or whether there's a picture included or not, is not. I may at least partly agree. But I would say that the reverse is true, too--the relationship between visual appearance of a word and its meaning, for example, can be profoundly significant in a way that the relationship between meaning and sound can't. There are unique relationships to be mined, all in my poetics more or less of equal importance, in yours (apparently) all of not much importance except the one central for you. > I'm > arguing that the relationship between sound and meaning within a > language for a native-speaker of that language is something that > poetry exploits in a way more profoundly significant than the way > spelling and typography can be exploited. Okay, I disagree. (and wonder why it's okay for you to tell me my devices aren't as significant as yours, but not for me to do the same, not that I believe I have) > And the clear implication is that your work is for people who are > better, smarter, more hip, or something, than those who admire > Rod McKuen. Oh-oh, sounds like I'm going to be thrown out of the party again. What I believe and stated, Marcus, is that some people are more interested in conceptual things like my kind of poetry than others--such as most of the people who like Rod McKuen's poetry. I used his poetry as an example because it's well-known, and it is not very conceptual. If you want to use this to make me politically incorrect, feel free. I'm not about to get involved in a discussion of my politics right now, though. > I would have said that math is a language of its own > and the reason you are trying to call it "poetry" > is that you don't have the skills to > do the actual math. If you want to manipulate mathematical > symbols, why, then, why not study math and get good at it? > Importing math symbols into another language (English in this > case) is much like using a Latin phrase here or a German one > there or a Japanese or ancient Greek one somewhere else: if it > doesn't illuminate the poem then it is merely pretentious. Good note of open-mindedness to wrap up this stimulating exchange on. --Bob G. From DICK at watson.ibm.com Sun Apr 8 18:06:30 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 01 18:06:30 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Logan review Message-ID: <200104082207.SAA31332@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> In a message dated 4/5/01 6:40:13 PM Central Daylight Time, DICK at watson.ibm.com writes: > available on line at http://www.newcriterion.com -> Indexes > -> 1998-1999 > > by - beware - William Logan. > > Sam Gwynn wrote: >> >>Logan's review here is really over the top. And that's saying a lot about a >>critic who's over the top quite a bit. >> I guess what's over the top depends on your point of view :-) (Sorry Sam, I couldn't resist.) Richard From mackechnie at email.msn.com Sun Apr 8 19:53:48 2001 From: mackechnie at email.msn.com (Russ MacKechnie) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 19:53:48 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Logan review In-Reply-To: <200104082207.SAA31332@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: Richard writes: > Sam Gwynn wrote: > >> > >>Logan's review here is really over the top. And that's > saying a lot about a > >>critic who's over the top quite a bit. > >> > I guess what's over the top depends on your point of view :-) > > (Sorry Sam, I couldn't resist.) I think I must join Richard here, Sam. I did not find Logan's review of Salter over the top at all (although I disagree with his assessment of _A Kiss in Space_---and with his assessment of Anne Carson's _Autobiography of Red_, as well). Logan is tough, acerbic, no doubt of that. But, significantly, Logan's acid more often than not etches a very concise, very accurate relief of the weaknesses in his chosen subjects. The classic example is his take on Sharon Olds's _Blood, Tin, Straw_ in the December, 1999 _New Criterion_ . (It can be accessed in the _New Criterion_ Sept., 1999 - June, 2000 archives.) The review ends with the following paragraph (one of the gentler passages): Poetry in our prudent hour needs more sex, not less, and Olds may someday become the laureate of the bedroom; but for all her radical pretense (she claims if she hadn?t married she?d have been a Weatherman bomber), she?s a homely Redbook moralist, believing in motherhood, family, and honey on her nipples. By the time she?s reduced to giving sex tips, or calling her husband?s member ?the errless digit,? all her shallow pretense is greedily on display. The sadism is safe, but de Sade would have run screaming from her bedroom. Logan's words are often harsh, bitterly comic---but they are rarely off the mark. In the case of this particular review, Logan was perhaps too kind (and it is as savage as I've seen him write). _Blood, Tin, Straw_ contains large dollops of remarkably awful verse. . . . Those who might want to peruse the Olds review in its entirety (a delicious read, save perhaps for Olds, her family, friends, and purblind admirers-come-what-may) can click on "Archives" at the _New Criterion_ site ( www.newcriterion.com ) and then select the archived articles from Sept., 1999 - June, 2000. The Logan piece appears under the very appropriate title "No Mercy." Russ MacKechnie From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Apr 8 20:01:02 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 20:01:02 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Logan review Message-ID: In a message dated 4/8/2001 6:56:43 PM Central Daylight Time, mackechnie at email.msn.com writes: > > I think I must join Richard here, Sam. I did not find Logan's review > of Salter over the top at all (although I disagree with his assessment > of _A Kiss in Space_ It was just that part about what is lurking beneath her clothes that I found objectionable. From mackechnie at email.msn.com Sun Apr 8 20:13:49 2001 From: mackechnie at email.msn.com (Russ MacKechnie) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 20:13:49 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Logan review In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sam Gwynn writes: > > I think I must join Richard here, Sam. I did not find > Logan's review > > of Salter over the top at all (although I disagree with > his assessment > > of _A Kiss in Space_ > > It was just that part about what is lurking beneath her > clothes that I found > objectionable. Oddly enough, Sam, I found this remark quite complimentary (in a rough-hewn way. . . .) Russ From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Apr 8 21:54:24 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 21:54:24 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Logan review Message-ID: In a message dated 4/8/2001 7:16:47 PM Central Daylight Time, mackechnie at email.msn.com writes: > Sam Gwynn writes: > > > > I think I must join Richard here, Sam. I did not find > > Logan's review > > > of Salter over the top at all (although I disagree with > > his assessment > > > of _A Kiss in Space_ > > > > It was just that part about what is lurking beneath her > > clothes that I found > > objectionable. > > Oddly enough, Sam, I found this remark quite complimentary (in a > rough-hewn way. . . .) > To each their own. From JforJames at aol.com Sun Apr 8 23:00:05 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 23:00:05 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Innovation Message-ID: <3e.a0d8010.28027fb5@aol.com> In a message dated 4/8/01 3:42:14 PM Eastern Daylight Time, grahamd at mail.ripon.edu writes: << He innovated in technique when he achieved a radically colloquial blank verse previously unknown to the tradition; and he innovated in approach in fashioning a modern (post-Darwinian, post-Freudian) version of pastoral, among other things. I've enjoyed teaching early Williams and Frost side by side because of their similarities as much as their differences, actually. >> David, Many technical innovations in poetry end up as little more than novelties or ephemera. For example, I respect what Cummings was up to with his fracturing of words, but I think it's an effect that wore off rather quickly. There's the initial surprise but ...then what? The same could be said about shaped poems like Easter Wings...was Herbert the first to do this, I'm not sure? Every once and a while a poet will resurrect one of these lesser innovative techniques, but the poem will need to be much more in order to become memorable. The other problem is that many innovative techniques are not hard to mimic. The jarring linebreak hardly raises a reader's eyebrow these days. The innovative approach is more little a complete revisioning of what poetry is or can be. Frost definitely had it. Here's a little thing I've been thinking about & I'm probably going to sound like an inveterate Luddite, but I've never understood the buzz over hypertext particularly when it comes to poetry. Haven't the best poems always been "hypertexts" in terms of what gets evoked and alluded to, the references or connotations, the undertones and overtones, the levels of verbal interplay, mushroomings and mirrorings, etc. Does the poetry reader really need or want the "help" of such software? Finnegan From tadrichards at prodigy.net Mon Apr 9 00:30:06 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 00:30:06 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <200104081956.PAA18516@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: <011a01c0c0ad$c2b08f40$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> How is the first line pentameter? It reads to me like 3 dactyls and a single stressed syllable. Tad > >>A Magnet > >> > >> > >>Since she was two, it had held up her end > >>on the door of the fridge: a plywood magnet stamped > >>with the fingerpainted imprint of her hand. > >>Essence-of-kid, all cheerfulness, in a pure > >>nursery red, it stood for her signature > >>and seemed, back then, to raise itself in greeting. > >> > >>When was it that it started to wave goodbye? > >>One day some sort of scrap it had always kept > >>in lofty view--report card, shopping list, > >>snapshot of somebody's new baby--slipped > >>with it, cinematically, down the door > >>like a climber's grip, failing along a rock face. > >> > >>--Demagnetized, of course, by the very years > >>that made her real hands strong. I've placed it high, > >>supporting nothing weightier than itself, > >>against that time I'd sense in me a fainter > >>grasp on the little girl who never crossed > >>the street without my finger in her fist. > > R.S. Gwynn wrote: > > >>I like this poem quite a bit. One thing that interest me is how the > >>pentameter get tighter as you move towards the end. Lots of anapests in the > >>first stanza, fewer in the second, almost none in the third--a diminishing of > >>the line itself that reflects the subject. You also get some nice sounds at > >>the end that help the poem conclude: alliteration and the slant rhyme of > >>"crossed" and "fist." The nice irony of "When was it when it started to wave > >>goodbye" is wonderful. > > and > > >>Incidentally, has anyone else commented on this poem? > > I disagree with Sam on this one. This reads like totally inoffensive > prose that has been chopped into lines of 10 syllables, give or take > a few depending on where the words reach the end of the line. The > anapests, iambs, etc. just fall where they may, to my ear. > > The substance of the poem is painfully sentimental; it makes me > want to suggest to Ms. Salter that children can become much more > enriching as they grow. Eventually they may even provide you > with grandchildren, who are unalloyed joy. (Sentimentality has > its place.) > > I have a real problem with "plywood magnet;" I suppose she means > a piece of plywood with a magnet glued onto the back, but her > phrase just sounds bad. And the magnet slipping "cinematically.... > like a climber's grip, failing...." seems melodramatic in the kitchen. > > I didn't like this one. Will the "silent majority" vote? > > Richard > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 9 03:08:40 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 03:08:40 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Teaching Poetry Conference Message-ID: <104.185d21f.2802b9f8@cs.com> This conference will be held in Santa Rosa, CA, in July: http://teachingpoetry.org/index.html From mbales at cybergate.net Mon Apr 9 07:45:54 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 07:45:54 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <3AD0E09F.B7B@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: Bob, your notion of rhyme sounds like a parody of the way rhyme is used by serious poets. You seem to be caricaturing the use of rhyme rather than trying to examine why it's really used by serious poets. I'd like to say again that rhyme is not merely pleasant, not merely decorative, not merely a clue as to the form of a poem, not merely traditional (though it is often all those, too). Rhyme is extraordinarily difficult to do well, and more so in English, and when it *is* done well it creates an authority for the poet's voice (or the voice in the poem, if different) that validates what the poet says (however banal it may be). That, it seems to me, is the main reason poets who employ rhyme use it, in my opinion. Now, rhyme is not the only technique that can create this effect. There are a number of rhetorical and poetic effects that are also used to achieve an authority for the speaker, and there are taxonomies of them easily available to anyone who wants to examine them -- and I urge those who haven't heard of rime parfait to take a look at them. Using rhymes to make readers understand that a poem is a sonnet in order to give that poem the chance to allude to other sonnets is not enough; a sonnet is more than its rhymes or rhyme-scheme. I'm glad to see we can agree to this extent, then: "I think rhyme, too, is a device to make poetry more of a challenge and thus help a poet find new ways to say things, and saying something in a new way is an important feature of poetry (see Pope). There's much more to it, and I do think that demonstration of a kind of mastery is part of it." But Pope, as you may recall, wasn't looking for just any new way to say something, but rather "What long was thought but ne'er so well expressed". There is a clear requirement there that what is said be well said; an explicit expectation of excellence. You seem to be saying that excellence is not the highest good in a poem -- that simple newness is a higher good than excellence. Now, you may not intend to say this; you may not mean to say this, but this is what you seem to be saying. Is it what you mean? Definitions don't require a book; defining one's terms is a minimum expectation, it seems to me, when two people want to speak civilly and they seem to disagree. Often the disagreement is less important than at first imagined once the definitions are in place. You are using words that seem to indicate that you have a clear and distinct hierarchy of goods and a way to measure those goods within their own categories and between categories, and examples from sports that seem to reinforce the notion that you have the Fosbury Flop of Poetry and are out to replace old bad techniques with new ones. If you don't really mean to say that you have a way to rank goods within poetry as reliably as high-jumpers rank good jumps, then you ought to find a new metaphor, new language in which to try to put your ideas forward. When you say "I said I don't know enough about cyber-poetry to be able to say what's new about it, etc. I know there ARE new things being done with it." you might as well say "I don't know enough to be able to say what's bad about it but I know there are bad things being done." Or good. Or indifferent. An admission of ignorance followed by an assertion of belief is not very persuasive. Isn't the point of trying to elucidate your ideas to do a good job of it? When you say: "You seem to be trying to catch me in various errors, which isn't hard. Why not relax and try to follow what I'm obviously saying?" my response is: Why not focus and say what you mean? And if you don't do a good job of elucidating your ideas, then on what grounds do you urge us to embrace your ideas? Just because you say so? I recognize that you're trying to say that the thing we praise is something of value -- I'm trying to get you to say how you can tell what that value is, and what its rank in your hierarchy of goods is *because* you seem to be saying so clearly that the poetry you admire and write is the Fosbury Flop of Poetry, and that that technique or set of techniques that you advocate is *better* than older techniques, and that the new techniques, because better, ought to supplant the old ones. That's what your example says, anyway, and that's what the proselytizing tone with which you approach this issue says, to me. When you say "always", as you do here: "But I DO take newness as a virtue, always, because it will either (1) lead to a valuable new way of doing something or (2) show us a new thing to avoid doing because it doesn't work", here again you seem to over-reach, for "always" would mean that you taken new evils to be virtues, as well as new goods -- it may even mean that you do not distinguish between goods and evils so long as there is newness. Since you claim to have a "taconomic brain", it seems reasonable to take you at your word, and to take you to mean "always" when you say "always". And so, then, we must assume that you "always" value newness, even when it is an evil, because newness is your self- declared highest good. But it seems unreasonable that anyone would value new evil over existing good just because the evil is new -- and you seem like a reasonable sort. Do you really mean to assert, by using that "always", that a new evil is a higher good for you than an existing good? Regarding rhyme again, it seems clear that even expected rhymes can be pleasurable! I agree that if *every* rhyme is expectable or predictable that we find the effect cloying or even appalling -- but to give an example of yet another short poem, this one by Frost, since we have him in mind, what could be more predictable than the rhyme "fire/desire" for example -- and yet the predictability of the rhyme doesn't make it unpleasurable in the least: Some say the world will end in fire Some say in ice. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 9 09:09:31 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 06:09:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream Message-ID: <20010409130931.D5E3F36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 10:12:36 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 10:12:36 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3AD1C354.449A@nut-n-but.net> Marcus: "Bob, your notion of rhyme sounds like a parody of the way rhyme is used by serious poets. You seem to be caricaturing the use of rhyme rather than trying to examine why it's really used by serious poets." I tried my best in this informal workshop setting to convey the gist of my main ideas on rhyme. Your idea that rhyme's main use is to validate its user when used well is interesting but I don't agree with it. A good poem validates its author--superfluously. If rhyme, for instance, makes a poem good, I like the poem because of its rhyme. I don't decide that the effective rhyme validates the rhymer, so I can take the rhymer seriously and accept his poem as a good one. Anyway, I didn't get into this thread to formally describe my whole poetics, or discuss rhyme in detail, only to try to show you what I meant by the advancement of craft through the introduction and early, refining use of new techniques. I think I've done this. You and others have made me see that my term "craft-advancing" is perhaps inadvertantly condescending. I was thinking purely of nuts and bolts sort of advances. I think I agree with Finnegan that it'd be better to speak of different ways of advancing craft. So my tentative solution is to divide craft-advancing between "content-advancing" and "technique- advancing." The first would cover introduction of new subject matter and new points of view or attitudes to poetry, the second with the introduction of new poetic devices to poetry and the significant refinement of old ones. These leave lots of room for argument, but that's inevitable. >From here on, I can only discuss the above, and whatever is closely related to it. I don't have the time or energy to defend every generality I make about other things concerned with poetry, or to lay out my whole poetics for you. I'm working on a series of books that will do that. No generality, except this one, by the way, is 100% valid. So I'm not too concerned that you are able to find minute flaws with many of mine. > Now, rhyme is not the only technique that can create this effect. > There are a number of rhetorical and poetic effects that are also > used to achieve an authority for the speaker, and there are > taxonomies of them easily available to anyone who wants to > examine them -- and I urge those who haven't heard of rime parfait > to take a look at them. When I have more time, I'll think about achieving authority for a speaker of poetry. It's something I confess I've never thought about before. As I've suggested before, whether the poem works or not is up to the poem, not to how well its maker demonstrates authoritativeness. And ANYTHING whatever that can make a poem work, in any way, makes the poem . . . trustworthy, I guess I'd put it. > Using rhymes to make readers understand that a poem is a sonnet > in order to give that poem the chance to allude to other sonnets is > not enough; a sonnet is more than its rhymes or rhyme-scheme. Of course. I didn't say that's all rhymes did, or that a poem with rhymes has nothing else of importance. Marcus, you keep telling me I'm saying or implying that newness is more important than excellence in a poem. I'm not saying it, nor do I think anyone could take me to be implying it. Newness is always valuable, for me, for reasons given. And if a poem isn't new in SOME way, it is of no use. That is, a poem can't just repeat what a previous poem did, it has to say or do something new. The question is really whether a poem can be top-notch without doing anything significantly new, like use a brandnew poetic device. My answer: undoubtedly. > Definitions don't require a book; defining one's terms is a minimum > expectation, it seems to me, when two people want to speak civilly > and they seem to disagree. Often the disagreement is less > important than at first imagined once the definitions are in place. All I'll say is that I feel I've provided sufficient definitions for the purposes of this discussion. You disagree, and seem unable to accept my definitions, always asking for further definitions I haven't time to give you. > You are using words that seem to indicate that you have a clear > and distinct hierarchy of goods and a way to measure those goods > within their own categories and between categories, and examples > from sports that seem to reinforce the notion that you have the > Fosbury Flop of Poetry and are out to replace old bad techniques > with new ones. Why are you repeating what you already alleged, incorrectly. I use the flop as an example of an entirely NEW technique. In high-jumping it was an improved technique, but I was ignoring that aspect of it--because, it seems to me, that you want to read intolerance into what I say. So I then said, okay, drop that and go to Pollock's drip technique. Not an improvement but a valuable new way of painting. > If you don't really mean to say that you have a way to rank goods > within poetry as reliably as high-jumpers rank good jumps, then > you ought to find a new metaphor, new language in which to try to > put your ideas forward. I taxonomize more than rank. I'm concerned with types of "jumps," not their effectiveness. > When you say "I said I don't know enough about cyber-poetry to be > able to say what's new about it, etc. I know there ARE new things > being done with it." you might as well say "I don't know enough to > be able to say what's bad about it but I know there are bad things > being done." Or good. Or indifferent. An admission of ignorance > followed by an assertion of belief is not very persuasive. This is typical of your kind of rejoinder. You refuse to go beyond what I literally say. Here I am really saying that while I'm no expert in cyber-poetry, I know enough about it to know it's doing new things. But I don't have time to go into it. This is not being greatly persuasive, but it would be persuasive enough that cyber-poetry is doing new things to most people in an informal discussion like this. It's like someone's saying he hasn't been in San Francisco too often but he's pretty sure there are good Ecudoran restaurants there, though he can't tell you exactly where. I'm not trying here to get you to "embrace" my ideas so much as I'm informally laying them out. Aside from that, I am quite certain now that I could never elucidate them sufficiently for you. See what I said about generalities above. My discussion of newness has to do VERY OBVIOUSLY with newness in poetry or art. For me, poetry has to do (primarily) with beauty/ugliness, not good/evil, so a evil newness is out, by definition. New ugliness as a good. Sure, since that will allow other poets to recognize and avoid it. > Do you really mean to assert, by using that "always", that > a new evil is a higher good for you than an existing good? You have a fixation on the idea that if I say newness is good, that means I think newness is better than some or all existing goods. This is a fallacy. The predictibility of rhyme is a complex subject. It has to do with context, with words between one rhymenant or rhyme-fellow, and another. If I wrote a poem to a woman that started, "The sky is blue," and went on to "I love--", just about any reader would expect "you." But Frost could rhyme the same two words without us expecting it in that certainly. I think one thing a good rhymer like Frost does is give us lots of things to take our minds off the rhyme. It's often a balance between complexity or radicality of subject versus soothing off-setting familiarity of meter and rhyme. I claim I would need at least a long chapter to go into this in proper detail, or just to show why seemingly predictible rhymes in Frost work. I've already said more than I wanted to in this post, though. > How would you > react to a young man coming up to you on the street, sticking a > gun in your ear, reading you two of his poems, and then charging > you the admission price of all the money you have on you to have > heard them -- is the gun in your ear a "tool of poetry" then? Is it in the poem? Did it put something in the poem? Sorry I disturbed you by saying that you as reader have to do SOME work to figure out what my essay on taxomonomy said. A reader has a responsibility to be clear but he has no responsibility to do the impossible, in this case to make an extremely resistant person understand what he is clearly saying, however awkwardly (and with insufficient examples). snip > You also advance the notion that "the new" is always (and you, not > I, said "always") preferable to the excellent, Please cite where I said this. --Bob G. From JforJames at aol.com Mon Apr 9 10:15:23 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 10:15:23 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Innovation Message-ID: <71.c531e97.28031dfb@aol.com> > The innovative approach is more little a complete revisioning > of what poetry is or can be. Frost definitely had it. > This should read: The innovative approach is more like a complete revisionsing of what poetry is or can be. From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Mon Apr 9 10:45:56 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 10:45:56 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Logan Review Message-ID: I don't know about that. The comment is on the level of a drunken fratboy, an educated one, but a beer-swilling pledge nonetheless. Saying in a review of a male poet that I wanted to know about what was lurking behind his trousers would likely be offensive for good reason. Unless she's trying to write erotica (and I didn't get that out of the review), I really don't think it was particularly complimentary or appropriate. -Amber At 08:13 PM 4/8/2001 -0400, you wrote: Sam Gwynn writes: > It was just that part about what is lurking beneath her > clothes that I found > objectionable. Oddly enough, Sam, I found this remark quite complimentary (in a rough-hewn way. . . .) Russ From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 11:13:14 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 11:13:14 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Innovation References: <71.c531e97.28031dfb@aol.com> Message-ID: <3AD1D18A.A87@nut-n-but.net> JforJames at aol.com wrote: > > > The innovative approach is more little a complete revisioning > > of what poetry is or can be. Frost definitely had it. > > > This should read: > The innovative approach is more like a complete revisionsing > of what poetry is or can be. Ha, glad to see someone else has as much trouble with these keyboard things as I does. --Bob G. From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 9 11:15:50 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 10:15:50 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Logan Review In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have to agree with Amber and Sam on this one. Logan's persistently engendered response to female poets often strikes me as a little creepy. Here's the first paragraph of his review of Salter: "Mary Jo Salter's mousy, tense, off-kilter poems disturb me more than I think they will and disappoint me more than they should. *A Kiss in Space* is full of honest, dutiful poems a housewife would write, if there were such a thing as a housewife anymore; they revel in domestic certitudes, the cozy rendering of a nuclear family out of Fifties advertisements, an all-electric house with a place for everything that has a place. Sometimes it seems such fastidious, well-made poems (you can see the dust-free cupboards, the gleaming refrigerator) lack nothing but a soul." I do wonder, what's the point of the adjective "mousy" and the "housewife" trope, if not to piss off feminists of either gender? Is there any content to such descriptors, really? Or are such things just irritating fillips added to what may or may not be a legitimate point, i.e. that Salter's poems are overly tidy and soul-less, insufficiently bold and risky? This is not an occasional habit of Logan's, by the way. Later in the same review of Salter, for instance: "Instead you get a hostess-like sincerity, sometimes with a barely detectable sneer, a chilliness she probably doesn't even notice (that makes it slightly erotic-the erotic is the missing substance here). There's a pleasantly sour anxiety beneath this prom-dress exterior, and here and there it breaks through." Nice to know what Logan finds erotic, I guess, but I'm not going to spend much time speculating about what he's got hidden beneath *his* clothes. . . . David Graham _____________ >I don't know about that. The comment is on the level of a drunken >fratboy, an educated one, but a beer-swilling pledge nonetheless. Saying in >a review of a male poet that I wanted to know about what was lurking behind >his trousers would likely be offensive for good reason. Unless she's trying >to write erotica (and I didn't get that out of the review), I really don't >think it was particularly complimentary or appropriate. >-Amber > >At 08:13 PM 4/8/2001 -0400, you wrote: >Sam Gwynn writes: > >> It was just that part about what is lurking beneath her >> clothes that I found >> objectionable. > > Oddly enough, Sam, I found this remark quite complimentary (in a >rough-hewn way. . . .) > > Russ >_______________________________________________ >New-Poetry mailing list >New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu >http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 11:19:30 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 07:19:30 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: >I didn't like this one. Will the "silent majority" vote? I must admit I didn't really like this one, although I didn't find it Horrible; I personally have serious doubts about this kind of slant rhyme, which doesn't provide the satisfying "clang" and closure of rhyme but which is sealed up in a kind-of rhyme scheme nonetheless: all of the drawbacks and none of the benefits. I also can't see a regular rhyme or metrical scheme in the poem, and while irregular-yet-repeated rhyme in poems like Anne Sexton's "Flee on Your Donkey" or Lowell's "Skunk Hour" suits the subject, I can't see what significance a not-regular pattern has here. I did like the image of the hand waving in greeting, and then "goodbye," and the demagnetizing making the grip of the child's (past) hand weaker as the real hand grew stronger, but the image of hand-holding in the last image verges a bit on the twee. Again, some kind of _form,_ as in Roethke's poems about his father or Snodgrass' about his daughter, would have helped contain an emotion which can sometimes seem sentimental. -- I didn't find Logan's comment about what was "under" Salter's clothing sexist, or insulting (his comments about Louise Gluck were a lot worse in that respect); more like, if you follow the thread of his thought in the review, he views her hausfrau's apron as a kind of disguise, and he thinks there is a person under the persona, mask, of easygoing housewife which he would find more valuable. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From tadrichards at prodigy.net Mon Apr 9 11:27:56 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 11:27:56 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: Message-ID: <005e01c0c109$a734dda0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Re the question of Logan's being insulting and provocative: Is this a bad thing? Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 11:19 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem > > >I didn't like this one. Will the "silent majority" vote? > > I must admit I didn't really like this one, although I didn't find it > Horrible; I personally have serious doubts about this kind of slant rhyme, > which doesn't provide the satisfying "clang" and closure of rhyme but which > is sealed up in a kind-of rhyme scheme nonetheless: all of the drawbacks > and none of the benefits. I also can't see a regular rhyme or metrical > scheme in the poem, and while irregular-yet-repeated rhyme in poems like > Anne Sexton's "Flee on Your Donkey" or Lowell's "Skunk Hour" suits the > subject, I can't see what significance a not-regular pattern has here. I > did like the image of the hand waving in greeting, and then "goodbye," and > the demagnetizing making the grip of the child's (past) hand weaker as the > real hand grew stronger, but the image of hand-holding in the last image > verges a bit on the twee. Again, some kind of _form,_ as in Roethke's poems > about his father or Snodgrass' about his daughter, would have helped contain > an emotion which can sometimes seem sentimental. > > -- I didn't find Logan's comment about what was "under" Salter's clothing > sexist, or insulting (his comments about Louise Gluck were a lot worse in > that respect); more like, if you follow the thread of his thought in the > review, he views her hausfrau's apron as a kind of disguise, and he thinks > there is a person under the persona, mask, of easygoing housewife which he > would find more valuable. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 11:33:15 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 07:33:15 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Innovation Message-ID: Our fearless leader wrote: >Here's a little thing I've been thinking about & I'm probably >going to sound like an inveterate Luddite, but I've never >understood the buzz over hypertext particularly when it >comes to poetry. Haven't the best poems always been >"hypertexts" in terms of what gets evoked and alluded to, >the references or connotations, the undertones and overtones, >the levels of verbal interplay, mushroomings and >mirrorings, etc. Does the poetry reader really need or want >the "help" of such software? Interesting question, sort of whether or not hypertext came before computers....I think something like "The Wasteland" or "Ulysses" would obviously fit the criteria of a "hypertext" in which outside sources are alluded to. In the computer era, you can have hotlinks which would take you directly to, say, the Dante reference of "I had not thought death had undone so many" (or you could have a Javascript popup window with the Italian appearing, I guess) and you are also not subject to a straight-through linear reading of the poem....supposedly. I've never really believed all the hype about the nonlinear nature of modern hypertext, as those who tout it seem determined to believe absolutely everyone reads "The Wasteland" straight through from beginning to end or listens to a recorded symphony movement by movement, and so on. Haven't they ever heard of skipping around? I forget who it was who said index cards were the first true invention of hypertext, because reference was no longer dependent on linear pagination.... Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From jdavis at panix.com Mon Apr 9 11:53:38 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 11:53:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem In-Reply-To: <005e01c0c109$a734dda0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Message-ID: > Re the question of Logan's being insulting and provocative: Is this a bad > thing? In itself, no. Debate's a sign of life. But unless there's some effort towards a common understanding, at least some agreed subjects, then it's just going to amount to border sniping. That is, if critic x categorically rejects poetries a, b, and c - declares that they are not even poetry - then the insults just serve to protect turf. And that, I'd argue, is the situation these days - the visible and vocal critics consider most of the field of production beneath discussion, and the overlap of critics' interests is pretty tiny. So when magazines that propose areas of overlap, such as Fence or Explosive, come along, some of the turf-protectors get virulent. This list also proposes an overlap, witness the border sniping around Bob G's taxonomies. But that's politics for you - ever will it be thus. And better to debate with sharp adversaries than retreat among the converted. Maybe. Jordan From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Mon Apr 9 12:09:19 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 12:09:19 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: Perhaps. If he ends up covering up what he's trying to say in sensationalism, then was the review worth writing? If he can't endorse anything (and he didn't seem to, at least in this article), then why would I bother finishing his column? I already knew what he thought by the time I arrived at the third review: So-and-so sucks somewhat because of X, so-and so sucks even more because of Q, and little miss so-and-so is adding a new level of suckiness because of M. Let us now insult famous women. Then, of course, there's moving from being provocative to being gross - he could have said the same thing as "moving beyond the vacuum, crystal and pearls," still have been insulting, and not have reminded me of little boys looking up from beneath the monkey bars. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: theoldmole To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/9/2001 11:27 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Re the question of Logan's being insulting and provocative: Is this a bad thing? Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 11:19 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem > > >I didn't like this one. Will the "silent majority" vote? > > I must admit I didn't really like this one, although I didn't find it > Horrible; I personally have serious doubts about this kind of slant rhyme, > which doesn't provide the satisfying "clang" and closure of rhyme but which > is sealed up in a kind-of rhyme scheme nonetheless: all of the drawbacks > and none of the benefits. I also can't see a regular rhyme or metrical > scheme in the poem, and while irregular-yet-repeated rhyme in poems like > Anne Sexton's "Flee on Your Donkey" or Lowell's "Skunk Hour" suits the > subject, I can't see what significance a not-regular pattern has here. I > did like the image of the hand waving in greeting, and then "goodbye," and > the demagnetizing making the grip of the child's (past) hand weaker as the > real hand grew stronger, but the image of hand-holding in the last image > verges a bit on the twee. Again, some kind of _form,_ as in Roethke's poems > about his father or Snodgrass' about his daughter, would have helped contain > an emotion which can sometimes seem sentimental. > > -- I didn't find Logan's comment about what was "under" Salter's clothing > sexist, or insulting (his comments about Louise Gluck were a lot worse in > that respect); more like, if you follow the thread of his thought in the > review, he views her hausfrau's apron as a kind of disguise, and he thinks > there is a person under the persona, mask, of easygoing housewife which he > would find more valuable. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 9 12:40:46 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 12:40:46 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <81.96944ec.2803400e@cs.com> In a message dated 4/9/01 11:14:51 AM Central Daylight Time, tadrichards at prodigy.net writes: > How is the first line pentameter? It reads to me like 3 dactyls and a single > stressed syllable. > > Tad > > > > > >>A Magnet > > >> > > >> > > >>Since she was two, it had held up her end I read it trochee, iamb, pyrrhic, spondee, iamb. From gmcvay at patriot.net Mon Apr 9 12:57:21 2001 From: gmcvay at patriot.net (Gwyn McVay) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 12:57:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem In-Reply-To: <81.96944ec.2803400e@cs.com> Message-ID: >>>I read it trochee, iamb, pyrrhic, spondee, iamb. You realize that if this view prevails, it is still only a pyrrhic victory. Reading Demeter--g. ----------------------------------- | Gwyn McVay gmcvay at patriot.net | | | | http://patriot.net/~gmcvay/ | ----------------------------------- From johnbrehm at mindspring.com Mon Apr 9 13:49:12 2001 From: johnbrehm at mindspring.com (john brehm) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 13:49:12 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: Message-ID: <001501c0c11d$64cc5920$d12bf7a5@compaqcomputer> This is what I love about metrical analysis. Ten poets/critics will give you ten different scansions of a single line. Why is that? John Brehm ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gwyn McVay" To: Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 12:57 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem > >>>I read it trochee, iamb, pyrrhic, spondee, iamb. > > You realize that if this view prevails, it is still only a pyrrhic > victory. > > Reading Demeter--g. > > ----------------------------------- > | Gwyn McVay gmcvay at patriot.net | > | | > | http://patriot.net/~gmcvay/ | > ----------------------------------- > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 9 13:55:35 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 13:55:35 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <6d.120b94f2.28035197@cs.com> In a message dated 4/9/01 12:51:55 PM Central Daylight Time, johnbrehm at mindspring.com writes: > > This is what I love about metrical analysis. Ten poets/critics will give > you > ten different scansions of a single line. Why is that? > > John Brehm > It's a highly subjective procedure, and I generally think it isn't very useful unless you've got some kind of unanimity on how you're going to scan certain things. I personally use only two marks (no intermediate stress) and believe in the pyrrhic and spondee. But a lot of people don't. I think scansion is best thought of as a pretty poor attempt to render graphically what has been heard. From jpl3 at lehigh.edu Mon Apr 9 13:35:33 2001 From: jpl3 at lehigh.edu (Joe Lucia) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 13:35:33 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <001501c0c11d$64cc5920$d12bf7a5@compaqcomputer> Message-ID: <3AD1F2E5.6F60AE1B@lehigh.edu> john brehm wrote: > > This is what I love about metrical analysis. Ten poets/critics will give you > ten different scansions of a single line. Why is that? Great question. Probably because stress is relative and different ears will hear it differently in any given line except in cases of the most ploddingly obvious (and hence least flexible) meter. Given national, regional, and personal variations in sentence cadence and word pronunciation, scansion is always just someone's best guess. Metrists, can any of you make the case that there is (usually only) one correct scansion for a given line? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: jpl3.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 337 bytes Desc: Card for Joe Lucia URL: From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 14:15:41 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 14:15:41 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Hypertext as Innovation References: Message-ID: <3AD1FC4D.5A54@nut-n-but.net> Right, Moira, skipping around is not new (what is?), but I would claim the way the computer facilitates it, and gives permission for it--even invites it is significantly new. Certainly it gives authors a new way of composing-- or Burroughs and his partner, or whoever it was who first handed out pages of a work the reader was told to reader in any order he felt like, did. I'm too old to get into it (too many things I don't want to leave in order to get into it) but wish I could. I find especially exciting the way a reader can find out things about an interesting situation (a novel's story, say) through a kind of research with dead-ends and surprises instead of being shown what's pertinent. Once this kind of thing is more established, I little doubt but that a novelist will use it brilliantly to build a fictional life we find out about the way we find out about a literary life by researching several books. And imagine being able to follow only your favorite characters. Or being able to skip the X-rated parts, or read them alone. Etc. Also think how an author can dispense with repetition since the reader can always click back to what a book reader would need to be reminded of. Imagine, too, going through a big novel, like Durrell's Alexandria Quartet as a whole, and suddenly realizing you're back where you once were before, and seeing the situation you're now in much differently than you did the first time--as in Durrell, but less guidedly. And think, too, of how helpfully a lot of material could be unobtrusively footnoted: a latin poem, for instance, could have a link to its translation that those with latin can ignore, and shouldn't be disturbed by the way they might by the translation right after the poem. A book novel can have a footnote to an appendix, but it would involve turning pages, much more a nuisance than clicking. I frankly think hypertext will eventually be seen as 3-D compared to book-text. I agree it shouldn't be called non-linear. I'd call it (potentially) multi-linear. I can even see (I suspect it's been done) textual reversal that imitates physical travel: that is, the reader goes through an ABCDEF sequence, then can return to A via FEDCB. So what? I dunno. I just suspect it'd be neat. Oh, for poetry, a very small benefit but still a benefit is the way you don't have to worry about a passage of your poem ending on a page before it actually ends so that the reader isn't sure whether it continues on the next page or a new stanza or equivalent thereof beings. I know there are ways of dealing with this in books, but still . . . Eventually, there will be programs that can allow real reader participation. I could enter a story as a character and key in my actions and speech, with the program changing the story to reflect the effect of what I do. This would obviously be a new form of literature, I should think. The author creates a world, the reader uses it. Like the one I'm in right at the moment, now that I think of it-- but you aren't, Moira, since you're just a fictional character. . . . Just thoughts off the top of my head. --Bob G. From johnbrehm at mindspring.com Mon Apr 9 14:24:12 2001 From: johnbrehm at mindspring.com (john brehm) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 14:24:12 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <6d.120b94f2.28035197@cs.com> Message-ID: <002501c0c122$480c7a40$d12bf7a5@compaqcomputer> Sam wrote: "I personally use only two marks (no intermediate stress) and believe in the pyrrhic and spondee. But a lot of people don't." Are there really people who don't believe in spondees? How can that be? Seriously? How would they scan Wordsworth's lines: "Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees." If spondees didn't exist, we'd have to invent them. John Brehm From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 14:32:29 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 10:32:29 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Don't Believe the Hype(rtext) Message-ID: >And imagine being able >to follow only your favorite characters. Or being able to >skip the X-rated parts, or read them alone. Etc. >Also think how an author can dispense with repetition since >the reader can always click back to what a book reader would >need to be reminded of. Imagine, too, going through a big novel, >like Durrell's Alexandria Quartet as a whole, and suddenly >realizing you're back where you once were before, and seeing >the situation you're now in much differently than you did >the first time--as in Durrell, but less guidedly. But I don't see any real difference from how we are able to read books now in this. Certainly we can skip the X-rated parts or read them alone without the help of a computer. I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov's famous description of a miraculous machine where you could pause the action at any point you liked, repeat it as many times as you liked, put it on hold as long as you wanted without stressing it, cross-reference it with another work, etc., etc. ....and then he reveals it's a book. Perhaps I am just too cynical in thinking there is nothing new under the sun, but I am definitely tired of the hype which accompanies hypertext and yet doesn't really seem to do anything _that_ extraordinary. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 14:33:35 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 10:33:35 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Hypertext as Innovation Message-ID: >new. Certainly it gives authors a new way of composing-- >or Burroughs and his partner, or whoever it was who first >handed out pages of a work the reader was told to reader >in any order he felt like, did. Didn't Burroughs do some of the early "hypertext" experiments with scissors and paste? Not very technologically advanced, that. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 14:37:12 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 10:37:12 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: John Brehm queried: >Are there really people who don't believe in spondees? How can that be? >Seriously? They must have missed the great American classic, "Spondee River Anthology," with its immortal beginning: "Pen-knife had he in hand...." Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Jandhodge at aol.com Mon Apr 9 14:49:58 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 14:49:58 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter -- pentameter? Message-ID: <70.96cb2eb.28035e56@aol.com> Since she was two, it had held up her end << How is [this] line pentameter? It reads to me like 3 dactyls and a single stressed syllable. Tad >> It surely isn't regular pentameter, and no one has claimed that for it. But I do read it as a five (or six, if a final spondee) stress line, thus [badly exaggerating the stresses]: SINCE she was TWO it had HELD UP (HER) END Initial inversion / iamb / double iamb* / iamb-spondee *Various terms have been applied to this not unusual substitution in an iambic line. In any case, I don't read it as three dactyls + single stress: SINCE she was TWO it had HELD up her END (Is it just me, or does that give a rather different meaning to "end"?) Sorry, Tad. Jan From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 14:52:59 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 10:52:59 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Metrical Analysis Message-ID: >"Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course, >with rocks, and stones, and trees." Not to set off a footwar, but I would read the 1st line above as spondee / iamb / iamb (di- UR)/ spondee and the 2nd line as nearly straight iambic, although "with" sounds slightly stressed to me, but not as stressed as "roll'd" in the first line. However, I was taught to scan by someone who believed there were no "unstressed" syllables -- only "more" and "less stressed" syllables (makes sense to me -- how can a word not have weight?). This method of teaching also emphasized reading the lines aloud and seeing where people tended to naturally stress words, rather than trying to fit them rigidly into a metrical pattern per se. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Jandhodge at aol.com Mon Apr 9 14:53:22 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 14:53:22 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <37.13522165.28035f22@aol.com> In a message dated 01-04-09 13:51:55 EDT, you write: << This is what I love about metrical analysis. Ten poets/critics will give you ten different scansions of a single line. Why is that? >> Because poetry is art, not technology? Jan From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 9 14:59:54 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 14:59:54 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <6f.13c482fc.280360aa@cs.com> In a message dated 4/9/01 1:25:26 PM Central Daylight Time, johnbrehm at mindspring.com writes: > Sam wrote: > > "I personally use only two marks (no intermediate stress) and > believe in the pyrrhic and spondee. But a lot of people don't." > > Are there really people who don't believe in spondees? How can that be? > Seriously? How would they scan Wordsworth's lines: > > "Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course, > with rocks, and stones, and trees." > > If spondees didn't exist, we'd have to invent them. > > John Brehm Tim Steele isn't very high on them, for one. From Jandhodge at aol.com Mon Apr 9 15:05:58 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 15:05:58 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: << Metrists, can any of you make the case that there is (usually only) one correct scansion for a given line? >> Joe-- I am a "metrist" only by avocation, not profession. But I would ask: why would one WANT to? Jan From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 14:49:53 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 14:49:53 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Hypertext as Innovation References: Message-ID: <3AD20451.4799@nut-n-but.net> Yes, cut-ups plus the requirement that there was no authorial order. A significant innovation I think. Hypertext can significantly facilitate the procedure, I think, and do a lot else, so is also a significant innovation, for me. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 15:03:03 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 15:03:03 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Don't Believe the Hype(rtext) References: Message-ID: <3AD20767.4FE7@nut-n-but.net> I agree that, like all new or newish things, hypertext is over-lauded. At another poetry discussion group, I argued for a while with someone who thought infraverbal poetry had been inspired by hypertext and similar things. (Interestingly, some hypertextists think hypertext has made the kind of visual poetry I do passe.) But surely you can see that hypertext on the computer is hugely different from a book. For instance, in a book, you cannot just skip the x-rated portions--you have to read them to identify them. Or, in my case when I read Henry Miller's Sexus and was bored by all but the x-rated sections, I had to skim lots of pages to get to the x-rated sections. Sure, some editor could index them or the like, but the computer's substitutes for indexing are much more user-friendly (or will be when perfected). --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 15:10:11 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 15:10:11 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: Message-ID: <3AD20913.3EDF@nut-n-but.net> I don't believe in the spondee because a set of two syllables will almost always consist of one that has a heavier beat than the other. I would add that context has much to do with how lines are scanned. I am more old-fashioned than many here, I suspect, in believing meter must be obeyed as much as possible, so all lines in a sonnet should be forced into iambic, except where obviously it won't work. The form tells us how to scan. The Salter poem seems without an established form, so omni-scannable. I find that blank verse that's read as iambs against normal pronunciation can take on grandeur once one's ear adjusts to its artificiality. The latter is the main point, it seems to me. So I read Shakespeare's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" as five iambs with an extra beat at the end, or an unfinished iamb. I think the emphasized "and's" are powerful. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 15:16:37 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 15:16:37 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <6d.120b94f2.28035197@cs.com> <002501c0c122$480c7a40$d12bf7a5@compaqcomputer> Message-ID: <3AD20A95.35FE@nut-n-but.net> I forgot to add I read the Wordsworth as straight iambs. But, yes, I would hope for different kinds of iambs-- and meant to say in my previous post that I don't believe in spondees as anything but rare exceptions in poetry (though sometimes wonderful). Roll'd ROUND in EARTH'S diURNal COURSE with ROCKS, and STONES, and TREES. --Bob G. From Jandhodge at aol.com Mon Apr 9 15:19:52 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 15:19:52 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <7b.12dc76aa.28036558@aol.com> << > Are there really people who don't believe in spondees? How can that be? > Seriously? Tim Steele isn't very high on them, for one. >> Gosh, he must really have fun with Donne, then: Death, be not proud, though some have call?d thee Mighty, and dreadful, for thou art not so: For those whom thou think'st thou dost o'erthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet can't thou kill me. . . . One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. I suppose if one tries really really really really hard, it might be possible to read that with no spondees. Or maybe it's just prose that accidentally rhymes? Jan From johnbrehm at mindspring.com Mon Apr 9 15:22:31 2001 From: johnbrehm at mindspring.com (john brehm) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 15:22:31 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <37.13522165.28035f22@aol.com> Message-ID: <005301c0c12a$6dd47040$d12bf7a5@compaqcomputer> > << This is what I love about metrical analysis. Ten poets/critics will give > you > ten different scansions of a single line. Why is that? >> > > Because poetry is art, not technology? > > Jan > Right, but many people assert that meter is a fairly systematic tool for measuring the stress patterns in a line of verse. If ten readers with sophisticated metrical training can't agree on the scansion of a single line that just strikes me as a little problematic--not for the poem necessarily, but for metrical analysis. But thanks for suggesting that poetry is art not technology. I don't think I've ever had anyone point that out to me before. John Brehm From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 9 15:30:36 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 15:30:36 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <22.148548cd.280367dc@cs.com> In a message dated 4/9/01 2:09:26 PM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > I read Shakespeare's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" > as five iambs with an extra beat at the end, or an > unfinished iamb. I think the emphasized "and's" > are powerful. > I assume you mean an extra unstressed syllable, not an extra beat. From Jandhodge at aol.com Mon Apr 9 15:37:23 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 15:37:23 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <63.144cbb37.28036973@aol.com> Bob G. writes: << I am more old-fashioned than many here, I suspect, in believing meter must be obeyed as much as possible, so all lines in a sonnet should be forced into iambic, except where obviously it won't work. The form tells us how to scan. >> Wow! Talk about defining terms to rig an argument! To say this one one hand, and then to argue that "old technologies" like rhyme and meter preclude innovation, is to win the gold medal for casuistry. This is precisely the kind of "arithmetical" approach to metrics that Pope (and others) were attacking, and that led English poetry to be cursed with bad verse filled with elisions, fake spellings [o'verthrown; if e'er; wouldest; etc.], expletives, and mercilessly tortured syntax against which it has been fighting ever since. Maybe meter is a tool to be used rather than "obeyed," and if one learns how to use it skilfully enough, one can master it rather than being enslaved by it? Jan From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 16:00:55 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 12:00:55 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pope on Meter Message-ID: True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance, 'Tis not enough no harshness give offense, The sound must seem an echo to the sense: Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows: But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar: When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labors, and the words move slow; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th'unbending corn, and skims along the main. Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise, And bid alternate passions fall and rise! [Alexander Pope: "An Essay on Criticism"] Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 16:09:06 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 12:09:06 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Really, my Favorite Bishop Poem.... Message-ID: How could I have missed this, argh. What a lag time. Sorry if I appeared to be ignoring you, Pat; sometimes I'm just spacey. Pat Fargnoli wrote: >I've never, though, understood >quite what all the fuss about "One Art" is. Not that its not clever and >skilled, but that in comparison to those I've name, it seems to be to be >lesser. I'd agree that "One Art" doesn't have the visual brilliance of "The Armadillo" or "Pink Dog" or "The Fish" or other much-loved Bishop poems, and I think it's a bit of a poet's poem -- but what I like most about it is how the loss careens from the ordinary, everyday (mother's watch, car keys: who hasn't lost ordinary possessions like that) to the huge and improbable (_three_ houses? and two rivers, two continents? How can you lose a continent?) and the way the drily humorous "The art of losing isn't hard to master" repeats and repeats itself until it's almost communicating the speaker's grief at the end where she seems nearly unable to even write "disaster" because of the loss she's suffered. The repetitious nature of the poem seems beautifully suited to what she's saying, too, both in someone repeating something over and over to try to convince herself of it, and in the numb stuporous repetition of grief. It's like the poet is repeating a charm until the very end to stave off the loss of the "you" with the "joking voice," which suddenly is revealed as the worst loss and the one the speaker has been dreading all along. It's almost as though she is counting up her losses as other people count up possessions they _do_ have to reassure themselves. And it's all done in such a conversational, natural, half-joking way that you don't nearly realize what's at stake until the very end of the poem. The words nearly reverse themselves and you realize the speaker is saying, more or less, one never masters the art of losing -- she can't any longer try to resign herself to the possibility of loss. Bishop's biographer ranks it with Roethke's "Words for the Wind" as one of the top modern villanelles, and I think she's right. Both are special favorites of mine. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 9 16:36:12 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 13:36:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Metrical Analysis Message-ID: <20010409203612.BFBE436F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 9 17:05:52 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 14:05:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <20010409210552.3098936F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Mon Apr 9 06:00:53 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 05:00:53 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bishop Message-ID: >Bishop's >biographer ranks it with Roethke's "Words for the Wind" as one of the top >modern villanelles, and I think she's right. Both are special favorites of >mine. I think you mean "The Waking." Paul Lake From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 17:14:22 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 13:14:22 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Bishop Message-ID: Yes, "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow." Thanks. >I think you mean "The Waking." >Paul Lake _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 17:27:58 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 17:27:58 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <22.148548cd.280367dc@cs.com> Message-ID: <3AD2295E.106A@nut-n-but.net> Yes, extra unstressed syllable. > > I read Shakespeare's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" > > as five iambs with an extra beat at the end, or an > > unfinished iamb. I think the emphasized "and's" > > are powerful. > > > I assume you mean an extra unstressed syllable, not an extra beat. RSGwynn From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 17:40:26 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 13:40:26 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: Bob G. wrote: >Yes, extra unstressed syllable. > > > > I read Shakespeare's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" > > > as five iambs with an extra beat at the end, or an > > > unfinished iamb. I think the emphasized "and's" > > > are powerful. > > I assume you mean an extra unstressed syllable, not an extra beat. But wait. Do you mean To MOR / row AND / to MOR / row AND / to MOR -row (extra syllable) which seems to me a sad example of rigidly metrically scanning something. Would anyone ever actually speak that way aloud? No one I have ever heard read this passage aloud says "AND" -- it's more To MOR row / and to MOR row / and to MOR row almost as a set of triplets, nearly. Or am I reading you incorrectly? Moira Russell Seattle, WA Wise Wretch! with Pleasures too refin'd to please; With too much Spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much Quickness ever to be taught; With too much Thinking to have common Thought: You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give, And die of nothing but a Rage to live. -- Alexander Pope _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From JforJames at aol.com Mon Apr 9 17:55:03 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 17:55:03 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Olds, Made In America Message-ID: his take on Sharon Olds's _Blood, Tin, > Straw_ in the December, 1999 _New Criterion_ . (It can be accessed in > the _New Criterion_ Sept., 1999 - June, 2000 archives.) The review > ends with the following paragraph (one of the gentler passages): > > Poetry in our prudent hour needs more sex, not less, > and Olds may someday become the laureate of the > bedroom; but for all her radical pretense (she claims > if she hadn?t married she?d have been a Weatherman > bomber), she?s a homely Redbook moralist, believing > in motherhood, family, and honey on her nipples. By > the time she?s reduced to giving sex tips, or calling her > husband?s member ?the errless digit,? all her shallow > pretense is greedily on display. The sadism is safe, but > de Sade would have run screaming from her bedroom. > > Logan's words are often harsh, bitterly comic---but they are rarely off > the mark. In the case of this particular review, Logan was perhaps too > kind (and it is as savage as I've seen him write). _Blood, Tin, Straw_ > contains large dollops of remarkably awful verse. . . . > > Those who might want to peruse the Olds review in its entirety (a > delicious read, save perhaps for Olds, her family, friends, and purblind > admirers-come-what-may) can click on "Archives" at the _New Criterion_ > site ( www.newcriterion.com ) and then select the archived articles from > Sept., 1999 - June, 2000. The Logan piece appears under the very > appropriate title "No Mercy." Russ, I haven't gotten around to Blood, Tin, Straw as yet, so I probably have no business commenting on this swatch of text, but I find I must defend Olds' poetry on the count of its frankness & unabashedness. Logan, and other reviewers, find the faults easily...they're evident. But so often they fail to see that a poet like Olds, or Ginsberg, is constantly working to disrupt that decorous calm that too easily settles over poetry. To make this kind poetry work you have to fail 9 out of 10 times...you have make some embarrassingly bad poems. But the 1 poem that works will be so much more interesting than 99% of everything else that's written from the poetic comfort zone by poets with no taste for the risks necessary to create a poetry (to paraphrase Levine) outrageous enough to be called American. Finnegan From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 9 18:19:07 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 18:19:07 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <88.4f9bd46.28038f5b@cs.com> In a message dated 4/9/2001 4:42:15 PM Central Daylight Time, moira_russell at hotmail.com writes: > > But wait. Do you mean > > To MOR / row AND / to MOR / row AND / to MOR -row (extra syllable) > > which seems to me a sad example of rigidly metrically scanning something. > Would anyone ever actually speak that way aloud? No one I have ever heard > read this passage aloud says "AND" -- it's more > > To MOR row / and to MOR row / and to MOR row > > almost as a set of triplets, nearly. Or am I reading you incorrectly? > > Moira Russell I hate to get into these scansion arguments because they're subjective, but I can't imagine any actor worth his salt reading that line as straight iambic. I'd go iamb, pyrrhic, iamb, pyrrhic, iamb (w/ extra syllable) Lew Turco says that in iambic verse the middle of three ordinarily unstressed syllables gets "promoted" to a stress, but I don't believe it and can't hear it. If I'm going to have to choose between stressed and unstressed for the "and"'s I'd have to pick the former. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 18:14:40 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 18:14:40 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <63.144cbb37.28036973@aol.com> Message-ID: <3AD23450.2AAF@nut-n-but.net> All I can say is that I prefer metrical verse to adhere to a meter. I have nothing against not using meter. Or using it haphazardly. There is much also to be said for breaking meter expressively when a poem calls for it, but I think the break should be obvious--so strong a break that the auditor HAS to change meter. So, as I put it, to make it so continuing the prescribed meter obviously won't work. Sure, you should use meter effectively. That many "o'er" poets don't doesn't mean you should not try to use it. Not that "o'er's" are not at times effective. One thing I believe is that a poem should announce itself as a poem, and meter--and poeticisms like "o'er"-- are among the ways it can do this. I think a value of poetry is its ability to build a refuge from reality-- i.e., from prose--for us, and it does this in good part by being stylized. Declaiming metrical verse as though it were prose is a good way to make it sound natural. If you prefer that, then that's the way to go. I prefer formal poetry to sound unnatural--in some way, without sounding too unnatural. Bottom line: I would NOT want a world in which everyone declaimed a given poem the same way. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 18:21:43 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 18:21:43 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: Message-ID: <3AD235F7.76E7@nut-n-but.net> Yup, Moira, I like toMORow AND toMORrow AND toMORrow. I was taught also to ignore meter when declaiming formal poetry, and took a long time to find the value of not, even in extreme-seeming cases like the tomorrow line. I'm an extremist at both ends of the traditionalism/ radicalism spectrum. --Bob G. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 9 18:21:03 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 18:21:03 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem Message-ID: <67.1259d2a6.28038fcf@cs.com> In a message dated 4/9/2001 4:42:15 PM Central Daylight Time, moira_russell at hotmail.com writes: > > To MOR row / and to MOR row / and to MOR row > > almost as a set of triplets, nearly. Or am I reading you incorrectly? Foot divisions ought to jibe with the five-foot meter. We stress the syllables the same, but I put the / marks to show five feet. These marks are purely artificial and aren't "heard" in any sense. They're just like marks on a ruler--they show us how far we've gone in the line. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 18:31:42 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 14:31:42 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] I'll Think About It All Tomorrow, Creeping By in its Petty Pace Message-ID: Well, this is getting miserably technical and no doubt dull. But if Sam meansto scan it To MO / row and / to MOR / row and / to MO / row (iamb) (phyrric) (iamb) (phyrric) (iamb) (orphan I guess) I believe I agree (although on the stage I've usually heard it done with big caesuras: "Tomorrow -- and tomorrow -- and tomorrow" with the emphasis on the days dripping away like water, or candlewax, or something drippable). I agree with you that metrical readings are usually quite subjective, although I think this tendency has unfortunately increased the further and further we get away from poem as spoken performance. Moira Russell Seattle, WA Wise Wretch! with Pleasures too refin'd to please; With too much Spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much Quickness ever to be taught; With too much Thinking to have common Thought: You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give, And die of nothing but a Rage to live. -- Alexander Pope _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Mon Apr 9 19:00:14 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 19:00:14 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] creeps IN this PETty PACE from DAY to DAY References: <88.4f9bd46.28038f5b@cs.com> Message-ID: <3AD23EFE.3A2D@nut-n-but.net> to THE last SYL'ble OF reCORDed TIME, et CETerA Even worse, if I were declaiming it, I'd do the WHOLE tomorrow passage in blank verse--with just a few elided words here and there. Perhaps I'm just reacting against the prosaic way American actors declaim Shakespeare, and the wide rejection of heightened rhetoric in American plays, but I really do like the sound of it that way, and find it immensely stirring auditorily--as it is as imagery. Not that it doesn't sound pretty good however read but I think the stylization raises it to another level--for those willing to let it en-chant them. --Bob G. From mackechnie at email.msn.com Mon Apr 9 20:55:48 2001 From: mackechnie at email.msn.com (Russ MacKechnie) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 20:55:48 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Olds, Made In America In-Reply-To: Message-ID: James Finnegan writes about Sharon Olds: > To make > this kind poetry work you have to fail 9 out of 10 > times...you have make > some embarrassingly bad poems. I'm not entirely sure that's true, James. But if it is, you'd think one might strive to avoid *publishing* the embarrassingly bad ones. Russ From tadrichards at prodigy.net Mon Apr 9 21:11:49 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 21:11:49 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <81.96944ec.2803400e@cs.com> Message-ID: <000c01c0c15b$38944640$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> I can see trochee, iamb, anapest, anapest. I just can't hear it as more that four stresses. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 12:40 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem > In a message dated 4/9/01 11:14:51 AM Central Daylight Time, > tadrichards at prodigy.net writes: > > > How is the first line pentameter? It reads to me like 3 dactyls and a single > > stressed syllable. > > > > Tad > > > > > > > > > >>A Magnet > > > >> > > > >> > > > >>Since she was two, it had held up her end > > I read it trochee, iamb, pyrrhic, spondee, iamb. > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Mon Apr 9 21:26:07 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 21:26:07 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem References: <001501c0c11d$64cc5920$d12bf7a5@compaqcomputer> <3AD1F2E5.6F60AE1B@lehigh.edu> Message-ID: <004301c0c15d$37b80520$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> I think ten different scansions is a bit much. I think most metricists would agree on most lines, and it's the unusual one that would call up a lot of different interpretations -- and I would say 4 would be a lot. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Lucia" To: Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 1:35 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem > john brehm wrote: > > > > This is what I love about metrical analysis. Ten poets/critics will give you > > ten different scansions of a single line. Why is that? > > Great question. Probably because stress is relative and different > ears will hear it differently in any given line except in cases of the > most ploddingly obvious (and hence least flexible) meter. Given > national, regional, and personal variations in sentence cadence and word > pronunciation, scansion is always just someone's best guess. Metrists, > can any of you make the case that there is (usually only) one correct > scansion for a given line? From tadrichards at prodigy.net Mon Apr 9 21:53:16 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 21:53:16 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pope on Meter References: Message-ID: <009d01c0c161$02edc7e0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Moira -- re Pope. Wow. This is wonderful. Thanks for posting. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 4:00 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Pope on Meter > True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, > As those move easiest who have learned to dance, > 'Tis not enough no harshness give offense, > The sound must seem an echo to the sense: > Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, > And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows: > But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, > The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar: > When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, > The line too labors, and the words move slow; > Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, > Flies o'er th'unbending corn, and skims along the main. > Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise, > And bid alternate passions fall and rise! > [Alexander Pope: "An Essay on Criticism"] > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From schro047 at tc.umn.edu Mon Apr 9 22:29:11 2001 From: schro047 at tc.umn.edu (Steve Schroer) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 21:29:11 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem References: <200104092157.f39Lv1j30103@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <3AD26FF7.AA71CFAB@tc.umn.edu> > But wait. Do you mean > To MOR / row AND / to MOR / row AND / to MOR -row > (extra syllable) > which seems to me a sad example of rigidly metrically scanning > something. Would anyone ever actually speak that way aloud? > No one I have ever heard read this passage aloud says "AND" > -- it's more > To MOR row / and to MOR row / and to MOR row > almost as a set of triplets, nearly. Or am I reading you incorrectly? One of the rules of English accentual-syllabic verse is that you can't have three consecutive unstressed syllables. Certainly people do read the line without regard to the metrical pattern. But they shouldn't. How else to distinguish what Shakespeare formatted as poetry from what he formatted as prose? It is my strong suspicion that in Shakespeare's time actors emphasized the meter of their lines to a degree that we today (post-Marlon Brando) would find most unnatural. As for John Brehm's comment: > If ten readers with sophisticated metrical training can't agree on > the scansion of a single line that just strikes me as a little > problematic--not for the poem necessarily, but for metrical > analysis. -- I think he underestimates the difficulty of rounding up ten readers who can hear the rhythm of metrical verse. And of those ten readers, at least nine of them will be autodidacts. "Training" in meter is almost nonexistent nowadays, though there are some helpful books on the subject. In my experience, people who've got the ear for it almost always agree on how lines should be scanned. This of course includes agreeing on the various options in ambiguous cases. Steve Schroer From tadrichards at prodigy.net Tue Apr 10 02:38:45 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 02:38:45 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Hypertext as Innovation References: <3AD20451.4799@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <002701c0c188$e51beee0$1a14fe3f@hvc.rr.com> I believe it was Brion Gysin who pioneered this particular innovation. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Grumman" To: Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 2:49 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Hypertext as Innovation > Yes, cut-ups plus the requirement that there was no > authorial order. A significant innovation I think. > Hypertext can significantly facilitate the procedure, I > think, and do a lot else, so is also a significant > innovation, for me. > > --Bob G. > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Apr 10 05:33:43 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 05:33:43 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Hypertext as Innovation References: <3AD20451.4799@nut-n-but.net> <002701c0c188$e51beee0$1a14fe3f@hvc.rr.com> Message-ID: <3AD2D377.43D4@nut-n-but.net> Yes, another BG. Couldn't remember his name. > I believe it was Brion Gysin who pioneered this particular innovation. > > > Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." > > Yes, cut-ups plus the requirement that there was no > > authorial order. A significant innovation I think. > > Hypertext can significantly facilitate the procedure, I > > think, and do a lot else, so is also a significant > > innovation, for me. --Bob G. From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Tue Apr 10 08:56:07 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 08:56:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Magee reads at PoProj 4/16 In-Reply-To: <3AD2D377.43D4@nut-n-but.net> from "Bob Grumman" at Apr 10, 2001 05:33:43 am Message-ID: <200104101256.IAA12374@dept.english.upenn.edu> Hi folks, shameless plug: I'll be reading this Monday night, 4/16 at 8pm at the Poetry Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 E. 10th St., NYC. Would love to see any and all of you there if you happen to be in the neighborhood, in the neighborhood, in the neighborhood. -m. From klvarnes at home.com Tue Apr 10 09:02:46 2001 From: klvarnes at home.com (Kathrine Varnes) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 08:02:46 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Poem In-Reply-To: <7b.12dc76aa.28036558@aol.com> Message-ID: > > > << > Are there really people who don't believe in spondees? How can that be? >> Seriously? > > Tim Steele isn't very high on them, for one. >> Nor am I. While I'm not one to get into fisticuffs over it, I generally hear heavy iambs or trochees where other folks hear spondees. Among other reasons folks have mentioned, if you really go for spondees and their weaker pals, then you confuse the whole issue of accents per line. You have a pentameter line with 5 accents, then 7, then 4. I find that needlessly complicated for an admittedly imprecise method. So I scan the Shakespeare as pentameter and the Salter, too. I'm of the "accent is relative within a foot" camp; natural speech stress is another thing. So: / x x / , / x / x x / > > > >>Since she was two, it had held up her end \ \ \ A pause sometimes promotes accent on words like "it" to my ear. This isn't what I'd call strong pentameter, and I only hear 3-4 real stresses. Accents are very light, but there. Depending on emphasis, "since SHE," works too. And it's a good thing jazz singers don't play standards the same way each time, too. Kathrine From Kimmelman at NJIT.EDU Tue Apr 10 09:24:51 2001 From: Kimmelman at NJIT.EDU (Kimmelman, Burt) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 09:24:51 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Essays Needed Message-ID: There are still two unclaimed entries for A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry that I am editing: "Frank Samperi" and "Allen Mandelbaum." Anyone interested in writing one or both of them? The volume is to be published by Facts on File, Inc., a publisher that enjoys very wide distribution in libraries, colleges and high schools, as well as bookstores, and it will be peer reviewed. Payment for essays will be in presentational offprints. All essays will carry the author's name, and a list of contributors will appear in the back of the book. The list, as well as author guidelines and writing samples, can be viewed at this website: http://eies.njit.edu/~kimmelma/companion.html. If you are interested in writing for the volume then please contact me at kimmelman at njit.edu. Thanks, Burt Kimmelman From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Tue Apr 10 11:19:01 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (=?utf-8?B?QW1iZXIgUHJlbnRpc3M=?=) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 11:19:01 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] =?utf-8?B?QnJlYWsgVGltZSE=?= Message-ID: Since we've been talking about critics criticizing, and now we're not really talking at all, so I figured you guys might want to look at this: http://webdelsol.com/f-bostoncomment.htm At least part of it is about NewPoetry's favorite subject (Lord, forgive me for bringing this up - Philip Levine. That's about it. -Amber From moira_russell at hotmail.com Tue Apr 10 11:34:14 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 07:34:14 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Break Time! Message-ID: Amber Prentiss posted: >http://webdelsol.com/f-bostoncomment.htm My, I didn't know William Logan could bring himself to write under a female pseudonym. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Tue Apr 10 12:53:40 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 18:53:40 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] Break Time! References: Message-ID: <035101c0c1de$ccf54360$425a4284@toshiba> > Amber Prentiss posted: > > >http://webdelsol.com/f-bostoncomment.htm it may be time to quote Pope again 92 Hear how learn'd Greece her useful rules indites, 93 When to repress, and when indulge our flights: 94 High on Parnassus' top her sons she show'd, 95 And pointed out those arduous paths they trod; 96 Held from afar, aloft, th' immortal prize, 97 And urg'd the rest by equal steps to rise. 98 Just precepts thus from great examples giv'n, 99 She drew from them what they deriv'd from Heav'n. 100 The gen'rous critic fann'd the poet's fire, 101 And taught the world with reason to admire. 102 Then criticism the Muse's handmaid prov'd, 103 To dress her charms, and make her more belov'd; 104 But following wits from that intention stray'd; 105 Who could not win the mistress, woo'd the maid; 106 Against the poets their own arms they turn'd, 107 Sure to hate most the men from whom they learn'd. Karen Alkalay-Gut gut22 at post.tau.ac.il http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ > From moira_russell at hotmail.com Tue Apr 10 12:01:53 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 08:01:53 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pope on Meter Message-ID: Tad Richards wrote: >Moira -- re Pope. Wow. This is wonderful. Thanks for posting. Glad you like -- I think a little Pope is a marvellous thing. Here is a bit immediately preceding the last quote: But most by Numbers judge a Poet's Song, And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong; In the bright Muse tho' thousand Charms conspire, Her Voice is all these tuneful Fools admire, [340] Who haunt Parnassus but to please their Ear, Not mend their Minds; as some to Church repair, Not for the Doctrine, but the Musick there. These Equal Syllables alone require, Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels tire, While Expletives their feeble Aid do join, And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line, While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes, With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes. Where-e'er you find the cooling Western Breeze, [350] In the next Line, it whispers thro' the Trees; If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep, The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep. Then, at the last, and only Couplet fraught With some unmeaning Thing they call a Thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the Song, That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along. Leave such to tune their own dull Rhimes, and know What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow; And praise the Easie Vigor of a Line, [360] Where Denham's Strength, and Waller's Sweetness join. I do wonder how Kathrine (or Tim Steele for that matter) would scan "And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line" -- not trying to be obstreperous, or challenging; just wondering. Moira Russell Seattle, WA Wise Wretch! with Pleasures too refin'd to please; With too much Spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much Quickness ever to be taught; With too much Thinking to have common Thought: You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give, And die of nothing but a Rage to live. -- Alexander Pope _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Tue Apr 10 12:05:35 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 08:05:35 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Papacy Message-ID: Karen Gut wrote: >it may be time to quote Pope again It's always time to quote Pope! (There's always room for Pope?) 'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill Appear in Writing or in Judging ill, But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence, To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense: Some few in that, but Numbers err in this, Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss; A Fool might once himself alone expose, Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose. 'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own. In Poets as true Genius is but rare, True Taste as seldom is the Critick's Share; Both must alike from Heav'n derive their Light, These born to Judge, as well as those to Write. Let such teach others who themselves excell, And censure freely who have written well. Authors are partial to their Wit, 'tis true, But are not Criticks to their Judgment too? Moira Russell Seattle, WA Wise Wretch! with Pleasures too refin'd to please; With too much Spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much Quickness ever to be taught; With too much Thinking to have common Thought: You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give, And die of nothing but a Rage to live. -- Alexander Pope _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From JforJames at aol.com Tue Apr 10 13:22:15 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 13:22:15 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Pankey Poem Message-ID: <97.13de044d.28049b47@aol.com> A poem by Eric Pankey from his collection CENOTAPH August Heirloom All this was almost mine, I who own nothing but debt, But a vacancy that accrues, That haunts each room like a ghost, Like the memory of a ghost cast out. All summer the cicada tooled the maple's copper air. All summer the cicada sharpened its awl. In the mirror's shallow A single star holds on like a nail in the wall. The sky's dark corner is scratched glass. One more word. One more word sapped of its meaning Like an unconfirmed miracle, Like the weightless bauble the cicada sloughed. Copyright? 2000 by Eric Pankey. From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Tue Apr 10 02:21:33 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 01:21:33 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] New Salter Poem Message-ID: Here's a short Salter poem from Rebel Angels I like. Paul Lake Summer 1983 None of us remembers these, the days when passing strangers adored us at first sight, just for living, or for strolling down the street; praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . you, too, in a little while, my darling will have lost all this, asked for a kiss will give one, and learn how love dooms us to earn love once we can speak of it. From schro047 at tc.umn.edu Tue Apr 10 13:51:29 2001 From: schro047 at tc.umn.edu (Steve Schroer) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 12:51:29 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem References: <200104101517.f3AFH1j06750@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <3AD34821.100C0E58@tc.umn.edu> > Among other reasons folks have mentioned, if you really go > for spondees and their weaker pals, then you confuse the > whole issue of accents per line. You have a pentameter line > with 5 accents, then 7, then 4. Pentameter doesn't count accents. It counts feet. There's your source of confusion. Spondees are not optional. They're an essential rhythmic device that permits the poet to slow down and thicken a line. / x x / / x / x x / > Since she was two, it had held up her end > A pause sometimes promotes accent on words like "it" to my > ear. Maybe sometimes, but to do so here would be to place an emphasis on "it" that the sense of the line doesn't call for. A person speaking this sentence would not stress "it"; since there's another perfectly good way to scan it, we don't need to go hunting for non-obligatory stresses. And "held up" is a spondee. Why? The spoken language. That's simply how people say the words when they occur together in this verb form. The noun form "hold-up," on the other hand, is definitely a trochee. I think the line has to go like this, with the old pyrrhic/spondee combination in the third and fourth feet:: SINCE she / was TWO, / it had / HELD UP / her END The first foot might be taken for an iamb instead of a trochee, but the scanning of the last four feet should not be controversial. Of course it's true that not all stresses are equally strong, and rhythmically sophisticated poets have always recognized this. Nevertheless the traditional metrical system -- the system that prevailed until the 20th century, when the great majority of poets and their readers lost the ability to hear the rhythm of language -- is either/or. For poets who wrote within this system, either a syllable carries a stress or it doesn't. I don't believe Salter has much of an ear for rhythm, but if we're going to scan her line in traditional fashion, I think we have to do it as I have done above. Steve Schroer From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Tue Apr 10 03:26:38 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 02:26:38 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Villanelle Message-ID: I agree with Steve Schroer when he writes, I don't believe Salter has much of an ear for rhythm . . ." Rhythmical mastery has never been Salter's strong point. But since we've had recent threads on Salter and on villanelles, here's a poem that twines them--a well done Salter villanelle, from *A Kiss in Space.* William's Logan might be pleased by the poem's hint of domestic rebellion. Paul Lake * * * Video Blues My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, And likes to rent her movies, for a treat. It makes some evenings harder to enjoy. The list of actresses who might employ Him as their slave is too long to repeat. (My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, coy Jean Arthur with that voice as dry as wheat . . .) It makes some evenings harder to enjoy. Does he confess all this just to annoy A loyal spouse? I know I can't compete. My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy. And can't a woman have her dreamboats? Boy, I wouldn't say my life is incomplete, But some evenings I could certainly enjoy Two hours with Cary Grant as _my_ own toy. I guess, though, we were destined not to meet. My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, Which makes some evenings harder to enjoy. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 10 15:10:04 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 15:10:04 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter Villanelle Message-ID: <57.14464944.2804b48c@cs.com> In a message dated 4/10/01 1:35:19 PM Central Daylight Time, paul.lake at mail.atu.edu writes: > But some evenings I could certainly enjoy > I like the poem too (have it posted outside my office on my "Steal These Poems" wall). But I can't imagine what she was thinking here. But some nights I could certainly enjoy From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Tue Apr 10 16:18:36 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 16:18:36 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) Message-ID: I hope I haven't asked this before, but here's my question of the day: What would an ideal literary periodical (that prints poetry) do? -Amber From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Tue Apr 10 16:36:27 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 15:36:27 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fascist Prosody In-Reply-To: <3AD34821.100C0E58@tc.umn.edu> References: <200104101517.f3AFH1j06750@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: No comment: >> Nevertheless the traditional metrical system -- the system that >>prevailed until the 20th century, when the great majority of poets and >>their >readers lost the ability to hear the rhythm of language -- is either/or. >For poets who wrote within this system, either a syllable carries a stress >or it doesn't. > >Steve Schroer > __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From jdavis at panix.com Tue Apr 10 16:31:49 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 16:31:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] archive? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Is there a public archive for this list? I'm trying to teach myself contemporary scansion, and I'd like the chance to go back through the competing interpretations of that Salter line... Jordan Davis From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Tue Apr 10 16:46:19 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 16:46:19 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] archive? Message-ID: The link at the bottom of every message takes you to an intro page for the list. About halfway through the page is a link called New Poetry Archives. Or you can go to the archive URL directly: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/ -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Jordan Davis To: 'new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu ' Sent: 4/10/2001 4:31 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] archive? Is there a public archive for this list? I'm trying to teach myself contemporary scansion, and I'd like the chance to go back through the competing interpretations of that Salter line... Jordan Davis _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 10 16:46:13 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 16:46:13 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) Message-ID: <76.969689a.2804cb15@cs.com> In a message dated 4/10/01 3:23:03 PM Central Daylight Time, aprentiss at agnesscott.edu writes: > > What would an ideal literary periodical (that prints poetry) do? > I think it ought to reflect a single editor's taste and not try to be eclectic. If you don't like this editor's taste, go elsewhere. I think it should be open to unpublished as well as established poets, whose work would be judged on their merit as *poems*, not as the products of a career. And it should publish a good number of intelligently written book reviews. From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Tue Apr 10 16:50:09 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 15:50:09 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] archive? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Here's the main page, which will lead you to the archives. http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry David Graham >Is there a public archive for this list? I'm trying to teach myself >contemporary scansion, and I'd like the chance to go back through the >competing interpretations of that Salter line... > >Jordan Davis > __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From griffinbaker at home.com Tue Apr 10 17:02:37 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 14:02:37 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem References: <200104101517.f3AFH1j06750@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <3AD34821.100C0E58@tc.umn.edu> Message-ID: <3AD374ED.75368B64@home.com> Winters also thought spondees extremely rare, available only in otherwise very strictly observed iambic meter. He has to go back to Barnabe Googe for his example. But most of the dispute concerns notation, not hearing. A newer notation, in the best system I know of, is Derek Attridge's, which might satisfy both spondiacs and anti-spondiacs. Attridge distinguishes between stresses, which define the rhythm, and beats, which define the meter. He has clear rules, all derived from what Steve calls "how people say the words," and a notation that shows how individual lines can realize both variant rhythms and identical meter. So even Pope's famous line still has only five beats. Attridge does away with the notion of feet (almost entirely an effect of notation, not audible at all). Scanning free verse lines, like Salter's, quibbling how to divide the words into feet, and then labelling them with Greek names seems pointless to me. Mark Baker From moira_russell at hotmail.com Tue Apr 10 17:18:36 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 13:18:36 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Silly rabbit, metrix are for kids Message-ID: Mark Baker wrote: >A newer notation, in the best system I know of, is Derek Attridge's, which >might satisfy both spondiacs and anti-spondiacs Very interesting, is this in a book of his, or an article? Does anyone know of a good sort of history of how meter has been heard and notated through the ages (from Homer on -- I like comprehensive sorts of things)? I have "All the Fun's in How you Say a Thing" but haven't read it through yet. Moira Rusell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From halvard at earthlink.net Tue Apr 10 17:34:09 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 17:34:09 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > What would an ideal literary periodical (that prints poetry) do? > > -Amber It should be "a ball of light in one's hand." Hal Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From tadrichards at prodigy.net Tue Apr 10 17:32:42 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 17:32:42 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) References: Message-ID: <003101c0c205$c760aa80$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Promote it. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 4:18 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) > I hope I haven't asked this before, but here's my question of the day: > > What would an ideal literary periodical (that prints poetry) do? > > -Amber > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Tue Apr 10 17:33:47 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 17:33:47 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] archive? References: Message-ID: <003d01c0c205$ed30d780$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Jordan -- I saved them all, I think -- I can forward them to you if you like. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jordan Davis" To: Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 4:31 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] archive? > Is there a public archive for this list? I'm trying to teach myself > contemporary scansion, and I'd like the chance to go back through the > competing interpretations of that Salter line... > > Jordan Davis > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Tue Apr 10 18:06:34 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 15:06:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) Message-ID: <20010410220634.4F1323ED3@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From DICK at watson.ibm.com Tue Apr 10 18:05:51 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 01 18:05:51 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Meter, scansion, etc. Message-ID: <200104102210.SAA25924@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Moira Russell wrote: >Very interesting, is this in a book of his, or an article? Does anyone know >of a good sort of history of how meter has been heard and notated through >the ages (from Homer on -- I like comprehensive sorts of things)? I have >"All the Fun's in How you Say a Thing" but haven't read it through yet. > Not directly addressing your request, but pretty close, is "Meter in English: A Critical Engagement," edited by David Baker. It's a collection of essays from lots of folks deeply interested in and holding strong opinions on the subject; when I finished it I had had enough for quite a while. But I do recommend it. Richard From moira_russell at hotmail.com Tue Apr 10 18:14:13 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 14:14:13 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) Message-ID: > >What would an ideal literary periodical (that prints poetry) do? Not cost an arm and a leg to subscribe; Be open to poets without a lot of publication credits but with a lot of talent; Publish stuff other than poetry (book reviews, short stories, critical pieces, nonfiction articles, dream chronicles)....For some reason nothing is so depressing as those journals with ream after ream after ream of poetry, like something being measured out by the yard. Cross-fertilization is good; AND have regular long essay-reviews featuring one or two particular poets (and if two poets were considered together, they would be _naturally linked_, like Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore); DOWN with omnibus reviews, which seem to just sprawl all over the page like some kind of floppy poetic Catch o' the Day. "Hey, book reviewer! Here's this morning's haul for you to process." Ugh; And pay a hundred dollars a line. Moira Russell Seattle, WA Wise Wretch! with Pleasures too refin'd to please; With too much Spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much Quickness ever to be taught; With too much Thinking to have common Thought: You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give, And die of nothing but a Rage to live. -- Alexander Pope _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From DICK at watson.ibm.com Tue Apr 10 18:11:15 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 01 18:11:15 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] rhythm/stress/beat Message-ID: <200104102214.SAA16554@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> >> Attridge distinguishes >>between stresses, which define the rhythm, and beats, which define the >>meter. I thought I knew what stresses/rhythm/beats/meter meant until I read this sentence. Would anyone care to elaborate on the distinction? Thanks. Richard From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Apr 10 18:25:00 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 18:25:00 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) References: Message-ID: <3AD3883C.78CC@nut-n-but.net> > > What would an ideal literary periodical (that prints poetry) do? > > > > -Amber > > It should be "a ball of light in one's hand." > > Hal No, no, you #!%*!!@! idiot! It should be a ball of *lighght* in one's hand. --Bob G. From Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu Tue Apr 10 20:30:54 2001 From: Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu (Ben Friedlander) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 19:30:54 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fascist Prosody References: <200104101517.f3AFH1j06750@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu,.Internet writes: >>> Nevertheless the traditional metrical system -- the system that >>>prevailed until the 20th century, when the great majority of poets and >>>their >>readers lost the ability to hear the rhythm of language -- is >either/or. >>For poets who wrote within this system, either a syllable carries a >stress >>or it doesn't. >> >>Steve Schroer >> It does? Or "it" does? Hm... Ben F. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Tue Apr 10 18:31:46 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 18:31:46 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem References: <200104101517.f3AFH1j06750@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <3AD34821.100C0E58@tc.umn.edu> <3AD374ED.75368B64@home.com> Message-ID: <3AD389D2.74F3@nut-n-but.net> Not surprisingly, I have lots of ideas on what an ideal literary magazine for poetry would be. Here's just one, that goes with what several others seem to want: Have as a double policy a requirement that at least ten poems per issue are by poets not previously published in any publication with a circulation of more than 100, and that not more than four poems by certified poets be published. By "certified," I mean Pulitzer Prize winners, American Academy of Poets members, etc. Rationale: one who wants to read them has plenty of places already to go to to do so. --Bob G. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Tue Apr 10 18:41:23 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 15:41:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: <20010410224123.4E97936F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From wasanthony at yahoo.com Tue Apr 10 19:22:15 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 16:22:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010410232215.20282.qmail@web12104.mail.yahoo.com> > What would an ideal literary periodical (that prints poetry) do? 1. Sell newspapers on the weekend to support itself. 2. Have monthly contests without charging a fee. Winners get published. 3. If it has an editorial board, change the board for every piece of work being considered. 4. Never publish Lynn Lyfshin. 5. Sponsor a poetry festival featuring the last six people who graced the covers of APR and charge $1,000 per workshop. 6. Have a web site whose first page is the first page. 7. Accept e-mail submissions. 8. Use recycled paper, but not recycled poems by major poets. 9. Print nothing but poetry. All poetry all the time. 10. Devote one issue to poets it has rejected, publishing only the poem(s) that were grounds for rejection. That's for starters. - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From griffinbaker at home.com Tue Apr 10 20:01:43 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 17:01:43 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Silly rabbit, metrix are for kids References: Message-ID: <3AD39EE6.38E4254C@home.com> Attridge has two books: _The Rhythms of English Poetry_, very dense, but a full defense and explanation, and _Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction_, designed as a college textbook, complete with exercises, and including some revisions of his earlier book. You can also find a precis of his theory, and an excellent use of it, in Brennan O'Donnell's _The Passion of Meter_ (but you have to like early Wordsworth to get throught that). I didn't think much of David Baker's book (poets arguing about what to call feet), especially if you can read the whole thing and not be able to distinguish among meter, rhythm, stresses, and beats. Stephen Adams' _Poetic Designs_ explains one difference (meter, the invariable pattern; rhythm, the variable sounds and inflections of individual lines). Beats, the contested term that Attridge has promoted, are not identical to stresses: promotion and demotion allow readers to experience beats and offbeats (another of Attridge's terms) on both stressed and unstressed syllables. The terminology is exasperating, but only because of its competition with the even more exasperating traditional spatchcocked jargon of iambs, spondees, and so on. Mark Baker From griffinbaker at home.com Tue Apr 10 20:05:36 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 17:05:36 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Fascist Prosody References: <200104101517.f3AFH1j06750@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <3AD39FD0.ED101B32@home.com> > >> > > It does? Or "it" does? Hm... > > Ben F. Every Olsonite adores a fascist, The beat in the post ... Mark B. From griffinbaker at home.com Tue Apr 10 20:26:21 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 17:26:21 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem References: <20010410224123.4E97936F9@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <3AD3A4AC.A2DED0F8@home.com> > > > Mark, > > It seems pointless to me too. Did Salter concern himself with scanning? Why is it such an all-consuming pass-time for academics to try to ascertain variant rhythms, identical meters, whether or not a line has only five beats, has no notion of feet, an effect of notation, audible or not? Why indeed quibble over such things? All of these "standards" are, to my view, superficial attributes. Do poets do all this deadly boring analytical planning before committing a line to verse? I cannot imagine why? These things should be occurring as the poetic thoughts are formed, integral, connected naturally throughout, almost sub-consciously > pre-ordained, not methodically plotted out. > > Bob Cobb You misunderstand me, Bob. I object to scanning free verse lines with traditional methods, because the verse usually has nothing to do, even in reaction, with traditional meter. But I'm not against deadly boring analysis or quibbling itself. Much of the poetry's in the superficies for me. Mark Baker From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 10 23:01:33 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 23:01:33 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: In a message dated 4/10/2001 4:06:28 PM Central Daylight Time, griffinbaker at home.com writes: > Scanning free verse lines, > like Salter's, quibbling how to divide the words into feet, and then > labelling them with Greek names seems pointless to me. > I didn't scan the whole poem (I have now), but it is obviously not free verse but loose iambic pentameter. Frost said that poets writing English meters had two real choices: iambic and loose iambic. "Stopping by Woods" for the former; "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" for the latter. There's no metrical mystery in Salter's poem--predominantly iambic with some anapests occasionally plus the usual kinds of substitutions you'd expect to find in iambic pentameter. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 11 00:06:02 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 21:06:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) Message-ID: <20010411040602.21D0E36FA@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 11 00:15:10 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 21:15:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: <20010411041510.64B8A36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Wed Apr 11 01:51:11 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 07:51:11 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) References: Message-ID: <006701c0c24b$6a695e80$fd5a4284@toshiba> > > What would an ideal literary periodical (that prints poetry) do? > > > > -Amber it would publish me Karen Alkalay-Gut gut22 at post.tau.ac.il http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ From griffinbaker at home.com Wed Apr 11 03:34:15 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 00:34:15 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem References: Message-ID: <3AD408F7.80E1DF0D@home.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbales at cybergate.net Wed Apr 11 08:12:03 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 08:12:03 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <3AD1C354.449A@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: BG: > I tried my best in this informal workshop setting to > convey the gist of my main ideas on rhyme. Well, it seems to me, your best attempt made your notion of rhyme sound like a parody, a caricature, of the way rhyme is used by serious poets. What seems even more remarkable, though, is that you seem to think that a workshop setting is a place to find agreement and approval. In my experience ordinarily one takes something one has some confidence in but which one suspects has some problems one doesn't see, or only dimly apprehends, to a workshop in order to get others to identify those problems and bring them into focus so one can address them. The notion that since it's a workshop you don't have to be careful to say what you mean or mean what you say seems like a misunderstanding of the workshop process. BG: > Your idea that rhyme's main use is to validate its user when > used well is interesting but I don't agree with it. A good > poem validates its author--superfluously.<< The validation of the author himself is superfluous? I might agree with that except it seems to me you are probably using "validates its author" in some special sense that I don't understand, because I was not talking about validating the author at all. I'm not saying that the author gets validated by excellence in the use of poetical techniques, I'm saying the poem gains authority for the reader when the poetical techniques used in the poem (rhyme, for example) are well-used. What I'm trying to say is that the way that a poet deploys the rhetorical and poetical techniques within a poem, whether rhyme or zeugma or any other, gives authority to the poem. The author could be a drunken child molester or a loving parent but if, for the space of the poem he or she can deploy poetical techniques to persuade the reader that what the poem says is significant, even important, that then that poem has authority for the reader irrepective of the personal vices or virtues of the writer. In short, it's possible for Hitler to write good, and Mother Teresa to write bad, poems -- because writing good poems has no necessary connection to moral virtue, and writing bad poems has no necessary connection to vice. BG: > If rhyme, for > instance, makes a poem good, I like the poem because of > its rhyme. I don't decide that the effective rhyme validates > the rhymer, so I can take the rhymer seriously and accept > his poem as a good one.<< Well, since I wasn't trying to say that the rhyme validates the rhymer, nor was I trying to say that rhyme makes a poem good, we seem to disagree again. I'm not sure what you mean by the way you use the phrase "validates the rhymer", which sounds like a combination of pop- psych with disdain. I'm saying that the way the poet employs the techniques of poetry lends the poem its authority with the reader. The notion that the poet is "validated" seems odd to me: is a carpenter "validated" by using a lathe? Perhaps a carpenter is distinguished from a glazer by using a lathe, or a poet distinguished from a novelist by usiing rhyme, but it doesn't seem to me that any of those people are validated by the use of a tool. BG: > Anyway, I didn't get into this thread to formally > describe my whole poetics, or discuss rhyme in detail, > only to try to show you what I meant by the advancement > of craft through the introduction and early, refining > use of new techniques. I think I've done this.<< Well, I don't think you have, because you are still, right here in this paragraph, still using the same vague words without any more explanation of what you mean that you were using before. You are still saying that "new techniques" must "advance the craft" without seeming the least bit worried that you haven't said what "new techniques" or "advance the craft" mean. BG: > You and others have made me see that my term "craft-advancing" > is perhaps inadvertantly condescending.<< Well, perhaps it was "inadvertant" the first few times, but since you insist on continuing to use it, how can you claim it is "inadvertant" now? BG: > I was thinking purely of nuts and bolts sort of advances.<< But what is a "nuts and bolts sort of advance"? And why "advance", necessarily? Couldn't it just as easily be a "failure"? Not every new thing is a good thing. But you seem to be insisting here again that newness by its nature is good -- and I dispute that, and I think other reasonable people would dispute it, too. BG: > I think I agree with > Finnegan that it'd be better to speak of different ways of > advancing craft.<< Well, let us then also dare to speak of the concomitant risks of damaging craft. It's not the case that every new thing is a good thing; some new things are bad things. And it may be that new bad things damage rather than advance craft. But once again, here you are with the advancing. I thought you said you acknowledged that it was condescending -- but here you are using it as if no such acknowledgment had been made. This is a fallacious technique of debate called "The Big Lie" (though let me hasten to point out that I don't think you're lying -- that's just the name of the technique), wherein the affirmer of the positive uses sheer repetition to get his point of view accepted. Why do you acknowledge that "advance the craft" is condescending and yet continue to use the phrase? BG: > So my tentative solution is to divide > craft-advancing between "content-advancing" and "technique- > advancing."<< There you go with the "advancing" again. You're just repeating yourself without making any attempt to clarify what you're saying,and you're using a phrase you have already acknowedged is condescending. This strongly suggests that you don't have any arguments better than these fallacious ones you're putting forward -- and that strongly suggests that we should be wary of embracing your views. BG: >From here on, I can only discuss the above, and whatever is > closely related to it. I don't have the time or energy > to defend every generality I make about other things concerned > with poetry, or to lay out my whole poetics for you.<< Oh, that's okay, Bob -- I don't have time to explain point by point why you're wrong at every turn, either: you'll just have to take my word for it, as you ask me to take your word that you're right. See how ridiculous that sort of argument is? See why it's a fallacy? BG: > So I'm not too concerned that you are able to find minute > flaws with many of mine.<< The points I'm making don't seem to me to be about minute flaws, but rather to be this: if you make bad arguments in support of your views, and when challenged cannot make better ones, it may be that there *are* no better ones and that your views ought to be considered warily. If you can make better arguments, use better examples, then you may find your point of view, or part of it, more willingly accepted. But if this is the best you can do, as you say above that it is ("I tried my best in this informal workshop setting to convey the gist of my main ideas on rhyme" -- which is itself condescending in that you seem to be trying to say that you *could* put your points better if you *wanted* to, but you don't because we here in this setting aren't worth the effort) then it seems to me that there is a long way to go before I, at least, would be willing to agree with your views. BG: > When I have more time, I'll think about achieving > authority for a speaker of poetry.<< Once again, it is not the "speaker of poetry" whose authority I am concerned with, beyond the confines of the individual poem. I think we must distinguish the poet-as-poet from the voice-in-the-poem or else we will be distinguishing poems as good or bad on the basis of the poets' individual proclivities or politics or sexual practices or whatever else. I hope you're not saying that it's your view that just because they're charming in person, or not (for example), we should like their poems, or not? BG: > ... As I've > suggested before, whether the poem works or not is > up to the poem, not to how well its maker demonstrates > authoritativeness. And ANYTHING whatever that can > make a poem work, in any way, makes the poem . . . > trustworthy, I guess I'd put it.<< Well, it is often the case that one's mother likes one's poems just because her child wrote them -- and by saying "ANYTHING" in caps and with emphasis I must take you to mean that you are including such non-poetic things as mother love or a gun in your ear as things that can make a poem trustworthy. By golly, Bob, stick a gun in my ear and insist I agree with you or you'll shoot me, and I'll agree with you. And I'm sure your mother loves your poems. But so what? What is such agreement or approval worth as serious criticism? Not much -- though it's always nice to hear people agree with one or to reflect that one's mother loves one. BG: > Marcus, you keep telling me I'm saying or implying that > newness is more important than excellence in a poem. > I'm not saying it, nor do I think anyone could take > me to be implying it.<< Well, I take you to mean that, in no small part because even though you acknowledge that the terms of art you are using are condescending you insist on using them; because you don't seem to see that not all new things are good things -- that there can be bad new things as well as good new things. Your insistence is clear: that newness is always better than oldness, even when oldness is excellent and newness is bad. BG: > Newness is always valuable, for me, for reasons given.<< But the reasons given are unpersuasive. BG: > All I'll say is that I feel I've provided sufficient definitions > for the purposes of this discussion. You disagree, and seem > unable to accept my definitions, always asking for further > definitions I haven't time to give you.<< That's okay, Bob -- I haven't time to give you all the reasons your opinion seems ill-thought-out and unsupported by your examples. Suffice it to say that since I don't have time to explain it to you you'll just have to take my word for it. See how ridiculous that sounds? See why it's a fallacy? MB: > > You are using words that seem to indicate that you have a clear and > > distinct hierarchy of goods and a way to measure those goods within > > their own categories and between categories, and examples from > > sports that seem to reinforce the notion that you have the Fosbury > > Flop of Poetry and are out to replace old bad techniques with new > > ones. BG: > ... I use the flop as an example of an entirely NEW technique. > In high-jumping it was an improved technique,...<< While I still have a little time, though, here's another example of bad argument. You directly contradict yourself in the space of a few words, saying that the Fosbury Flop was both, at one and the same time, "an entirely new technique" and that it was only an "improved technique". You can't have it both ways, Bob -- was it "entirely new" or was it merely "improved"? But irrespective of that problem, the example itself, of the Fosbury Flop *replacing* the previous jumping techniques, strongly suggests that you think that your "new techniques" of poetry- writing are the Fosbury Flop Of Poetry, and that your "new techniques" ought to replace the old techniques. I'm pointing out that it's a bad example. BG: > So I then said, okay, drop that and go to Pollock's > drip technique. Not an improvement but a valuable > new way of painting.<< You did not, unfortunately, say "...drop that and go...". Would that you had. May I take it now, then, that you are indeed abandoning the whole notion of "advancing craft" with the notion of the Fosbury Flop? Because my objection is to the whole notion, not just to the example. Once you start talking about "advance" you have to be able to define and measure advance against a standard, and you haven't suggested a standard yet. Do you have one? Or have you abandoned the notion of "advancing craft"? > I taxonomize more than rank. I'm concerned > with types of "jumps," not their effectiveness.<< Well, the problem with the example, or the metaphor as you now seem to be using it, of "jumps" is that jumps *can* be measured and are measured and that the point of serious jumping is exactly effectiveness. That's the problem with the analogy, metaphor, or example you've chosen here. To the extent you insist on using a metaphor of an easily-measured phenomenon to try to explain a phenoomenon not so easily-measured, it seems to me your views are going to have serious conceptual problems. BG: > ... You refuse to go beyond what I literally say.<< Well, since the only way I have to try to figure out what you think is what you literally say I am hoping you'll literally say what you mean, and mean what you say. You are not, after all, writing a poem about this, wherein you might reasonably expect some eympathetic suspension of disbelief: you are putting forward a serious and critical and controversial argument in prose -- and one imagines that you are doing so in order to try to persuade your audience that your views are reasonable and worth embracing. Isn't that what you're trying to do? BG: > It's like someone's saying he hasn't been in > San Francisco too often but he's pretty sure there are > good Ecudoran restaurants there, though he can't tell you > exactly where.<< Yes, I agree, your method so far has been very like that. For the person who finds himself in San Francisco with a taste for Ecuadoran food, however, it is pretty useless. And that's even without addressing the other possile issues of "North Ecuadoran" or "South Ecuadoran" cuisine, and whether one is "good" and the other not, or whether a "good ... restaurant" is one that is authentically dirty and ill-lit in a rough part of town, or operates up to code in a prominent hotel, according to the people talking. BG: > I'm not trying here to get you to "embrace" my ideas so > much as I'm informally laying them out. Aside from that, > I am quite certain now that I could never elucidate them > sufficiently for you.<< Well, why are you informally laying them out if you are pretty sure that even a rigorous and well-reasoned elucidation would be insufficient? Why bother at all? BG: > My discussion of newness has to do VERY OBVIOUSLY with > newness in poetry or art. For me, poetry has to do (primarily) > with beauty/ugliness, not good/evil, so a evil newness > is out, by definition. New ugliness as a good. Sure, > since that will allow other poets to recognize and avoid it.<< But if "New ugliness is good.", period, full stop, then why should any poet avoid it? It's good! And good means, well, good -- doesn't it? At least, good means good ordinarily; perhaps you have some other meaning for good, though, that you want to explain as a term of art? Ordinarily, though, once you talk about goods you imply that there are evils -- not, perhaps, evils such as child slavery or rape, but evils in the sense of "not-goods", you see. And it is just your assertion that both "ugly" and "beauty", ordinarily thought to be opposites, and thus not both "good" are, in fact in your view, both "good" after all that concerns me about your thesis, here. You seem to be denying that anything bad, or at least "no-good" can come out of any newness. I think that's a mistake, and for many reasons. But, of course, I haven't time to go into it here, so you'll just have to take my word for it. BG: > You have a fixation on the idea that if I say newness is > good, that means I think newness is better than some or > all existing goods.<< Well, that's the way you present it, Bob -- your insistence on using terms you agree are condescending, your use of and your defense of the reasonableness of such examples as the Fosbury Flop and Michael Jordan, your use of absolutes in talking about newness, all these things strongly suggest that you *do* think newness, mere newness, is better not just some but all existing goods. If you don't want your readers to think that you mean newness is better than all existing goods then you would do well to avoid locutions such as "always" and "ANYTHING whatever" and the like, as well as avoid examples that imply that what is good in poetry is as measurable as what is good in sport -- not to mention avoiding such common fallacies as begging the question, the big lie, and self-contradiction. MB: > > How would you > > react to a young man coming up to you on the street, sticking a gun > > in your ear, reading you two of his poems, and then charging you the > > admission price of all the money you have on you to have heard them > > -- is the gun in your ear a "tool of poetry" then? BG: > Is it in the poem? Did it put something in the poem?<< Sure, it put fear in the poem: fear that you'd be shot if you didn't first listen then pay for the privilege. Perhaps there was also a picture of a gun "woven into" the poem, as well, of course, or perhaps you can think of the gun in your ear as in itself a sort of weaving-into: certainly it was an integral part of the poetic experience, and I think we can say confidently that it had much to do with whether you were willing to say it was an excellent poem indeed -- so excellent in fact that you were happy to pay for having heard it ... and for having the gun, the poem, and their wielder, leave in possession of your money without having blown your head off. And, of course, it seems to me by your lights, that it is certainly a New Technique to stick a gun in someone's ear in order to compel them to attend an impromptu poetry reading. We may even be able to agree that without the gun in the ear the audience wouldn't have been as receptive either to the poem itself, to attending the reading, or to paying for the privilege. So, yes, I think the gun put something into the poem. What do you think? I'm sure you must think it is a new technique, perhaps we can call it "Guerrilla Poetry" and, since it is "new" declare it "good"? Coming soon, to a neighborhood near you! mbales at cybergate.net From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 11 09:27:28 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 09:27:28 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: <38.14b771ee.2805b5c0@cs.com> In a message dated 4/11/2001 2:44:10 AM Central Daylight Time, griffinbaker at home.com writes: > Name me a Frost poem in i.p. that's anywhere near as "loose"as Salter's. '"Mowing," for one. From wasanthony at yahoo.com Wed Apr 11 10:23:40 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 07:23:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) In-Reply-To: <20010411040602.21D0E36FA@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <20010411142340.82821.qmail@web12101.mail.yahoo.com> Well, these were offered half in jest, though at the very behinning I implemented #2 (albeit unannounced), #3 (in that I am the sole poetry editor and look at each work on its own terms),#4 (no comment necessary), and numbers 6 and 7. And, come to think of it, having to teach a couple of sections of comp is sorta like selling newspapers on the weekend - at least I feel like a "paperboy." - Jim --- "Robert R.Cobb" wrote: > Jim, > > Would you consider implementing any of these recommendations for > "Salt River Review"? > > Bob Cobb > > --- jcervantes > > wrote: > >> What would an ideal literary periodical (that prints poetry) do? > > > >1. Sell newspapers on the weekend to support itself. > > > >2. Have monthly contests without charging a fee. Winners get > >published. > > > >3. If it has an editorial board, change the board for every piece > of > >work being considered. > > > >4. Never publish Lynn Lyfshin. > > > >5. Sponsor a poetry festival featuring the last six people who > graced > >the covers of APR and charge $1,000 per workshop. > > > >6. Have a web site whose first page is the first page. > > > >7. Accept e-mail submissions. > > > >8. Use recycled paper, but not recycled poems by major poets. > > > >9. Print nothing but poetry. All poetry all the time. > > > >10. Devote one issue to poets it has rejected, publishing only the > >poem(s) that were grounds for rejection. > > > >That's for starters. > > > >- Jim > > ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From schro047 at tc.umn.edu Wed Apr 11 10:25:54 2001 From: schro047 at tc.umn.edu (Steve Schroer) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 09:25:54 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem References: <200104102137.f3ALb2j14000@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <3AD46972.E83C2216@tc.umn.edu> Mark Baker (who understands meter and can hear the rhythms of language) writes: > A newer notation, in the best system I know of, is Derek > Attridge's.... Attridge does away with the notion of feet > (almost entirely an effect of notation, not audible at all). Feet not audible at all -- hmm. It would be odd if an element that has been regarded as absolutely central to accentual-syllabic prosody should prove irrelevant to the effects produced by poems written under that dispensation. Odd, but I suppose not impossible. I'm pretty sure I hear individual feet, in the sense that I'm always comparing the actual line to the ideal line. When I read iambic pentameter, I'm hearing daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM on one level of my mind; and it's when the poem doesn't give me a daDUM that I say to myself, for example, Aha, substitution in position 1. No doubt this happens in part because I'm highly aware of the notation, but I think it must happen to some degree for anybody who's tuned into the meter. I mean, iambic pentameter isn't iambic pentameter unless there's a total of five daDUMs (in the ideal line, that is), so there's a sort of counting going on; and what can one count other than individual iterations? Perhaps Attridge addresses this objection. But of course I can't be bothered to read his book. I'd rather just speculate about it. Does Attridge by any chance treat line endings as a species of pause? > Scanning free verse lines, like Salter's, quibbling how to divide > the words into feet, and then labelling them with Greek names > seems pointless to me. Well, yes. But I thought there was some question as to whether the poem was trying to be roughly metrical. Steve Schroer From jdavis at panix.com Wed Apr 11 10:31:22 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 10:31:22 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] God save the corpse - In-Reply-To: <20010411142340.82821.qmail@web12101.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > > >10. Devote one issue to poets it has rejected, publishing only the > > >poem(s) that were grounds for rejection. Exquisite Corpse used to comment on rejected poems in a section called "Body Bag." Ouch City. Jordan From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 11 11:26:07 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 08:26:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) Message-ID: <20010411152607.5518E36EE@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Wed Apr 11 11:56:05 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 11:56:05 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] God save the corpse - Message-ID: Still does. http://webdelsol.com/Exquisite_Corpse/ They call it the Cyber Bag. I'm not quite sure it's the same thing. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Jordan Davis To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/11/2001 10:31 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] God save the corpse - > > >10. Devote one issue to poets it has rejected, publishing only the > > >poem(s) that were grounds for rejection. Exquisite Corpse used to comment on rejected poems in a section called "Body Bag." Ouch City. Jordan _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 11 11:59:54 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 08:59:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: <20010411155954.4469C274F@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From cstroffo at earthlink.net Wed Apr 11 12:44:56 2001 From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (chris stroffolino) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 12:44:56 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] God save the corpse - References: Message-ID: <3AD48A06.A905C338@earthlink.net> J-- Ouch City? Does that mean that you disapprove? Sure, it may have been flippant, and not especially helpful to the poets who were rejected, but at least it was more honest than many others....so you knew you were rejected (or even accepted) for your work rather than for social reasons..... unlike so many I'm sure you know in NYC chris Jordan Davis wrote: > > > >10. Devote one issue to poets it has rejected, publishing only the > > > >poem(s) that were grounds for rejection. > > Exquisite Corpse used to comment on rejected poems in a section called > "Body Bag." Ouch City. > > Jordan > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From jdavis at panix.com Wed Apr 11 13:53:46 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 13:53:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] God save the corpse - In-Reply-To: <3AD48A06.A905C338@earthlink.net> Message-ID: Chris Stroffolino wrote: > Ouch City? Does that mean that you disapprove? A better question might be - does that mean they zapped me? I assume they did, since I submitted a few times in the late 80s early 90s, and didn't see every issue those years. > Sure, it may have been flippant, and not especially helpful to the poets > who were rejected, but at least it was more honest > than many others....so you knew you were rejected (or even accepted) > for your work rather than for social reasons..... I'm not sure your conclusion follows from your premise. I saw it as the equivalent of giggling (and heckling) at the back of the room during an open mic - fun for the hecklers, but not especially honest, or fair, even, since the hecklers effectively drowned out whomever they were describing. But everybody's read unsolicited submissions, right? Not a process to lead one to exalted conceptions of honesty or fairness. That said, ain't the Corpse great? Jordan From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 11 14:13:49 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 14:13:49 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: In a message dated 4/11/01 11:01:40 AM Central Daylight Time, CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > > I hope that when you are listening to hear all of those > "daDUMS" that you are pausing long enough to get the gist of the meaning of > the words. I would try to avoid the actual pronouncement of the "daDUMS," > even though I am aware of their existence. If the poem be written in iambic > pentameter, strict or otherwise, this should be clear enough without checking > to see if all the "daDUMS" are in place. I would think, equally, to your > trained mind's ear, that if the "daDUMS" are not there, > this too will be obvious to you. Structure should be under-layment, layered, > woven in, not something top-sided, but integral to the content, to my way of > thinking at least. > I'm not sure if I understand this message. If it's clear the the basic line (the meter) is made up of five daDUMS, then I'm more or less guided in how it stretches and contracts in its actual rhythm. Form is never more than an extension of content; content is never more than an extension of form. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Wed Apr 11 14:15:01 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 14:15:01 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: <71.c6a9010.2805f925@cs.com> In a message dated 4/11/01 11:01:40 AM Central Daylight Time, CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > > >I'm pretty sure I hear individual feet, in the sense that I'm always > comparing the actual line to the ideal line. When I read iambic pentameter, I' > m hearing daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM on one level of my mind; and it's > when the poem doesn't give me a daDUM that I say to > >myself, for example, Aha, substitution in position 1. No doubt this happens > in part because I'm highly aware of the notation, but I think it must happen > to some degree for anybody who's tuned into the meter. I mean, iambic > pentameter isn't iambic pentameter unless there's > >a total of five daDUMs (in the ideal line, that is), so there's a sort of > counting going on; and what can one count other than individual iterations? > > Oh, I get it. I didn't say this. I'm not sure who did. But I more or less agree with it. From tadrichards at prodigy.net Wed Apr 11 14:28:27 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 14:28:27 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Cancer Poetry Project References: <3ACAE6D7.7F54@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <02d201c0c2b5$33e52be0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> I'll be reading at Barnes & Noble on 82nd St., NYC, tomorrow, in connection with the release of The Cancer Poetry Project. I'll be one of a number of New York-area poets who are in the collection, and will just be reading a few poems, so I'm planning, in addition to my own, to read the selections by listmembers David Graham and Patti Marshock. Tad From griffinbaker at home.com Wed Apr 11 14:13:13 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 11:13:13 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem References: <200104102137.f3ALb2j14000@wiz.cath.vt.edu> <3AD46972.E83C2216@tc.umn.edu> Message-ID: <3AD49EB8.52A1AD84@home.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From griffinbaker at home.com Wed Apr 11 14:53:57 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 11:53:57 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem References: <38.14b771ee.2805b5c0@cs.com> Message-ID: <3AD4A845.FA53BBE@home.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 11 15:05:30 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 12:05:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: <20010411190530.F01AA36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 11 15:17:17 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 12:17:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: <20010411191717.69DFC3ECC@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From DICK at watson.ibm.com Wed Apr 11 16:48:36 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 01 16:48:36 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter villanelle Message-ID: <200104112102.RAA15528@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Paul Lake wrote: >>a well done Salter villanelle, >> William's Logan might be pleased by the poem's hint >>of domestic rebellion. I think Logan might be pleased that this villanelle supports his mildly kinky view of Salter. The "employ him as their slave" and "my own toy" imagery, at the same time that the fantasy objects are all safely remote, in time as well. It seems just a little dark side of Victorian. Richard From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Wed Apr 11 17:46:58 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 17:46:58 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Journals (new twist) Message-ID: Now that we have some ideas on what the ideal journal ought to do, do any of them fit your particular ideals? If not, why not? -Amber From JforJames at aol.com Wed Apr 11 17:44:20 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 17:44:20 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: <20.14c405d3.28062a34@aol.com> In a message dated 4/11/01 3:44:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time, griffinbaker at home.com writes: > doggerelvillanelle This cut by Mark Baker matches my response to "Video Blues." For me it's one of those Why-bother? poems...nothing to say is still nothing say even when it's done in form....you don't get any extra credit. The first poem by Salter has certain virtues; tho turned at the end a notch too much toward sentimental. The short, rather cryptic & wry love lyric (reposted below) interested me the most....tho I'm not sure if I could explicate it. I don't often agree with Coleridge's remark that a poem is generally best when not well understood; but here I find myself letting go of my need to know Finnegan Summer 1983 None of us remembers these, the days when passing strangers adored us at first sight, just for living, or for strolling down the street; praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . you, too, in a little while, my darling will have lost all this, asked for a kiss will give one, and learn how love dooms us to earn love once we can speak of it. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 11 18:04:50 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 15:04:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Southern Ocean Review Message-ID: <20010411220450.2554F36FA@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Wed Apr 11 18:15:19 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 18:15:19 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem Message-ID: I think I can make some sense out of the poem, Finnegan. I didn't understand it until I read it again in your message, but now I think I do. I haven't done an explication in I don't know how long, but here it is: The "passing strangers [who] adored us at first sight" are those people who just goggle over a baby's tiny limbs and everything it does. The "begged for a smile" is the same thing I'm sure most people have done with someone's child: 'Hey, little girl, you going to smile for me? Huh? Smile? Pretty please?' "Praising all of our given names" is along the same lines, I think. "You, too[...]my darling" is apparently a child the speaker's talking to. "Will have lost all this": "All this" is what "none of us remembers," being a baby loved just for being. "Asked for a kiss will give one" implies that, once she's grown, she'll know what the social implications of certain actions are. A baby does not care whether it's grandma or the garbageman; if he doesn't want to give a kiss, he won't. An older child or an adult understands the social politics of such actions and would readily do it. "learn/how love dooms us to earn/love once we can speak of it." is the culmination of this theme. Babies don't work for any of this lavish love and affection. They don't have terms for it. Once someone has the language to understand all of these things, she has matured. She understands society. When that happens, just being isn't enough for love. She'll have to do things for people in return for their affection, and I think that is the loss implied by this poem. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: JforJames at aol.com To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/11/01 5:44 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem The first poem by Salter has certain virtues; tho turned at the end a notch too much toward sentimental. The short, rather cryptic & wry love lyric (reposted below) interested me the most....tho I'm not sure if I could explicate it. I don't often agree with Coleridge's remark that a poem is generally best when not well understood; but here I find myself letting go of my need to know Finnegan Summer 1983 None of us remembers these, the days when passing strangers adored us at first sight, just for living, or for strolling down the street; praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . you, too, in a little while, my darling will have lost all this, asked for a kiss will give one, and learn how love dooms us to earn love once we can speak of it. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Wed Apr 11 18:19:19 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 18:19:19 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3AD4D867.251D@nut-n-but.net> BG: I tried my best in this informal workshop setting to convey the gist of my main ideas on rhyme. Marcus: "Well, it seems to me, your best attempt made your notion of rhyme sound like a parody, a caricature, of the way rhyme is used by serious poets. So be it. Marcus: "What seems even more remarkable, though, is that you seem to think that a workshop setting is a place to find agreement and approval." Never said anything like that that I know of. Marcus: "In my experience ordinarily one takes something one has some confidence in but which one suspects has some problems one doesn't see, or only dimly apprehends, to a workshop in order to get others to identify those problems and bring them into focus so one can address them." "The notion that since it's a workshop you don't have to be careful to say what you mean or mean what you say seems like a misunderstanding of the workshop process." I was talking about a workshop atmosphere which I take this forum to be. In such an atmosphere, it seems permissible to me to spend minutes on conveying your ideas rather than hours. There are many proper uses of a workshop. One is simply to let others know what your ideas are so they can use them if they want to, reject them if not. BG: "Your idea that rhyme's main use is to validate its user when used well is interesting but I don't agree with it. A good poem validates its author--superfluously." Marcus: "The validation of the author himself is superfluous? I might agree with that except it seems to me you are probably using 'validates its author' in some special sense that I don't understand, because I was not talking about validating the author at all. I'm not saying that the author gets validated by excellence in the use of poetical techniques, I'm saying the poem gains authority for the reader when the poetical techniques used in the poem (rhyme, for example) are well-used." I was trying to understand what you meant by what you said. I seems to me that whetever gains authority by well-executed rhyme, for instance, doesn't need to gain authority. It seems to me that the well-executed rhyme makes the poem good. What's the point of saying the poem has gained authority? Authority for what? To be taken as good? Here I have to say to you what you keep saying to me. Improve your definitions, etc. But not necessarily because they are in need of it, but because I'm too busy with other things to spend the time trying to work out what you mean I would if rhyme were more important to me than it is. Marcus: "What I'm trying to say is that the way that a poet deploys the rhetorical and poetical techniques within a poem, whether rhyme or zeugma or any other, gives authority to the poem. The author could be a drunken child molester or a loving parent but if, for the space of the poem he or she can deploy poetical techniques to persuade the reader that what the poem says is significant, even important, that then that poem has authority for the reader irrespective of the personal vices or virtues of the writer." All I say is that well-deployed techniques make the poem good/significant. The excellence of the poem makes it significant. Why the extra step you seem to want: a. poem is good; b. therefore it has authority; therefore I the reader can accept it as significant rather than a. poem is good; b. therefore I the reader can accept it as significant? The morality of an author is way off the subject of what we began this thread with, as far as I can see. For now, I am only interested in the poem, not its creator. snip of misunderstanding countered by misunderstanding as far as I can tell. Marcus goes on to say I still haven't said what advancing the craft and new techniques are. No hint that maybe I have but he hasn't been able to understand me. Anyway, if I haven't, so be it. Marcus: "it may be that new bad things damage rather than advance craft. Well, we could have a ten-million-word discussion of this, I'm sure, but I wonder if there really is anything for which there is no right use in poetry at all. Can you name one technique that is pernicious no matter how used in poetry? And be sane--don't bring in poisonous ink that will emit funes that blind readers. A text printed with such ink could not, by definition, be a poem because its main use would be utilitarian, not aesthetic (according to my taxonomy). I didn't say "craft-advancing" was condescending, but that my way of using it may have seemed condescending against my will to some. I've tried since to use it better. And I hope that my saying I'm not using it condescendingly will cause some to take my use of it differently from the way they have. Finally, though, in a discussion like this, causing various kinds of offense is inevitable. I don't have time to be as good at avoiding offense as David Graham, for instance, is (though even he isn't perfect). And I certainly don't have time to argue about how condescending I am. Any more than I so far have. > BG: > > So my tentative solution is to divide > > craft-advancing between "content-advancing" and "technique- > > advancing."<< > > There you go with the "advancing" again. You're just repeating > yourself without making any attempt to clarify what you're > saying,and you're using a phrase you have already acknowedged is > condescending. This strongly suggests that you don't have any > arguments better than these fallacious ones you're putting forward -- > and that strongly suggests that we should be wary of embracing > your views. So be it. > BG: > >From here on, I can only discuss the above, and whatever is > > closely related to it. I don't have the time or energy > > to defend every generality I make about other things concerned > > with poetry, or to lay out my whole poetics for you.<< > > Oh, that's okay, Bob -- I don't have time to explain point by point > why you're wrong at every turn, either: you'll just have to take my > word for it, as you ask me to take your word that you're right. See > how ridiculous that sort of argument is? See why it's a fallacy? I'm not sure. But what I'm doing, of course, is explaining why I'm right and you're wrong sufficiently for what I call a workshop discussion. You seem to think I haven't. So be it. > BG: > > So I'm not too concerned that you are able to find minute > > flaws with many of mine.<< > > The points I'm making don't seem to me to be about minute flaws, > but rather to be this: if you make bad arguments in support of your > views, and when challenged cannot make better ones, it may be > that there *are* no better ones and that your views ought to be > considered warily. Try "when challenged cannot make ones that seem better to me," and consider that you are simply too dense to accept my arguments. > If you can make better arguments, use better examples, then you > may find your point of view, or part of it, more willingly accepted. > But if this is the best you can do, as you say above that it is ("I > tried my best in this informal workshop setting to convey the gist of > my main ideas on rhyme" -- which is itself condescending in that > you seem to be trying to say that you *could* put your points > better if you *wanted* to, but you don't because we here in this > setting aren't worth the effort) then it seems to me that there is a > long way to go before I, at least, would be willing to agree with your > views. So be it. > BG: snip of material already covered, in my view. BG: " ... As I've suggested before, whether the poem works or not is up to the poem, not to how well its maker demonstrates authoritativeness. And ANYTHING whatever that can make a poem work, in any way, makes the poem . . . trustworthy, I guess I'd put it." > Well, it is often the case that one's mother likes one's poems just > because her child wrote them -- and by saying "ANYTHING" in > caps and with emphasis I must take you to mean that you are > including such non-poetic things as mother love or a gun in your > ear as things that can make a poem trustworthy. By golly, Bob, > stick a gun in my ear and insist I agree with you or you'll shoot me, > and I'll agree with you. And I'm sure your mother loves your > poems. But so what? What is such agreement or approval worth > as serious criticism? Not much -- though it's always nice to hear > people agree with one or to reflect that one's mother loves one. You have missed my point entirely, Marcus, and I condescendingly must tell you that I haven't time to set you right. > BG: > > Newness is always valuable, for me, for reasons given.<< How does my statement above mean newness is better than oldness? > BG: > > ... I use the flop as an example of an entirely NEW technique. > > In high-jumping it was an improved technique,...<< > > While I still have a little time, though, here's another example of > bad argument. You directly contradict yourself in the space of a > few words, saying that the Fosbury Flop was both, at one and the > same time, "an entirely new technique" and that it was only an > "improved technique". You can't have it both ways, Bob -- was it > "entirely new" or was it merely "improved"? It was both, Marcus. I could have said, " ... I use the flop as an example of an entirely NEW specific technique of high jumping which improved the general technique of getting over the bar in high jumping" and gone into more details. But why? Anyone reading me would understand what I meant, and only someone with a psychological need to trip up those who argue with him any way possible would worry about it. > But irrespective of that problem, the example itself, of the Fosbury > Flop *replacing* the previous jumping techniques, strongly > suggests that you think that your "new techniques" of poetry- > writing are the Fosbury Flop Of Poetry, and that your "new > techniques" ought to replace the old techniques. I'm pointing out > that it's a bad example. I said new techniques are like the flop inasmuch as they are different in kind from the old techniques. It still seems to me a reasonably good example. snip of more prosecuting attorneying of Marcus. I have not abandoned the notion of craft-advancement. When someone invents a new poetic device, he advances the craft by providing poets with a new tool. That's my final word on that topic for this thread. Marcus: "Well, why are you informally laying them out if you are pretty sure that even a rigorous and well-reasoned elucidation would be insufficient? Why bother at all?" It's possible that others besides you are reading what I say. My hope is that one or two of them might get something out of it. And, of course, I was suggesting that no matter how rigorous and well-reasoned any elucidation I came up with, you would find ways of shooting it down--which wouldn't necessarily mean it was not rigorous and well-reasoned. > If "New ugliness is good.", period, full stop, then why should > any poet avoid it? It's good! And good means, well, good -- > doesn't it? That's right. "New" also means "new." A poet should not avoid new ugliness but once it has been introduced and shown to be ugliness, he can avoid it as old ugliness. Marcus goes on to show how using a gun to force someone to listen to one's poems is a new poetic technique in my sense. A much better analogy than the Fosbury flop. --Bob G. From DICK at watson.ibm.com Wed Apr 11 18:43:08 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 01 18:43:08 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter poems Message-ID: <200104112251.SAA21848@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Summer 1983 None of us remembers these, the days when passing strangers adored us at first sight, just for living, or for strolling down the street; praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . you, too, in a little while, my darling will have lost all this, asked for a kiss will give one, and learn how love dooms us to earn love once we can speak of it. To me, this is by far the most interesting of the 3 that have been posted. Thanks to Amber's reading for teaching me that the first 4 lines refer to the baby's reception in the world, and the rest contrast it with the complexity that puberty brings. The last 3 lines are quite fine, I think. But "strolling down the street" in line 3 doesn't fit that reading, although I think the rest of the 4 lines require it. Another example of carelessness? - like plywood magnet? Richard From tadrichards at prodigy.net Wed Apr 11 19:15:54 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 19:15:54 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter poems References: <200104112251.SAA21848@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: <052801c0c2dd$5c00ef60$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Richard -- being pushed down the street in a stroller. I, too, like this poem very much -- first Salter poem posted here that I've liked. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 6:43 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter poems > Summer 1983 > > > None of us remembers these, the days > when passing strangers adored us at first sight, > just for living, or for strolling down the street; > praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . > you, too, in a little while, > my darling will have lost all this, > asked for a kiss will give one, and learn > how love dooms us to earn > love once we can speak of it. > > > > To me, this is by far the most interesting of the > 3 that have been posted. Thanks to Amber's reading for teaching me > that the first 4 lines refer to the baby's reception > in the world, and the rest contrast it with the complexity > that puberty brings. The last 3 lines are quite fine, I think. > > But "strolling down the street" in line 3 doesn't > fit that reading, although I think the rest of the 4 > lines require it. Another example of > carelessness? - like plywood magnet? > > Richard > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From terran at sirius.com Wed Apr 11 20:13:39 2001 From: terran at sirius.com (shep) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 17:13:39 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter poems In-Reply-To: <200104112251.SAA21848@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> References: <200104112251.SAA21848@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: > Summer 1983 > > >None of us remembers these, the days >when passing strangers adored us at first sight, >just for living, or for strolling down the street; >praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . >you, too, in a little while, >my darling will have lost all this, >asked for a kiss will give one, and learn >how love dooms us to earn >love once we can speak of it. > > > >To me, this is by far the most interesting of the >3 that have been posted. Thanks to Amber's reading for teaching me >that the first 4 lines refer to the baby's reception >in the world, and the rest contrast it with the complexity >that puberty brings. The last 3 lines are quite fine, I think. > >But "strolling down the street" in line 3 doesn't >fit that reading, although I think the rest of the 4 >lines require it. Another example of >carelessness? - like plywood magnet? > >Richard Does it help if you hear strolling as being in a stroller? -shep From jdavis at panix.com Thu Apr 12 09:22:43 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 09:22:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer 1983 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > Summer 1983 > > > > > >None of us remembers these, the days > >when passing strangers adored us at first sight, > >just for living, or for strolling down the street; > >praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . > >you, too, in a little while, > >my darling will have lost all this, > >asked for a kiss will give one, and learn > >how love dooms us to earn > >love once we can speak of it. Summer of '83, that was when Reagan had finally started to pull through, right? Terms of Endearment, Flashdance, War Games, Risky Business, Mr. Mom. Down Under, Africa, Stray Cat Strut, Total Eclipse of the Heart, Electric Avenue, Do You Really Want to Hurt Me, Making Love Out of Nothing at All. Jordan From halvard at earthlink.net Thu Apr 12 09:26:02 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 09:26:02 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] NYC event Message-ID: If you're in the NYC area, Lynda Schor and Jane Lazarre will be reading at Barnes & Noble, 240 E. 86th St., New York, NY 10028, on Tuesday, May 1, at 7:30 p.m. Both readers are contributors to *Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood*, published by Seven Stories Press and edited by Moyra Davey, who will also participate in the reading/discussion. Store contact: Frances Kelly--212-794-1962 From JforJames at aol.com Thu Apr 12 09:59:36 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 09:59:36 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter poems Message-ID: <80.996d253.28070ec8@aol.com> In a message dated 4/11/01 6:59:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time, DICK at watson.ibm.com writes: > Thanks to Amber's reading for teaching me > that the first 4 lines refer to the baby's reception Yes, thanks Amber. A whole different reading now for me...since I was wrongly thinking of young adult lovers. Finnegan From JforJames at aol.com Thu Apr 12 10:05:32 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 10:05:32 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] marginalized again Message-ID: <9a.12c084b9.2807102c@aol.com> FYI, this snip: "At least 70 -- mostly marginal -- Web sites, including the poetry site http://www.eMule.com/poetry/" From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 12 10:56:55 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 10:56:55 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer 1983 References: Message-ID: <002d01c0c360$d3a29c20$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Electric Avenue was a great song. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jordan Davis" To: Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2001 9:22 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer 1983 > > > > > Summer 1983 > > > > > > > > >None of us remembers these, the days > > >when passing strangers adored us at first sight, > > >just for living, or for strolling down the street; > > >praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . > > >you, too, in a little while, > > >my darling will have lost all this, > > >asked for a kiss will give one, and learn > > >how love dooms us to earn > > >love once we can speak of it. > > > Summer of '83, that was when Reagan had finally started to pull through, > right? Terms of Endearment, Flashdance, War Games, Risky Business, Mr. > Mom. Down Under, Africa, Stray Cat Strut, Total Eclipse of the Heart, > Electric Avenue, Do You Really Want to Hurt Me, Making Love Out of > Nothing at All. > > Jordan > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Thu Apr 12 11:08:22 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 10:08:22 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] POEMGRAHAM #3/Sandburg Message-ID: Recent discussion here of rhyming & rhythm got me thinking about the music of free verse, and how it differs from and resembles the music of received forms. This in turn led me to Carl Sandburg, a poet I think is undervalued despite or perhaps because of his fame. He's a greatly limited poet, I think, but scattered regularly among his collected poems are many moments of great sparkle. Sometimes even a whole lyric. Here's an early one I admire for its control and beauty as it plays with sound. LOAM In the loam we sleep, In the cool moist loam, To the lull of years that pass And the break of stars, From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 12 11:06:19 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 11:06:19 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] NYC event References: Message-ID: <003301c0c362$20f96340$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Lynda Schor is a wonderful writer -- I've been a fan of hers for years. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Halvard Johnson" Cc: "New-Poetry at Wiz. Cath. Vt. Edu" Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2001 9:26 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] NYC event > If you're in the NYC area, Lynda Schor and Jane Lazarre > will be reading at Barnes & Noble, 240 E. 86th St., New > York, NY 10028, on Tuesday, May 1, at 7:30 p.m. > > Both readers are contributors to *Mother Reader: Essential > Writings on Motherhood*, published by Seven Stories Press > and edited by Moyra Davey, who will also participate in the > reading/discussion. > > Store contact: Frances Kelly--212-794-1962 > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Apr 12 10:04:16 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 10:04:16 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter poems References: <200104112251.SAA21848@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: <3AD5B5E0.6FC5@nut-n-but.net> "strolling" doesn't work for me, either, although I at once thought of the kid's being in a stroller. Can't think of how to rework the line, though. Another okay poem but I still wonder about the random use of end-rhymes. They bother me, because I notice them and wonder why they're there. Surely, no one calls this a metrical poem? --Bob G. From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Thu Apr 12 00:25:01 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 23:25:01 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem In-Reply-To: <20.14c405d3.28062a34@aol.com> Message-ID: on 4/11/01 4:44 PM, JforJames at aol.com at JforJames at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 4/11/01 3:44:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time, > griffinbaker at home.com writes: > >> doggerelvillanelle > This cut by Mark Baker matches my response to "Video Blues." > For me it's one of those Why-bother? poems...nothing to say is still > nothing say even when it's done in form....you don't get any extra credit. > The first poem by Salter has certain virtues; tho turned at the end > a notch too much toward sentimental. The short, rather cryptic & > wry love lyric (reposted below) interested me the most....tho I'm not > sure if I could explicate it. I don't often agree with Coleridge's remark > that a poem is generally best when not well understood; but here I find > myself letting go of my need to know > Finnegan > > Summer 1983 > > > None of us remembers these, the days > when passing strangers adored us at first sight, > just for living, or for strolling down the street; > praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . > you, too, in a little while, > my darling will have lost all this, > asked for a kiss will give one, and learn > how love dooms us to earn > love once we can speak of it. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > I read this Salter poem as a mother addressing her young toddler. Paul Lake From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Thu Apr 12 00:26:22 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 23:26:22 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem In-Reply-To: Message-ID: on 4/11/01 5:15 PM, Amber Prentiss at aprentiss at agnesscott.edu wrote: > I think I can make some sense out of the poem, Finnegan. I didn't understand > it until I read it again in your message, but now I think I do. > I haven't done an explication in I don't know how long, but here it is: > > The "passing strangers [who] adored us at first sight" are those people who > just goggle over a baby's tiny limbs and everything it does. The "begged for > a smile" is the same thing I'm sure most people have done with someone's > child: 'Hey, little girl, you going to smile for me? Huh? Smile? Pretty > please?' "Praising all of our given names" is along the same lines, I think. > "You, too[...]my darling" is apparently a child the speaker's talking to. > "Will have lost all this": "All this" is what "none of us remembers," being > a baby loved just for being. "Asked for a kiss will give one" implies that, > once she's grown, she'll know what the social implications of certain > actions are. A baby does not care whether it's grandma or the garbageman; if > he doesn't want to give a kiss, he won't. An older child or an adult > understands the social politics of such actions and would readily do it. > "learn/how love dooms us to earn/love once we can speak of it." is the > culmination of this theme. Babies don't work for any of this lavish love and > affection. They don't have terms for it. Once someone has the language to > understand all of these things, she has matured. She understands society. > When that happens, just being isn't enough for love. She'll have to do > things for people in return for their affection, and I think that is the > loss implied by this poem. > -Amber > -----Original Message----- > From: JforJames at aol.com > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Sent: 4/11/01 5:44 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Salter poem > > > The first poem by Salter has certain virtues; tho turned at the end > a notch too much toward sentimental. The short, rather cryptic & > wry love lyric (reposted below) interested me the most....tho I'm not > sure if I could explicate it. I don't often agree with Coleridge's > remark > that a poem is generally best when not well understood; but here I find > myself letting go of my need to know > Finnegan > > Summer 1983 > > > None of us remembers these, the days > when passing strangers adored us at first sight, > just for living, or for strolling down the street; > praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . > you, too, in a little while, > my darling will have lost all this, > asked for a kiss will give one, and learn > how love dooms us to earn > love once we can speak of it. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > After responding to Jim, I discovered that Amber Prentice had already nicely explicated the poem. Paul Lake From cstroffo at earthlink.net Thu Apr 12 11:03:53 2001 From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (chris stroffolino) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 11:03:53 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] God save the corpse - References: Message-ID: <3AD5C3D9.BD931634@earthlink.net> The Corpse, like the best magazines that publish poetry, was uneven-- but it did alot of things that nobody did, and was a bright spot, especially in the midst of 80s conservatism... (i guess 90s conservatism killed it...) Yeah, I think I was zapped as well (though there might be a long story behind it, I won't waste on this list) But I don't think it's entirely fair to say they were just like hecklers-- for they would hierarchize the responses from "Mas!" (and even quote some lines from the rejected poems they especially liked) to something to the effect of "Please don't send again." At least there was some effort at dialogue, and at placing some of its cards on the table, which is preferable to the formletters rejections one gets from some--- in my ex perience most--other editors, even sometimes WHEN THEY SOLICIT (or at least 'ask' for) WORK from you--- In other cases, there is the "silent treatment" where you're never told what it is about your work the editor doesn't like, and it becomes clearer that the editor (who maybe also runs a reading series at a church) doesn't necessarily judge work, but on who you know (and "suck up to" or do I mean "suck off"), although there's always room for doubt---but when a certain venue publishes a lot of work that is quite similar to yours, for say over 10 years, but keeps passing over yours (and you just happened to have a huge social argument with oneor two of their minions) there is a good reason to question ethics when people act so defensively secretive... If they genuinely didn't like my work, and thus rejected it, they would earn my respect When I become an editor again, I will try to be much more activist, and honest if my friends or social colleagues feel the so-called "ouch" which still hurts less than suspicions of bad-faith... c Jordan Davis wrote: > Chris Stroffolino wrote: > > > Ouch City? Does that mean that you disapprove? > > A better question might be - does that mean they zapped me? I assume they > did, since I submitted a few times in the late 80s early 90s, and didn't > see every issue those years. > > > Sure, it may have been flippant, and not especially helpful to the poets > > who were rejected, but at least it was more honest > > than many others....so you knew you were rejected (or even accepted) > > for your work rather than for social reasons..... > > I'm not sure your conclusion follows from your premise. I saw it as the > equivalent of giggling (and heckling) at the back of the room during an > open mic - fun for the hecklers, but not especially honest, or fair, even, > since the hecklers effectively drowned out whomever they were describing. > But everybody's read unsolicited submissions, right? Not a process to lead > one to exalted conceptions of honesty or fairness. > > That said, ain't the Corpse great? > > Jordan > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Thu Apr 12 12:53:23 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 12:53:23 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter poems Message-ID: In a message dated 4/12/01 10:17:52 AM Central Daylight Time, BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: > > Surely, no one calls this a metrical poem? > > Summer 1983 > > > > > > > > >None of us remembers these, the days > > >when passing strangers adored us at first sight, > > >just for living, or for strolling down the street; > > >praised all our given names; begged us to smile . . . > > >you, too, in a little while, > > >my darling will have lost all this, > > >asked for a kiss will give one, and learn > > >how love dooms us to earn > > >love once we can speak of it. > Variable iambic meters ranging from pentameter to trimeter. See Frost's "After Apple-Picking" or "Fire and Ice." The former is what used to be known as the false Pindaric ode or the irregular ode. From JforJames at aol.com Thu Apr 12 13:06:22 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 13:06:22 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Anne Carson excerpts Message-ID: <57.145f80fa.28073a8e@aol.com> By Anne Carson, from her collection of poems and essays PLAINWATER: Excerpts from Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother Friday 4:00 a.m. Not swimming. Black motionless night. Bushes. The swimmer stands at the window. Ducks are awake down by the water's edge. Friday 4:00 p.m. Swimming. In late afternoon the lake is shaded. There is the sudden luxury of the places where the cold springs come flooding up around the swimmer's body from below like an opening dark green geranium of ice. Marble hands drift enormously in front of his face. He watches them move past him down into the lower water where red stalks float in dust. A sudden thin shaft of fish smell. No sleep here, the swimmer thinks as he shoots along through the utterly silent razor-glass dimness. One drop of water entirely awake. . . . Monday 5:30 a.m. Swimming. Blue peaches are floating down onto the lake from under dawn cloud. The swimmer parts the water like a dancer peeling a leotard down her long opal leg. Sullen where he moves through its unlit depths?a smell of gasoline makes him stop and look around. A small silent rowboat is passing, two women in fishing hats studying him. Old ballerinas, he decides abruptly and dives out of sight. Monday 12:00 p.m. Swimming. Noon darkness clamps down on the lake. The water feels black enough to dye his skin. Its cold pressure. A strange greening on top of the water. The swimmer is trying to remem- ber a sentence from Rilke about the world one beat before a thunderstorm? Monday 6:00 p.m. Swimming. Rain continues. The far hills are gun-colored with ancient mist floating whitely before them. Chilly and concentrating hard the swimmer moves along just under the surface of the water, watching each drop hit the surface and bounce. Ping. Water on water. He is wondering how it would feel to be a voice in a medieval motet, not a person singing but a voice itself, all the liquors raining and unraining around it. Ping. Or to be a cold willow girl in the ancient hermit's embrace. High above him at the top of the sky, blood clouds are gathering like a wound behind flesh. Monday 10:00 p.m. Not swimming. Standing at the window the swimmer stares out through a stretching pitch-black wind toward the lake. He can feel it lift and turn like a sleeper in the same bed. Can hear the wind touch each link of its dreams in between. What does a lake dream? Ping. Friday 4:00 a.m. Not swimming. Staring. The lake lies like a silver tongue in a black mouth. Friday 8:00 a.m. Swimming. The storm has cleared. A blinding gold wind knocks hard waves flat across the swimmer's face as he plunges forward, trying to place himself in the trough of it but the diagonals shift and mock him. On the surface the water is navy blue and corrugated by wind. Spots of white foam crowd hectically up and down the waves. There is an urgency to it as if a telephone were ringing in the house. But there is no telephone in the house. Friday 6:00 p.m. Swimming. A dark blue wind is driving sunset home. The swimmer glances from under his arm at the shoreline where poplar trees are roaring with light and dropping their leaves to silver in the wind. With each stroke of his arm the swimmer exchanges this din for the silence beneath, his sliding green kingdom of hungers, monotonies and empty penetrations. To open this treasury is not for one's father or brother or wife to decide. Oneself. Wednesday 8:30 a.m. Swimming. Small white bundles of mist are hurrying over the still surface of the lake. I wonder why I don't dream anymore, the swim- mer is thinking as he inserts himself into the dark green glass. There were times he used to dream a lot. Now the nights are blank, except for intervals when he rises to look at the lake. And then behind his back he can feel the cat wake and observe him from its lit eyes. Not lifting its head. It is a very old cat (a gift from his brother) and seems to be dying. Before they go back to sleep he gives the cat a drink from a teacup of water in which he has dissolved some drops of honey. It eats little solid food nowadays but dreams well at night, so far as he can judge from its mutters and tiny thrashings. What unaccount- able longings and hidden fears are swimming on fire in you? he wonders as he leans on his bed in the dark watching the small fur body. Almost everything physiologists know about the living brain has been learned from sleeping cats. Sleeping or waking, cat brains most resemble human brains in design. Cat neurons fire as intensely as human neurons, whether bom- barded from without or from within. Lightly, lightly he touches its head where the suffering bones come haunting through old flesh. A glow enters his fingers, as if it were a pearl dreaming. Copyright (c) 1995 by Anne Carson +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Read more Anne Carson at http://www.knopfpoetry.com/ From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 12 13:48:00 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 13:48:00 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter poems References: <200104112251.SAA21848@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> <3AD5B5E0.6FC5@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <008b01c0c378$b7b5a300$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> I think that random rhyming (not only end, but internal) is a difficult thing to bring off, and the proof is in the pudding. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Grumman" To: Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2001 10:04 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Salter poems > "strolling" doesn't work for me, either, although > I at once thought of the kid's being in a stroller. > Can't think of how to rework the line, though. > > Another okay poem but I still wonder about the > random use of end-rhymes. They bother me, because I > notice them and wonder why they're there. > > Surely, no one calls this a metrical poem? > > --Bob G. Well, it's accentual, anyway, going from 5-stress lines to 4-stress to 3-stress, and the number of lines for each stress pattern diminishing too -- 4, then 3, then 2. I'd say it's metric with variations, and I think Salter doesn't handle variations in meter well, and I'm going to give one of those hair-stands-up-on-the-back-of-neck explanations. If it feels to me that poet is in control, and varying the rhythm for a purpose, then I'll go with it. I don't have to know the purpose, just to be able to assure myself that I have a trusted guide. I mostly feel comfortable with the random rhymes. They do feel right to me. Except....why doesn't she close it with a rhyme? The two lines that conspicuously don't rhyme are "this" and "it," and both those are flat, unexciting end words. This from a writer who was willing to force "for a treat" for the sake of rhyme! I still like this a lot more than I don't like it. From JBCM2 at aol.com Thu Apr 12 14:02:18 2001 From: JBCM2 at aol.com (JBCM2 at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 14:02:18 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: [Fwd: Appeal to UN Human Rights Commission on LEONARD PELTIER] Message-ID: apologies for cross posting... jb... -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "R. Gancie/C.Parcelli" Subject: [Fwd: Appeal to UN Human Rights Commission on LEONARD PELTIER] Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 08:21:36 +0000 Size: 26631 URL: From yakub_beg at yahoo.com Thu Apr 12 14:25:33 2001 From: yakub_beg at yahoo.com (K. Lorraine Graham) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 14:25:33 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <008b01c0c378$b7b5a300$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Message-ID: Oops, I sent this from another mail account and it didn't go through, now I'm resending it from the adress I use to subscribe to this list. Sorry if this caused confusion! Greetings- I've just read an essay that might prove helpful in discussing some of what's being talked about here, called "Anarchism and Culture," by Jeff Hanson in Witz (you can find it on line at http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/witz/4-3.html ) I?m not going to summarize the essay here, but some of the issues it raises are on my mind as I'm writing this, and so I've put out the link so anyone interested can have a look. If I'd finished reading Charles Olson's "Projective Verse," I would probably talk about it here too, but I haven't and I'm at work so I can't. Soon. This post is offered as a way of participating in this discussion but also trying to enlarge the discussions' parameters. I've thought very carefully about everything I'm writing here, but I don't know if any of it's "true" or makes any sense in anyway that makes sense. Please bear this in mind. I'm uncomfortable with the terms "craft-advancing" "content-advancing" and "technique-advancing," as put forth by BG. A poem determined to be advancing anything is only determined to be so because of a specific context. The most obvious context right now is historical, i.e., how many poems and poets were considered bad or useless or simply "not good" at the time but are now canonized? Does advanced mean better? Better what, better art? More relevant art? More innovative relevant art? Relevant to what, to whom? These are things I'm thinking through, and I certainly don't expect to come up with definite answers by the end of this post or in the near future. I'm not even sure if I could define what makes a poem "work" or not. I'd be wary if people found my poems "trustworthy," because it seems like that might mean the poems were somehow just a validation of something existing. Something being a cultural context maybe, or a historical definition or interpretation of what a poem is or how it should be.... I think a "new vs. old" argument in poetry, whether it be over forms, content, whatever, is not a helpful way for me to frame this problem (wait, did I define a problem?) (Though the argument raises important issues). Here, I think, is where I refer to Jeff Hanson's essay. Mmmm... He writes: "Restricting the repertoire of poetic assumptions and techniques impoverishes poetry by limiting its possible connections to other poetries and to aspects of the world outside poetry. What we need is more connections, not fewer. We need more surprising and more eclectic connections, not reified ones. I do not like attempts to banish figures of speech, techniques, forms, sensibilities from poetry. How do I know that these tools are wholly outdated?" and goes on: "I like to think I write in the anarchistic tension opened by the techniques and assumptions of a variety of networks. (all terms used in this essay (and this is me, Lorraine speaking, and not Jeff Hanson) are defined by Jeff in the essay, so I'm not going to do it here) Such eclecticism, I feel, opens more possibilities than it shuts down, helps me to avoid writing more and more refined versions of a single network's blueprint for poetry (and if you read the essay you'll see here he hasn't restricted himself to either "mainstream" or "avant-garde" poetry), and gives me more tools with which to work. "If I am successful, such writing takes place not on a continuum running from culture to anarchism, but in the anarchistic spaces between cultures or at the interface of cultures. The poetic field is filled with various forms, techniques and assumptions, all with a history which is a part of there meanings, but only a part, and with plenty of space where the possibilities are open and where various forms, techniques, and assumptions can be stretched, rearranged, overturned, and otherwise played with." Note that all types of tools are included, old ones new ones, distorted ones, combined ones, overtaken ones and ones that are rebuilt or rebuilt and then twisted around. This isn't a copout saying that "everything is wonderful" or "all poems are wonderful." Rather, what the essay says (I think, or what I'm saying after reading it) is that poetry can be created from potentially any tool (which includes tools other than "poetic tools"), yes, but that the most exciting possibilities for poetry and for art in general come from pushing the boundaries a bit...and there are lots of ways to push them (i.e. NOT just a change of form)(though form is important, probably higher on MY list of importance than other factors but not the only thing). Consider some "Post L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" poets use of lyric and narrative or other poets that are identified with other avant-guard's use of more traditional poetic forms (I'm thinking of Bernadette Meyer's "Sonnets.") Maybe a sonnet with a traditional rhyming sequence but presented in another way (content, language? A Shakespearian sonnet in Chinese?) could also be a good example of what I'm trying to say (anyone have one?)? Whew! Hope this post sparks some thought and desire to discuss, as the previous posts have for me. -Lorraine ----------- www.yakub-beg.com _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Thu Apr 12 03:16:08 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 02:16:08 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Random rhyming Message-ID: >I think that random rhyming (not only end, but internal) is a difficult >thing to bring off, and the proof is in the pudding. >Tad Richards I don't know, Tad. Two Frost poems already mentioned on the list--"After Apple Picking" and "Fire and Ice"--rhyme without pattern, and they're great poems. Lately, I've grown rather fond of writing in meter but with the rhymes placed to please my ear instead of in a set pattern. I usually prefer to do this in short poems, but I've just finished a new one that's 28 lines long and I rather like the effect there, too. For what it's worth, here are two short poems with unpatterned rhymes. Both appeared in Poetry magazine, in separate issues. Paul Lake * * * Martyr of Modernity Christ had his cross. Antoine Lavoisier, Discoverer of matter's conservation, When sentenced by the frenzied Paris mob For crimes against the state, used the occasion To make a last experiment. To see How long a brain could live deprived of blood, He asked a friend to mount the guillotine And lift his severed head and count his blinks Before all thought devolved to chemistry, Then bravely gazed until the last: thirteen. Allegory of the Bees Affectless drones, observing the wild dance Of honey-drudgers, smile with condescension At the ecstatic mass?s naive notion That waggled steps can measure a straight course To hidden nectar, or unplotted land Be spanned and mapped by buzzing blurring signs, While honey-drudgers leave in steady lines, Tracking the legend to its honeyed source. From DICK at watson.ibm.com Thu Apr 12 14:19:26 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 01 14:19:26 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] salter poem (still) Message-ID: <200104121824.OAA27198@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Tad wrote: >>Richard -- being pushed down the street in a stroller. >> >>I, too, like this poem very much -- first Salter poem posted here that I've >>liked. >> and Shep wrote: >> >>Does it help if you hear strolling as being in a stroller? >> >>-shep >> Yes, I guessed that was what she meant, but then why didn't she find a way to say it? I hate to have to repair a poem when I read it. Richard From griffinbaker at home.com Thu Apr 12 14:32:06 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 11:32:06 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter poems References: Message-ID: <3AD5F4A6.99A1A4EA@home.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Thu Apr 12 14:51:40 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 14:51:40 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Random rhyming References: Message-ID: <3AD5F93C.7290@nut-n-but.net> I probably should have said I didn't quite see the value of occasionally-occurring random end rhymes. In Paul's two poems most lines rhyme, and the rhymes work fine (as do the rest of the elements). In the Salter, two pairs of lines rhyme and one pair of lines has end-consonance (if I remember correctly). And they don't seem placed in spots that seem appropriate--it's as though the poet saw she could make some rhymes, so did, because she thinks rhymes are good or something. It just seems sloppy to me. As for its "meter," seems to me it'd be pretty hard not to write a metrical poem if this one is considered to have meter. --Bob G. From TerryP17 at aol.com Thu Apr 12 15:09:06 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 15:09:06 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Propaganda on the Board Message-ID: <53.4ec0508.28075757@aol.com> Re: The Peltier screed. Is pure, all-out propaganda appropriate here, or did this, somehow, slip through the cracks? --Terry Ponick From JforJames at aol.com Thu Apr 12 15:12:05 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 15:12:05 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] SETTING "NO MAIL" Message-ID: <32.136ea987.28075805@aol.com> It occurs to me that more of you may need to stop mail in the coming months...so here's a reminder of the process. It sounds more complicated than it is... For those of you who have (a) never received a password; or (b) don't remember what it is, this may be of help if you want to set your options to nomail or to unsub temporarily: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry 1) go to the main page above 2) at the bottom of the page, next to Edit Options button, enter your email address & hit button. 3) on next page, midway down on the left is an Email My Password button. Hit that. A new password will be sent to you. 4) With the password in hand back to the main page (above) at bottom again enter your email address and hit Edit Options. 5) At the next page, click on the Disable Mail option. And by entering your password and submitting your change, you should be all set. Let me know if this doesn't work & I'll take care of the change. JimF JforJames at aol.com From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 12 15:32:18 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 15:32:18 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Random rhyming References: Message-ID: <018b01c0c387$49bb8040$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Paul -- I was actually agreeing with you -- and supporting Salter. I think it's a lovely effect when brought off well, and I think she mostly does it well in this poem. The problem was, I screwed up writing the note. I started a reply at the top, forgot I had done it, and went on writing from scratch at the bottom. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Lake" To: Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2001 3:16 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Random rhyming >I think that random rhyming (not only end, but internal) is a difficult >thing to bring off, and the proof is in the pudding. >Tad Richards I don't know, Tad. Two Frost poems already mentioned on the list--"After Apple Picking" and "Fire and Ice"--rhyme without pattern, and they're great poems. Lately, I've grown rather fond of writing in meter but with the rhymes placed to please my ear instead of in a set pattern. I usually prefer to do this in short poems, but I've just finished a new one that's 28 lines long and I rather like the effect there, too. For what it's worth, here are two short poems with unpatterned rhymes. Both appeared in Poetry magazine, in separate issues. Paul Lake * * * Martyr of Modernity Christ had his cross. Antoine Lavoisier, Discoverer of matter's conservation, When sentenced by the frenzied Paris mob For crimes against the state, used the occasion To make a last experiment. To see How long a brain could live deprived of blood, He asked a friend to mount the guillotine And lift his severed head and count his blinks Before all thought devolved to chemistry, Then bravely gazed until the last: thirteen. Allegory of the Bees Affectless drones, observing the wild dance Of honey-drudgers, smile with condescension At the ecstatic mass?s naive notion That waggled steps can measure a straight course To hidden nectar, or unplotted land Be spanned and mapped by buzzing blurring signs, While honey-drudgers leave in steady lines, Tracking the legend to its honeyed source. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Thu Apr 12 04:34:33 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 03:34:33 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Random rhyming In-Reply-To: <3AD5F93C.7290@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: on 4/12/01 1:51 PM, Bob Grumman at BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net wrote: > I probably should have said I didn't quite see the > value of occasionally-occurring random end rhymes. > In Paul's two poems most lines rhyme, and the rhymes > work fine (as do the rest of the elements). In the > Salter, two pairs of lines rhyme and one pair of lines > has end-consonance (if I remember correctly). And they > don't seem placed in spots that seem appropriate--it's > as though the poet saw she could make some rhymes, so did, > because she thinks rhymes are good or something. It just > seems sloppy to me. > > As for its "meter," seems to me it'd be pretty hard not > to write a metrical poem if this one is considered to have > meter. > > --Bob G. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > Bob, I pretty much agree with you on the Salter poem's (the first one we all began with) meter and rhyming. There was a time when Brad Leithauser, Mary Jo Salter, and Amy Clampitt were all publishing their early books at the same time and with the same publisher, Knopff. They were all friends and thanked each other in their books, and, it seemed to me, often seemed to be writing in the same interchangeable style. In fact, they often seemed to be a single entity-- "Amy Jo Clamphauser." In all three of the poets' books,the meter and rhyming often seemed worse than casual. I was especially annoyed by the way they (Salter and Leithauser, anyway) sometimes write rhymed quatrains in which the first and third lines rhyme while the second and fourth don't. I'm not strictly doctrinaire about meter and form but that idea strikes me as downright perverse. Though I often find things to admire in their poetry, I do sometimes wish they'd tighten their meters and make them more expressive and less decorative. Paul Lake From Jandhodge at aol.com Thu Apr 12 16:18:02 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 16:18:02 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Reprise of Short Poems Message-ID: Given a half-life of one and a half days, some threads die too fast. So I thought I'd revisit an "old" one and post a few more epigrams: Modern Poets Our swans are now of such remorseless quill, Themselves live singing and their hearers kill. On a Poetess Miss M's a nightingale. 'Tis well Your simile I keep. It is the way with Philomel To sing while others sleep. * * * You ask why can't Clarissa hold her tongue. Because she fears her fingers will be stung. << Feel free to substitute "Bill Logan ... his," etc., if you wish. >> The author? G. M. Hopkins [from "Six Epigrams"] Jan From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 12 16:23:03 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 16:23:03 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] salter poem (still) References: <200104121824.OAA27198@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: <000001c0c3cb$e270e200$3c14fe3f@ibm25310> I think she's pushing the word here, but I think for a reason. The baby of course is not literally strolling alone down the street, she's being pushed in a stroller. But she might as well be alone -- she's the only one to whom anyone is paying attention. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2001 2:19 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] salter poem (still) > Tad wrote: > >>Richard -- being pushed down the street in a stroller. > >> > >>I, too, like this poem very much -- first Salter poem posted here that I've > >>liked. > >> > and Shep wrote: > >> > >>Does it help if you hear strolling as being in a stroller? > >> > >>-shep > >> > Yes, I guessed that was what she meant, but then why > didn't she find a way to say it? I hate to have to > repair a poem when I read it. > > Richard > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 12 23:53:12 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 23:53:12 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Reprise of Short Poems References: Message-ID: <001001c0c3cd$43e0eca0$3c14fe3f@ibm25310> Robert Herrick: Fain would I kiss my Julia's dainty legge Which is as white and hairless as an egge Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2001 4:18 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Reprise of Short Poems > Given a half-life of one and a half days, some threads die too fast. So I > thought I'd revisit an "old" one and post a few more epigrams: > > Modern Poets > > Our swans are now of such remorseless quill, > Themselves live singing and their hearers kill. > > > On a Poetess > > Miss M's a nightingale. 'Tis well > Your simile I keep. > It is the way with Philomel > To sing while others sleep. > > > * * * > > You ask why can't Clarissa hold her tongue. > Because she fears her fingers will be stung. > > > << Feel free to substitute "Bill Logan ... his," etc., if you wish. >> > > The author? > > G. M. Hopkins [from "Six Epigrams"] > > Jan > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Apr 13 06:41:24 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 06:41:24 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] salter poem (still) References: <200104121824.OAA27198@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> <000001c0c3cb$e270e200$3c14fe3f@ibm25310> Message-ID: <3AD6D7D4.7BD8@nut-n-but.net> I didn't keep a copy of the poem, but Tad's thought about "strolling" makes me think maybe "out for a stroll" might be a solution. The use of the word "stroller" won't work because the reader is, I assume, supposed to have to do a little work to to figure out the subject of the poem. But "strolling" remains wrong for me. --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Apr 13 07:08:24 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 07:08:24 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3AD6DE28.64F5@nut-n-but.net> Lorraine, I pretty much agree with Jeff's essay. As for your discomfort with "craft-advancing" "content-advancing" and "technique-advancing," I agree that "a poem determined to be advancing anything is only determined to be so because of a specific context." Sure. I think you're saying a person using these terms may be wrong because history might say X, which seemed today to advance a craft, didn't. But that will always be true-- that is, the age that says X didn't advance the craft may say Y did, and be "wrong" in the view of a still later age. So should we not speak of advancing the craft? Anyway, I continue to claim that there are devices and attitudes, etc. that advance the craft because they are new to poetry and thus give poets new ways of doing poetry, and the more ways of doing poetry poets have, the better. I think this definition is outside history, too, in that it can be objectively determined whether a technique or attitude is new or not (though not easy in most cases). My guess is that no poetic method has ever been discarded. Even if some have, it doesn't mean they didn't advance the craft when new. As I've said perhaps twelve thousand times now, I do not claim that a poem that (significantly) advances the craft is necessarily better than one that doesn't. Except that it is better at providing and demonstrating the use of new methods or attitudes--just as some poem that doesn't advance the craft (significantly) may be better than any craft-advancing poem of its time at the use of verbal metaphors and ten other received devices. I also feel old vs. new not the most useful way to think about poetry, although it is not useless, either. In my formal taxonomy, I define kinds of poetry by what they do, not by whether what they do is new or old. I'm entirely with Jeff about new connections, using both received and new techniques, etc. Never haven't been. Thanks for posting Jeff's essay, and for your comments, too. --Bob From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Apr 13 07:15:29 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 07:15:29 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] salter poem (still) References: <200104121824.OAA27198@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> <000001c0c3cb$e270e200$3c14fe3f@ibm25310> <3AD6D7D4.7BD8@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <3AD6DFD1.17BE@nut-n-but.net> Just saw a copy of the baby poem and see that "out for a stroll" wouldn't work. I think if I were the poet, I'd go with "just for living, or for being out on the street; and ditch "strolling/stroller" altogether. --Bob G. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Fri Apr 13 10:19:17 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 07:19:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] salter poem (still) Message-ID: <20010413141917.B8503273F@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From Jandhodge at aol.com Fri Apr 13 10:58:04 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 10:58:04 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Oh Message-ID: <3c.a4c44e0.28086dfc@aol.com> BobGrumman writes: << The use of the word "stroller" won't work because the reader is, I assume, supposed to have to do a little work to to figure out the subject of the poem. >> Which of course would never happen in a mathemaku or "vizlature." Jan From DICK at watson.ibm.com Fri Apr 13 10:14:48 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 01 10:14:48 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter's poem (still, still) Message-ID: <200104131458.KAA39364@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Tad wrote: >>I think she's pushing the word here, but I think for a reason. The baby of >>course is not literally strolling alone down the street, she's being pushed >>in a stroller. But she might as well be alone -- she's the only one to whom >>anyone is paying attention. >> That's very creative, Tad, and maybe even she intended it - but I wonder. I sure wish someone would interpret _my_ writing so sympathetically. What can you do for "plywood magnet?" :-) Richard From tadrichards at prodigy.net Fri Apr 13 12:15:18 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 12:15:18 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] salter poem (still) References: <20010413141917.B8503273F@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <009a01c0c434$eedd5500$3c14fe3f@ibm25310> Give her a break -- she tried something that risks cuteness, but does a poet's job of working with words. It works better than the alternatives, and it's her poem. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert R.Cobb" To: Sent: Friday, April 13, 2001 10:19 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] salter poem (still) > Bob G., > > There's always "baby buggy," "baby carriage," "perambulation," or "perambulator." > > Bob Cobb > > --- Bob Grumman > > wrote: > >Just saw a copy of the baby poem and > >see that "out for a stroll" wouldn't work. > > > >I think if I were the poet, I'd go with > >"just for living, or for being out on the street; > >and ditch "strolling/stroller" altogether. > > > > --Bob G. > > > > > >_______________________________________________ > >New-Poetry mailing list > >New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > >http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > == > Poetry Catamaran > > "Just how advanced a poetic craft need be to sail along the'known mainstream' down to the poetic sea?" > > Robert R. Cobb > AMONG FRIENDS, original art and poetry. > http://rrcobb.tripod.com > > _____________________________________________________________ > ----- > Check out my portfolio at www.talent.com > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Fri Apr 13 12:17:01 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 12:17:01 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter's poem (still, still) References: <200104131458.KAA39364@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: <00a401c0c435$2c1d4380$3c14fe3f@ibm25310> Richard -- I'll wager there are people that do. I think "plywood magnet" - and most of the rest of that poem - is a disaster. And all of the villanelle. But I really like this one. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Friday, April 13, 2001 10:14 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Salter's poem (still, still) > Tad wrote: > >>I think she's pushing the word here, but I think for a reason. The baby of > >>course is not literally strolling alone down the street, she's being pushed > >>in a stroller. But she might as well be alone -- she's the only one to whom > >>anyone is paying attention. > >> > That's very creative, Tad, and maybe even she intended it - but I wonder. > I sure wish someone would interpret _my_ writing so sympathetically. > > What can you do for "plywood magnet?" :-) > > Richard > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Fri Apr 13 01:28:47 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 00:28:47 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Say Uncle Message-ID: Since things are a little slow today on the list, I'll post a recent review of Kay Ryan's new book _Say Uncle_. I wrote this under a strict two page length restriction (for a recent issue of Georgia Review), so I'm not entirely happy with it--especially the somewhat niggling tone of the final paragraphs. One of the generic problems of review writing is the need to find critical things to say, to find fault. Still, it's mostly positive and reflects my high opinion of Ryan and her new book. Has anyone else read _Say Uncle_ and had a similar or different reaction? Paul Lake * * * SAY UNCLE. By Kay Ryan Grove Press. New York: Grove Press, 2000. 76 pp. $13 The poems of Say Uncle display the characteristic wit and verve readers have come to expect from Kay Ryan since her watershed 1994 volume Flamingo Watching. Exquisitely fashioned, their brief lines animated by hidden rhymes and python-like syntax, these new poems confirm Ryan?s status as one of America?s most interesting and accomplished poets. At her frequent best, Ryan charges language the way lightning charges metal rods, ringing new turns on familiar phrases (?The Fabric of Life?), reinvigorating old metaphors (?Drops in the Bucket?), and coining brilliant neologisms (?Blandeur?) to add dazzle and flash to her lines. In the latter, Ryan prays not for the strenuously achieved ?sublime? of nineteenth century poets, but for its humble opposite: ?If it please God / let less happen. / Even out Earth?s / rondure, flatten / Eiger, blanden / the Grand Canyon.? As in previous books, her taut lyrics are compact as aphorisms, suggesting allegorical depths beneath their simple narratives and descriptions. Ryan is particularly good at investing animals with emblematic meaning. In ?Don?t Look Back,? for instance, she compares fish, those ?torpedoes of / disinterest,? to an S-necked mother goose trailing an ?exact and modest / number of goslings,? who, ?if she / looks back / acknowledges losses / and if she does not / also loses.? What is most refreshing about Ryan?s poems is the way they unabashedly wring significance from mundane experience. Tackling such subjects as ?Failure? and ?Weakness and Doubt,? the poet offers consolation and redemptive insight. In employing such grand abstractions the poet sometimes risks sounding like the bathetic ?Deep Thoughts? on Saturday Night Live. Addressing this danger, Ryan notes that ?Great thoughts,? like eucalyptus trees, ?make the soil / beneath them barren,? and she adds that ?Standing in a / grove of them / is hideous.? To prevent such barrenness, Ryan brings her abstractions down to earth with precisely observed and poignant details. Sustaining the tension of short lines requires a flawless ear and near-perfect pitch, and most of the time Ryan?s are matchless. Occasionally, however, her lines become loose and mannered, and slackness creep in. In addition, sometimes the small compass within which this poet inscribes her fabulous tales and meditations constricts her art, making it seem not so much condensed as merely miniature?but Ryan herself usually seems aware of this danger. She addresses the point in ?Bad Day? when she wittily portrays the artist as an ?elfin tailor? for whom, on good days, a little stolen piece of cloth ?reveals what it / was made for.? On other days, the poet concedes, ?neither the idea / nor the material / presents itself; / and these are / the hard days / for the tailor elf.? When the elfin poet displays such charming self-awareness, there?s little for a critic to add but grateful plaudits. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Apr 13 13:15:42 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 13:15:42 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Oh References: <3c.a4c44e0.28086dfc@aol.com> Message-ID: <3AD7343E.55E@nut-n-but.net> BobGrumman writes: The use of the word "stroller" won't work because the reader is, I assume, supposed to have to do a little work to to figure out the subject of the poem. My point above was that Salter doesn't want us immediately to know that her poem is about a baby. > Which of course would never happen in a mathemaku > or "vizlature." If it does not happen in any of my mathemaku, let me know, and I'll fix it. --Bob G. From JforJames at aol.com Fri Apr 13 17:40:31 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 17:40:31 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Poet Sighting: Yusef Komunyakaa Message-ID: Last week I had the opportunity to hear Yusef Komunyakaa read in Hartford CT. He gave a fine reading; tho you had to keep your ears cocked to catch all the words. (I'm not certain if he's got a bit of a mumble or if it's just the ol' Bogalusa upbringing.) He didn't strain to entertain as so many readers do. He presented the poems with some contextual introduction, but didn't overdo... he left plenty for the listener to work out on the fly. One felt a genuine humility in his presentation of his poems...& gratitude for the audience's interest. Hearing the poems made me think: This is the real deal; this is why poetry is still important in this world. Finnegan Here's a poem he didn't read... Villon/Leadbelly Two bad actors canonized by ballads flowering into dusk, crowned with hoarfrost. But the final blows weren't dealt in Meung- sur-Loire or the Angola pen. "Irene, Irene, I'll see you in my dreams." Unmoved by the hangman's leer, these two roughhouse bards ignored his finger traveling down the list. They followed every season's penniless last will & testament. Their songs bleed together years. A bridge more than a ledger of bones. Ghosts under the skin in bedlam, Princes of Fools, they prowled syncopated nights of wolfbane & gin mills of starlight at The Golden Monkey & The Bucket of Blood, double-daring men across thresholds, living down the list, strung out on immoratlity's rag. Yusef Komunyakaa From tadrichards at prodigy.net Fri Apr 13 19:30:37 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 19:30:37 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poet Sighting: Yusef Komunyakaa References: Message-ID: <01a301c0c471$beee2300$3c14fe3f@ibm25310> Jim -- thanks for the report...and the poem. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Friday, April 13, 2001 5:40 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Poet Sighting: Yusef Komunyakaa > Last week I had the opportunity to hear Yusef Komunyakaa > read in Hartford CT. He gave a fine reading; tho you had to keep > your ears cocked to catch all the words. (I'm not certain if he's > got a bit of a mumble or if it's just the ol' Bogalusa upbringing.) > He didn't strain to entertain as so many readers do. He presented > the poems with some contextual introduction, but didn't overdo... > he left plenty for the listener to work out on the fly. One felt a > genuine humility in his presentation of his poems...& gratitude for > the audience's interest. Hearing the poems made me think: This is > the real deal; this is why poetry is still important in this world. > Finnegan > Here's a poem he didn't read... > > > Villon/Leadbelly > > Two bad actors canonized by ballads > flowering into dusk, crowned with hoarfrost. > But the final blows weren't dealt in Meung- > sur-Loire or the Angola pen. "Irene, > Irene, I'll see you in my dreams." > > Unmoved by the hangman's leer, > these two roughhouse bards ignored > his finger traveling down the list. > They followed every season's penniless > last will & testament. Their songs > > bleed together years. A bridge > more than a ledger of bones. > Ghosts under the skin in bedlam, > Princes of Fools, they prowled > syncopated nights of wolfbane > > & gin mills of starlight > at The Golden Monkey & The Bucket > of Blood, double-daring men across > thresholds, living down the list, > strung out on immoratlity's rag. > > Yusef Komunyakaa > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From JforJames at aol.com Fri Apr 13 19:57:28 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 19:57:28 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Williams & Williams Message-ID: Lucinda, Dad Share Stage Lucinda Williams apparently didn't pick up her twangy drawl from her dad, Miller Williams. But Friday night at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Music Hall, the University of Arkansas professor supplied plenty of evidence as to where his daughter got her lyric-slinging ability: It's genetic. Lucinda and her original poetry man -- chosen by President Clinton (news - web sites) to provide the poem for his 1997 inauguration -- took turns delivering verse in their respective mediums at a one-off event titled "Poetry Sung . . . Poetry Said." The pair have shared stages a few times in the past, but for this International Poetry Forum program, Lucinda also tried something she'd never done before: playing with a full orchestra, the Duquesne Wind Symphony. The student ensemble backed her on two songs. "It's such an honor, I have to say it, to have this wonderful orchestra behind me," she said, beaming, after performing a lovely "Something About What Happens When We Talk." "It's so beautiful. I want to do this all the time now. I wanna do a whole record like this." But Williams has to get her new one, Essence, first, and promised the audience that would happen on June 12th. So she provided several samples from it, standing as she played acoustic guitar while her band mate Bo Ramsey played electric. Her voice, so expressive and clear, sounded much better than it did a couple of weeks earlier at an Austin, Texas, performance, and the songs, stripped to their own essence, did too. A likely highlight of the new disc will be the slithery, bayou-influenced "Get Right With God," which she described as a song about her fascination with Pentecostal rituals like snake-handling as a means of getting into heaven. Leaving her cowboy hat behind for the occasion, Lucinda wore snakeskin-patterned pants and a black blazer, her now frosty-blonde hair hanging loose around her shoulders. Miller, looking classically professorial with his glasses, white beard and ring of white hair, recited from a podium, then sat onstage while she played, his finger holding his place in the slim volume from which he read. As she played her first tune, a pure and sweet version of "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." Lucinda swayed and occasionally clicked her heel on the floorboards to keep time while Ramsey provided guitar and vocal accompaniment. Her dad then commented that, when he heads toward heaven, "if there is a moment when one's standing before St. Peter and he says, 'Why should I let you in here?' I'm going to say, 'I read my poems between Lucinda's songs.'" It was that kind of night. A clearly proud Miller and his first-born, still glad to have his approval even at age forty-eight, constantly traded glances and smiles. After he read "A Poem for Emily," about his granddaughter's (and her niece's) first day of life, his daughter said, "You can see where I learned everything I know." Introducing that poem, Miller said he's sometimes asked what their work has in common. His answer: "We both tend to rely on ordinary people in the vulnerable . . . moments of their lives." It's true. They share an uncanny knack for writing simple, eloquent verse full of imagery so vivid, observations of life's minutiae become moments of major significance. His poems have a sweet humanity, a gentle, conversational way of conveying love and compassion. Her songs have a confessional feel, creating a sense that she's offering full emotional exposure -- raw or not. And though she has said that writing lyrics is quite different from writing poetry, she still gets advice on works in progress from her English professor pop. If the result is a line like "I see you now at the piano, your back a slow curve," from "Little Angel, Little Brother," one might suspect he's imparting some magical power that transcends mere wisdom. In one of many laugh-inducing moments, Lucinda informed the audience that her brother, Robert, is indeed alive and well. People ask, she said, because of the lyric, "Curled up on the back seat, parked outside of a bar, an empty bottle at your feet." "He wasn't dead, he was dead drunk," she cracked. While Lucinda's humor generally doesn't show up her songs, many of her father's poems carry tones of wry bemusement. Introducing "71 South," he said it was about "the kinship that we feel to other creatures when we realize that they have purpose in their lives." The four-line verse is about a squirrel that gets hit by a truck. His poems also can be quite touching. In one about his grandson, he recited the lines, "This arm that never threw a ball far enough to make a team/If more than nine came out to play/Threw one into your hands today/From merely sixty years away." It drew a collective "awww" from the audience. Her lyrical masterpiece is "Sweet Old World," a song about suicide that's so powerful, it can bring on tears. After she did that one and her other showstopper, the biting, fierce "Joy" ("You took my joy/I want it back!"), her father said proudly, "It's wonderful to have a daughter who's hard to follow." She might have said the same about him. LYNNE MARGOLIS From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Sat Apr 14 03:22:43 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 09:22:43 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poet Sighting: Yusef Komunyakaa References: <01a301c0c471$beee2300$3c14fe3f@ibm25310> Message-ID: <008b01c0c4b5$7ff59720$405a4284@toshiba> I for one am impressed. Do you have more poems by him? Karen Alkalay-Gut gut22 at post.tau.ac.il http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Friday, April 13, 2001 5:40 PM > Subject: [New-Poetry] Poet Sighting: Yusef Komunyakaa > > > > Last week I had the opportunity to hear Yusef Komunyakaa > > read in Hartford CT. He gave a fine reading; tho you had to keep > > your ears cocked to catch all the words. (I'm not certain if he's > > got a bit of a mumble or if it's just the ol' Bogalusa upbringing.) > > He didn't strain to entertain as so many readers do. He presented > > the poems with some contextual introduction, but didn't overdo... > > he left plenty for the listener to work out on the fly. One felt a > > genuine humility in his presentation of his poems...& gratitude for > > the audience's interest. Hearing the poems made me think: This is > > the real deal; this is why poetry is still important in this world. > > Finnegan > > Here's a poem he didn't read... > > > > > > Villon/Leadbelly > > > > Two bad actors canonized by ballads > > flowering into dusk, crowned with hoarfrost. > > But the final blows weren't dealt in Meung- > > sur-Loire or the Angola pen. "Irene, > > Irene, I'll see you in my dreams." > > > > Unmoved by the hangman's leer, > > these two roughhouse bards ignored > > his finger traveling down the list. > > They followed every season's penniless > > last will & testament. Their songs > > > > bleed together years. A bridge > > more than a ledger of bones. > > Ghosts under the skin in bedlam, > > Princes of Fools, they prowled > > syncopated nights of wolfbane > > > > & gin mills of starlight > > at The Golden Monkey & The Bucket > > of Blood, double-daring men across > > thresholds, living down the list, > > strung out on immoratlity's rag. > > > > Yusef Komunyakaa > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From mbales at cybergate.net Sat Apr 14 10:20:21 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 10:20:21 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <3AD6DE28.64F5@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: >MB: > In my experience ordinarily one takes something one > has some confidence in but which one suspects has some > problems one doesn't see, or only dimly apprehends, to a > workshop in order to get others to identify those problems and > bring them into focus so one can address them.... > The notion that since it's a workshop you don't have to > be careful to say what you mean or mean what you say seems > like a misunderstanding of the workshop process.<< BG: > I was talking about a workshop atmosphere which I take > this forum to be. In such an atmosphere, it seems > permissible to me to spend minutes on conveying your > ideas rather than hours. There are many proper uses > of a workshop. One is simply to let others know what > your ideas are so they can use them if they want to, > reject them if not.<< What you're doing, instead, though, it seems to me, is to reject the workshop notion: you're satisfied, it seems, with expressing your ideas quickly and badly, and you don't want an engaged discussion of either your ideas themselves or how you express them. The very workshop atmosphere that allows you to present your views entails not only that others may comment on your work, but that if you are challenged on some point or points that you defend your work -- or at least that's the way I conceive of a workshop atmosphere. What you do, taking advantage of the freedom of the workshop atmosphere to say what you please, and then trying to stifle discussion about what you say by pleading no time to engage, reminds me of the fellow who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan. BG: > It seems to me that whatever gains authority by well-executed > rhyme, for instance, doesn't need to gain authority. It > seems to me that the well-executed rhyme makes the poem good. > What's the point of saying the poem has gained authority? > Authority for what? To be taken as good?< Just so: the authority to be taken as good because the rhymes are not lame or trite or overused or whatever. And we disagree, too, about well-executed rhyme making the poem good: well-executed rhyme by itself doesn't mean the poem is good; but it is one of the indicators. Those of us who claim to be good readers are constantly on the lookout for those indicators of "a good poem", depending on the terms in which the poem presents itself. So, for example, if the poem rhymes, we expect it to rhyme well, and if it doesn't then that's a black mark against the poem, and we are less likely to say "it's a good poem". But merely well-executed rhyme does not make a good poem. BG: > Here I have to > say to you what you keep saying to me. Improve your definitions, > etc. > But not necessarily because they are in need of it, but because I'm > too busy with other things to spend the time trying to work out what > you mean I would if rhyme were more important to me than it is.<< So you expect all your readers to "work out" what you say, but you cannot be bothered to take the time to "work out" what they say? How convenient! BG: > All I say is that well-deployed techniques make the poem > good/significant. The excellence of the poem makes it > significant. Why the extra step you seem to want: a. poem > is good; b. therefore it has authority; therefore I the > reader can accept it as significant rather than a. poem > is good; b. therefore I the reader can accept it as significant?<< And I disagree that one well-executed technique can make a poem "good" -- I am of the opinion that it takes more than that: that substantially all of the techniques used in a poem have to be well- executed before a poem can be said to be "a good poem". And I argue that it is the cumulative effect of the well-executed techniques that lend the poem authority to say what it says, and that poorly-executed techniques will detract from the authority of the poem, will make what a poem says less authoritative. BG: > Marcus goes on to say I still haven't said what advancing > the craft and new techniques are. No hint that maybe I > have but he hasn't been able to understand me. Anyway, > if I haven't, so be it.<< I've pointed out that you've made assertions, employed fallacious arguments, and used poor examples and have repeated your assertions and your fallacious arguments and your examples. It's hard to understand your definitions when you merely repeat your initial assertions and reiterate your fallacious arguments and inapposite examples. BG: > ... I wonder if there really is > anything for which there is no right use in poetry > at all. Can you name one technique that is pernicious > no matter how used in poetry? And be sane--don't bring > in poisonous ink that will emit funes that blind readers.<< No -- nor one that is good no matter how it is used, either -- but so what? It is, after all, how the techniques are used, whether well or ill, and how they both fit in with and help expand contemporary language that we value; isn't it? BG: > I didn't say "craft-advancing" was condescending, but > that my way of using it may have seemed condescending > against my will to some. I've tried since to use it > better.<< But you haven't used it differently so it seems to me that your subsequent uses are not any better: they are just as condescending as before *because* you still cling to the notion of "advancement". > > BG: > > > So my tentative solution is to divide > > > craft-advancing between "content-advancing" and "technique- > > > advancing."<< MB: > > There you go with the "advancing" again. You're just repeating > > yourself without making any attempt to clarify what you're > > saying,and you're using a phrase you have already acknowedged is > > condescending. This strongly suggests that you don't have any > > arguments better than these fallacious ones you're putting forward; > > and that strongly suggests that we should be wary of embracing > > your views.<< BG: > So be it.<< And so we can see clearly the lecturer's, and not the workshop- participant's, or the discussion-interlocutor's, approach. > > BG: > > >From here on, I can only discuss the above, and whatever is > > > closely related to it. I don't have the time or energy > > > to defend every generality I make about other things concerned > > > with poetry, or to lay out my whole poetics for you.<< > > > > Oh, that's okay, Bob -- I don't have time to explain point by > > point why you're wrong at every turn, either: you'll just have to > > take my word for it, as you ask me to take your word that you're > > right. See how ridiculous that sort of argument is? See why it's > > a fallacy? BG: > I'm not sure. But what I'm doing, of course, is explaining > why I'm right and you're wrong sufficiently for what > I call a workshop discussion. You seem to think I > haven't. So be it.<< But you haven't explained at all -- you've simply repeated yourself, employed fallacious arguments, all the while admitting you're presenting your ideas badly. Either that is astonishingly condescending ("sufficiently for ... a workshop discussion" seems to you to mean "very badly indeed") or you don't realize just how badly you are presenting your views. > > BG: > > > So I'm not too concerned that you are able to find minute > > > flaws with many of mine.<< MB: > > The points I'm making don't seem to me to be about minute flaws, > > but rather to be this: if you make bad arguments in support of > > your views, and when challenged cannot make better ones, it may be > > that there *are* no better ones and that your views ought to be > > considered warily. MB: > Try "when challenged cannot make ones that seem better > to me," and consider that you are simply too dense to > accept my arguments.<< Yes, of course, that's always a possibility, but it seems not to be the case in this instance because your arguments are fallacious and you yourself admit that they are bad. I hold that it is not a vice to be thought too dense to accept bad arguments. On the other hand, adding ad hominem attacks on me such as "you are simply too dense" doesn't seem to me to add any virtue to your views. MB: > > If you can make better arguments, use better examples, then you > > may find your point of view, or part of it, more willingly > > accepted. But if this is the best you can do, as you say above > > that it is ("I tried my best in this informal workshop setting to > > convey the gist of my main ideas on rhyme" -- which is itself > > condescending in that you seem to be trying to say that you > > *could* put your points better if you *wanted* to, but you don't > > because we here in this setting aren't worth the effort) then it > > seems to me that there is a long way to go before I, at least, > > would be willing to agree with your views. BG: > So be it. And so we can see clearly again the lecturer's, and not the workshop-participant's, or the discussion-interlocutor's, approach. > BG: > ... As I've suggested before, whether the poem works > or not is up to the poem, not to how well its maker demonstrates > authoritativeness. And ANYTHING whatever that can make a poem work, > in any way, makes the poem . . . trustworthy, I guess I'd put it.<< MB: > > Well, it is often the case that one's mother likes one's poems > > just because her child wrote them -- and by saying "ANYTHING" in > > caps and with emphasis I must take you to mean that you are > > including such non-poetic things as mother love or a gun in your > > ear as things that can make a poem trustworthy. By golly, Bob, > > stick a gun in my ear and insist I agree with you or you'll shoot > > me, and I'll agree with you. And I'm sure your mother loves your > > poems. But so what? What is such agreement or approval worth as > > serious criticism? Not much -- though it's always nice to hear > > people agree with one or to reflect that one's mother loves one. BG: > You have missed my point entirely, Marcus, and I condescendingly > must tell you that I haven't time to set you right.<< And so we can see once again, even more clearly, the lecturer's, and not the workshop-participant's, or the discussion-interlocutor's, approach. And once again the incredible convenience of your lack of time. > > BG: > > > ... I use the flop as an example of an entirely NEW technique. > > > In high-jumping it was an improved technique,...<< MB: > > While I still have a little time, though, here's another example > > of bad argument. You directly contradict yourself in the space of > > a few words, saying that the Fosbury Flop was both, at one and the > > same time, "an entirely new technique" and that it was only an > > "improved technique". You can't have it both ways, Bob -- was it > > "entirely new" or was it merely "improved"? BG: > It was both, Marcus. I could have said, " ... I use the > flop as an example of an entirely NEW specific technique of > high jumping which improved the general technique of > getting over the bar in high jumping" and gone into more > details. But why? Anyone reading me would understand > what I meant...<< There is no "general technique of getting over the bar" though, Bob. There are only specific techiniques. There is a GOAL or objective of getting over the bar, but no "general technique" for doing so. You're arguing that "buy low sell high" or "jump as high as you can" or "write good poems" are "general techniques" -- but they are nothing like "techniques": they are goals or objectives, and trying to claim they are techniques is a disingenuous argument. Further, it is YOUR distinction between "new" and "improved" that we are talking about here: your claim is that "new" is always of value because it is "entirely new" -- like the Fosbury Flop is "entirely new", and not like more accurate placement of the take-off foot in the scissors-style, or better footwear, or skin-tight clothing to get more speed before take-off, and the like. Your comparison is that your mathemaku is like the Fosbury Flop but better foot placement is like excellence in rhyming: you claim yours is BETTER because it is NEW, and, by extension, that it should replace the old because it is better. Apparently you are the only, or one of only a few, who don't understand the implications of what you're claiming. BG: >... and only someone with a psychological need > to trip up those who argue with him any way possible > would worry about it. << Starting back in with the name-calling, are we, now? This is paradigmatic of ad hominem. Address the issues at hand, Bob, please. BG: > I said new techniques are like the flop inasmuch as they > are different in kind from the old techniques. It still > seems to me a reasonably good example.<< Yes, I'm sure it seems to you that it is a good example. I'm pointing out that because it is an example of a better technique replacing an old technique in accomplishing a measurable goal that it is a bad example for your argument *because* it so clearly implies that you have both a way to measure "good poetry" and a way to write it "better" that should replace the old way. That's why it's a bad example -- unless, of course, you are really completely aware of the implications of your argument and that that's WHY you still think it's a good example. Is that the case? BG: > I have not abandoned the notion of craft-advancement. When > someone invents a new poetic device, he advances the craft > by providing poets with a new tool.<< Yes, it's perfectly clear that you have not abandoned the notion of "craft-advancement" -- and that's just what I'm objecting to. You want to say "craft-advancement", and imply that your new way is better than others' old ways until someone points out that that's what you're doing. Then you retreat with a great deal of ineffectual hand-waving to the notion of "different way", until you are asked if "different way" means you are abandoning the notion of "better" implicit in the word "advancement" at which point you say that you are not abandoning "advancement". Well, it won't work, Bob -- either you abandon the notion of "advancement" with its ideas of measurable and clear goals and techniques that measurable "advance" those goals, or you don't. If you don't, then you are stuck with all the baggage of what you are saying, which is essentially "Our way is measurably better than your way, and we will bury you". MB: > Well, why are you informally laying them out > if you are pretty sure that even a rigorous and well-reasoned > elucidation would be insufficient? Why bother at all?<< BG: > It's possible that others besides you are reading what I > say. My hope is that one or two of them might get > something out of it.<< Oddly enough, that is just what *I* am hoping, too. BG: > And, of course, I was suggesting > that no matter how rigorous and well-reasoned any > elucidation I came up with, you would find ways of > shooting it down--which wouldn't necessarily mean it > was not rigorous and well-reasoned.<< Well, then, why not give it a try, Bob? Perhaps you'll be pleasantly surprised. At the current rate, though, slapping ad hominem on top of name-calling on top of bad argument isn't doing very well for you. BG: > Marcus goes on to show how using a gun to force someone > to listen to one's poems is a new poetic technique in my > sense. A much better analogy than the Fosbury flop.<< I knew you'd like it. mbales at cybergate.net From halvard at earthlink.net Sat Apr 14 10:15:12 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 10:15:12 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . Message-ID: I Went into the Maverick Bar I went into the Maverick Bar In Farmington, New Mexico. And drank double shots of bourbon backed with beer. My long hair was tucked up under a cap I'd left the earring in the car. Two cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables, A waitress asked us where are you from? a country-and-western band began to play "We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie" And with the next song, a couple began to dance. They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties; I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness-- America--your stupidity. I could almost love you again. We left--onto the freeway shoulders-- under the tough old stars-- In the shadow of bluffs I came back to myself, To the real work, to "What is to be done." --Gary Snyder Hal Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Apr 14 11:22:11 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 11:22:11 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: The Significance of Being Mainstream References: Message-ID: <3AD86B22.5FB@nut-n-but.net> Marcus, from my point of view, we're talking at cross-purposes. From yours, I'm just repeating fallacious arguments and being condescending. In either case, I see no point in continuing the discussion. I will, however, make a separate post that briefly summarizes some of what I've been trying to say. It won't help you, but it may be helpful to others, and I can use some of it in other writings I hope eventually to do. --Bob G. From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sat Apr 14 11:33:37 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 10:33:37 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Plug Message-ID: The title poem from my collection *Stutter Monk* is featured today at Poetry Daily: http://www.poems.com David Graham __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sat Apr 14 11:40:45 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 11:40:45 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rhyme, Craft-Advancement, Etc. References: Message-ID: <3AD86F7D.3CFE@nut-n-but.net> One last stab at rhymes and craft-advancement. I now think we may need sub-categories of technical craft-advancements based on their originality (according to a consensus of informed poetry-readers, after reflection). So I now suggest (tentatively) that technical craft-advancements be divided among three sub-categories, alpha, beta and delta. Alpha for advancements based on fully new techniques, beta for advancements based on somewhat new techniques, and delta for advancements arising from just new use of known techniques. I think it should not be that hard to decide, in most cases, which category a given technical advancement belongs in. Take advancements based on rhyme. The first users of rhyme were achieving an alpha technical advancement because rhyme was clearly a new technique (though only an improvement on the technique of using sounds for aesthetic purposes in poetry). An example of a beta technical advancement based on rhyme would be my fore-rhyme (if it is my invention, which would surprise me, but no one has yet cited someone else's methodically using it, or thinking of it as a particular kind of rhyme before I did in the sixties). It is a beta technical advancement because based on a technique definitely different from conventional rhyme (it is the use of all the sounds in the front of words to make rhyme rather than the sounds in the back--and is not simple alliteration--e.g., back/bad, blast/blast, as opposed to alliterations like back/bed, blast/bloom), but not as wholly new as rhynme itself was: I took a standard technique and changed it. An example of a delta technical advancement based on rhyme would be the first use of consonance as a form of end-rhyme: a received device, consonance, is used in a slightly new way. Note well, the result of a technique a delta advancement is based on might be superior to the result of a technique an alpha acvancement is based on. What makes alpha and beta advancements special is that they give poets new tools to work with as opposed to new ways of using old tools (though sometimes the distinction is not easy to make). This improves poetry as a whole though it may not lead to better poems, only to a wider range of equally high-level poems. For an example of a current alpha technical advancement, I would refer the interested to the use of what I've just named the infravisation (which I rhyme with "improvisation"). This is the technique of doing something infraverbal to a word--that is, making changes inside an individual word to add significant new meanings to it beyond what a pun could. Geof Huth's "shadowl" is an example I presented to this group a while back. It got panned by all who responded to it--without much, if any, indication as to why it was trivial, or whatever. To each his own, but I consider the poem first-rate, and the infravisation a significant new tool for poetry (though over a hundred years old, it has not yet been used sufficiently for me to consider it a received technique). Here's why: the way the word "owl" emerges from the word "shadow" on the page is a juxtaphor, or implicit metaphor, for the way an owl (what the word "owl" denotes) emerges from shadow (what the word "shadow" denotes) in the real world outside the page: suddenly, unexpectedly, with a subtle change of atmosphere like the change in the pronunciation of the "o" of "shadow." For those with a background in haiku and visual poetry, there is more: "shadow" is an implicit metonymy for darkness/night--and an owl is a deadly predator, so you have something passive turning into something actively evil (from the point of view of mice, at any rate). The owl is part of a shadow till it swoops. I like, too, the size of the scene's increase due to nothing but a single line (a mere "1"). Some might protest that "shadowl" is no more than a pun, but I don't see it. The only element in it that is punlike is "ow" which is less than a syllable of one two-syllable word, and of a second one-syllable word, and there is no similarity of sound between the "ow" of "shadow" and the "ow" of "owl." Certainly some infravisations are more punning than this one, and the infravisation evolved from punning, but it seems to me to be an entirely new poetic technique. With that, I'm through with this topic (I hope) for at least a few months. Marcus may not know any more about what I've been saying than he did when he first saw and sneered at "shadowl," but I trust others do, whether they agree with me, or consider what I'm saying of interest, or not. --Bob G. From mbales at cybergate.net Sat Apr 14 12:02:04 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 12:02:04 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: The Significance of Being Mainstream In-Reply-To: <3AD86B22.5FB@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: BG: > Marcus, from my point of view, we're talking at > cross-purposes.<< Perhaps if you were to say what your purposes are that would help. What *are* your purposes if you don't want (as you clearly don't want) people to examine what you say closely? Whether you do or not, however, the point of continuing the discussion, it seems to me, is for the benefit of the uncommitted bystanders. mbales at cybergate.net From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sat Apr 14 12:42:49 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 12:42:49 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Plug References: Message-ID: <007001c0c501$f1846a00$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> David -- congratulations. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Graham" To: Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 11:33 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Plug > The title poem from my collection *Stutter Monk* is featured today at > Poetry Daily: http://www.poems.com > > David Graham > > __________________ > David Graham > grahamd at mail.ripon.edu > __________________ > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From mbales at cybergate.net Sat Apr 14 13:23:44 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 13:23:44 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rhyme, Craft-Advancement, Etc. In-Reply-To: <3AD86F7D.3CFE@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: BG: > One last stab at rhymes and craft-advancement. I > now think we may need sub-categories of technical > craft-advancements based on their originality > (according to a consensus of informed poetry-readers, > after reflection).<< It seems to me that you are still deploying value-laden words without respect to the values with which they are laden: "advancement", and now "originality" and "informed". You seem to continue to cling to the notion of advancement without having made any attempt to distinguish what appears to be your term-of-art usage of it from the critique of it that it assumes too much: Advanced from what to what -- advancement is a matter of measurement from non-goal-attainment toward, or at least in the direction of, goal-attainment. What's the goal you're proposing? What's the scale on which you are going to measure the advance? Originality you do try to provide a sort of scale for: "consensus of informed poetry readers after reflection", but that still leaves unanswered the question of what characterizes an "informed poetry reader" or what you'll do if either no consensus develops or if a plurality of consensuses forms. What is "original" if there are (as I think we can confidently predict there will be) a number of different loosely-knit groups each claiming that this is original but that that is not? What's the scale by which you propose to measure disagreement among "informed poetry readers after reflection"? BG: > So I now suggest (tentatively) > that technical craft-advancements be divided among > three sub-categories, alpha, beta and delta. Alpha > for advancements based on fully new techniques, beta > for advancements based on somewhat new techniques, > and delta for advancements arising from just new > use of known techniques.<< Of course the "alpha" sub-category is going to be the category you have already held to be the primary category! But even setting aside for a moment the implicit ranking of the sub- categories you propose, we are still faced with the "Fosbury Flop Dilemma" -- that is, once again, that, since you hold that a "fully new technique" in poetry is like the Fosbury Flop in high-jumping (a technique that is so much better at accomplishing a measurable goal that it must replace the old technique in all but a few trivial instances such as beginners, for example), your "fully new technique" "alpha" sub-category is really just your distinction between "new technique" and "old or improved technique" in a new guise, without further elucidation. BG: > ... Take advancements based on rhyme. The > first users of rhyme were achieving an alpha technical > advancement because rhyme was clearly a new technique > (though only an improvement on the technique of > using sounds for aesthetic purposes in poetry).<< But all you're arguing here is that it is new, not that it is better. Mere newness is not necessarily an "advancement" -- and unless you are willing to say "All new techniques are advancements" (which I think you would not be wise to venture) you cannot reasonably hold the position that any new technique is an advancement. And yet you do not -- you claim rhyme was, by its first user, "an improvement on the technique of using sounds for aesthetic purposes" MERELY because it was once "new"! From wasanthony at yahoo.com Sat Apr 14 13:43:52 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 10:43:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Plug In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010414174352.11008.qmail@web12103.mail.yahoo.com> --- David Graham wrote: > The title poem from my collection *Stutter Monk* is featured today at > Poetry Daily: http://www.poems.com > Very very nice. - Jim, who once thought of being a Felonious Monk ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Sat Apr 14 14:51:50 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 11:51:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Plug/Plug back at you. Message-ID: <20010414185150.8FE1536F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sat Apr 14 15:44:16 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 15:44:16 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . Message-ID: <99.1386f76d.280a0290@cs.com> In a message dated 4/14/2001 9:19:46 AM Central Daylight Time, halvard at earthlink.net writes: > > I Went into the Maverick Bar > > I went into the Maverick Bar > In Farmington, New Mexico. > And drank double shots of bourbon > backed with beer. > My long hair was tucked up under a cap > I'd left the earring in the car. > > Two cowboys did horseplay > by the pool tables, > A waitress asked us > where are you from? > a country-and-western band began to play > "We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie" > And with the next song, > a couple began to dance. > > They held each other like in High School dances > in the fifties; > I recalled when I worked in the woods > and the bars of Madras, Oregon. > That short-haired joy and roughness-- > America--your stupidity. > I could almost love you again. > > We left--onto the freeway shoulders-- > under the tough old stars-- > In the shadow of bluffs > I came back to myself, > To the real work, to > "What is to be done." > It's "Muskogee." Maybe G. S. should have stuck around a little longer. He might have learned something. From griffinbaker at home.com Sat Apr 14 16:38:09 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 13:38:09 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . References: <99.1386f76d.280a0290@cs.com> Message-ID: <3AD8B531.82C30021@home.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From DICK at watson.ibm.com Sat Apr 14 16:47:55 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 01 16:47:55 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] David Graham's poems from Poetry Daily Message-ID: <200104142054.QAA51668@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> I've just read the 7 of them, and I heartily recommend them to everyone. Richard From DICK at watson.ibm.com Sat Apr 14 17:21:09 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 01 17:21:09 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] "I Went into the Maverick Bar" Message-ID: <200104142123.RAA42190@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> This reminds of the remark someone is alleged to have made to Ernest Hemingway: "Ernest, why don't you take the false hair off your chest?" Richard From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sat Apr 14 17:26:27 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 17:26:27 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . References: <99.1386f76d.280a0290@cs.com> Message-ID: <000901c0c529$90c5ff80$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Muskokie is where the ACLU went to court to give the rednecks permission to march. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 3:44 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . > In a message dated 4/14/2001 9:19:46 AM Central Daylight Time, > halvard at earthlink.net writes: > > > > > I Went into the Maverick Bar > > > > I went into the Maverick Bar > > In Farmington, New Mexico. > > And drank double shots of bourbon > > backed with beer. > > My long hair was tucked up under a cap > > I'd left the earring in the car. > > > > Two cowboys did horseplay > > by the pool tables, > > A waitress asked us > > where are you from? > > a country-and-western band began to play > > "We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie" > > And with the next song, > > a couple began to dance. > > > > They held each other like in High School dances > > in the fifties; > > I recalled when I worked in the woods > > and the bars of Madras, Oregon. > > That short-haired joy and roughness-- > > America--your stupidity. > > I could almost love you again. > > > > We left--onto the freeway shoulders-- > > under the tough old stars-- > > In the shadow of bluffs > > I came back to myself, > > To the real work, to > > "What is to be done." > > > > It's "Muskogee." Maybe G. S. should have stuck around a little longer. He > might have learned something. > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sat Apr 14 17:41:51 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 16:41:51 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hag & Snyder In-Reply-To: <000901c0c529$90c5ff80$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> References: <99.1386f76d.280a0290@cs.com> Message-ID: I yield to no one in my admiration for Merle Haggard, but I must admit I've had Snyder's book in my possession for over a quarter century without noticing this particular typo. It's on the shelf right next to Stevens's *Necesssary Angle*. (By the way, Haggard's latest CD, *If I Could Only Fly*, is his best in years.) David Graham _________________ >Muskokie is where the ACLU went to court to give the rednecks permission to >march. > > > > > Tad Richards >> > "We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie" >> > And with the next song, >> >> It's "Muskogee." Maybe G. S. should have stuck around a little longer. >He >> might have learned something. >> _______________________________________________ __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From halvard at earthlink.net Sat Apr 14 21:26:41 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 21:26:41 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hag & Snyder In-Reply-To: Message-ID: David, if it's a typo it's shared by a lot of other people out there in cyberworld. I've found a number of sites for Haggard's song where the spelling is as in Snyder's poem. Could it be a common folkish variant? BTW, congratulations on your poeme du jour! Hal > I yield to no one in my admiration for Merle Haggard, but I must admit I've > had Snyder's book in my possession for over a quarter century without > noticing this particular typo. > > It's on the shelf right next to Stevens's *Necesssary Angle*. > > (By the way, Haggard's latest CD, *If I Could Only Fly*, is his best in > years.) > > David Graham > _________________ > > >Muskokie is where the ACLU went to court to give the rednecks permission to > >march. > > > > > > > > > > Tad Richards > > >> > "We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie" > >> > And with the next song, > > >> > >> It's "Muskogee." Maybe G. S. should have stuck around a little longer. > >He > >> might have learned something. > >> _______________________________________________ > > __________________ > David Graham > grahamd at mail.ripon.edu > __________________ > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sat Apr 14 23:24:32 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 19:24:32 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Rhyme, Craft-Advancement, Etc. Message-ID: Bob G. wrote: >>Marcus may not know any more about what I've been saying than he did when >>he first saw and sneered at "shadowl," Marcus wrote: >You have me confused with someone else; I'm the one who sneered at >"lighght" as "Hey, look! Silent letters!" But having >evidently missed my first opportunity to sneer at "shadowl" let me seize >this one. Marcus and Bob, perhaps it would be a good idea to backchannel this conversation? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sat Apr 14 23:29:19 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 19:29:19 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . Message-ID: Gary Snyder wrote: > > "We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie" R.S. Gwynn wrote: >It's "Muskogee." I believe the song being referred to is "I'm Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee," as played in "Platoon," which has the line about not smoking marijuana. And having grown up in Santa Fe, attended grad school in Albuquerque, and being a visitor to Farmington, Gallup, Taos, Los Alamos, T or C, etc., etc., I can say that is a song I have personally never heard played in NM. Maybe things were different then. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sat Apr 14 23:33:25 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 19:33:25 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] "I Went into the Maverick Bar" Message-ID: Dick wrote: >This reminds of the remark someone is alleged to have made to Ernest >Hemingway: "Ernest, why don't you take the false hair off your chest?" It was the literary critic Max Eastman who wrote in an article that Hemingway's literary style was that of "wearing false hair on the chest." There is a really charming story in A. Scott Berg's biography of Perkins of a meeting between Hemingway and Eastman in Perkins' office (Scribners published both writers). Hemingway ripped open his shirt to display a chest with natural hair. Eastman smiled and ripped open his own shirt to display, I think, fairly scanty hair. Perkins was relieved that disaster was apparently abated and was about to rip open his own shirt to join in the solidarity, when Hemingway went for Eastman. Perkins was, like others, a believer in Hemingway's propaganda to the extent that he dove to rescue the man on the bottom, thinking it would of course be Eastman. It was Hemingway -- who was never really that good in a streetfight. Moira Russell Seattle, WA "'The Sun Also Rises' was about bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit" --- Zelda Fitzgerald _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sat Apr 14 23:40:44 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 19:40:44 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick, yeah Message-ID: OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee; We don't take our trips on LSD We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street; We like livin' right, and bein' free. I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, A place where even squares can have a ball We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all. We don't make a party out of lovin'; We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo; We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy, Like the hippies out in San Francisco do. And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, A place where even squares can have a ball. We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all. Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen. Football's still the roughest thing on campus, And the kids here still respect the college dean. We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, In Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA. *** IMHO Snyder's disregard for the spelling reveals his essential ignorance of what he is actually talking about. It is easy to sneer at those "short-haired" people with rough lives when you've got an education and believe you know what they should do better than they could possibly do. And man I have NEVER heard this song in New Mexico. What I constantly heard in jukeboxes in fairly skanky bars was stuff like "Cimarron": "Spanish is a lovin' tongue...." or SELENA. Could Snyder honestly have heard an Oklahoma hymn in Farmington? This is like saying you heard "I Love L.A." in a jukebox bar in Dubuque. In Farmington you're going to hear something like "Achy Breaky Heart," or "La Bamba," or "Coplas." Moira Russell annoyed in Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sun Apr 15 00:06:51 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 00:06:51 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . References: Message-ID: <00de01c0c561$87ef9960$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Moira - "Okie From Muskogee" predates "Platoon." It was a number one hit in 1969, and was played in country bars in every state in the union, then and for the next several years. Merle Haggard was from California, and toured extensively in the west -- including, I'm sure, New Mexico, althought Merle himself undoubtedly wasn't playing in the honky tonk in Farmington. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 11:29 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . > Gary Snyder wrote: > > > > "We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie" > > R.S. Gwynn wrote: > >It's "Muskogee." > > I believe the song being referred to is "I'm Proud to be an Okie from > Muskogee," as played in "Platoon," which has the line about not smoking > marijuana. And having grown up in Santa Fe, attended grad school in > Albuquerque, and being a visitor to Farmington, Gallup, Taos, Los Alamos, T > or C, etc., etc., I can say that is a song I have personally never heard > played in NM. Maybe things were different then. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sun Apr 15 02:06:54 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 01:06:54 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick, yeah In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Tad's right to throw some historical context into this discussion of Gary Snyder's poem & Merle Haggard's song. I think that there are legitimate complaints to be made about Gary Snyder's poetry in general, and about the political vision as expressed in "I Went Into the Maverick Bar" in particular. But of course lots of political poems look a bit dated after 27 years. And--though I am proudly on record as a Merle Haggard fan--I have to say that "Okie From Muskogee" is a remarkably stupid song, tolerable today only as camp. Using the song (which was, as Tad mentions, a huge nationwide hit during the Vietnam war) as shorthand for national idiocy doesn't seem all that outrageous to me. I think the song's success as redneck anthem may have caught Haggard a little off guard; I've always suspected he meant a little more irony than was taken. But in any case let's not take a typo and try to paint Snyder as a pointy-headed intellectual who knows nothing about the working class or their folkways. That's just not accurate. By the way, I am old enough to remember when the length of your hair was widely taken as an index of your political views--and old enough to have witnessed a few bar fights sparked by just that. Whatever the faults of Snyder's poem, "America--your stupidity" reminds me powerfully of those days. David Graham __________________ ======================== I Went into the Maverick Bar I went into the Maverick Bar In Farmington, New Mexico. And drank double shots of bourbon backed with beer. My long hair was tucked up under a cap I'd left the earring in the car. Two cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables, A waitress asked us where are you from? a country-and-western band began to play "We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie" And with the next song, a couple began to dance. They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties; I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness-- America--your stupidity. I could almost love you again. We left--onto the freeway shoulders-- under the tough old stars-- In the shadow of bluffs I came back to myself, To the real work, to "What is to be done." --Gary Snyder ----------------------------------------- OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee; We don't take our trips on LSD We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street; We like livin' right, and bein' free. I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, A place where even squares can have a ball We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all. We don't make a party out of lovin'; We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo; We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy, Like the hippies out in San Francisco do. And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, A place where even squares can have a ball. We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all. Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen. Football's still the roughest thing on campus, And the kids here still respect the college dean. We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, In Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA. *** IMHO Snyder's disregard for the spelling reveals his essential ignorance of what he is actually talking about. It is easy to sneer at those "short-haired" people with rough lives when you've got an education and believe you know what they should do better than they could possibly do. And man I have NEVER heard this song in New Mexico. What I constantly heard in jukeboxes in fairly skanky bars was stuff like "Cimarron": "Spanish is a lovin' tongue...." or SELENA. Could Snyder honestly have heard an Oklahoma hymn in Farmington? This is like saying you heard "I Love L.A." in a jukebox bar in Dubuque. In Farmington you're going to hear something like "Achy Breaky Heart," or "La Bamba," or "Coplas." Moira Russell annoyed in Seattle, WA __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Sun Apr 15 07:21:51 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 04:21:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] (no subject) Message-ID: <20010415112151.E02AC274F@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From cstroffo at earthlink.net Sun Apr 15 11:13:58 2001 From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (chris stroffolino) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 11:13:58 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick, yeah References: Message-ID: <3AD9BAB6.F2D0A98@earthlink.net> Moira-- Just because you didn't hear the song in NM doesn't mean that Snyder didn't... (I never saw a hippie burn a draft card on Main St., on Wall St. maybe, but not Main St.!) But more importantly, you may have a point about Snyder's condescending attitude here, and yes, perhaps the hippies and yippies and their ilk were no better than those they criticized (in terms of exclusivity, etc.---remember the "don't trust anyone over 30": thing, for instance) and the times were extremely polarized in ways that probably ultimately hurt everyone---but Haggard's song itself is also an attempt to polarize and get some people nodding in agreement and other people angry or at least alienated or smug (however you read Snyder)--- Basically, the main point of the song is preferring LEGAL drink over ILLEGAL drugs--- them's may not be fightin words as much anymore (I hope nobody quotes ":Southern Man" by Neil Young and its answer song) and I remember quite clearly (in my college years) being very anti the Haggard song, but then gradually getting into him (of course it had to be because The Grateful Dead did a cover) I now feel I have enough "negative capability," to appreciate both sides of this particular argument---rather than just demonize the snyder piece.... especially if one is interested in where the 60s went wrong, and how maybe in the future there could be a more successful alliance between "hippie" and "okie" (or their2001 equivalents).... Moira Russell wrote: > OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE > > We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee; > We don't take our trips on LSD > We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street; > We like livin' right, and bein' free. > > I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, > A place where even squares can have a ball > We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, > And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all. > > We don't make a party out of lovin'; > We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo; > We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy, > Like the hippies out in San Francisco do. > > And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, > A place where even squares can have a ball. > We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, > And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all. > > Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; > Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen. > Football's still the roughest thing on campus, > And the kids here still respect the college dean. > > We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, > In Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA. > > *** > > IMHO Snyder's disregard for the spelling reveals his essential ignorance of > what he is actually talking about. It is easy to sneer at those > "short-haired" people with rough lives when you've got an education and > believe you know what they should do better than they could possibly do. > And man I have NEVER heard this song in New Mexico. What I constantly heard > in jukeboxes in fairly skanky bars was stuff like "Cimarron": "Spanish is a > lovin' tongue...." or SELENA. Could Snyder honestly have heard an Oklahoma > hymn in Farmington? This is like saying you heard "I Love L.A." in a > jukebox bar in Dubuque. In Farmington you're going to hear something like > "Achy Breaky Heart," or "La Bamba," or "Coplas." > > Moira Russell > annoyed in Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Sun Apr 15 14:06:12 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 14:06:12 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick, yeah Message-ID: In a message dated 4/15/2001 10:56:21 AM Central Daylight Time, cstroffo at earthlink.net writes: > Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; I always thought this was a classic line. Has anybody noticed that this song is in iambic pentameter? Thought a rarity . . . From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sun Apr 15 16:04:43 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 15:04:43 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poet Sighting: Yusef Komunyakaa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've heard Komunyakaa a couple times. Once at an AWP conference in particular, I had the same sort of reaction. He breaks all the rules of effective reading, and still it was mesmerizing. Wasn't just me, either: afterward, I discovered several of my friends wandering about in the same sort of pleasant daze. Here's another YK poem: Yellow Jackets When the plowblade struck An old stump hiding under The soil like a beggar's Rotten tooth, they swarmed up & Mister Jackson left the plow Wedged like a whaler's harpoon. The horse was midnight Against dusk, tethered to somebody's Pocketwatch. He shivered, but not The way women shook their heads Before mirrors at the five & dime--a deeper connection To the low field's evening star. He stood there, in tracechains, Lathered in froth, just Stopped by a great, goofy Calmness. He whinnied Once, & then the whole Beautiful, blue-black sky Fell on his back. David Graham ___________________ >Last week I had the opportunity to hear Yusef Komunyakaa >read in Hartford CT. He gave a fine reading; tho you had to keep >your ears cocked to catch all the words. (I'm not certain if he's >got a bit of a mumble or if it's just the ol' Bogalusa upbringing.) >He didn't strain to entertain as so many readers do. He presented >the poems with some contextual introduction, but didn't overdo... >he left plenty for the listener to work out on the fly. One felt a >genuine humility in his presentation of his poems...& gratitude for >the audience's interest. Hearing the poems made me think: This is >the real deal; this is why poetry is still important in this world. >Finnegan __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sun Apr 15 15:58:59 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 15:58:59 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hippies and rednecks References: Message-ID: <00a001c0c5e6$83289a00$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Reportedly, Hag's tour bus was driving through Oklahoma on the way to a gig, everyone on board was stoned out of their mind, and someone saw a road sign pointing to Muskogee, and said, "They don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee." Everyone broke up with the reefer giggles, and Hag started humming the line. I believe this story is true. What may be apocryphal, although I heard it at the time, was the story that Muskogee was one of the biggest dope-moving centers in the Southwest. Sort of the Mena, Arkansas of its day (Terry Ponick will get that reference). Here's something I wrote a few years ago, as part of the intro to my New Country Music Encyclopedia - my take on country and psychedelia in the 60s. Real life changed in the '60s. The kids weren't Lesley Gore and Frankie Avalon any more; they were Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and suddenly you could learn from the of Innocence as well as the Voice of Experience. (Maybe we didn't learn enough--is being able to snicker at the naivete of kids who put flowers in the barrels of guns really such progress?) Johnny Cash carried the banner of country music through much of those days. Bob Dylan listened to him. Johnny Cash carried on his own form of social awareness, singing about the American Indian and playing benefits in places like San Quentin prison, where a young convict named Merle Haggard heard him. Merle Haggard was the antithesis of Sixties culture. The self- proclaimed Voice of Experience in the Sixties was Jimi Hendrix; the message was from a traveller returned from inner space. Haggard was just the opposite: a voice from the heartland from America, but a flat-out honest voice. The fugitive, the branded man. In a time when kids were blaming the older generation for their problems and the world's problems, Haggard blamed himself. In Woodstock, The Band knew what Haggard was talking about when Robbie Robertson wrote songs like "Tears of Rage," about the plight of parents trying to reach their children. On the West Coast, Crosby, Stills and Nash had some inkling of what Haggard was talking about when they wrote "Teach Your Children." In the Midwest, John Prine knew, when he wrote songs of the deepest respect for his elders, like "Grandpa Was a Carpenter" and "Hello in There." And the hippy-dippy Grateful Dead knew, when they recorded Haggard's songs. And when Haggard recorded the hippie- bashing "Okie From Muskogee," the counter-culture embraced him as much as it vilified him. In the best of the "Okie" answer songs, "I'll Change Your Flat Tire, Merle," a hippie comes to Haggard's rescue because "Merle, you've got soul." Janie Frickie was a student at the revolution-tossed University of Indiana in the '60s, but was so involved with her music, she says, that she barely noticed the outside world. But the role models for a young woman country singer--Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton--were presences that the outside world couldn't fail to notice. And at the same time, a Rhodes Scholar/West Point instructor turned dropout headed not for San Francisco but for Nashville. Kris Kristofferson got a job as a janitor in a Nashville recording studio, and started writing songs that would become classics in both country and rock. A strange phenomenon affects the country music community from time to time: crossover mania. Country has always looked for a way to expand its audience. Identifying itself as the music of America's heartland, proclaiming its pride? in its roots, country has always had a bit of an inferiority complex about those roots. That's why when it thinks about crossing over, it always thinks of crossing in the same direction: Uptown. Cafe society, the carriage trade. Vegas. In the Fiftties, that country establishment like what Eddy Arnold was doing, dressing up in a tuxedo and singing at supper clubs. It was terrified of what Elvis and Roy Orbison and those guys were doing, bringing funky, low-rent, black music into the country tent. It turned to the "Nashville Sound," devised by Chet Atkins and others, in which brilliant musicians got together and created a Muzak overlay to country arrangements. By the late Sixties, country had gotten used to the rockabillies, and had welcomed singers as diverse as Jerry Lee Lewis and Conway Twitty back into the fold--though not, for some reason, Roy Orbison, who is almost completely absent from the country charts. The rockabillies weren't scary any more, but a new generation of teenagers had become even more menacing. As Hank Thompson put it in "Ace in the Hole," an updated parody of an old Tin Pan Alley song: "Those hippies and demonstrators/Draft dodgers and agitators/Want old age benefits at twenty one." As the Vietnam War and the Generation Gap divided America, the music of America's heartland and working people bifurcated itself in what would seem to be a strange way, if you were only listening to the music. Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie are close kin in musical heritage, style and attitude, but in the '60s, something called "folk music" represented youth, liberalism (this will be a difficult concept for the '80s generation--youth and liberalism???), and the anti-war movement, and something called "country music" represented middle age, social and political conservatism, and support for the war. At the same time, country performers were getting to be a big deal on TV. Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell had their own network shows??and for a teenaged California Beatles fan named Rosanne Cash, this was something of an embarrassment. Actually, Cash, like Willie Nelson and a number of other country singers, was a political liberal, but the image of country music was closer to Hank Thompson's message. Or Johnny Wright's message, in "Hello Vietnam," or Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler's in "The Ballad of the Green Berets," or most dramatically, Merle Haggard's in "Okie From Muskogee" and "Fightin' Side of Me." It's questionable whether these songs accurately represented Haggard's philosophy--he's a subtle and thoughtful man--but they became anthems of the political right. If the country estaqblishment hated the hippies, not all the hippies felt the same animosity. Bob Dylan journeyed down to Nashville to make an album, and started a pop music fad for Nashville as a recording center, and the Nashville Sound (John Sebastian and the Lovin' Spoonful reflected this in their song "Nashville Cats"). Johnny Cash and Dylan formed a mutual admiration society. The Byrds, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Asleep at the Wheel, the Grateful Dead and Commander Cody were just some of the pop acts who loved country music, but you won't find any of them on the country charts for that era. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sun Apr 15 17:37:49 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 13:37:49 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . Message-ID: >Moira - "Okie From Muskogee" predates "Platoon." Yes, as the granddaughter of a man who hopscotched from Oklahoma to Arizona to California, I know that. My point was 1) Snyder was misremembering the song and 2) that was a more popular showcase for the song. It's not exactly tops of the pops right now. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sun Apr 15 17:42:43 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 13:42:43 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick, yeah Message-ID: >Using the song >(which was, as Tad mentions, a huge nationwide hit during the Vietnam war) >as shorthand for national idiocy doesn't seem all that outrageous to me. But the effect to someone who knows the area is like watching one of those movies filmed in the Southwest which has the characters driving north to Albuquerque. heir folkways. That's just not accurate. The poem has the Hemingwayesque air of "I am the man, I saw it, I was there, the accuracy of my reporting backs up my point." >By the way, I am old enough to remember when the length of your hair was >widely taken as an index of your political views--and old enough to have >witnessed a few bar fights sparked by just that. Well, I am currently old enough to remember -- in fact, it happened day before yesterday -- when someone yelled at me from a passing car, "Hey, you got a shotgun under that coat?" (A long black winter _cloth_ coat, not a black leather trenchcoat.) Intolerance is not limited to the 60s. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From mbales at cybergate.net Sun Apr 15 18:25:55 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 18:25:55 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick, yeah In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Moira: > Well, I am currently old enough to remember -- in fact, it > happened > day before yesterday -- when someone yelled at me from a passing car, > "Hey, you got a shotgun under that coat?" (A long black winter > _cloth_ coat, not a black leather trenchcoat.) Intolerance is not > limited to the 60s.<< You think that is intolerance? LOL I've been wearing a J.Peterman coat for years and get that all the time -- people are trying to be funny. It's like the folks who shout out a window at the person walking a Great Dane: "Hey, are you walking him or is he walking you?" It may not be a very good joke, but it's intended as a joke. Marcus mbales at cybergate.net From terran at sirius.com Sun Apr 15 18:18:11 2001 From: terran at sirius.com (shep) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 15:18:11 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick, yeah In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >Well, I am currently old enough to remember -- in fact, it happened >day before yesterday -- when someone yelled at me from a passing >car, "Hey, you got a shotgun under that coat?" (A long black winter >_cloth_ coat, not a black leather trenchcoat.) Intolerance is not >limited to the 60s. > >Moira Russell >Seattle, WA My license plate is TERRAN. During the Iran hostage crisis, I was yelled at from a pick-up Go back to Iran. I can only assume Terran was taken to be Teheran. Never underestimate the intelligence of the truly stupid. I used to leave an old VW parked in the street, nothing worth taking, unlocked. You got it - one morning I find a window broken, the car rummaged. They must not even have tried the handle. From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sun Apr 15 18:28:23 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (theoldmole) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 18:28:23 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . References: Message-ID: <001f01c0c5fb$62279bc0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Is it a new poem? I was assuming it dated back to, or at least referred back to, the time when the song was popular. If it's a poem about today, then that's certainly a different story. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2001 5:37 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . > > >Moira - "Okie From Muskogee" predates "Platoon." > > Yes, as the granddaughter of a man who hopscotched from Oklahoma to Arizona > to California, I know that. My point was 1) Snyder was misremembering the > song and 2) that was a more popular showcase for the song. It's not exactly > tops of the pops right now. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From halvard at earthlink.net Sun Apr 15 19:39:07 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 19:39:07 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . In-Reply-To: <001f01c0c5fb$62279bc0$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> Message-ID: It's from *Turtle Island*, which was published in '74. Can't say exactly when the poem itself was written--late 60s, early 70s, probably. > Is it a new poem? I was assuming it dated back to, or at least referred back > to, the time when the song was popular. If it's a poem about today, then > that's certainly a different story. Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sun Apr 15 20:16:21 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 20:16:21 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . References: Message-ID: <002001c0c60a$77d82340$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Yeah, that makes more sense. Then it was written, and refers to a time, when "Okie From Muskogee" was still an anthem. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Halvard Johnson" To: Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2001 7:39 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . > It's from *Turtle Island*, which was published in '74. Can't say exactly > when the poem itself was written--late 60s, early 70s, probably. > > > Is it a new poem? I was assuming it dated back to, or at least referred back > > to, the time when the song was popular. If it's a poem about today, then > > that's certainly a different story. > > Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." > > Halvard Johnson > =============== > email: halvard at earthlink.net > website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sun Apr 15 20:29:07 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 20:29:07 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick, yeah References: Message-ID: <004601c0c60c$405085a0$6401a8c0@ibm25310> It occurs to me - my daughter worked for a while at Rodeo Nights in Santa Fe, and I heard a whole lot of country standards there, from "King of the Road" to "Honky Tonk Heroes" to "He Stopped Loving Her Today." I can't swear I specifically heard "Okie From Muskogee," but it seems likely that I did. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sun Apr 15 21:21:46 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 20:21:46 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hippies and rednecks In-Reply-To: <00a001c0c5e6$83289a00$6401a8c0@hvc.rr.com> References: Message-ID: Ah, "I'll Fix Your Flat Tire, Merle"--that really brings back memories, Tad. Pure Prairie League circa 1975, wasn't it? Not the original incarnation of the group, as I recall. Don't know if it was original or a cover. From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sun Apr 15 21:32:01 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 21:32:01 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hippies and rednecks References: Message-ID: <005c01c0c615$09afc160$6401a8c0@ibm25310> I'm proud to be a hippie from Olema, I smile at all the freaks and all the squares..... Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Graham" To: Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2001 9:21 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Hippies and rednecks > Ah, "I'll Fix Your Flat Tire, Merle"--that really brings back memories, > Tad. Pure Prairie League circa 1975, wasn't it? Not the original > incarnation of the group, as I recall. Don't know if it was original or a > cover. > > From memory: > > I'll fix your flat tire, Merle, > Don't you let your sweet country-pickin' fingers > get all covered with "earl" > For you're a honky, I know, > but Merle, you got soul > so I'll fix your flat tire, Merle > > Now *that's* poetry. . . . > > Thanks, Tad, for this article. > > David Graham > _______________________ > > > >In Woodstock, The Band knew what Haggard was talking about when > >Robbie Robertson wrote songs like "Tears of Rage," about the > >plight of parents trying to reach their children. On the West > >Coast, Crosby, Stills and Nash had some inkling of what Haggard > >was talking about when they wrote "Teach Your Children." In the > >Midwest, John Prine knew, when he wrote songs of the deepest > >respect for his elders, like "Grandpa Was a Carpenter" and "Hello > >in There." And the hippy-dippy Grateful Dead knew, when they > >recorded Haggard's songs. And when Haggard recorded the hippie- > >bashing "Okie From Muskogee," the counter-culture embraced > >him as much as it vilified him. In the best of the "Okie" answer > >songs, "I'll Change Your Flat Tire, Merle," a hippie comes to > >Haggard's rescue because "Merle, you've got soul." > > > > > > > > __________________ > David Graham > grahamd at mail.ripon.edu > __________________ > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sun Apr 15 21:44:34 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 17:44:34 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . Message-ID: >Is it a new poem? I was assuming it dated back to, or at least referred >back >to, the time when the song was popular. Well, unlike Salter's poem, there's no date in the title. I didn't mean to set off a big flap; it was just jarring to me, as I've spent time in Farmington, and know the song, and for me the two don't go together. Maybe I'm too young to appreciate the poem, or it's meant only as a period piece, or I'm not reading it carefully enough. This touches a nerve for me, as it apparently does for other people, because my father's side of the family is dirt-poor, from the Southwest and in the demographic described as "trailer trash" or "white trash" -- no college education, often little or no high school education, living in mobile homes or trailers, and so on. My father basically escaped poverty because he served in WWII and was able to go to college on the GI Bill, which he said opened up a whole new world for him. When I was in grad school I heard classmates telling "white trash" jokes (set off by the Tonya Harding scandal) with such zeal I had to wonder what their reactions would be if someone started telling jokes equally zealously about poor blacks or Jews. When my grandparents and uncles and aunts were called "Okies" in California it was an insult. So for me, Snyder's use of the song as a sign that the crew in the bar is "stupid America" really rubs me the wrong way. I was born in 1971, so obviously missed the popularity of the song with a certain demographic, controversies about long hair (although now it's controversies about long, dyed, shaved hair....meme plus chose). But because the people in the bar don't share Snyder's values or viewpoint, he's apparently willing to write them off in a really reductive way. That kind of narrowing of the vision, writing off people, is what gets to me. And that kind of intolerance really gets to me when it is professed by people who consider themselves liberal and "tolerant" -- at least far moreso than the "stupid America" in the bar. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sun Apr 15 22:08:09 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 22:08:09 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . References: Message-ID: <006e01c0c61a$15ed5aa0$6401a8c0@ibm25310> The guy who really played both sides of this fence was Charlie Daniels, who in 1973 - around the same time Gary Snyder was in Farmington - recorded "Uneasy Rider," which pandered to the hippies in a song about a longhair who gets in trouble in a redneck bar, and in in 1988, the Reagan era, did a second "Uneasy Rider" about a good ol boy who wanders into a gay bar. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2001 9:44 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . > > >Is it a new poem? I was assuming it dated back to, or at least referred > >back > >to, the time when the song was popular. > > Well, unlike Salter's poem, there's no date in the title. I didn't mean to > set off a big flap; it was just jarring to me, as I've spent time in > Farmington, and know the song, and for me the two don't go together. Maybe > I'm too young to appreciate the poem, or it's meant only as a period piece, > or I'm not reading it carefully enough. > > This touches a nerve for me, as it apparently does for other people, because > my father's side of the family is dirt-poor, from the Southwest and in the > demographic described as "trailer trash" or "white trash" -- no college > education, often little or no high school education, living in mobile homes > or trailers, and so on. My father basically escaped poverty because he > served in WWII and was able to go to college on the GI Bill, which he said > opened up a whole new world for him. When I was in grad school I heard > classmates telling "white trash" jokes (set off by the Tonya Harding > scandal) with such zeal I had to wonder what their reactions would be if > someone started telling jokes equally zealously about poor blacks or Jews. > When my grandparents and uncles and aunts were called "Okies" in California > it was an insult. > > So for me, Snyder's use of the song as a sign that the crew in the bar is > "stupid America" really rubs me the wrong way. I was born in 1971, so > obviously missed the popularity of the song with a certain demographic, > controversies about long hair (although now it's controversies about long, > dyed, shaved hair....meme plus chose). But because the people in the bar > don't share Snyder's values or viewpoint, he's apparently willing to write > them off in a really reductive way. That kind of narrowing of the vision, > writing off people, is what gets to me. And that kind of intolerance really > gets to me when it is professed by people who consider themselves liberal > and "tolerant" -- at least far moreso than the "stupid America" in the bar. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From schro047 at tc.umn.edu Sun Apr 15 23:27:08 2001 From: schro047 at tc.umn.edu (Steve Schroer) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 22:27:08 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Maverick, yeah References: <200104160135.f3G1Z2j17542@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: <3ADA668C.5A447072@tc.umn.edu> > > Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; > I always thought this was a classic line. Has anybody noticed > that this song is in iambic pentameter? Thought a rarity . . . Actually the rhythm of the verses is mostly trochaic, though there are a few lines that could be read as iambic. Note how in three of four lines the first syllable is accented: LEATHer BOOTS are STILL in STYLE for MANly FOOTwear; BEADS and ROMan SANdals WON'T be SEEN. FOOTball's STILL the ROUGHest THING on CAMpus, And the KIDS here STILL reSPECT the COLLege DEAN. I haven't heard the song for years -- and didn't pay attention at the time -- but I'm guessing that the accented syllables coincide with the downbeats. Can anyone confirm this? I'm also guessing that, in the first line of this stanza, the melody kicks in on "boots are," with "Leather" a throwaway prefix (or whatever the musical term is). Otherwise there's an extra foot. Steve Schroer From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 16 00:09:22 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 00:09:22 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Maverick, yeah Message-ID: <9e.130194fc.280bca72@cs.com> In a message dated 4/15/2001 10:28:21 PM Central Daylight Time, schro047 at tc.umn.edu writes: > > > > Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; > > > I always thought this was a classic line. Has anybody noticed > > that this song is in iambic pentameter? Thought a rarity . . . > > Actually the rhythm of the verses is mostly trochaic, though there are a few > lines that > could be read as iambic. Note how in three of four lines the first syllable > is > accented: > > LEATHer BOOTS are STILL in STYLE for MANly FOOTwear; > BEADS and ROMan SANdals WON'T be SEEN. > FOOTball's STILL the ROUGHest THING on CAMpus, > And the KIDS here STILL reSPECT the COLLege DEAN. > > I haven't heard the song for years -- and didn't pay attention at the time -- > but I'm > guessing that the accented syllables coincide with the downbeats. Can anyone > confirm > this? > > I'm also guessing that, in the first line of this stanza, the melody kicks > in on "boots > are," with "Leather" a throwaway prefix (or whatever the musical term is). > Otherwise > there's an extra foot. > > Steve Schroer > "Leather boots" gets sung as an anapest--da, da, doomp--grace notes. "I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, / A place where even squares can have a ball"--these are iambic, as is "White lightning's still be biggest thrill of all." Either call it iambic with quite a few headless lines (acephalous) or trochaic with some extra syllables (anacrustic) at the beginnings of lines--half a dozen of one, six of another. From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 16 00:22:49 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 00:22:49 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I find it hard to see "stupid America" as being applied to the folks in the bar, Moira. All they're doing is horsing around by the pool tables and dancing 50s style, which reminds the speaker of his own short-hair youth and thus includes him in. But "stupid America" does speak big to the America of the 60s, with its hair fetishes, its war, etc. Keith Wilson once told me of driving through small towns in Oregon with Snyder and Carlos Reyes, while on a poetry-reading tour, and feeling quite threatened as the local folk crowded around to see three--count 'em--three dudes with long hair and/or beards driving down Main St. in one car. The most humiliating day in the life of my second wife's father (an army lt. colonel) was walking with *me* through the El Paso airport, and I just had a beard. As I see it here, the main thing that affects the speaker is seeing the old-fashioned dancing style, and he doesn't even denigrate that. Hal Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. --Noam Chomsky Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > This touches a nerve for me, as it apparently does for other people, because > my father's side of the family is dirt-poor, from the Southwest and in the > demographic described as "trailer trash" or "white trash" -- no college > education, often little or no high school education, living in mobile homes > or trailers, and so on. My father basically escaped poverty because he > served in WWII and was able to go to college on the GI Bill, which he said > opened up a whole new world for him. When I was in grad school I heard > classmates telling "white trash" jokes (set off by the Tonya Harding > scandal) with such zeal I had to wonder what their reactions would be if > someone started telling jokes equally zealously about poor blacks or Jews. > When my grandparents and uncles and aunts were called "Okies" in California > it was an insult. > > So for me, Snyder's use of the song as a sign that the crew in the bar is > "stupid America" really rubs me the wrong way. I was born in 1971, so > obviously missed the popularity of the song with a certain demographic, > controversies about long hair (although now it's controversies about long, > dyed, shaved hair....meme plus chose). But because the people in the bar > don't share Snyder's values or viewpoint, he's apparently willing to write > them off in a really reductive way. That kind of narrowing of the vision, > writing off people, is what gets to me. And that kind of intolerance really > gets to me when it is professed by people who consider themselves liberal > and "tolerant" -- at least far moreso than the "stupid America" in the bar. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From mbales at cybergate.net Mon Apr 16 06:01:02 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 06:01:02 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Maverick, yeah In-Reply-To: <9e.130194fc.280bca72@cs.com> Message-ID: RSG: > "...Leather boots" gets sung as an anapest--da, da, doomp--> grace notes. > "I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, / A place where even squares > can have a ball"--these are iambic, as is "White lightning's still be > biggest thrill of all." Either call it iambic with quite a few headless > lines (acephalous) or trochaic with some extra syllables > (anacrustic) at the beginnings of lines...<< And also call "white lightning" illegal -- which illuminates the supposed dichotomy between "legal alcohol" and "illegal drugs" for the disingenuity it is. mbales at cybergate.net From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 16 08:53:20 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 05:53:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Maverick, yeah Message-ID: <20010416125320.838A336F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From TerryP17 at aol.com Mon Apr 16 11:35:02 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 11:35:02 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Hippies and rednecks Message-ID: Tad, Nice writeup on what seems so long ago but really wasn't--I think. And a good play-by-play of the rejection-sythesis continuum that has gone on over the years in the country music scene, where the lyricists are still mostly Old Formalists more or less. LOL on Mena, Ark. I shoulda been there. I coulda been a contendah. --Terry Ponick From cstroffo at earthlink.net Mon Apr 16 11:38:31 2001 From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (chris stroffolino) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 11:38:31 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] And now for something just a little bit different . . . References: Message-ID: <3ADB11F8.2F7D8DE5@earthlink.net> Halvard--- Yes, that's how I read the poem too-- When I first got into Snyder (through college Poulin anthology circa 1981--when 60s counter culture didn't quite seem as dead as it does now) that poem was alongside another piece called "Long Hair," whose prose-piece about how the deermeat people eat becomes a kind of trojan horse that makes them grow long hair, was also a nice eye-opener on that theme-- Of course, male long hair may not be as much of a "freak flag" and certainly it is no longer a sign of leftist social and/or political leanings (as it was then) I mean Merle himself let his hair grow much longer (by '75) than a lot of people have it today-- but, since some people have been interested in applying scansion to Haggard's "old formalism", I'm wondering if maybe the obsession with hair length that was such a contested point back then (as in "Signs" by The Five Man Electrical Band) is analogous to the obsession with the battle between formalist scansion on this list vs. the "verse libre" (long hair, let it all hang out Hombres, or "express yourself" Charles Wright & The Watts... Not that I want to pursue "a politics of poetic form" division between the Haggard song and the Snyder poem, but I'm wondering if, especially on the context of this list, such an analogy is becoming relevant... Chris P.S. Country music buffs might want to check out the Cd that came out last year by Nashville singer/songwriter/guitarist Matthew Gaudalupe, just called "Guadalupe,"-- The album's all originals, though I've seen him perform "okie" live... Halvard Johnson wrote: > I find it hard to see "stupid America" as being applied to the folks > in the bar, Moira. All they're doing is horsing around by the pool > tables and dancing 50s style, which reminds the speaker of his > own short-hair youth and thus includes him in. But "stupid America" > does speak big to the America of the 60s, with its hair fetishes, its > war, etc. > > Keith Wilson once told me of driving through small towns in Oregon > with Snyder and Carlos Reyes, while on a poetry-reading tour, and > feeling quite threatened as the local folk crowded around to see > three--count 'em--three dudes with long hair and/or beards driving > down Main St. in one car. > > The most humiliating day in the life of my second wife's father (an > army lt. colonel) was walking with *me* through the El Paso airport, > and I just had a beard. > > As I see it here, the main thing that affects the speaker is seeing the > old-fashioned dancing style, and he doesn't even denigrate that. > From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 16 13:08:31 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 09:08:31 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick Bar -- Snyder Message-ID: Some of the critical material here http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/maverick.htm seems to support the point Snyder is linking the present-day people in the bar in 1973 or 74 (or whenever the poem was written) and the generation before them in the 50s. Maybe "stupid" is meant as a form of a term of endearment, but it seems a highly ambiguous one. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 16 13:15:42 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 13:15:42 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Maverick, yeah Message-ID: <8.132655b5.280c82be@cs.com> In a message dated 4/16/01 7:57:37 AM Central Daylight Time, CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > > Marcus, > > White Lightning, made in quantities for personal consumption, like wine, or > beer, was, and "still" is legal. Of course, if the idea, which often was, > and is, to make money from the sale of home-made "likker", that was, and " > still" is, illegal. The "revenoors" get upset whenever "likker" is sold > without a tax stamp! > > Bob Cobb When I was growing up in NC, there was a "paraphernalia" law with made possession of more that ten empty bleach bottles (the white plastic kind) illegal. And "Thunder Road" was always playing at a drive-in near you. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 16 13:36:12 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 09:36:12 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Moonshine Message-ID: R.S. Gwynn wrote: >When I was growing up in NC, there was a "paraphernalia" law with made >possession of more that ten empty bleach bottles (the white plastic >kind)illegal. In the late 20s, my paternal grandfather (the Okie) bottled his own moonshine in AZ, and my maternal grandfather (the Hungarian peasant) was a "rumrunner" in Detroir (there is a great picture of him which resembles, to me at least anyway, Jay Gatsby). They never met and I always wondered what they would have thought of each other's stuff. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 16 14:58:04 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 14:58:04 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick Bar -- Snyder In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Some of the critical material here > http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/maverick.htm > seems to support the point Snyder is linking the present-day people in the > bar in 1973 or 74 (or whenever the poem was written) and the generation > before them in the 50s. Maybe "stupid" is meant as a form of a term of > endearment, but it seems a highly ambiguous one. > > Moira Russell Ambiguous, yes--as the speaker's feelings are ambivalent. He sees those folks in the bar as a potential threat (hence, the earring stays in the car and the long hair is tucked up), but he also see his younger (more innocent?), short-haired self there. Hal "The bacon too carries on its modest love affair." --Tony Towle Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 16 15:01:27 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 11:01:27 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Maverick Bar -- Snyder Message-ID: >He sees those folks in the bar as a potential threat (hence, >the earring stays in the car and the long hair is tucked up), >but he also see his younger (more innocent?), short-haired >self there. Presumably before he read Lenin and wised up. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From rkubie at mail.pratt.lib.md.us Mon Apr 16 15:14:25 2001 From: rkubie at mail.pratt.lib.md.us (Rachel Kubie) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 15:14:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry Month at the Pratt Library, Baltimore MD Message-ID: List-- Hope this message isn't too long, but if anyone's in or near Baltimore, these are the poetry events coming up. Just finished reading Allen Grossman's new book "How To Do Things With Tears"--and think it's brilliant. He'll be reading on the 21st with John Yau. Rachel Kubie ************** Poetry Month Events Enoch Pratt Free Library 400 Cathedral Street Baltimore, MD 21201 Maryland Poetry Fair Saturday, April 21 11 a.m. Central Library For poets and writers and all poetry lovers, the Pratt Library hosts the third annual Maryland Poetry Fair. Meet representatives of small presses, literary magazines, writers' organizations and network with other writers at this daylong celebration of Maryland poetry. Exhibitors and authors may reserve a table in the Main Hall by calling the Public Relations Office, 410-396-5494. The Maryland State Poetry & Literary Society will offer free on-site editorial readings (one poem per person) in the Poe Room from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. These critique sessions, tailored to the poet and poem, are inspired by the Poets Ink Workshops led by Hugh Burgess, President of MSPLS. Bring two typed copies of a poem you're working on and meet with an editor. Your Words Out Loud Baltimore poet and actress Jaki Terry will act as a dynamic poetry coach for the incurably shy! Bring two poems and get ready to stand up and read. Wheeler Auditorium, 11:30 - 1 p.m. Allen Grossman and John Yau Readings and book signings Saturday, April 21 2 p.m. Central Library - Wheeler Auditorium Allen Grossman, Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, helped to develop the General Education Program in the Liberal Arts at Brandeis University. His numerous awards include the MacArthur "Genius" award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Grossman's collection of selected poems, The Ether Dome, was published in 1991. His most recent works are The Philosopher's Window and The Long Schoolroom. "One of the grand originals of contemporary poetry." J. D. McClatchy. John Yau, Visiting Professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, is a poet, fiction writer, art critic and independent curator. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, a General Electric Foundation award and the Jerome Shestack prize. Yau's most recent work includes My Symptoms and I Was a Poet in the House of Frankenstein. Clayton Eshelman has described Yau's work as "poetry of omen and memory, where Chinese chariots must make their way through the desolate landscape of late night Hollywood movies." Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady and Local Cave Canem Poets Sunday, April 22 2 p.m. Central Library - Main Hall In 1996 poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady founded Cave Canem, a national organization which supports the work of African American poets through workshops, conferences and awards. The Pratt Library is proud to host this fifth anniversary celebration in Baltimore featuring readings by Derricotte and Eady and Cave Canem poets from the Baltimore-Washington area: Jane Alberdeston, Teri Ellen Cross, Hayes Davis, Robin Dunn, Michelle Elliott, John Frazier, Brian Gilmore, Monica Hand, Reginald Harris, Valerie Jean, Brandon Johnson, Carlo Paul and Shannon Williams. Toi Derricotte is the author of The Black Notebooks; An Interior Journey and four collections of poetry. She is the recipient of two NEA fellowships and many awards, among them The Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Derricotte is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Cornelius Eady has published five books of poetry, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets). He has recently written the librettos for two dramatic works combining poetry and music, You Don't Miss Your Water and Running Man. Enoch Pratt Free Library 400 Cathedral St. Baltimore, MD 21201-4484 410-396-5430 www.epfl.net From jdavis at panix.com Mon Apr 16 15:15:27 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 15:15:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] scorecard - can't keep up In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Wait, is this the anarchist-buddhist-fountain pen collector Gary Snyder we're talking about here? I haven't looked at my copy of No Nature since the author handsomely inscribed it "To Larry" - I've gotta stop mumbling - but I really don't remember any red stuff there - at the most, some Bakunin? Jordan Davis On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Moira Russell wrote: > > >He sees those folks in the bar as a potential threat (hence, > >the earring stays in the car and the long hair is tucked up), > >but he also see his younger (more innocent?), short-haired > >self there. > > Presumably before he read Lenin and wised up. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From dzauhar at uic.edu Mon Apr 16 15:26:34 2001 From: dzauhar at uic.edu (David Zauhar) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 14:26:34 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] scorecard - can't keep up In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Jordan Davis wrote: > Wait, is this the anarchist-buddhist-fountain pen collector Gary Snyder > we're talking about here? I haven't looked at my copy of No Nature since > the author handsomely inscribed it "To Larry" - I've gotta stop mumbling - > but I really don't remember any red stuff there - at the most, some > Bakunin? > > Jordan Davis > I was just about to send a request similar to Jordan's: Where O Where does this connection between Lenin and Gary Snyder come from? --David Zauhar, owner of three Gary Snyder volumes inscribed by the poet "To Michael Zohar..." From gmcvay at patriot.net Mon Apr 16 15:41:36 2001 From: gmcvay at patriot.net (Gwyn McVay) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 15:41:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] scorecard - can't keep up In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ha ha, you guys. *My* copy of Snyder's Mountains And Rivers is *correctly* inscribed to me. Maybe I'm just cuter? (ducks & flees & other animals) ----------------------------------- | Gwyn McVay gmcvay at patriot.net | | | | http://patriot.net/~gmcvay/ | ----------------------------------- From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 16 15:50:16 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 14:50:16 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Snyder & Lenin In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Moira helpfully posted a URL earlier (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/maverick.htm ) with some critical snippets on this poem. Including: ------------------------------------ "I Went into the Maverick Bar," vividly captures the despairing lack of social possibility that is a minor but important theme counterpointing Snyder's utopian vision. The allusion to Lenin's revolutionary tract in the last line of the poem, along with the use of what is one of Snyder's key phrases, "the real work," poses this anecdote on an edge of ambiguity that in many ways resembles that prized in the art-lyric. Yet the ambiguity here--the unspecified commitment, the feelings of rejection and fear mingled with nostalgia and fondness--actually dissolves with the phrase "I came back to myself." Here Snyder realizes how far his values are from those of many of his ordinary fellow citizens, but he also realizes he must and will maintain those values. Unlike the art-lyric, which traditionally strives for an image of closure that focuses and yet heightens ambiguity, this poem closes with an opening vista of resolution to pursue an ethically formed, intellectually shaped goal. --Charles Molesworth. From Gary Snyder's Vision. Copyright ? 1983 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. ______________________ "I Went into the Maverick Bar" has received considerable attention, both positive and negative. In it Snyder recognizes that his own heritage is the same as that of the people he encounters here . . . . In the end, however, he emphasizes the difference between him and them: he denounces that cultural heritage because it has become destructive, xenophobic, and repressive. The speaker realizes that his responsibility to Turtle Island and to these people--although they are not yet ready to recognize or accept it--requires that he continue to promote his alternative vision. That this vision involves nothing short of complete social transformation is suggested by his defining the "real work" in terms of " 'What is to be done,' " the title of a major theoretical work by Lenin on the necessity of a Marxist revolution led by a vanguard party in Russia at the turn of the century. --Patrick D. Murphy. From Understanding Gary Snyder. Copyright ? 1992 by the University of South Carolina. ______________________ David Graham >> >I was just about to send a request similar to Jordan's: Where O Where >does this connection between Lenin and Gary Snyder come from? > > --David Zauhar, owner of three Gary Snyder volumes inscribed by >the poet "To Michael Zohar..." > __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 16 16:13:30 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 15:13:30 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: My all-time favorite book inscription came from Swedish poet Tomas Transtr?mer. As is my custom, I had put my own name in the book when I bought it. Years later I brought it to a reading. So the poet scribbled right below my name, "but the book was actually written by Tomas Transtr?mer." When I first met Robert Bly about 25 years ago, he came to our apartment to eat before a reading. Asked to sign some books, he inquired about my astrological sign. Learning that I was a Pisces, he proceeded to copy excerpts of a poem by Piscean Cesar Vallejo for me in one of his own books. That's not all. At the time we had a broadside by Bly in our bathroom, right above the toilet paper. It was a comic poem (never reprinted, as far as I know) called "The Outhouse Poem." Later that night we discovered he had signed "The Outhouse Poem" *while sitting on the pot*. Top that, anyone! I still have "The Outhouse Poem" tucked away somewhere, but when I looked at it a few years ago, I found that the signature had almost totally faded away. Might be tempting to find some symbolism there. . . . David Graham -------------------------------- Ha ha, you guys. *My* copy of Snyder's Mountains And Rivers is *correctly* inscribed to me. Maybe I'm just cuter? (ducks & flees & other animals) ----------------------------------- | Gwyn McVay gmcvay at patriot.net | __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 16 16:35:27 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 16:35:27 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP again . . . Message-ID: <15.12c6bc1c.280cb18f@cs.com> Who's going to be at AWP? Jim Cervantes is one--who else? From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 16 17:10:22 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 13:10:22 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] scorecard - can't keep up Message-ID: >Wait, is this the anarchist-buddhist-fountain pen collector Gary Snyder >we're talking about here? Well, here is one place you can find it online: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/what-itd/ (Lenin) and here is another: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801495474/o/qid=987454993/sr=8-2/ref=aps_sr_b_1_2/107-0177056-9734107 (Chernyshevsky) The Tolstoy is a lot harder to find as a separate work. The most recent copy in the UW library is in a 1929 Scribners collected edition of his work. I assumed Snyder was referring to Lenin, since more Americans have read him than Chernyshevsky's novel, and not very many have read the Tolstoy, although I did when I was going through a complete-as-I-could-stand Tolstoy kick as a teenager. (I haven't read the Lenin, but I've heard of the novel.) That would apparently make the silent generation reps dancing, the masses. Merle Haggard as the true opiate of the people? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 16 17:42:26 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 17:42:26 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Once upon a time, I purchased a copy of *Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music* by Kathleen Hoover and John Cage, took it home and found it to be inscribed "for Finney, Ross Lee and Gretchen L., friends to Virgil Thomson, warmly theirs, Virgil T, Ann Arbor, May 1, 2, 3, 1959" Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From Janet.Kieffer at colorado.edu Mon Apr 16 17:50:17 2001 From: Janet.Kieffer at colorado.edu (Janet Kieffer) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 15:50:17 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? I ordered a used book written by a friend of mine to find a glowing inscription to someone who later dumped the book. It's depressing, frankly! "For Louise, " etc. --jk -----Original Message----- From: Halvard Johnson [mailto:halvard at earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 3:42 PM To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Once upon a time, I purchased a copy of *Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music* by Kathleen Hoover and John Cage, took it home and found it to be inscribed "for Finney, Ross Lee and Gretchen L., friends to Virgil Thomson, warmly theirs, Virgil T, Ann Arbor, May 1, 2, 3, 1959" Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Mon Apr 16 06:46:11 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 05:46:11 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pulitzer in poetry Message-ID: >From the Washington Post: Stephen Dunn won the poetry prize for his volume of original verses, "Different Hours," his 11th collection. Anyone read it, like it, think the prize was well bestowed? Paul Lake From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Mon Apr 16 06:52:41 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 05:52:41 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: on 4/16/01 4:50 PM, Janet Kieffer at Janet.Kieffer at colorado.edu wrote: > Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an > inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? > > I ordered a used book written by a friend of mine to find a glowing > inscription to someone who later dumped the book. It's depressing, frankly! > > "For Louise, " etc. > > --jk > > -----Original Message----- > From: Halvard Johnson [mailto:halvard at earthlink.net] > Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 3:42 PM > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions > > > Once upon a time, I purchased a copy of *Virgil Thomson: > His Life and Music* by Kathleen Hoover and John Cage, > took it home and found it to be inscribed "for Finney, Ross Lee > and Gretchen L., friends to Virgil Thomson, warmly theirs, > Virgil T, Ann Arbor, May 1, 2, 3, 1959" > > Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." > > Halvard Johnson > =============== > email: halvard at earthlink.net > website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > Sort of. I once had a book signing for my novel _Among the Immortals__ at a Little Rock bookstore. The managers insisted I sign a copy and inscribe it to them. I later found the book on sale in another Little Rock bookstore as a new book, with the inscription intact. Paul Lake From maxpaul at sfsu.edu Mon Apr 16 18:04:50 2001 From: maxpaul at sfsu.edu (MAXINE CHERNOFF) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 15:04:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP again . . . In-Reply-To: <15.12c6bc1c.280cb18f@cs.com> Message-ID: Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff On Mon, 16 Apr 2001 Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote: > Who's going to be at AWP? Jim Cervantes is one--who else? > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 16 18:39:18 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 14:39:18 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: Hal wrote: >Once upon a time, I purchased a copy of *Virgil Thomson: >His Life and Music* by Kathleen Hoover and John Cage, >took it home and found it to be inscribed "for Finney, Ross Lee >and Gretchen L., friends to Virgil Thomson, warmly theirs, >Virgil T, Ann Arbor, May 1, 2, 3, 1959" In one of the Graves biographies (either the Seymour-Smith one or the 1st vol of the series written by his nephew) there is mention of how Graves sold a lot of first editions which were presents from friends for ready cash (some of the friends, like T.E. Lawrence, sent him first editions for this purpose). But apparently Edith Sitwell, I think, found one of her presents in a second-hand book stall, was really livid, bought it for herself and wrote a scathing comment about Graves in it. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 16 18:40:49 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 14:40:49 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: Janet wrote: >Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an >inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? The glowing inscriptions from family members/spouses to each other in used books are pretty depressing, too. "To X, with all my love, on our second wedding anniversary, with hopes of many more to come...." Have to wonder what happened there. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Mon Apr 16 18:51:36 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 18:51:36 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: I think the worst I met was at the Goucher College. (I've since run south.) I was looking at their copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and the inscription was something like this: X, one day, I'm sure your poetry will be in here. (Of course, if anyone is in Towson, Maryland, you can check.) -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Moira Russell To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/16/2001 6:40 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Janet wrote: >Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an >inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? The glowing inscriptions from family members/spouses to each other in used books are pretty depressing, too. "To X, with all my love, on our second wedding anniversary, with hopes of many more to come...." Have to wonder what happened there. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 16 18:57:27 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 18:57:27 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Pulitzer in poetry Message-ID: In a message dated 4/16/2001 4:55:17 PM Central Daylight Time, paul.lake at mail.atu.edu writes: > > Stephen Dunn won the poetry prize for his volume of original verses, > "Different Hours," his 11th collection. > > Anyone read it, like it, think the prize was well bestowed? > I've read about half of it--a month or so back. Typical Dunn--low pressure stuff but fairly entertaining. He has a somewhat smug tone that I don't much like. As usual, I can think of a dozen or so other books that might have won--just depends on who was on the committee. From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 16 18:59:11 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 14:59:11 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Interview Message-ID: Philip Dacey interviews Stephen Dunn online at http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/00/03/ Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 16 19:00:10 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 19:00:10 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: <22.14d27906.280cd37a@cs.com> They say the used bookstores in Houston used to have plenty of pristine books inscribed, "To my best friend Richard Howard . . . ." or words to that effect. From antrobin at clipper.net Mon Apr 16 19:21:58 2001 From: antrobin at clipper.net (Anthony Robinson) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 16:21:58 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions References: Message-ID: <016301c0c6cc$4f587880$96acefd8@0021936706> Not quite. I don't have any books. That is, I haven't written any. That is, correction, no one has published a book of mine yet. However, the resident big cheese poet in my town (Eugene, OR) has a habit of selling books by others (inscribed to him) to the local used-books store. I often check the new arrivals section to see what poor poet he's most recently sold. Yeah, it's sad. Tony > Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an > inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? > > I ordered a used book written by a friend of mine to find a glowing > inscription to someone who later dumped the book. It's depressing, frankly! > > "For Louise, " etc. > > --jk > > -----Original Message----- > From: Halvard Johnson [mailto:halvard at earthlink.net] > Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 3:42 PM > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions > > > Once upon a time, I purchased a copy of *Virgil Thomson: > His Life and Music* by Kathleen Hoover and John Cage, > took it home and found it to be inscribed "for Finney, Ross Lee > and Gretchen L., friends to Virgil Thomson, warmly theirs, > Virgil T, Ann Arbor, May 1, 2, 3, 1959" > > Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." > > Halvard Johnson > =============== > email: halvard at earthlink.net > website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 16 21:30:00 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 21:30:00 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I rather like the idea of books moving along from hand to hand, from shelf to shelf, sort of like nomads. Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an > inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? > > I ordered a used book written by a friend of mine to find a glowing > inscription to someone who later dumped the book. It's depressing, frankly! > > "For Louise, " etc. > > --jk From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 16 21:34:36 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 21:34:36 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: <22.14d27906.280cd37a@cs.com> Message-ID: Ah, copies sent to reviewers. That's another thing. Doris Grumbach, when she moved away from Washington, DC, some years ago now, gave or sold hundreds of books she'd collected over her years as a Washington Post critic/reviewer to a little bookstore on Wisconsin Avenue. I think I've got a couple around here somewhere, but most, as I recall, had the sort of inscription Sam reports. Can't say they were "pristine" however. Hal > They say the used bookstores in Houston used to have plenty of pristine books > inscribed, "To my best friend Richard Howard . . . ." or words to that effect. From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Mon Apr 16 22:39:07 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 22:39:07 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: In a message dated 4/16/2001 8:37:30 PM Central Daylight Time, halvard at earthlink.net writes: > Ah, copies sent to reviewers. That's another thing. Doris Grumbach, when > she moved away from Washington, DC, some years ago now, gave or sold > hundreds of books she'd collected over her years as a Washington Post > critic/reviewer to a little bookstore on Wisconsin Avenue. I think I've got > a couple around here somewhere, but most, as I recall, had the sort of > inscription Sam reports. Can't say they were "pristine" however. > > Hal > I get a lot of review copies too. I just give them to our library, where the contemporary poetry offerings are pretty thin. From Jandhodge at aol.com Mon Apr 16 22:43:21 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 22:43:21 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: << Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? >> Close. I ran across a signed copy of my chapbook at a Planned Parenthood book sale. It actually sold for $10. I was selling new copies [signed to the purchaser] for $5. Glad a charitable cause is making something on my efforts. Jan From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 16 22:46:40 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 21:46:40 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Pulitzer in poetry In-Reply-To: Message-ID: According to the Pulizter web page, other nominees in poetry for the Pulitzer this year were Sydney Lea and Bruce Smith. Jurors were Anthony Hecht, Mary Karr, and Jonathan Holden. I haven't yet read the Dunn book. Pleased to see that Sydney Lea was nominated, anyway. I know we'll never agree on anything like the "best" books published in 2000, but I'd be interested in hearing which ones other people *would* have nominated, given the chance. Off the top of my head, my list would include: William Trowbridge: *Flickers* Daisy Fried: *She Didn't Mean to Do It* Kevin Stein: *Chance Ransom* Robert Morgan: *Topsoil Road* David Keller: *Trouble in History* Baron Wormser: *Mulroney & Others* David Graham >> >> Stephen Dunn won the poetry prize for his volume of original verses, >> "Different Hours," his 11th collection. >> >> Anyone read it, like it, think the prize was well bestowed? >> >I've read about half of it--a month or so back. Typical Dunn--low pressure >stuff but fairly entertaining. He has a somewhat smug tone that I don't much >like. As usual, I can think of a dozen or so other books that might have >won--just depends on who was on the committee. __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 16 23:06:49 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 22:06:49 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've never found an inscribed copy for sale, but I did once find a chapbook of mine at the local library's used book sale for 10 cents. My first thought, I confess, was to wonder which of my friends or colleagues couldn't spare a millimeter of shelf space for my masterwork and felt compelled to *give* it away (I live in a *very* small town). My second thought was that I was nearly out of copies myself, so I bought it. At my author rate, it would have cost me $4.50 to purchase it from the publisher. It did feel strange buying it, though. David Graham ------------------------- ><< Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an > inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? >> > >Close. I ran across a signed copy of my chapbook at a Planned Parenthood >book sale. It actually sold for $10. I was selling new copies [signed to >the purchaser] for $5. Glad a charitable cause is making something on my >efforts. > >Jan __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From tadrichards at prodigy.net Tue Apr 17 00:09:56 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 00:09:56 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Hippies and rednecks References: Message-ID: <004d01c0c6f4$4426fea0$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Terry - Thanks. it's the middle section of a longer piece where I took on pretty much the whole history of country music. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 11:35 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Hippies and rednecks > Tad, > > Nice writeup on what seems so long ago but really wasn't--I think. And a good play-by-play of the rejection-sythesis continuum that has gone on over the years in the country music scene, where the lyricists are still mostly Old Formalists more or less. > > LOL on Mena, Ark. I shoulda been there. I coulda been a contendah. > > --Terry Ponick > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Tue Apr 17 00:38:41 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 00:38:41 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] scorecard - can't keep up References: Message-ID: <00ca01c0c6f8$484a6cc0$6401a8c0@ibm25310> One doesn't have to be a Leninist to quote Lenin, certainly. Nor is it clear that a doctrinaire Leninist would reject the working class. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 5:10 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] scorecard - can't keep up > > >Wait, is this the anarchist-buddhist-fountain pen collector Gary Snyder > >we're talking about here? > > Well, here is one place you can find it online: > http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/what-itd/ > (Lenin) > and here is another: > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801495474/o/qid=987454993/sr=8-2/ref =aps_sr_b_1_2/107-0177056-9734107 > (Chernyshevsky) > The Tolstoy is a lot harder to find as a separate work. The most recent > copy in the UW library is in a 1929 Scribners collected edition of his work. > > I assumed Snyder was referring to Lenin, since more Americans have read him > than Chernyshevsky's novel, and not very many have read the Tolstoy, > although I did when I was going through a complete-as-I-could-stand Tolstoy > kick as a teenager. (I haven't read the Lenin, but I've heard of the > novel.) > > That would apparently make the silent generation reps dancing, the masses. > Merle Haggard as the true opiate of the people? > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Tue Apr 17 00:40:13 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 00:40:13 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions References: Message-ID: <00d001c0c6f8$7e9a3bc0$6401a8c0@ibm25310> At a used bookstore, I bought my wife, Pat, a copy of Timothy White's oral history of Little Richard inscribed "To Pat, love from Little Richard" Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Halvard Johnson" To: Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 5:42 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions > Once upon a time, I purchased a copy of *Virgil Thomson: > His Life and Music* by Kathleen Hoover and John Cage, > took it home and found it to be inscribed "for Finney, Ross Lee > and Gretchen L., friends to Virgil Thomson, warmly theirs, > Virgil T, Ann Arbor, May 1, 2, 3, 1959" > > Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." > > Halvard Johnson > =============== > email: halvard at earthlink.net > website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Tue Apr 17 01:55:29 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 07:55:29 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions References: Message-ID: <004a01c0c703$060082e0$425b4284@toshiba> Yesterday someone brought me a book of mine they had picked up in a second hand store. The person to whom I had written the dedication had white-outed the name. But - oh greater shame - there was a stupid spelling mistake in my little inscription. Karen Alkalay-Gut gut22 at post.tau.ac.il http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2001 4:43 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions > > > << Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an > inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? >> > > Close. I ran across a signed copy of my chapbook at a Planned Parenthood > book sale. It actually sold for $10. I was selling new copies [signed to > the purchaser] for $5. Glad a charitable cause is making something on my > efforts. > > Jan > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From griffinbaker at home.com Tue Apr 17 02:50:56 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 23:50:56 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] scorecard - can't keep up References: <00ca01c0c6f8$484a6cc0$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Message-ID: <3ADBE7D0.3506C29A@home.com> But he sets off the phrase, in quotes, as the last line of the poem. It means little, has almost no resonance, sounds even stupid, unless you read it, with the quotes, as some Poundian gesture towards some inherited (and perhaps, in stupid America, disregarded) wisdom. Of course Lenin has nothing to do with Snyder's "real work." Reading the poem again, after a long time since I attempted a pony tail, I feel that I can almost love his stupidity. Mark Baker OTIS RICHARDS wrote: > One doesn't have to be a Leninist to quote Lenin, certainly. Nor is it clear > that a doctrinaire Leninist would reject the working class. > From DICK at watson.ibm.com Tue Apr 17 09:24:32 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 01 09:24:32 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] another something different Message-ID: <200104171327.JAA22620@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> This appears in "The Last Avant-Garde" by David Lehman. I hate fussing with nature and would like the world to be All weeds. I see it from the train, citybound, how the yuccas and chicory Thrive. So much messing about, why not leave the world alone? Then There would be no books, which is not to be borne. Willa Cather alone is worth The price of admission to the horrors of civilization. Let's make a list. The greatest paintings. Preferred orchestral conductors. Nostalgia singers. The best, the very best, roses. After learning all their names--Rose de Rescht, Cornelia, Pax--it is important to forget them. All these Lists are so much dirty laundry. Sort it out fast and send to laundry Or hurl into washing machine, add soap and let 'er spin. The truth is That all these household tasks and daily work--up the street two men Install an air conditioner--are beautiful. James Schuyler (excerpted from "Hymn to Life") From jdavis at panix.com Tue Apr 17 09:38:33 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 09:38:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A bookstore where I worked (until I failed to open up one morning... it's all in my memoir) once offered an English translation edition of Pasternak for sale, signed by Pasternak, at $150. "Suzanne," I said to the owner, "can I have this one for five dollars? Pasternak died before it was published." Jordan Davis From Janet.Kieffer at colorado.edu Tue Apr 17 10:15:29 2001 From: Janet.Kieffer at colorado.edu (Janet Kieffer) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 08:15:29 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: Yeah, it spanned some years, that's true. And in a sense it followed her around. --jk -----Original Message----- From: Halvard Johnson [mailto:halvard at earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 7:30 PM To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions I rather like the idea of books moving along from hand to hand, from shelf to shelf, sort of like nomads. Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > Have you ever had one of your friends acquire a used book of yours with an > inscription to someone you hoped wouldn't dump your book? > > I ordered a used book written by a friend of mine to find a glowing > inscription to someone who later dumped the book. It's depressing, frankly! > > "For Louise, " etc. > > --jk _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Janet.Kieffer at colorado.edu Tue Apr 17 10:22:13 2001 From: Janet.Kieffer at colorado.edu (Janet Kieffer) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 08:22:13 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: However, the resident big cheese poet in my town (Eugene, OR) has a habit of selling books by others (inscribed to him) to the local used-books store. I often check the new arrivals section to see what poor poet he's most recently sold. Yeah, it's sad. Tony This is terrible, man! (But it's also funny, twistedly funny that you make it a point to check!) --jk From gmcvay at patriot.net Tue Apr 17 10:50:25 2001 From: gmcvay at patriot.net (Gwyn McVay) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 10:50:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I had a chapbook of mine inscribed to my chiropractor *stolen* from his waiting room. Is this an obscure compliment--or will karma worsen the spinal condition of the thief? ----------------------------------- | Gwyn McVay gmcvay at patriot.net | | | | http://patriot.net/~gmcvay/ | ----------------------------------- From Janet.Kieffer at colorado.edu Tue Apr 17 11:07:34 2001 From: Janet.Kieffer at colorado.edu (Janet Kieffer) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 09:07:34 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: Karma will render the thief stooped over for the rest of his days. --jk -----Original Message----- From: Gwyn McVay [mailto:gmcvay at patriot.net] Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2001 8:50 AM To: New Poetry Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions I had a chapbook of mine inscribed to my chiropractor *stolen* from his waiting room. Is this an obscure compliment--or will karma worsen the spinal condition of the thief? ----------------------------------- | Gwyn McVay gmcvay at patriot.net | | | | http://patriot.net/~gmcvay/ | ----------------------------------- _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From MillB at aol.com Tue Apr 17 11:42:07 2001 From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 11:42:07 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP again . . . Message-ID: <3b.135e421f.280dbe4f@aol.com> I'm supposed to be there, but I'm playing it by ear--I spent last night in the hospital and am hoping I will be well enough to go. . .got AWP booked, so. Depending upon how I feel. . .I'm also scheduled to be reading for the SoCalif anthology. Cheers, Millicent Borges From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Tue Apr 17 00:37:09 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 23:37:09 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: on 4/17/01 9:50 AM, Gwyn McVay at gmcvay at patriot.net wrote: > > I had a chapbook of mine inscribed to my chiropractor *stolen* from his > waiting room. Is this an obscure compliment--or will karma worsen the > spinal condition of the thief? > > ----------------------------------- > | Gwyn McVay gmcvay at patriot.net | > | | > | http://patriot.net/~gmcvay/ | > ----------------------------------- > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > When I was in grad school at Stanford, a fellow poet in the writing seminar proudly told me that he'd just stolen a copy of my recently published chapbook from the campus bookstore. Paul Lake From wasanthony at yahoo.com Tue Apr 17 19:26:53 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 16:26:53 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] until next week Message-ID: <20010417232653.57703.qmail@web12108.mail.yahoo.com> Going no-mail in preparation for AWP. Look forward to seeing old friends and meeting folks from this list. re: Book Inscriptions: no unusual stories to tell, though I have a shelf of signed books. I DO have a broadside of a Ginsberg poem, "Personals Ad," printed by Chax Press in 1991 for the Tucson Poetry Festival at which Ginsberg was one of the readers. It is signed by him. - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From tadrichards at prodigy.net Tue Apr 17 09:59:08 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 09:59:08 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions References: Message-ID: <000601c0c7aa$21c99280$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Did you get it? Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jordan Davis" To: Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2001 9:38 AM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions > A bookstore where I worked (until I failed to open up one morning... it's > all in my memoir) once offered an English translation edition of Pasternak > for sale, signed by Pasternak, at $150. "Suzanne," I said to the owner, > "can I have this one for five dollars? Pasternak died before it was > published." > > Jordan Davis > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From jdavis at panix.com Wed Apr 18 00:15:10 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 00:15:10 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: <000601c0c7aa$21c99280$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Message-ID: Yes, but only after agreeing to give her a cool hundred for the three separate volumes of the Maximus Poems. It all evened out - I got a second printing of the collected O'Hara for fifteen bucks the next week (unsigned, of course - but maybe *I* should have scribbled in "Fsds O'Hsds" in order to force a replay of the Pasternak Gambit). This was during a time when, metabolically, I could get by on free refills of coffee, and therefore could reallocate the month's food budget to more pressing needs. Jordan on 4/17/01 9:59 AM, OTIS RICHARDS at tadrichards at prodigy.net wrote: > Did you get it? > > >> A bookstore where I worked (until I failed to open up one morning... it's >> all in my memoir) once offered an English translation edition of Pasternak >> for sale, signed by Pasternak, at $150. "Suzanne," I said to the owner, >> "can I have this one for five dollars? Pasternak died before it was >> published." >> From dzauhar at uic.edu Wed Apr 18 08:55:36 2001 From: dzauhar at uic.edu (David Zauhar) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 07:55:36 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Gwyn McVay wrote: > > I had a chapbook of mine inscribed to my chiropractor *stolen* from his > waiting room. Is this an obscure compliment--or will karma worsen the > spinal condition of the thief? > I look forward to the day that books I authored are being stolen. But once, while browsing in Chicago's Myopic Books, I came across a copy of my friend's recently published book, _Something Completely Different: British Television and American Culture_ (by Jeffrey S. Miller, published by U of Minnesota Press, 2000). I open it up. $9.95. I see ink through the page. Purple ink, the color favored by Jeffrey. I turn the page: "to David Zauhar, thanks...etc." Someone had swiped the book from my office. Luckily, the clerks at Myopic know me, and knew I hadn't sold them any books recently, so I got it back for free. Thought the rest of you would like this story, as it gives you a ready-made excuse should someone ever find one of their books, inscribed to you, in a used bookstore: "THERE it is! Some wanker must've swiped it...". David Zauhar, nowhere near as cute as Gwyn in Gary Snyder's eyes. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 18 10:04:54 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 07:04:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Book Inscriptions Message-ID: <20010418140454.4429736F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From JackKerouac25 at aol.com Wed Apr 18 15:57:40 2001 From: JackKerouac25 at aol.com (JackKerouac25 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 15:57:40 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Teaching Poetry Conference Message-ID: <28.142d747f.280f4bb4@aol.com> I was wondering if any of you will be attending the Teaching Poetry conference in Santa Rosa, California, in June. Our own R.S. Gwynn will be speaking, I believe. I plan to attend; however I have no idea how I'm going to pay for the trip. Ah, the perks of being an adjunct: all the disrespect that students give full time faculty and only a quarter of the pay. Cheers, Jeff Newberry Jeffrey L. Newberry Adjunct Instructor Department of English and Foreign Languages University of West Florida 11000 University Parkway Pensacola, FL 32514 850.474.2923 850.473.7330 From smadoff at sprynet.com Wed Apr 18 21:29:04 2001 From: smadoff at sprynet.com (Steven H. Madoff) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 21:29:04 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] reading that may be of interest Message-ID: <003f01c0c870$1fd63c00$1fa59840@vaio> This Saturday (April 21) at 4, Lucie Brock-Broido and Cal Bedient are going to read at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art at 258 Main Street in Ridgefield, CT. Should be an interesting reading. I don't know how many of you have read Bedient's first book of poems, "Candy Necklace," but it seemed to me an extraordinary debut collection--particularly since Bedient until then had been known only for his criticism and made the debut either in his late 50s or early 60s (I think). In any case, I thought it worth letting you all know about.--Steven -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From klvarnes at home.com Thu Apr 19 00:31:55 2001 From: klvarnes at home.com (Kathrine Varnes) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 23:31:55 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Teaching Poetry Conference In-Reply-To: <28.142d747f.280f4bb4@aol.com> Message-ID: Yes, I'll be there. Kathrine > I was wondering if any of you will be attending the Teaching Poetry > conference in Santa Rosa, California, in June. Our own R.S. Gwynn will be > speaking, I believe. I plan to attend; however I have no idea how I'm going > to pay for the trip. Ah, the perks of being an adjunct: all the disrespect > that students give full time faculty and only a quarter of the pay. > > Cheers, > > Jeff Newberry > > Jeffrey L. Newberry > Adjunct Instructor > Department of English and Foreign Languages > University of West Florida > 11000 University Parkway > Pensacola, FL 32514 > 850.474.2923 > 850.473.7330 > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From JforJames at aol.com Thu Apr 19 12:10:48 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 12:10:48 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Electronic Lit Awards Message-ID: <2b.143701b3.28106808@aol.com> This was posted by cris cheek on another list... THE ELECTRONIC LITERATURE ORGANIZATION ANNOUNCES THE SHORT LISTS FOR THE 2001 POETRY AND FICTION ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AWARDS Chicago, IL, April 17 - The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is pleased to announce the short lists for the first Electronic Literature Awards. The two $10,000 Award-winners will be announced at a ceremony May 18, 2001 at the New School's Swayduck Auditorium in New York City (Ground Floor, 65 Fifth Avenue, between 13th and 14th -- note change of venue). Sixteen judges have whittled the international pool of one hundred and sixty three works down to a short list of six in each category. Final Judges Heather McHugh (Poetry) and Larry McCaffery (Fiction) will select the winner in each category. Tickets for the May 18th ceremony are available online for $10 @ http://eliterature.org/Awards2001 "Many of the first and second round judges commented on the remarkable diversity of works submitted," said Scott Rettberg, executive director of the ELO. "Collectively, these works represent the efforts of a nascent literary movement that takes the electronic media not only as a new means of distributing literature, but also as an interactive space that can be utilized to create entirely new kinds of literary art." **************************************************** SHORT LIST FOR THE 2001 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AWARD FOR FICTION "Alternumerics" by Paul Chan of Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. "Lexia to Perplexia" by Talan Memmott of San Francisco, California, U.S.A. "Patchwork Girl" by Shelley Jackson of Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. "_the data][h!][bleeding texts_" by Mez of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia "These Waves of Girls" by Caitlin Fisher of Toronto, Canada "The Impermanence Agent" by Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al. of New York City, New York, U.S.A. **************************************************** SHORT LIST FOR THE 2001 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AWARD FOR POETRY "Configuration" by Hilary Mosher-Buri of Iowa City, Iowa, U.S.A. "Cyberpoetry Underground" By Kominos Zervos of Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia "Him" by Dane Watkins of Somerset, England, U.K. "The Minotaur Project" by Kim White of Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. "Nepabunna" by Geniwate of Prospect, South Adelaide, Australia "Windsound" by John Cayley of London, England, U.K. **************************************************** ABOUT THE WORKS NOTE: More extensive info is available at eliterature.org/Awards2001 +++++++++++ FICTION +++++++++++ "Alternumerics" by Paul Chan MEDIUM: Web (with font installation) URL: http://www.nationalphilistine.com/alternumerics/ Author's Decription: Alternumerics presents work based on a collection of fonts that explore the fissure between language, interactivity, and translation. The fonts, "Self portrait as a font", "Sexual healing / shift for harassment", and "The future must be sweet - after Fourier" transform the traditional form and function of computer based fonts by replacing the individual letters and numbers (or the alphanumerics) with textual fragments which connect and signify what is typed in a radically different way. Each fontpiece is accompanied by another piece of work that uses the font to explore the relationship between what is written, what is translated, and fundamentally, what is communicated when we use language to describe the slipperiness of the Self, the intangibility of Desire, or the sheer possibility of a Politics of the future. --------------- "Lexia to Perplexia" by Talan Memmott MEDIUM: Web URL: http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/newmedia/lexia/index.htm Author's Description: Lexia to Perplexia is a deconstructive/grammatological look at the construction of User narratives through the attachment to the Internet apparatus. A mix between theory and fiction, the work makes wide use of neologisms, advanced coding, and graphics while exploring the hidden agencies of attachment and network desire. --------------- "Patchwork Girl" by Shelley Jackson MEDIUM: CDROM CATALOG URL: http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/PatchworkGirl.html Author's Description: Patchwork Girl is a hypertext novel comprising original fiction and borrowed texts, art and theory. It tells the story of a female Frankenstein monster. --------------- "_the data][h!][bleeding texts_" by mez MEDIUM: Web URL: http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm Author's Description: _the data][h!][bleeding t.ex][e][ts_r remnants from email performances d-voted to the dispersal of writing that has been n.spired and mutated according 2 the dynamics of an active network. the texts make use of the polysemic language system termed _mezangelle_, which evolved/s from multifarious email exchanges, computer code flavoured language and net iconographs. --------------- "These Waves of Girls" by Caitlin Fisher MEDIUM: Web URL: http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves Author's Description: These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella exploring memory, girlhoods, cruelty, childhood play and sexuality. The piece is composed as a series of small stories, artifacts, interconnections and meditations from the point of view of a four year old, a ten-year old, a twenty year old... --------------- "The Impermanence Agent" by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a.c. chapman, Brion Moss, and Duane Whitehurst MEDIUM: Web URL: http://www.impermanenceagent.com Author's Description: A small "Agent" window that the user places in a corner of their screen, a proxy server, and a web server. The Agent window tells a story. The proxy server monitors user web browsing and alters browsed pages. The information from proxy monitoring is used to customize the story, and the customized version is served to the Agent window from the web server. Customization continues until none of the original story remains. --------------- +++++++++++ POETRY +++++++++++ "Configuration" by Hilary Mosher Buri MEDIUM: Web URL: http://home.dencity.com/buriweb/ Author's Description: A poem in seven parts, with instruction in a geometrical drawing and accompanied by "editor's" comments, related texts, and figures. --------------- "cyberpoetry underground" by Komninos Zervos MEDIUM: CDROM Author's Description: cyberpoetry underground: the whole navigation is in a 3d textual space, text animations, hot-spotted panoramas of text, and synthesized voice sound poetry. It's authored for mac. Readers journey through 5 qtvr (quicktime virtual reality) 360 degree panoramas of text representing 5 stations of the london underground. In each panorama the text objects that make the scene are hyperlinks to animated sound/text cyberpoems. --------------- "Him" by Dane Watkins MEDIUM: Web Web-URL: http://www.comfylux.com/him Author's Description: A hypertext poem where the lines lead to different aspects of male identity cut out of magazines and the reader becomes lost in the permutation. --------------- "The Minotaur Project" by Kim White MEDIUM: Web web-URL: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~theminotaurproject/ Author's description: The Minotaur Project is a poem cycle in four parts. It is part of a longer poem that reimagines the classical myth of Kore. Minotaur is one of the elements Kore encounters in the underworld. When finished, this long poem will exist only in the computer. --------------- "Nepabunna" by geniwate MEDIUM: CD-ROM and Web Author's Description: The work uses remote sensing data from the Landsat 5 satellite as the starting point, then progresses to a mythopoeia of contemporary technology (using Australian Aboriginal themes) and finally cites string theory as an example of the nexus between science/beauty/truth. Poetry and digital media combine to examine this nexus. --------------- "Windsound" by John Cayley MEDIUM: CDROM Author's Description: 'windsound' is a 'text movie' animated by transliteral morphs (textual morphing based on letter replacements) through a sequence of nodal texts. 'windsound' is based on original texts by myself, plus my own translation of a Song period lyric, 'Cadence: Like a Dream' by Qin Guan (1049-1100). It is designed to be viewed as an all-but-linear movie. Once started, it plays through a sequence taking about 20 minutes. While it plays continuously, the text which you read (where not composed) is algorithmically generated. (In later, still unfinished pieces such text movies are navigable, becoming similar to so-called 'object movies'.) While the piece has narrative and fictional qualities, it is submitted as poetry since I write out of a tradition of innovative poetry, and because the piece addresses linguistic structures at a granular level: as literal art. ************************************* ABOUT THE ELECTRONIC LITERATURE ORGANIZATION The Electronic Literature Organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with a mission to promote and facilitate the writing, reading, and publishing of literature designed for the electronic media. Based in Chicago, the ELO is directed by a national board of leading experts in electronic literature, internet business, and electronic publishing, and is additionally advised by an international board of literary advisors and a board of internet industry advisors. The ELO maintains the Electronic Literature Directory and an Electronic Literature Web Resource Center, staffed by a network of leading e-lit writers operating independently in different parts of the USA. The ELO is supported by the donations of individual members, by corporations including ZDNet, and by foundations including the Ford Foundation. From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Thu Apr 19 03:12:33 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 02:12:33 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: Not much on the list today. Bummer. Here's a poem about that waiting at the screen feeling. A villanelle. Only my third in 25 years, so forgive me. Paul Lake Terminals We wait for something without knowing what. Bored or distracted, in the screen?s fixed glare, We surf the net above the deeps of thought. When no one?s looking, we cruise sites for smut, Downloading tits and twirling pubic hair, Waiting for something without knowing what, Or, shutting out the office scuttle-butt, We play clandestine games of solitaire, Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. We?re hardly ever doing what we ought. There?s somewhere else to which our minds repair. We wait for something without knowing what. Books gather dust. In information?s glut, We seek excitement somewhere, anywhere, Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. Life is a terminal and narrow rut. We long for E-mail like an answered prayer. We wait for something without knowing what. We surf the net above the deeps of thought. From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Thu Apr 19 15:37:12 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 21:37:12 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail References: Message-ID: <002f01c0c908$229fe740$d75a4284@toshiba> Paul, This really uses the villanelle form to good effect -- the repetition intensifies the sense of boredom and lack of direction. And now off to surf the net Karen Karen Alkalay-Gut gut22 at post.tau.ac.il http://geocities.com/alkalay_gut/ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Lake" To: Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 9:12 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail > > > Not much on the list today. Bummer. Here's a poem about that waiting at the > screen feeling. A villanelle. Only my third in 25 years, so forgive me. > > Paul Lake > > > Terminals > > > We wait for something without knowing what. > Bored or distracted, in the screen?s fixed glare, > We surf the net above the deeps of thought. > > When no one?s looking, we cruise sites for smut, > Downloading tits and twirling pubic hair, > Waiting for something without knowing what, > > Or, shutting out the office scuttle-butt, > We play clandestine games of solitaire, > Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. > > We?re hardly ever doing what we ought. > There?s somewhere else to which our minds repair. > We wait for something without knowing what. > > Books gather dust. In information?s glut, > We seek excitement somewhere, anywhere, > Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. > > Life is a terminal and narrow rut. > We long for E-mail like an answered prayer. > We wait for something without knowing what. > We surf the net above the deeps of thought. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From moira_russell at hotmail.com Thu Apr 19 14:52:07 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 10:52:07 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: Paul, really nice villanelle....shows off how the Net tends to amplify the distraction Pascal said we all diddle around with to keep from going nuts, and how we "hardly ever do what we ought." And this is one of the few modern vilanelles I've seen where the repetition actually does build & build to a new sort of meaning. But I've been blogging all morning instead of typing, so now I feel guilty. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Thu Apr 19 15:19:34 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 15:19:34 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: <14.12d50731.28109446@cs.com> In a message dated 4/19/01 1:22:02 PM Central Daylight Time, paul.lake at mail.atu.edu writes: > > Terminals > > > We wait for something without knowing what. > Bored or distracted, in the screen?s fixed glare, > We surf the net above the deeps of thought. > > When no one?s looking, we cruise sites for smut, > Downloading tits and twirling pubic hair, > Waiting for something without knowing what, > > Or, shutting out the office scuttle-butt, > We play clandestine games of solitaire, > Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. > > We?re hardly ever doing what we ought. > There?s somewhere else to which our minds repair. > We wait for something without knowing what. > > Books gather dust. In information?s glut, > We seek excitement somewhere, anywhere, > Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. > > Life is a terminal and narrow rut. > We long for E-mail like an answered prayer. > We wait for something without knowing what. > We surf the net above the deeps of thought. > A good one, Paul. I'll duplicate it for my class, who are working on repeating forms next week (in my absence, ha!). From JoFuhrman at excite.com Thu Apr 19 16:37:55 2001 From: JoFuhrman at excite.com (Joanna Fuhrman) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 13:37:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: <20051199.987712675696.JavaMail.imail@bubbles.excite.com> I was interested in people's responses to this poem. I agree that it is a well done "villanelle" --nice rhymes and good fit of subject to form, but I wonder about poems like this. Really-- I'm being sincere-- what's the point of writing/reading poetry that doesn't make one see the world in a new way. I think I already knew that waiting for email was an empty activity-- how does this poem change the conventional way of looking at things. Does a poem have to? I am curious to what people think. Why else do we read except to see the world in a "new" way? What do we mean by "new"? What other uses could poetry have? best, Joanna On Thu, 19 Apr 2001 02:12:33 -0500, new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu wrote: > > > Not much on the list today. Bummer. Here's a poem about that waiting at the > screen feeling. A villanelle. Only my third in 25 years, so forgive me. > > Paul Lake > > > Terminals > > > We wait for something without knowing what. > Bored or distracted, in the screen?s fixed glare, > We surf the net above the deeps of thought. > > When no one?s looking, we cruise sites for smut, > Downloading tits and twirling pubic hair, > Waiting for something without knowing what, > > Or, shutting out the office scuttle-butt, > We play clandestine games of solitaire, > Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. > > We?re hardly ever doing what we ought. > There?s somewhere else to which our minds repair. > We wait for something without knowing what. > > Books gather dust. In information?s glut, > We seek excitement somewhere, anywhere, > Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. > > Life is a terminal and narrow rut. > We long for E-mail like an answered prayer. > We wait for something without knowing what. > We surf the net above the deeps of thought. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________________ Send a cool gift with your E-Card http://www.bluemountain.com/giftcenter/ From moira_russell at hotmail.com Thu Apr 19 16:57:51 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 12:57:51 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: Joanna wrote: >what's the point >of writing/reading poetry that doesn't make one see the world in a new way. >I think I already knew that waiting for email was an empty activity-- how >does this poem change the conventional way of looking at things. Well, I really was reminded of Pascal's writings about distraction -- especially with "Bored _or_ distracted." We're either underemployed or twitching around. I think the pun on "terminal" meaning both monitor and mortal condition is pointing to something deeper -- that there's an infinite and often destructive capacity in human beings to distract ourselves nearly to death and in a lot of ways the Net has simply boosted that to the point where it makes TV look as educational as the Encyclopedia Brittanica. The emptiness of waiting for email is more metaphorical than simply descriptive -- at least that's how I took it. "We're hardly ever doing what we ought" -- here the mention of pleasant often brainless activity of surfing turns into a moral comment about wasted days. The activity of waiting for mail has instead been turned into checking for email about every fifteen minutes, compulsively (I plead no comment on this point!). The wordplay on "surfing" above a galaxyful of information which we can't even begin to sound during a lifetime is nice, too....in short I read it as a comment on a cultural and a human condition, somewhat -- forgive me -- deeper than just the loneliness of an empty email box. Moira Russell Seattle, WA > > We wait for something without knowing what. > > Bored or distracted, in the screen?s fixed glare, > > We surf the net above the deeps of thought. > > > > When no one?s looking, we cruise sites for smut, > > Downloading tits and twirling pubic hair, > > Waiting for something without knowing what, > > > > Or, shutting out the office scuttle-butt, > > We play clandestine games of solitaire, > > Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. > > > > We?re hardly ever doing what we ought. > > There?s somewhere else to which our minds repair. > > We wait for something without knowing what. > > > > Books gather dust. In information?s glut, > > We seek excitement somewhere, anywhere, > > Surfing the net above the deeps of thought. > > > > Life is a terminal and narrow rut. > > We long for E-mail like an answered prayer. > > We wait for something without knowing what. > > We surf the net above the deeps of thought. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From halvard at earthlink.net Thu Apr 19 17:06:00 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 17:06:00 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail In-Reply-To: <20051199.987712675696.JavaMail.imail@bubbles.excite.com> Message-ID: > Really-- I'm being sincere-- what's the point > of writing/reading poetry that doesn't make one see the world in a new way. I wasn't aware that reading/writing poetry *needed* a point, but then I guess there are a lot of "old" ways of seeing the world I haven't gotten around to yet. Hal "Flotsam, please, and a side order of jetsam." Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From griffinbaker at home.com Thu Apr 19 17:22:03 2001 From: griffinbaker at home.com (Mark Baker) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 14:22:03 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail References: Message-ID: <3ADF56FB.6F84D026@home.com> Just what I was longing for, Paul. And now: Fragment Prefacing 2001 Edition of Don Juan He would to Heaven that he were so much Better-- Than he was hyperactive psychopath-- Emotionally warmer, not a debtor, Brought up by mum and dad on stable path (Or found by Irish doc, Beside Health Centre, Who'd break his patterned disregard for math)-- He says--the future'll know my malady-- A wandering outlaw--named ADHD. > The Telegraph, London > April 16, 2001 > > LORD BYRON, the poet who scandalised England with his hellraising > exploits, was actually a psychopath, according to new research by a > leading psychiatrist. George Gordon, the sixth Baron Byron, was famed > throughout Europe for the dramatic personal style of his poetry and his > biting satires. He also became notorious for his dissolute way of life, > propelled by drink and drugs, which led to a broken marriage, claims that > he slept with hundreds of women - and debts equivalent to at least > ?600,000 today. > > Literary scholars have argued that Byron was a tortured genius, struck > down with regular bouts of depression. Now, a detailed study of his > behaviour has led to a less romantic diagnosis: that the poet exhibited > so-called anti-social personality disorder - the technical term for a > psychopath. > > Professor Michael Fitzgerald, a psychiatrist at the Beside Health Centre > in Dublin, reached his conclusion after examining accounts of Byron's > life. Born in 1788, the poet had an unstable upbringing - seen as a key > factor in the development of psychopathy. > > The abandoned son of John "Mad Jack" Byron, a wastrel who fled to France > to avoid debts, Byron was raised by his emotionally volatile mother > Catherine Gordon, and appears to have been denied emotional warmth at a > critical stage in his development. As a child, he showed symptoms of > emerging psychopathy: habitual lying, a callous disregard for others, > truanting and random acts of cruelty - including sticking pins into his > mother as she prayed in chapel. > > He was expelled from Harrow because of his contempt for authority, and > spent only a term at Cambridge before descending into a life of debauchery > in London. After achieving fame at the age of 24 with his dramatic poem > Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he was able to indulge his passions to ever > greater excess. He eventually fled England to escape debts and a ruined > marriage. He settled in Italy, embarked on more affairs and made his > extravagant life the source for his most famous work, the satirical poem > Don Juan. After a spell helping the fight for Greek independence, he died > of fever, aged 36. > > The poet's psychopathic behaviour may have begun as so-called attention > deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) inherited from his ancestors, said > Prof Fitzgerald. "When one examines his family tree, one finds plenty of > rakes, spendthrifts, melancholics and eccentrics," he pointed out. "He had > a tremendous appetite for sensation, and of course many persons with ADHD > are novelty-seeking." > > By the time Byron reached adulthood, however, full-blown psychopathy had > emerged. Prof Fitzgerald said: "There's no doubt he had a pervasive > pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others. His > impulsivity could be seen in his extreme promiscuity." Writing in the > Journal of Medical Biography, Prof Fitzgerald argues that Byron's poetry > may have benefited from his psychiatric problems. "Persons with ADHD can > be highly creative." > > A leading authority on Byron, Prof Malcolm Kelsall, of Cardiff > University's School of English, said such a mental condition tied in well > with the themes of the poet's works. Prof Kelsall said: "The way he used > language was tremendously subversive - he's a great rebel. That has made > him tremendously attractive with revolutionary movements throughout > Europe." > From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Thu Apr 19 06:38:22 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 05:38:22 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail In-Reply-To: <3ADF56FB.6F84D026@home.com> Message-ID: on 4/19/01 4:22 PM, Mark Baker at griffinbaker at home.com wrote: > Just what I was longing for, Paul. > And now: > > > Fragment Prefacing 2001 Edition of Don Juan > > He would to Heaven that he were so much Better-- > Than he was hyperactive psychopath-- > Emotionally warmer, not a debtor, > Brought up by mum and dad on stable path > (Or found by Irish doc, Beside Health Centre, > Who'd break his patterned disregard for math)-- > He says--the future'll know my malady-- > A wandering outlaw--named ADHD. > > > >> The Telegraph, London >> April 16, 2001 >> >> LORD BYRON, the poet who scandalised England with his hellraising >> exploits, was actually a psychopath, according to new research by a >> leading psychiatrist. George Gordon, the sixth Baron Byron, was famed >> throughout Europe for the dramatic personal style of his poetry and his >> biting satires. He also became notorious for his dissolute way of life, >> propelled by drink and drugs, which led to a broken marriage, claims that >> he slept with hundreds of women - and debts equivalent to at least >> ?600,000 today. >> >> Literary scholars have argued that Byron was a tortured genius, struck >> down with regular bouts of depression. Now, a detailed study of his >> behaviour has led to a less romantic diagnosis: that the poet exhibited >> so-called anti-social personality disorder - the technical term for a >> psychopath. >> >> Professor Michael Fitzgerald, a psychiatrist at the Beside Health Centre >> in Dublin, reached his conclusion after examining accounts of Byron's >> life. Born in 1788, the poet had an unstable upbringing - seen as a key >> factor in the development of psychopathy. >> >> The abandoned son of John "Mad Jack" Byron, a wastrel who fled to France >> to avoid debts, Byron was raised by his emotionally volatile mother >> Catherine Gordon, and appears to have been denied emotional warmth at a >> critical stage in his development. As a child, he showed symptoms of >> emerging psychopathy: habitual lying, a callous disregard for others, >> truanting and random acts of cruelty - including sticking pins into his >> mother as she prayed in chapel. >> >> He was expelled from Harrow because of his contempt for authority, and >> spent only a term at Cambridge before descending into a life of debauchery >> in London. After achieving fame at the age of 24 with his dramatic poem >> Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he was able to indulge his passions to ever >> greater excess. He eventually fled England to escape debts and a ruined >> marriage. He settled in Italy, embarked on more affairs and made his >> extravagant life the source for his most famous work, the satirical poem >> Don Juan. After a spell helping the fight for Greek independence, he died >> of fever, aged 36. >> >> The poet's psychopathic behaviour may have begun as so-called attention >> deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) inherited from his ancestors, said >> Prof Fitzgerald. "When one examines his family tree, one finds plenty of >> rakes, spendthrifts, melancholics and eccentrics," he pointed out. "He had >> a tremendous appetite for sensation, and of course many persons with ADHD >> are novelty-seeking." >> >> By the time Byron reached adulthood, however, full-blown psychopathy had >> emerged. Prof Fitzgerald said: "There's no doubt he had a pervasive >> pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others. His >> impulsivity could be seen in his extreme promiscuity." Writing in the >> Journal of Medical Biography, Prof Fitzgerald argues that Byron's poetry >> may have benefited from his psychiatric problems. "Persons with ADHD can >> be highly creative." >> >> A leading authority on Byron, Prof Malcolm Kelsall, of Cardiff >> University's School of English, said such a mental condition tied in well >> with the themes of the poet's works. Prof Kelsall said: "The way he used >> language was tremendously subversive - he's a great rebel. That has made >> him tremendously attractive with revolutionary movements throughout >> Europe." >> > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > Thanks, Mark. Now I'm depressed thinking that if Byron were alive today, they'd give him ritalin and there'd be no Don Juan. Paul Lake From moira_russell at hotmail.com Thu Apr 19 17:53:55 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 13:53:55 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: Paul wrote: >Thanks, Mark. Now I'm depressed thinking that if Byron were alive today, >they'd give him ritalin and there'd be no Don Juan. Did you ever see the "Great Authors on Prozac" cartoon in the New Yorker where Edgar Allen Poe is portrayed chirping (sorry) "Hel-lo there, birdie!"? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Thu Apr 19 06:51:00 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 05:51:00 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail In-Reply-To: Message-ID: on 4/19/01 4:53 PM, Moira Russell at moira_russell at hotmail.com wrote: > > > > Paul wrote: > >> Thanks, Mark. Now I'm depressed thinking that if Byron were alive today, >> they'd give him ritalin and there'd be no Don Juan. > > Did you ever see the "Great Authors on Prozac" cartoon in the New Yorker > where Edgar Allen Poe is portrayed chirping (sorry) "Hel-lo there, birdie!"? > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > No, but I wish I had. Sounds hilarious. Paul Lake From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Thu Apr 19 18:25:53 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 18:25:53 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: This gives me a question. Is what's good for the audience always good for the poet? -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Paul Lake To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/19/2001 6:38 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail > Thanks, Mark. Now I'm depressed thinking that if Byron were alive today, they'd give him ritalin and there'd be no Don Juan. Paul Lake _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From mackechnie at email.msn.com Thu Apr 19 18:47:46 2001 From: mackechnie at email.msn.com (Russ MacKechnie) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 18:47:46 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Twirling for E-mail. . . . Message-ID: Paul Lake poeticizes, in part: > When no one's looking, we cruise sites for smut, > Downloading tits and twirling pubic hair, > Waiting for something without knowing what. . . . Clever villanelle, Paul. And perhaps Joanna should do a little more New Critical close reading before positing a failure here "to change the conventional way of looking at things." The delightfully ambiguous syntax allows for at least *some* relief from keyboard boredom . . . if "twirling" joins its partner "Downloading" in modifying "we," rather than play the part of participle destined only for adjectival modification of "pubic hair," what an unconventional if voyeuristic view we get. Some folk might twirl their mustachios, others errant strands of beard, still others those snippets of curl upon the forehead?but your surfer has found a rather different site, his facile fingers to explore. (And "twirling" cannot help but evoke a raised "baton," no?) Of course, if "twirling" *does* modify "pubic hair," then principles of parallel construction provide a very interesting picture, indeed, of those talented "tits." Dancing/Singing California Raisins have nuthin' on Nimble-nippled Downloading Tits, if you ask me. . . . ~ Russ MacKechnie ~ From DICK at watson.ibm.com Thu Apr 19 18:47:15 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 01 18:47:15 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: <200104192253.SAA32926@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Joanna Furhman wrote: >> >>I was interested in people's responses to this poem. I agree that it is a >>well done "villanelle" --nice rhymes and good fit of subject to form, but I >>wonder about poems like this. Really-- I'm being sincere-- what's the point >>of writing/reading poetry that doesn't make one see the world in a new way. >> Are all the old ways of seeing the world perfectly understood and evaluated as valid or not, and by how much? Is another "new" fact needed, or perhaps better understanding of some of the already known ones? I liked Paul's villanelle because it illustrated very nicely the psychological state of "waiting for e-mail," and suggested that I might spend my time more profitably (doing almost anything else.) And, by the way, the villanelle was enjoyable just as an example of something done well, with which the world is not overfull. Richard From moira_russell at hotmail.com Thu Apr 19 18:59:03 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 14:59:03 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: >No, but I wish I had. Sounds hilarious. It also featured Karl Marx sitting up exclaiming "Maybe capitalism _can_ work out its kinks!" I'll try to find an online copy. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From cstroffo at earthlink.net Thu Apr 19 19:02:05 2001 From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (chris stroffolino) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 19:02:05 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail References: Message-ID: <3ADF6E6D.CBB7D118@earthlink.net> Amber--- Or this may be slightly off the topic, but what about moods? Auden once remarked that he could read the poetry of Marianne Moore in any mood. I am a little incredulous. What could that mean? I just read a poem today---a very long unpublished piece by Joshua Beckman (this is what may tie into your question) and I phoned him to let him know it was "devastatingly beautiful" I feel haunted and sad after reading it? Where does that mood come from? The poem? Does the poem want the reader to feel sad? If I hadn't already been somewhat sad would the poem have been able to reach me? Sadness soon becomes the wrong word, melancholy, too, an approximation. It isn't that I don't like reading sad poems it's that (if they work) that they make me want to have to get angry just to shake them off, but sometimes they just make me tired and overwhelmed and take a rest from (what from this perspective) seems the folly of thinking--- I don't know if this was good for me, or for the poet... c Amber Prentiss wrote: > This gives me a question. Is what's good for the audience always good for > the poet? > -Amber > > -----Original Message----- > From: Paul Lake > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Sent: 4/19/2001 6:38 AM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail > > > > Thanks, Mark. Now I'm depressed thinking that if Byron were alive today, > they'd give him ritalin and there'd be no Don Juan. > > Paul Lake > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From pmarshock at hotmail.com Thu Apr 19 20:16:11 2001 From: pmarshock at hotmail.com (Patti Marshock) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 17:16:11 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Paul's villanelle Message-ID: I agree whole heartedly. I think this poem also shows how we can use the internet for losing ourselves, blanking out what the real work of life is. And substituting potential fulfillment for what is actually happening in the world around us. I think there's always a point to reading. Escape, enlightenment or affirmation, all are valid reasons. I love the villanelle form, tough as it is. Still working on my first. I've been playing with sestina and ghazal lately. In fact, I wrote what I call a syncopated sestina last month. It's still waiting for me to come back and rewrite. Regards patti _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Thu Apr 19 21:08:07 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 18:08:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Paul's villanelle Message-ID: <20010420010807.346DD36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From JoFuhrman at excite.com Fri Apr 20 00:07:37 2001 From: JoFuhrman at excite.com (Joanna Fuhrman) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 21:07:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: <15007264.987739657973.JavaMail.imail@bubbles.excite.com> > >> > I liked Paul's villanelle because it illustrated very nicely > the psychological state of "waiting for e-mail," and suggested > that I might spend my time more profitably (doing almost anything > else.) This sort of comment is interesting to me in that it suggests a distinction between "illustration" and "enactment." To me, the poems that are most compelling are the ones that don't "illustrate" a concept, but use their language to "enact" or "create" an experience. (yeah yeah you've all heard this before) I agree that New Criticism was valuable in that it taught us to look closely at poems, but I'm not all that excited about most of the poems that ideology produced. I mean the poetry I love most defines my ability to perform a clean new crit. close reading on it. I like those moments that I can't make sense of (but I mean that's the problem with much so called "experimental" writing too-- having no meaning can be just as easy to "get"-- as having a pat message) > Are all the old ways of seeing the world perfectly understood > and evaluated as valid or not, and by how much? Is another "new" > fact needed, or perhaps better understanding of some of the already > known ones? > It's not "new facts" I read poetry for, but something to jar me out of my daily habits of thinking ("lift the veil" as Shelly said.) > I liked Paul's villanelle because it illustrated very nicely > the psychological state of "waiting for e-mail," and suggested > that I might spend my time more profitably (doing almost anything > else.) > > And, by the way, the villanelle was enjoyable just as an example > of something done well, with which the world is not overfull. It's funny to me that so many people think it's enough to just do something well. I think I would rather write poems that "failed" but "took me somewhere" than succeed at just being a "good poem" -- like a painting that matches a dress. If a poem is just another "well made thing" why bother? You could spend your time on something that would give you real money. Joanna > _______________________________________________________ Send a cool gift with your E-Card http://www.bluemountain.com/giftcenter/ From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 20 02:02:44 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 22:02:44 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: >I agree that New Criticism was valuable in that it taught us to look >closely at poems, but I'm not all that excited about most of the poems that >ideology produced. New Criticism produced poetry? I don't think so....Sophocles ("Oedipus Rex") and Homer predate Aristotle's "Poetics." The work of art nearly always precedes the theory -- in fact, provides the guidelines for the theory itself. I've rarely if ever heard of someone producing a work of art to pattern -- or, if this does happen, of it being any good. T.S. Eliot was a proponent of "New Criticism" you might say (objectivity, impersonality) but as Randall Jarrell pointed out what are Eliot's poems if not _highly_ subjective? Criticism rarely produces anything but more criticism, ad infinitum. >It's funny to me that so many people think it's enough to just do something >well. I am reminded here of Isak Dinesen's epigraph to "Out of Africa" -- "To ride well -- to shoot the bow -- to speak the truth" (from the Persian). Doing "something" well is about as "easy" as all of those things. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From JforJames at aol.com Fri Apr 20 10:02:16 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 10:02:16 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Paul's villanelle Message-ID: <104.222c53e.28119b68@aol.com> In a message dated 4/19/01 10:51:21 PM Eastern Daylight Time, CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > I would post one 'cept I've already posted my allotment for this month at [ > New > Poetry]. Bob & others, that "guideline" is meant to keep the focus of the list on discussion of contemporary poetry and to keep the list from being used for the personal promotion of one's poetry. But if anyone has a poem that advances a particular discussion or is apropos, in other words, then he/she needn't worry about posting it. Also, that guideline should have positive aspect; it should be looked at as "an invitation" to the members of this list to post their own work periodically. Jim F From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Fri Apr 20 10:03:54 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 07:03:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: <20010420140354.28CEE36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Fri Apr 20 10:40:38 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 10:40:38 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: I think poetry's mission ought to be not to bore, whatever that takes. It doesn't always have to produce something new to do that. About the well-made point: I don't think that anyone has to like something because it is well-made, and I think poetry, even if it isn't explicitly trying to connect with an audience, wants an audience as soon as it's sent with an SASE. Most people, at least those who don't teach, have an aversion to some well-made Great Piece/Author/Type of Literature. (To tie in a long-dead thread, I do know someone who doesn't think Shakespeare's all that hot.) I think this is healthy. No one should have to accept every piece of literature shoved down her throat between freshman year of high school and whenever the poor thing limps out of the education education. Writing something well, easy or not, doesn't mean that anyone will or should care. -Amber At 10:02 PM 4/19/2001 -0800, you wrote: I agree that New Criticism was valuable in that it taught us to look closely at poems, but I'm not all that excited about most of the poems that ideology produced. New Criticism produced poetry? I don't think so....Sophocles ("Oedipus Rex") and Homer predate Aristotle's "Poetics." The work of art nearly always precedes the theory -- in fact, provides the guidelines for the theory itself. I've rarely if ever heard of someone producing a work of art to pattern -- or, if this does happen, of it being any good. T.S. Eliot was a proponent of "New Criticism" you might say (objectivity, impersonality) but as Randall Jarrell pointed out what are Eliot's poems if not _highly_ subjective? Criticism rarely produces anything but more criticism, ad infinitum. It's funny to me that so many people think it's enough to just do something well. I am reminded here of Isak Dinesen's epigraph to "Out of Africa" -- "To ride well -- to shoot the bow -- to speak the truth" (from the Persian). Doing "something" well is about as "easy" as all of those things. Moira Russell Seattle, WA From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Thu Apr 19 23:39:20 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 22:39:20 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Twirling for E-mail. . . . In-Reply-To: Message-ID: on 4/19/01 5:47 PM, Russ MacKechnie at mackechnie at email.msn.com wrote: > Paul Lake poeticizes, in part: > >> When no one's looking, we cruise sites for smut, >> Downloading tits and twirling pubic hair, >> Waiting for something without knowing what. . . . > > Clever villanelle, Paul. And perhaps Joanna should do a little > more New Critical close reading before positing a failure here "to > change the conventional way of looking at things." The delightfully > ambiguous syntax allows for at least *some* relief from keyboard boredom > . . . if "twirling" joins its partner "Downloading" in modifying "we," > rather than play the part of participle destined only for adjectival > modification of "pubic hair," what an unconventional if voyeuristic view > we get. Some folk might twirl their mustachios, others errant strands > of beard, still others those snippets of curl upon the forehead?but your > surfer has found a rather different site, his facile fingers to explore. > (And "twirling" cannot help but evoke a raised "baton," no?) Of course, > if "twirling" *does* modify "pubic hair," then principles of parallel > construction provide a very interesting picture, indeed, of those > talented "tits." Dancing/Singing California Raisins have nuthin' on > Nimble-nippled Downloading Tits, if you ask me. . . . > > ~ Russ MacKechnie ~ > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > Way to go, Russ. I meant that line to be read both ways. The first part of the line,"Downloading tits," envisioned a male viewer, the second half of the line perhaps provided some gender equity. Paul Lake From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Fri Apr 20 12:00:34 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 09:00:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Paul's villanelle Message-ID: <20010420160034.D901336F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From tadrichards at prodigy.net Fri Apr 20 12:03:00 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 12:03:00 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" References: Message-ID: <001701c0c9b3$60584360$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Amber - re: "Most people, at least those who don't teach, have an aversion to some well-made Great Piece/Author/Type of Literature." Can you amplify this a little? Most people don't like work that's well made? And most people don't like to read literature by great authors? I suppose that's true, in that most people don't like to read at all. But...what would you say causes most people's aversion to well made literature by great authors? And do you think this something that should be encouraged? Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 10:40 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > I think poetry's mission ought to be not to bore, whatever that takes. It > doesn't always have to produce something new to do that. > > About the well-made point: I don't think that anyone has to like something > because it is well-made, and I think poetry, even if it isn't explicitly > trying to connect with an audience, wants an audience as soon as it's sent > with an SASE. Most people, at least those who don't teach, have an aversion > to some well-made Great Piece/Author/Type of Literature. (To tie in a > long-dead thread, I do know someone who doesn't think Shakespeare's all that > hot.) I think this is healthy. No one should have to accept every piece of > literature shoved down her throat between freshman year of high school and > whenever the poor thing limps out of the education education. Writing > something well, easy or not, doesn't mean that anyone will or should care. > > -Amber > > At 10:02 PM 4/19/2001 -0800, you wrote: > I agree that New Criticism was valuable in that it taught us to look closely > at poems, but I'm not all that excited about most of the poems that ideology > produced. > > New Criticism produced poetry? I don't think so....Sophocles ("Oedipus > Rex") and Homer predate Aristotle's "Poetics." The work of art nearly > always precedes the theory -- in fact, provides the guidelines for the > theory itself. I've rarely if ever heard of someone producing a work of art > to pattern -- or, if this does happen, of it being any good. T.S. Eliot was > a proponent of "New Criticism" you might say (objectivity, impersonality) > but as Randall Jarrell pointed out what are Eliot's poems if not _highly_ > subjective? Criticism rarely produces anything but more criticism, ad > infinitum. > > It's funny to me that so many people think it's enough to just do something > well. > > I am reminded here of Isak Dinesen's epigraph to "Out of Africa" -- "To ride > well -- to shoot the bow -- to speak the truth" (from the Persian). Doing > "something" well is about as "easy" as all of those things. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Fri Apr 20 12:40:23 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 09:40:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] SESTINA SENSES AND NONSENSE Message-ID: <20010420164023.E5C36274F@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Fri Apr 20 12:57:57 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 12:57:57 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: Specifically, I'm talking about students. I don't mean that most people don't like work that's well made. I do mean that some people (specificaly, students) do not like some of the works usually taken to be extremely well-made, and though I don't think it needs to be encouraged, I don't think it should be discouraged. I get that feeling that, in many courses, I am expected to like and appreciate every text that's listed on the syllabus, droning, "This is a great piece of literature. It is a masterpiece. You should read it; if you don't like it, you obviously don't have any taste and shouldn't be an English major." I feel that I'm being yanked into a long chain of unquestioning criticism (an obvious oxymoron). People saying, "You know, I really hated this," is a good way to show how literature can fail, even if it is great. Literature is /canonized/, and deciding that you don't agree with the standard ranking of a piece of literature is practically disobeying the word of God. I think that's sad and dangerous. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: OTIS RICHARDS To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/20/01 12:03 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Amber - re: "Most people, at least those who don't teach, have an aversion to some well-made Great Piece/Author/Type of Literature." Can you amplify this a little? Most people don't like work that's well made? And most people don't like to read literature by great authors? I suppose that's true, in that most people don't like to read at all. But...what would you say causes most people's aversion to well made literature by great authors? And do you think this something that should be encouraged? Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 10:40 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > I think poetry's mission ought to be not to bore, whatever that takes. It > doesn't always have to produce something new to do that. > > About the well-made point: I don't think that anyone has to like something > because it is well-made, and I think poetry, even if it isn't explicitly > trying to connect with an audience, wants an audience as soon as it's sent > with an SASE. Most people, at least those who don't teach, have an aversion > to some well-made Great Piece/Author/Type of Literature. (To tie in a > long-dead thread, I do know someone who doesn't think Shakespeare's all that > hot.) I think this is healthy. No one should have to accept every piece of > literature shoved down her throat between freshman year of high school and > whenever the poor thing limps out of the education education. Writing > something well, easy or not, doesn't mean that anyone will or should care. > > -Amber > > At 10:02 PM 4/19/2001 -0800, you wrote: > I agree that New Criticism was valuable in that it taught us to look closely > at poems, but I'm not all that excited about most of the poems that ideology > produced. > > New Criticism produced poetry? I don't think so....Sophocles ("Oedipus > Rex") and Homer predate Aristotle's "Poetics." The work of art nearly > always precedes the theory -- in fact, provides the guidelines for the > theory itself. I've rarely if ever heard of someone producing a work of art > to pattern -- or, if this does happen, of it being any good. T.S. Eliot was > a proponent of "New Criticism" you might say (objectivity, impersonality) > but as Randall Jarrell pointed out what are Eliot's poems if not _highly_ > subjective? Criticism rarely produces anything but more criticism, ad > infinitum. > > It's funny to me that so many people think it's enough to just do something > well. > > I am reminded here of Isak Dinesen's epigraph to "Out of Africa" -- "To ride > well -- to shoot the bow -- to speak the truth" (from the Persian). Doing > "something" well is about as "easy" as all of those things. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From rkubie at mail.pratt.lib.md.us Fri Apr 20 12:50:10 2001 From: rkubie at mail.pratt.lib.md.us (Rachel Kubie) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 12:50:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Allen Grossman John Yau Toi Dericotte Cornelius Eady Message-ID: April 21st and 22nd Enoch Pratt Free Library 400 Cathedral Street Baltimore, MD 21201 for information and directions please call (410) 396-5487 SATURDAY Allen Grossman and John Yau Readings and book signings Saturday, April 21 2 p.m. Central Library - Wheeler Auditorium Allen Grossman's new book, How To Do Things with Tears (New Directions, 2001) will be available. SUNDAY Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady and Local Cave Canem Poets Sunday, April 22 2 p.m. Central Library - Main Hall From JforJames at aol.com Fri Apr 20 13:53:11 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 13:53:11 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: <7f.136376e2.2811d187@aol.com> > I'm being sincere-- what's the point > of writing/reading poetry that doesn't make one see the world in a new way. > I think I already knew that waiting for email was an empty activity-- how > does this poem change the conventional way of looking at things. Joanna, I think these questions are always worth posing. And I think they should always be posed by a poet after his/her poem is written. In regards to Paul's villanelle, I would say that if no new ground is being broken, then at least the archetypal theme of existential angst is at stake. (Echo of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in..."We wait for something without knowing what.") I think archetypal themes, so tied to our human condition, are very hard to write around or write away from. They well up. But these existential dilemmas should be approached, as much as possible, from new perspectives. Without predisposition toward a certain or known outcome. For me, as a reader, form has a way of making my mind shut down. I often find I have to fight through the artifice. (All poems employ artifice; but with certain forms the construct is so much in the foreground & by definition a form is a well-trodden path.) I often find myself thinking "Oh no, here comes the turn" or "Ta-dah...here's the big-close, the concluding couplet" in a sonnet, or "Not again; that line was barely worth its weight in words the first go-round, and now it's being repeated," in the villanelle. And sestinas, don't get me started...I dread those o-so-cleverly repeated end words in 6+envoi stanzas of fuss & filler. (Confession: I hardly ever read thru the whole of a sestina. My eyes glaze over somewhere in the third stanza and I then skip down for quick glance at the mercifully short envoi.) Finnegan Cease & deSestina For his formal crime, Arnaut Daniel shall for all time be burned in hell. From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Fri Apr 20 03:49:57 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 02:49:57 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Cease and deSestina Message-ID: Jim, I'm ambivalent about villanelle's but agree with you about sestina's. About the only one I can stand is Dana Gioia's "My Confessional Sestina" because it makes fun of them so well. Paul Lake From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 20 15:17:14 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 11:17:14 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Cease and deSestina Message-ID: Paul wrote: >Jim, I'm ambivalent about villanelles but agree with you about sestinas. >About the only one I can stand is Dana Gioia's "My Confessional Sestina" >because it makes fun of them so well. For the sestina-wary Elizabeth Bishop wrote two wonderful examples: "A Miracle for Breakfast" and "Sestina" (great title, that). But mostly I'm not that terribly fond of them, either, usually because people pick words that can't carry all that much repetition. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Jandhodge at aol.com Fri Apr 20 16:44:40 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 16:44:40 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] A "doubled" sestina Message-ID: <26.1455a776.2811f9b8@aol.com> Jim writes: << sestinas, don't get me started...I dread those o-so-cleverly repeated end words in 6+envoi stanzas of fuss & filler. (Confession: I hardly ever read thru the whole of a sestina. My eyes glaze over somewhere in the third stanza and I then skip down for quick glance at the mercifully short envoi.) >> I too find sestinas generally labored and dull. But finding pleasant wisdom in Luther's admonition to "Trust God, and sin bravely," I indulged myself in answering this challenge posed in a personal ad: CHALLENGE: Incorporate these words into a sestina: Poetry, Fiction, Exuberant, Divorced, Worldly, Woman. Or try these: Man, Writer, Northeast, Wise, Adventurous, Lively. Just kidding, of course, but I'd love to hear from divorced/widowed male, 55+ for possible long-term rela- tionship . . . Though socially disqualified, I thought it would be fun to write a kind of "doubled" sestina incorporating both sets of words according to pattern-- Dear Exuberant Divorced Worldly Woman, Perhaps poetry matters only to the man at home in fiction, or to that rare writer who, exuberant only north by northeast,* finds himself divorced from the world (nowise wishing to be worldly) but adventurous in his dreams of woman. She will be lively as only woman can be--with that liveli- ness poetry was born for and which man, if unworldly enough and adventirous, can image. Though fiction lie, a good writer may lie, divorced from the world and wise- ly so, exuberantly. But why northeast? Does exuberance belong but to the northeast? Is woman languid if she's but midwest lively, or midwest man divorced from all things wise and beautiful? Is poetry from such a man a lesser fiction? Do you think such a writer, though otherworldly, less adventurous? And what is "worldly"? what "adventurous"? Exuberance can be hard if from the northeast the wind brings a chill fiction to a writer that his dream of woman--lovely and lively enough to dance in poetry and bless a man-- is divorced from possibility, that it's unwise for him, supposedly divorced from the wise, true, and worldly good, to feign adventurous- ness or dare believe poetry. Yet such a man might rival in exuberance any northeast- erner. Dear woman, let me belie that lively and hurtful fiction; find in me that writer who can fiction such truth that no writer could divorce it from the real, that the wise would embrace it, and every woman of lively wit find in it such worldly, adventurous exuberance as would thaw the polar north. East of Eden, poetry is still the best of man. Please excuse this (doubled) sestina its absent tercet. Its humble author is daunted by the prospect of having to work all twelve words (and especially the unwieldy trio of "Adventurous," "exuberant," and "northeast") into a mere three coherent lines. Sincerely, Adventurous, Lively Man and Writer, 55+, but alas! not Northeast and perhaps not Wise *Cf. Hamlet's "I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw." Jan From MerwinDame at aol.com Fri Apr 20 16:59:16 2001 From: MerwinDame at aol.com (MerwinDame at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 16:59:16 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] my father's daughter...by sestina sinatra ;) Message-ID: <8a.56afe2a.2811fd24@aol.com> my old poetry professor used to say that every poet gets one -- and only one -- good sestina in a lifetime. i always loved that, for some reason. :) all i can say is, for better or for worse, this one had better be mine, goddamnit -- because NEVER AGAIN...LOL *muffy* ps) i, too, cannot vouch for the integrity of the linebreaks via email...but i am sure you'll piece it together, my brilliant little sausages. :) pps) by the way, herr cobb...don't bother attempting the form again -- you got yours. :) Sestina To My Father, Who Now Smokes Only In His Heart (for Thomas Cipro) The best spent evening on this goddamned earth, is lying around, having a smoke, inhaling Brautigan, Berryman, and Bellow, dispatching children to the Land of Dreams and Shadows, eating, with my fingers, marinated artichoke hearts, and looking at old pictures of my father when he was a Beat. I know by his old, patched clothing that he was a Beat; by his ratty, black turtleneck and loose knobby trousers the color of disturbed earth; by the clutched book, the Van Dyke beard, the tattoo of intertwined hearts, hidden, that said Bill and Joan in them; by the constant ribbon of grey smoke that encircled his passionate head; by the shadows of question and discontent made by the curve of his mouth, a mouth that would bellow on and on about Paris & Pound, art & life, economics, poetry, and the tendency to exist; a mouth that would bellow at his coffee shop comrades, trying to beat them with logic by dredging the ponds and shadows of his own subconscious. They aroused, they condemned, they purposely poured the salt-of-the-earth onto their own wounds, in a heady ritual of smoke and coffee meant to infinitely link their minds and their hearts. Sometimes they were distracted -- by a waitresses' chest, the smallness of their own lives, a friendly game of Hearts. But mostly, it was the articulate act, the lucid waltz of words that compelled them to bellow on, kept in time by the rising and falling of the smoke, and the sleepy beat of a weary earth they planned to rouse from its thick nap of complacent shadows. Long ago, my father lifted me from imagined childhood shadows, pressing together our minds and our hearts, whispering to me how to find beauty on this earth--- to listen for its beckon and bellow calling me to a place where words and ideas beat against each other until they become a lovely dust, to be sucked in and savored, like a good smoke. You stayed in New York, now with patches on your tweed elbows, and one on your arm to stave off the love of smoke. And I am here, still cast in your long, mutinous shadows, still hearing the umbilical beat of our minds and our hearts intertwined, like a tattoo on an old man's arm. You call me and my impassioned offspring shout and bellow and demand to speak with you. They descend on me, their feet causing a revolution on the linoleum earth. Father, I have lived as you have, searching the earth; taking in bliss, like smoke; Answering the occasional rebel bellow; finding light in shadows. I will never lose heart; we resound to the same beat ----Muffy Bolding From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Fri Apr 20 20:05:48 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 17:05:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: <20010421000548.E5BAF2756@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From tadrichards at prodigy.net Fri Apr 20 20:48:20 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 20:48:20 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" References: Message-ID: <002701c0c9fc$c3faa9a0$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Do students not like this work _because_ it's well made? Would they be equally likely to have a problem with a professor putting carelessly made work in front of them and saying "you have to like this,and if you don't, it proves you have no taste." Is "lighght" a well-made or a carelessly made poem? Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 12:57 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > Specifically, I'm talking about students. I don't mean that most people > don't like work that's well made. I do mean that some people (specificaly, > students) do not like some of the works usually taken to be extremely > well-made, and though I don't think it needs to be encouraged, I don't think > it should be discouraged. I get that feeling that, in many courses, I am > expected to like and appreciate every text that's listed on the syllabus, > droning, "This is a great piece of literature. It is a masterpiece. You > should read it; if you don't like it, you obviously don't have any taste and > shouldn't be an English major." I feel that I'm being yanked into a long > chain of unquestioning criticism (an obvious oxymoron). People saying, "You > know, I really hated this," is a good way to show how literature can fail, > even if it is great. Literature is /canonized/, and deciding that you don't > agree with the standard ranking of a piece of literature is practically > disobeying the word of God. I think that's sad and dangerous. > -Amber > > -----Original Message----- > From: OTIS RICHARDS > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Sent: 4/20/01 12:03 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > > Amber - re: "Most people, at least those who don't teach, have an > aversion > to some well-made Great Piece/Author/Type of Literature." > > Can you amplify this a little? Most people don't like work that's well > made? > And most people don't like to read literature by great authors? I > suppose > that's true, in that most people don't like to read at all. But...what > would > you say causes most people's aversion to well made literature by great > authors? And do you think this something that should be encouraged? > > > > > Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." > The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 > http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Amber Prentiss" > To: > Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 10:40 AM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > > > > I think poetry's mission ought to be not to bore, whatever that takes. > It > > doesn't always have to produce something new to do that. > > > > About the well-made point: I don't think that anyone has to like > something > > because it is well-made, and I think poetry, even if it isn't > explicitly > > trying to connect with an audience, wants an audience as soon as it's > sent > > with an SASE. Most people, at least those who don't teach, have an > aversion > > to some well-made Great Piece/Author/Type of Literature. (To tie in a > > long-dead thread, I do know someone who doesn't think Shakespeare's > all > that > > hot.) I think this is healthy. No one should have to accept every > piece of > > literature shoved down her throat between freshman year of high school > and > > whenever the poor thing limps out of the education education. Writing > > something well, easy or not, doesn't mean that anyone will or should > care. > > > > -Amber > > > > At 10:02 PM 4/19/2001 -0800, you wrote: > > I agree that New Criticism was valuable in that it taught us to look > closely > > at poems, but I'm not all that excited about most of the poems that > ideology > > produced. > > > > New Criticism produced poetry? I don't think so....Sophocles > ("Oedipus > > Rex") and Homer predate Aristotle's "Poetics." The work of art nearly > > always precedes the theory -- in fact, provides the guidelines for the > > theory itself. I've rarely if ever heard of someone producing a work > of > art > > to pattern -- or, if this does happen, of it being any good. T.S. > Eliot > was > > a proponent of "New Criticism" you might say (objectivity, > impersonality) > > but as Randall Jarrell pointed out what are Eliot's poems if not > _highly_ > > subjective? Criticism rarely produces anything but more criticism, ad > > infinitum. > > > > It's funny to me that so many people think it's enough to just do > something > > well. > > > > I am reminded here of Isak Dinesen's epigraph to "Out of Africa" -- > "To > ride > > well -- to shoot the bow -- to speak the truth" (from the Persian). > Doing > > "something" well is about as "easy" as all of those things. > > > > Moira Russell > > Seattle, WA > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Fri Apr 20 21:03:34 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 21:03:34 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Cease and deSestina References: Message-ID: <007401c0c9fe$e4a3f380$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Well, I've actually been writing a couple of sestinas lately, and I do believe that you can keep them moving, and keep them interesting. I wouldn't write them all the time, but every now and then, one comes together. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Moira Russell" To: Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 3:17 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Cease and deSestina > Paul wrote: > > >Jim, I'm ambivalent about villanelles but agree with you about sestinas. > >About the only one I can stand is Dana Gioia's "My Confessional Sestina" > >because it makes fun of them so well. > > For the sestina-wary Elizabeth Bishop wrote two wonderful examples: "A > Miracle for Breakfast" and "Sestina" (great title, that). But mostly I'm > not that terribly fond of them, either, usually because people pick words > that can't carry all that much repetition. > > Moira Russell > Seattle, WA > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From JforJames at aol.com Fri Apr 20 21:25:24 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 21:25:24 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Cease and deSestina Message-ID: << I'm ambivalent about villanelle's but agree with you about sestina's. About the only one I can stand is Dana Gioia's "My Confessional Sestina" because it makes fun of them so well. >> Paul, I do have a genuine affection for certain forms. Villanelles and sonnets seem to me forms that if we didn't have them already, someone would have to invent. Still the resistance of familiarity rears itself in the reader. Sestinas are largely exercises. Gioia's poem is worth the effort... tho I wish he'd just it broken off somewhere before the envoi instead of completing the form. He's taking on more than the inherent vices of the form; his poem is an indictment of the little litmags and poetry as a pedagogical enterprise. Finnegan From tadrichards at prodigy.net Fri Apr 20 21:37:02 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 21:37:02 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] A "doubled" sestina References: <26.1455a776.2811f9b8@aol.com> Message-ID: <00bb01c0ca03$916b12c0$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Jan - I like this one. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 4:44 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] A "doubled" sestina > Jim writes: > > << sestinas, don't get me started...I dread those o-so-cleverly repeated > end words in 6+envoi stanzas of fuss & filler. (Confession: I hardly > ever read thru the whole of a sestina. My eyes glaze over somewhere > in the third stanza and I then skip down for quick glance at the mercifully > short envoi.) >> > > > I too find sestinas generally labored and dull. But finding pleasant wisdom > in Luther's admonition to "Trust God, and sin bravely," I indulged myself in > answering this challenge posed in a personal ad: > > CHALLENGE: Incorporate these words into a sestina: > Poetry, Fiction, Exuberant, Divorced, Worldly, Woman. > Or try these: Man, Writer, Northeast, Wise, Adventurous, > Lively. Just kidding, of course, but I'd love to hear from > divorced/widowed male, 55+ for possible long-term rela- > tionship . . . > > Though socially disqualified, I thought it would be fun to write a kind of > "doubled" sestina incorporating both sets of words according to pattern-- > > > Dear Exuberant Divorced Worldly Woman, > > Perhaps poetry matters only to the man > at home in fiction, or to that rare writer > who, exuberant only north by northeast,* > finds himself divorced from the world (nowise > wishing to be worldly) but adventurous > in his dreams of woman. She will be lively > > as only woman can be--with that liveli- > ness poetry was born for and which man, > if unworldly enough and adventirous, > can image. Though fiction lie, a good writer > may lie, divorced from the world and wise- > ly so, exuberantly. But why northeast? > > Does exuberance belong but to the northeast? > Is woman languid if she's but midwest lively, > or midwest man divorced from all things wise > and beautiful? Is poetry from such a man > a lesser fiction? Do you think such a writer, > though otherworldly, less adventurous? > > And what is "worldly"? what "adventurous"? > Exuberance can be hard if from the northeast > the wind brings a chill fiction to a writer > that his dream of woman--lovely and lively > enough to dance in poetry and bless a man-- > is divorced from possibility, that it's unwise > > for him, supposedly divorced from the wise, > true, and worldly good, to feign adventurous- > ness or dare believe poetry. Yet such a man > might rival in exuberance any northeast- > erner. Dear woman, let me belie that lively > and hurtful fiction; find in me that writer > > who can fiction such truth that no writer > could divorce it from the real, that the wise > would embrace it, and every woman of lively > wit find in it such worldly, adventurous > exuberance as would thaw the polar north. East > of Eden, poetry is still the best of man. > > Please excuse this (doubled) sestina its absent tercet. Its humble > author is daunted by the prospect of having to work all twelve words > (and especially the unwieldy trio of "Adventurous," "exuberant," and > "northeast") into a mere three coherent lines. > > Sincerely, > Adventurous, Lively Man and > Writer, > 55+, but alas! not Northeast and > perhaps not Wise > > > *Cf. Hamlet's "I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, > I know a hawk from a handsaw." > > Jan > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Fri Apr 20 23:26:24 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 23:26:24 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: I doubt people don't like it because it's well-made. What I'm trying to talk about is the assumption of well-made => good => you should like it. They would probably have more a problem with a professor putting carelessly made work in front of them, whatever the hell carelessly-made and well-made mean, and I think badly-made ought to substitute for carelessly-made. Hard, careful work in poetry does not guarantee great results. I suppose that works that tend to be part of the canon are usually considered to be well-made. I believe I mutated 'well-made' from Moira's conversation earlier in the thread (excerpted at the end). I am not saying that a prof ought to dish any old crap out, and I am not saying that well-made works bore people because they are well-made. I am saying that they are not perfectly made, since nothing ever is, and that a student ought not feel intimidated because he doesn't like them. As a student, it feels as if I'm requested to overlook an esteemed author's faults for technical brilliance and /like/ a dang work, no matter how it might offend me or, worse still, not move me at all. It's as if I am supposed to put aside my preferences as a reader in order to appreciate something. That seems a bit silly and unrealistic to me. I'll put my biases aside when I want to and not because someone thinks I ought to. -Amber P.S. Here it is: >>It's funny to me that so many people think it's enough to just do >>something well. > I am reminded here of Isak Dinesen's epigraph to "Out of Africa" -- >"To ride well -- to shoot the bow -- to speak the truth" (from the >Persian). Doing "something" well is about as "easy" as all of those >things. P.P.S. I have no idea about how well or carelessly made "lighght" was. It's fun to say as a word; I don't know if it holds up as a poem. -----Original Message----- From: OTIS RICHARDS To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/20/01 8:48 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Do students not like this work _because_ it's well made? Would they be equally likely to have a problem with a professor putting carelessly made work in front of them and saying "you have to like this,and if you don't, it proves you have no taste." Is "lighght" a well-made or a carelessly made poem? Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards From MerwinDame at aol.com Sat Apr 21 02:50:45 2001 From: MerwinDame at aol.com (MerwinDame at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 02:50:45 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: <70.9d94da0.281287c5@aol.com> In a message dated 4/20/2001 8:26:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time, aprentiss at agnesscott.edu writes: << I doubt people don't like it because it's well-made. What I'm trying to talk about is the assumption of well-made => good => you should like it. They would probably have more a problem with a professor putting carelessly made work in front of them, whatever the hell carelessly-made and well-made mean, and I think badly-made ought to substitute for carelessly-made. Hard, careful work in poetry does not guarantee great results. I suppose that works that tend to be part of the canon are usually considered to be well-made. I believe I mutated 'well-made' from Moira's conversation earlier in the thread (excerpted at the end). I am not saying that a prof ought to dish any old crap out, and I am not saying that well-made works bore people because they are well-made. I am saying that they are not perfectly made, since nothing ever is, and that a student ought not feel intimidated because he doesn't like them. As a student, it feels as if I'm requested to overlook an esteemed author's faults for technical brilliance and /like/ a dang work, no matter how it might offend me or, worse still, not move me at all. It's as if I am supposed to put aside my preferences as a reader in order to appreciate something. That seems a bit silly and unrealistic to me. I'll put my biases aside when I want to and not because someone thinks I ought to. -Amber >> dearest amber -- i have failed to do so thus far, so please allow me to tell you now how much i consistently enjoy your queries and observations. your absolutely genuine desire to get to the heart of a matter is frequently provocative, and always refreshing and interesting. i bet you are a real piece of work to have in class, and that it is all the more rewarding -- for both students and professors -- because of your presence there. keep pushing it, doll. :) *muffy* From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Sat Apr 21 08:13:42 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 05:13:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: SESTINA SENSES AND NONSENSE Message-ID: <20010421121342.9DD9336F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: rrcobb Subject: SESTINA SENSES AND NONSENSE Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 20:03:45 -0500 Size: 3227 URL: From JforJames at aol.com Sat Apr 21 12:50:59 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 12:50:59 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Eye Dialect, new issue Message-ID: Eye Dialect: Issue Four, Spring 2001 http://www.contemporarypoetry.com/dialect/issuefour.htm Welcome to the Fourth Issue of Eye Dialect. (If you would like to be removed from this mailing please click here to send a message to us.) Once again Eye Dialect has seen a number of changes come through since our last issue, unveiled in the summer of 2000. Since then our nine month gestation period has been filled with pangs- the most pertinent being that Eye Dialect suffered a fatal crash/flaw/lock (we still don't quite know what happened) which caused large portions of the site to become non-functional for over a month. During this time we placed a more limited version on the web but our daily browsing numbers declined from approximately 115 to 87 unique visitors per day, showing us that there were one too many dead links for most visitors. With yeoman efforts from Tom Cuneo at Forsite.net, we were able to rather laboriously check and clean all of Eye Dialect's 506 files with the result that a more complete and bug free version is now on the web. This incident has caused a few repercussions in our design and daily doings. We've decided to fall back on e-mail submissions and mailing list updates. This method is certainly less elegant and convenient than the submission forms we were using, but it's certainly more stable. In the course of making repairs, we've also had to abandon (for the moment) the ring structure around which Eye Dialect was based. Our idea was that instead of squirreling away good writing into a number of isolated archives, we'd simply add new work to a growing ring of writing. A visitor to Eye Dialect could then click along through poets and writers, stories and poems, stopping at anything which might strike their fancy. We felt this was advantageous to the writers as well since their work would always stand a good chance to be read, regardless of when we added it. Our plan was that our "issues" would serve as gateways to this ring of complete works- i.e. that "new work" would be featured as "an issue", but that once a visitor went to the work, they'd be able to access any of the writing on the site. We plan on reestablishing this structure over the next few months. For the interim, we've created a "list" of writing, a main index of all works. A bit less elegant but easy enough to navigate. We also have an audio index which lists all the pages with Audio recordings. Despite all the side projects put on hold and the small improvements which were back-burnered, my deepest regret regarding the site's troubles was that we've held off on adding new writers to the site. Indeed- we've accepted and held work for far longer than was our intent. Our apologies to all the writers, especially the talented and gracious Sandy McKinney and Larry Fontenot for their patience and understanding through the whole repair process. It still remains our privilege to make good writing available to the public (remember when there was no web- when one could not find free poetry outside the well patrolled shelves of the local public library?) and I'd like to thank everyone for their support. In our first issue, we featured mostly poetry. In the second issue, we added some excellent poems and short stories, also a special section on Kenneth Morris. In the third issue we featured six poet's works, including translations, as well as a new short story and two reviews. In this issue we have poetry from C.E. Chaffin, Larry Fontenot, Leonard Kress, Sandy McKinney, Jessy Randall, John Tranter and Fran Van Zant. We also have a story from Briar Sauro. My best, RJ McCaffery On behalf of our staff, I would like to express our wish we hope you enjoy our selections and state that it is our great pleasure to present the following. . . Poets and Poems: C.E. Chaffin Up Late with My Hearing-Impaired Love Larry L. Fontenot Errant Berry Leonard Kress Letter from Bernard Malamud Sandy McKinney Birth of a Legend Christmas Eve on Ninth Avenue Cityscape Spiritual Sacrilege Du Printemps Jessy Randall Boys on Bikes John Tranter Backyard Cabin Fever The Creature From the Black Lagoon Glow-boys Stratocruiser Poolside Lullaby Frank Van Zant Boston, May 15, 1894 Fiction and Reviews Briar Sauro Porn From JforJames at aol.com Sat Apr 21 21:11:13 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 21:11:13 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Gig #8 Message-ID: <36.14c7a980.281389b1@aol.com> From: Keith Tuma Subject: Gig #8 T H E G I G # 8 (March 2001) The latest issue of _The Gig_ is now available: it contains poetry by Kenneth Goldsmith, Maurice Scully, Peter Middleton, Elizabeth James, Adrian Clarke, Randolph Healy, Peter Manson, Ralph Hawkins & John Wilkinson; plus reviews by Pete Smith & Nate Dorward of books by Lissa Wolsak, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Stephen Rodefer et al. There's also the results of the reader's poll announced in the last issue, in which readers were invited to nominate (&, if they wished, discuss) three of their favourite books published from 1995 to the present. _The Gig_ appears three times a year; it publishes new poetry & criticism from the US, Canada, UK & Ireland. Backissues are still available, notably #4/5, a 232pp perfectbound collection of essays on the work of the UK poet Peter Riley by Peter Middleton, Peter Larkin, Mark Morrisson, Nigel Wheale et al. Regular issues are 60-64pp chapbooks: see the website at http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/ for details. * Rates for all issues except #4/5: within Canada: single issue: $7 Cdn ($12 for institutions); three-issue subscription (or set of three backissues): $18 (institutions $36). US subscription: $14 US (institutions $28 US). Overseas subscription: 10 pounds (institutions 20 pounds). Rates for #4/5: within Canada: $20 Cdn (institutions $40); within US: $15 US (institutions $30); overseas: 11 pounds surfacemail, 13 pounds airmail (institutions 20 pounds). All prices include postage. Make cheques out to "Nate Dorward". Write to: Nate Dorward, 109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, Ontario, M2N 2B1, Canada; e-mail: . Copies may be obtained within the UK through Peter Riley (Books), 27 Sturton Street, Cambridge, CB1 2QG; e-mail: . * Separately available is _The Topological Shovel_, a set of four essays by Allen Fisher in workbook format, 52pp. Prices: $12 Cdn; $9.50 US; 6.50 pounds UK/overseas (all prices include postage). * Issue #8 has as always a brief section of notes at the back about contemporary poetry (this issue contains notes on sources & allusions in Prynne, R.F. Langley, Peter Riley, John Riley & Raworth). Listmembers are welcome to write me (backchannel) with notes; contributors of any notes that I end up using will receive a free issue of the magazine. * Nate & Jane Dorward ndorward at sprint.ca THE GIG magazine: http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/ 109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada ph: (416) 221 6865 From JforJames at aol.com Sat Apr 21 21:15:09 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 21:15:09 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Kenneth Koch Message-ID: <54.1349a94c.28138a9d@aol.com> A poem by Kenneth Koch, from NEW ADDRESSES, a collection of poems that takes on the classic poetic device of apostrophe, or direct address. Koch, in these poems, talks directly to things that have been important in his life. If you'd like to see how Koch uses the same device with a very different topic, see the bonus poem below. To World War Two Early on you introduced me to young women in bars You were large, and with a large hand You presented them in different cities, Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafe's. It was a time of general confusion Of being a body hurled at a wall. I didn't do much fighting. I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole. I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning. It felt unusual Even if for a good cause To be part of a destructive force With my rifle in my hands And in my head My serial number The entire object of my existence To eliminate Japanese soldiers By killing them With a rifle or with a grenade And then, many years after that, I could write poetry Fall in love And have a daughter And think about these things From antrobin at clipper.net Sat Apr 21 21:08:35 2001 From: antrobin at clipper.net (Anthony Robinson) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 18:08:35 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] Kenneth Koch References: <54.1349a94c.28138a9d@aol.com> Message-ID: <051c01c0cac8$c3155900$96acefd8@0021936706> Koch is a favorite of mine. Thanks for these. Tony > A poem by Kenneth Koch, from NEW ADDRESSES, a collection of poems that takes > on the classic poetic device of apostrophe, or direct address. > > Koch, in these poems, talks directly to things that have been important in > his life. If you'd like to see how Koch uses the same device with a very > different topic, see the bonus poem below. > > > > To World War Two > > Early on you introduced me to young women in bars > You were large, and with a large hand > You presented them in different cities, > Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk > On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafe's. > It was a time of general confusion > Of being a body hurled at a wall. > I didn't do much fighting. I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole. > I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning. > It felt unusual > Even if for a good cause > To be part of a destructive force > With my rifle in my hands > And in my head > My serial number > The entire object of my existence > To eliminate Japanese soldiers > By killing them > With a rifle or with a grenade > And then, many years after that, > I could write poetry > Fall in love > And have a daughter > And think about these things > From a great distance > If I survived > I was "paying my debt > To society" a paid > Killer. It wasn't > like anything I'd done > Before, on the paved > Streets of Cincinatti > Or on the ballroom floor > At Mr. Vathe's dancing class > What would Anne Marie Goldsmith > Have thought of me > If instead of asking her to dance > I had put my BAR to my shoulder > And shot her in the face > I thought about her in my foxhole-- > One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night > We take precautions but it is night and it is you. > The typhoon continues and so do you. > "I can't be killed--because of my poetry. I have to live on in order to write > it." > I thought--even crazier thought, or just as crazy-- > "If I'm killed while thinking of lines, it will be too corny > When it's reported" (I imagined it would be reported!) > So I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me on the beach on > Leyte > Was "The surf comes in like masochistic lions." > I loved this terrible line. It was keeping me alive. My Uncle Leo wrote to me, > "You won't believe this, but some day you may wish > You were footloose and twenty on Leyte again." I have never wanted > To be on Leyte again, > With you, whispering into my ear, > "Go on and win me! Tomorrow you might not be alive, > So do it today!" How could anyone win you? > You were too much for me, though I > Was older than you were and in camouflage. But for you > Who threw everything together, and had all the systems > Working for you all the time, this was trivial. If you could use me > You'd use me, and then forget. How else > Did I think you'd behave? > I'm glad you ended. I'm glad I didn't die. Or lose my mind. > As machines make ice > We made dead enemy soldiers, in > Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands > That produced fire and kept going straight through > I was carrying one, > I who had gone about for years as a child > Praying God don't let there be another war > Or if there is, don't let me be in it. Well, I was in you. > > All you cared about was existing and being won. > You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades. > > > > Copyright (c) 2000 by Kenneth Koch > > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > Read an interview with Kenneth Koch and his poems "To My Heart as I Go > Along," "To Jewishness," and "To My Twenties." http://www.knopfpoetry.com > > Read Kenneth Koch's essay "On Reading Poetry" from his book SLEEPING ON THE > WING at http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/studentcenter/essays/koch.html > > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > Visit our website and wander around -- check out the broadsides there for you > to print out in color or black and white, the poets-on-poetry essays, and the > on-going conversation about poetry in the forum. If you know of interesting > poetry links, that's the place to let others know: > http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/studentcenter/forums.cgi?page=1&mess ag > > es_per_page=20 > > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > You can sign up for Random House's new monthly African American e-newsletter > which will feature excerpts and original content from today's foremost > African-American authors. Get the advanced word on the newest work from > writers like Colson Whitehead, E. Lynn Harris, Cornel West, Chinua Achebe, > Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston. Send a blank email to > af-am at randomhouse.com to join. > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > Additional Koch poem below.... > > > \ > > > \ > > > \ > > > > "To 'Yes'" > > You are always the member of a team, > Accompanied by a question-- > If this is the way the world ends, is it really going to? > No. Are you a Buddhist? Maybe. A monsoon? Yes. > I have been delighted by you even in the basement > When asking if I could have some coal lumps and the answer was yes. > Yes to the finality of the brightness > And to the enduring qualities of the lark > She sings at heaven's gate. But is it unbolted? Bolted? Yes. > Which, though, is which? To which the answer cannot be yes > So reverse question. Pamela bending before the grate > Turns round rapidly to say Yes! I will meet you in Boston > At five after nine, if my Irishness is still working > And the global hamadryads, wood nymphs of my "yes." > But what, Pamela, what does that mean? Am I a yes > To be posed in the face of a negative alternative? > Or has the sky taken away from me its ultimate guess > About how probably everything is going to be eventually terrible > Which is something we knew all along, being modified by a yes > When what we want is obvious but has a brilliantly shining trail > Of stars. Or are those asterisks? Yes. What is at the bottom > Of the most overt question? Do we die? Yes. Does that > Always come later than now? Yes. > I love your development > From the answer to a simple query to a state of peace > That has the world by the throat. Am I lying? Yes. > Are you smiling? Yes. I'll follow you, yes? No reply. > > Copyright (c) 2000 by Kenneth Koch > --- > NOTE: You received this message because you subscribed > to knopfpoetry as: JforJames at aol.com on the Books at Random > Web site. To unsubscribe send a blank email to > leave-knopfpoetry-6633036S at list.randomhouse.com > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From JforJames at aol.com Sat Apr 21 21:28:21 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 21:28:21 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: In a message dated 4/19/01 7:40:54 PM Eastern Daylight Time, cstroffo at earthlink.net writes: << Auden once remarked that he could read the poetry of Marianne Moore in any mood. I am a little incredulous. What could that mean? >> Chris, I can only speculate, but I would say that of all the Moderns Marianne Moore lacks affect. A Moore poem is tabula rasa prepped for the reader's disposition. Finnegan ps: am intrigued by the Joshua Beckman poem...care to share it in part or whole? From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sat Apr 21 20:53:24 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 20:53:24 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" References: <70.9d94da0.281287c5@aol.com> Message-ID: <013201c0cacd$16945460$6401a8c0@ibm25310> I certainly agree that it would be wonderful to have Amber as a student, but I'm still not sure I agree with her on this point. I don't think that anyone _should_ like anything, well-made or not. I think one would be just as wrong to insist that a student like something carelessly made, like Whitman, or clumsily made, like Dreiser or Kerouac or Sexton or Corso. And I'd guess if you backed those same professors up against the wall, that the one who liked the well-made poem by Dryden might very well not like the well-made poem by Lowell. I have a problem with any professor who tells you you're stupid, for whatever reason. But does this really happen a lot? Do most professors insist that you like something, well-made or otherwise, just because they tell you to? I think it's probably a good idea to require students to _recognize_ what's well made -- that is, to have a definable and defensible set of standards. But since there is no one definition of what's well-made, you'd really have to encourage a student to think for herself before you could expect that. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2001 2:50 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > In a message dated 4/20/2001 8:26:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time, > aprentiss at agnesscott.edu writes: > > << I doubt people don't like it because it's well-made. What I'm trying to > talk > about is the assumption of well-made => good => you should like it. They > would probably have more a problem with a professor putting carelessly made > work in front of them, whatever the hell carelessly-made and well-made mean, > and I think badly-made ought to substitute for carelessly-made. Hard, > careful work in poetry does not guarantee great results. I suppose that > works that tend to be part of the canon are usually considered to be > well-made. I believe I mutated 'well-made' from Moira's conversation earlier > in the thread (excerpted at the end). > > I am not saying that a prof ought to dish any old crap out, and I am not > saying that well-made works bore people because they are well-made. I am > saying that they are not perfectly made, since nothing ever is, and that a > student ought not feel intimidated because he doesn't like them. As a > student, it feels as if I'm requested to overlook an esteemed author's > faults for technical brilliance and /like/ a dang work, no matter how it > might offend me or, worse still, not move me at all. It's as if I am > supposed to put aside my preferences as a reader in order to appreciate > something. That seems a bit silly and unrealistic to me. I'll put my biases > aside when I want to and not because someone thinks I ought to. > > > -Amber >> > > > dearest amber -- > > i have failed to do so thus far, so please allow me to tell you now how much > i consistently enjoy your queries and observations. your absolutely genuine > desire to get to the heart of a matter is frequently provocative, and always > refreshing and interesting. i bet you are a real piece of work to have in > class, and that it is all the more rewarding -- for both students and > professors -- because of your presence there. > > keep pushing it, doll. :) > > *muffy* > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sat Apr 21 22:00:56 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 18:00:56 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: ><< Auden once remarked that he could read the poetry of Marianne Moore > in any mood. More proof, hard though it may be to believe, that I and Auden are not the same: I cannot read Moore in any mood. I agree that Moore has a real lack of affect -- moreover, her work to me has the feeling of a catalogue -- everything is closed off under glass, pinned-down, etherized, scrutinized, _dissected_ nearly. You don't get that feeling at all from Bishop, whose fish, moose, bights, mountains, seascapes, continents, etc., seem to exist on their own, along with the human eye seeing them. Moore reminds me of a thousand-power magnification of an insect's eye -- fascinating, but ultimately strange. (I think she's rather fallen out of favor nowadays -- thought of as a Giant but not actually much read -- certainly she doesn't seem to be as popular as Bishop.) Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From JforJames at aol.com Sat Apr 21 22:05:56 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 22:05:56 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] June Jordan webcast Message-ID: Subj: webcast: June Jordan, April 23-24 Date: 4/12/01 1:05:04 PM Eastern Daylight Time From: wh at dept.english.upenn.edu (Writers House) Sender: owner-whwebcastpast at dept.english.upenn.edu To: jordanites at dept.english.upenn.edu "...the increasingly fearless child, who would grow up to become one of America's fiercest literary figures and social activists, is also the hope of an African-American generation..." --from a review of Jordan's new memoir, SOLDIER the Kelly Writers House Fellows program very proudly presents poet and activist J U N E J O R D A N via live webcast 10 AM Tuesday, April 24 a conversation with June Jordan moderated by Al Filreis This program will be webcast live; to participate via web audiocast, write to << wh at english.upenn.edu >>. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kelly Writers House 3805 Locust Walk 215 573-WRIT www.english.upenn.edu/~wh The Kelly Writers House Fellows program is made possible by a generous grant from Paul Kelly. For more information about the spring 2000 Fellows program, see << www.english.upenn.edu/~whfellow >>. | Writers House Fellows 2001 | ------------------------------- | Tony Kushner Feb 12-13 | David Sedaris Mar 5-6 | June Jordan April 23-24 JUNE JORDAN is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also directs the POETRY FOR THE PEOPLE program, which she founded. She has published many volumes of poetry and political essays, including CIVIL WARS, TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, NAMING OUR DESTINY (her selected poems), HARUKO/LOVE POETRY, and KISSING GOD GOOD-BYE. In her book of political essays, AFFIRMATIVE ACTS, she writes with lyric power, often in anger or disconsolateness (or both), of the dismantling of affirmative action, on real as opposed to imagined cultural pluralism, on bisexuality - ruminating on the combustible intersections of race, class, sexual choice, and injustice, reflecting on the palpable hatred that infuses American society, speaking out against worldwide suffering. Her essay and poems present the "intimate face of universal struggle," in her phrase. Her recently published memoir, SOLDIER, lovingly and angrily depicts her brutal father, a West Indian elevator operator who wanted his only child to be extraordinarily successful--to attain the dignity and power allowed only to white men at the time. To advance this ambition, he repeatedly challenged the young June physically, psychologically, and intellectually. The memoir ends as June is 12, offered admission, and a full scholarship, to the prestigious (all-white) Northfield Academy. "I knew if I said, 'No, thank you,' my father would kill me... And I wondered if I was about to become a first." In SOLDIER we encounter the making of the lyricism and the musicality, as well as the strength and outrage, that characterizes the poet whose widely discussed, widely anthologized poems we have come to know. ---------------------------- The Kelly Writers House wh at dept.english.upenn.edu 3805 Locust Walk 215-573-WRIT Philadelphia, PA 19104 http://www.english.upenn.edu/~wh From JforJames at aol.com Sat Apr 21 22:20:09 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 22:20:09 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Dark Poetry Message-ID: <72.9deb5aa.281399d9@aol.com> From: jesse glass Subject: Dark Poetry Project The Dark Poetry Project?Please Spread The Word (Apologies for Cross-Posting) Attention Goth, Surreal, Occult, Horror, Extreme, Absurd, Bizarre & Experimental Poets. A major print anthology is in the works to present the best of the midnight explosion!!!! Send 3-5 typed poems on A4 paper with a short (~200 word) biographical statement before Dec. 31st, 2001 to: Jesse Glass /D.P.P. Meikai University 8 Akemi Urayasu Chiba 279-8550 Japan. Include your e-mail address. No manuscripts will be returned, so keep copies. You may also submit via e-mail to DO NOT SEND FILES! APPENDED FILES WILL NOT BE READ. Do not send links. Paste your submission into the body of an e-mail. Put "d.p.p. submission" and your name in the heading. IF WE LIKE WHAT YOU SEND WE WILL CONTACT YOU. No correspondence will be entered into regarding your poetry. No queries will be answered.. If you haven?t heard from us within three months after the final deadline, assume that you won?t. What we are looking for: Anything that excites us. Things to avoid: The trite and the sentimental. Archaic language, and the self-consciously "poetic" (Thee, thou, thine, mine, ye, alas, Oh!, Alack! Alas!). Inverted syntax. Rhyming, unless it?s done well. Political propaganda. Harlequin romance. Song lyrics. Suicide notes. Kiddie Porn. Weltschmerz. Haiku. Poetics We Recognize: Modern & Post-Modern forms: i.e. Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Mina Loy & after. Guiding Stars of The Dark Poetry Project (If you haven?t read ?em, do!): Heraclitus, Yunmen, Dee & Kelly, de Sade, Potocki, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Kleist, Nerval, Melville, Walt Whitman ("The Sleepers"), Emily Dickinson, Nietzsche, Jarry, The Dadaists, The Surrealists, The Absurdists, Artaud, Michaux, Maria Sabina, Helen Adam, William Burroughs, Jack Spicer, Kathy Acker and other kick-ass writers & thinkers from many times and many lands. Memorable Quote: "If your darkness does not come from within, it had better not come at all." ?Clapperclaw 8/12/200. About Jesse Glass. How to order his books. http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html From JforJames at aol.com Sat Apr 21 22:24:30 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 22:24:30 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry program Message-ID: <20.154c304c.28139ade@aol.com> Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 06:28:48 -0700 From: Ram Devineni Subject: Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry program Hello Everyone: I would like to thank everyone involved for doing such a remarkable job putting together this global event. Over 200 readings occurred to create dialogue among civilizations through poetry. Including a major reading at the United Nations in New York City and a literary conference. I have uploaded photos from the readings around the world and the events in New York City on http://www.dialoguepoetry.org In addition, photos from the West Philippines Sea and a video clip from Antarctica have been added. The photos from Mt. Everest will arrive June. When visiting the site, you may need to click REFRESH or RELOAD on your browser to see the new site. On behalf of Mr. Giandomenico Picco and the United Nations, I would like to congratulate everyone on this major achievement. But, the work is not done. (1) Continue to send poems for the anthology to poems at dialoguepoetry.org . Remember, we will only publish poems from readings that have occurred. Please read guidelines on our website. (2) Please send exchange ads to poems at dialoguepoetry.org as jpg or gif files. If you need to mail them, then send to c/o Ram Devineni, Rattapallax Press, 532 La Guardia Place, Suite 353, New York, NY 10012 USA (3)Please send photos and news clippings of your readings to devineni at dialoguepoetry.org or larry at lgjaffe.com This week I will be sending additional emails on other global projects we will be working on and look forward to working with everyone in the future. Again, my thanks. Cheers, Ram Devineni Program Coordinator Publisher, Rattapallax Press From jdavis at panix.com Sat Apr 21 23:11:17 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 23:11:17 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Try "Marriage" or "Bowls." J on 4/21/01 10:00 PM, Moira Russell at moira_russell at hotmail.com wrote: > >> << Auden once remarked that he could read the poetry of Marianne Moore >> in any mood. > > More proof, hard though it may be to believe, that I and Auden are not the > same: I cannot read Moore in any mood. I agree that Moore has a real lack > of affect -- moreover, her work to me has the feeling of a catalogue -- From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sat Apr 21 23:36:09 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 19:36:09 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Witter Bynner Message-ID: I went to St. John's College, and on that alumni list we were recently discussing whether or not Witter Bynner is, in fact, buried with his lover (in ash or human form we are uncertain) under a bronze statue of a dog in the garden behind the President's house, where the parents of graduating students are regularly invited for cocktail parties (apparently Bynner and Co are not under the lawn, but safely tucked away in a secluded corner). Does anyone have any information on Bynner? Is this true? Is there a decent biography? With apologies for crossposting, here is what I sent to my alumni list (the Agresto mentioned was recently the college President, famous, or infamous, for his reluctance to give same-sex partners of teachers benefits): "Now the big question is: does Agresto know what is buried in the garden? And how, and from whom, did they get permission? Isn't it illegal to have a body in a private spot? Is it them, or just their ashes? For Heavensakes, is there a biography of Bynner around? "I'd heard of Bynner mainly through 1) his house (I believe some student one year crashed through the guardrails into it, and everyone was relieved the house wasn't damaged) 2) "Spectra" because I was interested in Imagist poetry 3) the Bynner foundation which gives money to poets but to which, alas, you cannot apply; you must be selected. FWIW I think he was interested in Eastern poetry and translating it in new ways before Pound was, but I wouldn't swear to it. It is funny to find him popping up in literary biographies here and there -- usually in the form of "X went Southwest for the winter, visited Santa Fe and stayed with Witter Bynner" -- one gets the impression he and Mabel Dodge Luhan were the extent of the Literary Scene in NM for a couple of decades. Or at least good for some squares some lit-crit talk and a flop." Moira Russell Seattle, WA SJC alum _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sat Apr 21 23:46:22 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 19:46:22 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Longing for E-mail Message-ID: Jordan Davis wrote: >Try "Marriage" or "Bowls." J I don't understand why you recommend "Marriage" at least as an antidote to Moore's supposed lack of feeling, as it is for one thing a nearly impenetrable collage of quotations, with marriage likened to such things as The blue panther with black eyes, the basalt panther with blue eyes, entirely graceful? one must give them the path? the black obsidian Diana who 'darkeneth her countenance as a bear doth.' And the opening lines seem those of someone absolutely determined to steer away from human contact, seeing marriage entirely as some kind of social trap, a public farce made of a private promise. "Bowls" also seems to hold people at a distance. I don't mean to seem contentious but I don't see why you recommended these poems. Perhaps if you said something about why _you_ like them or why you think I could be mistaken about them, rather than simply citing them, it would be clearer. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Sun Apr 22 00:37:13 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 00:37:13 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" Message-ID: Gah! This is just my interpretation of a situation, and I make no claim about my judgement of human interaction. What I was trying to get across was a more subtle point in my message, but when I get subtle, I go on for four pages. It's very rare that a teacher would just say, "Hey, you're stew-pid," but the pressure is there, at least for me, it must come from somewhere. I don't think I made it all up. I just think that there are things that I am expected to like before I read them. The "You haven't read M? You didn't like Q?" cocktail party talk people begin to cultivate in college. It's not explicit but implied. I could be wrong. Has happened before. I don't know. Is this making any sense? (Last week of classes.) -Amber -----Original Message----- From: OTIS RICHARDS To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/21/01 8:53 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" I certainly agree that it would be wonderful to have Amber as a student, but I'm still not sure I agree with her on this point. I don't think that anyone _should_ like anything, well-made or not. I think one would be just as wrong to insist that a student like something carelessly made, like Whitman, or clumsily made, like Dreiser or Kerouac or Sexton or Corso. And I'd guess if you backed those same professors up against the wall, that the one who liked the well-made poem by Dryden might very well not like the well-made poem by Lowell. I have a problem with any professor who tells you you're stupid, for whatever reason. But does this really happen a lot? Do most professors insist that you like something, well-made or otherwise, just because they tell you to? I think it's probably a good idea to require students to _recognize_ what's well made -- that is, to have a definable and defensible set of standards. But since there is no one definition of what's well-made, you'd really have to encourage a student to think for herself before you could expect that. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2001 2:50 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > In a message dated 4/20/2001 8:26:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time, > aprentiss at agnesscott.edu writes: > > << I doubt people don't like it because it's well-made. What I'm trying to > talk > about is the assumption of well-made => good => you should like it. They > would probably have more a problem with a professor putting carelessly made > work in front of them, whatever the hell carelessly-made and well-made mean, > and I think badly-made ought to substitute for carelessly-made. Hard, > careful work in poetry does not guarantee great results. I suppose that > works that tend to be part of the canon are usually considered to be > well-made. I believe I mutated 'well-made' from Moira's conversation earlier > in the thread (excerpted at the end). > > I am not saying that a prof ought to dish any old crap out, and I am not > saying that well-made works bore people because they are well-made. I am > saying that they are not perfectly made, since nothing ever is, and that a > student ought not feel intimidated because he doesn't like them. As a > student, it feels as if I'm requested to overlook an esteemed author's > faults for technical brilliance and /like/ a dang work, no matter how it > might offend me or, worse still, not move me at all. It's as if I am > supposed to put aside my preferences as a reader in order to appreciate > something. That seems a bit silly and unrealistic to me. I'll put my biases > aside when I want to and not because someone thinks I ought to. > > > -Amber >> > > > dearest amber -- > > i have failed to do so thus far, so please allow me to tell you now how much > i consistently enjoy your queries and observations. your absolutely genuine > desire to get to the heart of a matter is frequently provocative, and always > refreshing and interesting. i bet you are a real piece of work to have in > class, and that it is all the more rewarding -- for both students and > professors -- because of your presence there. > > keep pushing it, doll. :) > > *muffy* > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From rloden at concentric.net Sun Apr 22 09:00:58 2001 From: rloden at concentric.net (Rachel Loden) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 06:00:58 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] lack of affect? References: Message-ID: <3AE2D60A.AD6E8B02@concentric.net> Moira, does this help at all re: Miss Moore as zombie? "So he who strongly feels, / behaves . . ." It's true she hails from another century, but coldness? That's not what I hear. Rachel L. What Are Years? What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe. And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt,-- dumbly calling, deafly listening--that in misfortune, even death, encourages others and in its defeat, stirs the soul to be strong? He sees deep and is glad, who accedes to mortality and in his imprisonment rises upon himself as the sea in a chasm, struggling to be free and unable to be, in its surrendering finds its continuing. So he who strongly feels, behaves. The very bird, grown taller as he sings, steels his form straight up. Though he is captive, his mighty singing says, satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy. This is mortality, this is eternity. --Marianne Moore -- Rachel Loden http://www.thepomegranate.com/loden/hotel.html email: rloden at concentric.net From tadrichards at prodigy.net Sun Apr 22 11:51:33 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 11:51:33 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] "see something new" References: Message-ID: <000901c0cb44$1c0247a0$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Amber - I certainly felt that when I first arrived in college, but more from other students than professors. I felt like the biggest dolt on campus. At a certain point, you just have to ignore it. You've managed to gain the respect of a fair number of poets and college professors here, so I wouldn't worry about the ones who are trying to get their kicks by proving that they've read more than an undergraduate. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amber Prentiss" To: Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2001 12:37 AM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > Gah! This is just my interpretation of a situation, and I make no claim > about my judgement of human interaction. What I was trying to get across was > a more subtle point in my message, but when I get subtle, I go on for four > pages. It's very rare that a teacher would just say, "Hey, you're stew-pid," > but the pressure is there, at least for me, it must come from somewhere. I > don't think I made it all up. I just think that there are things that I am > expected to like before I read them. The "You haven't read M? You didn't > like Q?" cocktail party talk people begin to cultivate in college. It's not > explicit but implied. I could be wrong. Has happened before. I don't know. > Is this making any sense? (Last week of classes.) > -Amber > > -----Original Message----- > From: OTIS RICHARDS > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Sent: 4/21/01 8:53 PM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > > I certainly agree that it would be wonderful to have Amber as a student, > but > I'm still not sure I agree with her on this point. I don't think that > anyone > _should_ like anything, well-made or not. I think one would be just as > wrong > to insist that a student like something carelessly made, like Whitman, > or > clumsily made, like Dreiser or Kerouac or Sexton or Corso. And I'd guess > if > you backed those same professors up against the wall, that the one who > liked > the well-made poem by Dryden might very well not like the well-made poem > by > Lowell. > > I have a problem with any professor who tells you you're stupid, for > whatever reason. > > But does this really happen a lot? Do most professors insist that you > like > something, well-made or otherwise, just because they tell you to? > > I think it's probably a good idea to require students to _recognize_ > what's > well made -- that is, to have a definable and defensible set of > standards. > But since there is no one definition of what's well-made, you'd really > have > to encourage a student to think for herself before you could expect > that. > > > > > Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." > The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet > of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 > http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2001 2:50 AM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] "see something new" > > > > In a message dated 4/20/2001 8:26:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time, > > aprentiss at agnesscott.edu writes: > > > > << I doubt people don't like it because it's well-made. What I'm > trying to > > talk > > about is the assumption of well-made => good => you should like it. > They > > would probably have more a problem with a professor putting > carelessly > made > > work in front of them, whatever the hell carelessly-made and > well-made > mean, > > and I think badly-made ought to substitute for carelessly-made. Hard, > > careful work in poetry does not guarantee great results. I suppose > that > > works that tend to be part of the canon are usually considered to be > > well-made. I believe I mutated 'well-made' from Moira's conversation > earlier > > in the thread (excerpted at the end). > > > > I am not saying that a prof ought to dish any old crap out, and I am > not > > saying that well-made works bore people because they are well-made. I > am > > saying that they are not perfectly made, since nothing ever is, and > that > a > > student ought not feel intimidated because he doesn't like them. As a > > student, it feels as if I'm requested to overlook an esteemed > author's > > faults for technical brilliance and /like/ a dang work, no matter how > it > > might offend me or, worse still, not move me at all. It's as if I am > > supposed to put aside my preferences as a reader in order to > appreciate > > something. That seems a bit silly and unrealistic to me. I'll put my > biases > > aside when I want to and not because someone thinks I ought to. > > > > > > -Amber >> > > > > > > dearest amber -- > > > > i have failed to do so thus far, so please allow me to tell you now > how > much > > i consistently enjoy your queries and observations. your absolutely > genuine > > desire to get to the heart of a matter is frequently provocative, and > always > > refreshing and interesting. i bet you are a real piece of work to have > in > > class, and that it is all the more rewarding -- for both students and > > professors -- because of your presence there. > > > > keep pushing it, doll. :) > > > > *muffy* > > _______________________________________________ > > New-Poetry mailing list > > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From JforJames at aol.com Sun Apr 22 22:19:44 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 22:19:44 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] PARATAXIS Message-ID: <47.a48f76c.2814eb40@aol.com> Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 15:37:26 +0100 From: Chris Hamilton-Emery Subject: NEW PARATAXIS PLEASE FORWARD TO ALL INTERESTED PARTIES Press release: (with apologies for any cross-postings!) PARATAXIS EDITIONS is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of a new issue of the occasional journal PARATAXIS: MODERNISM AND MODERN WRITING, edited by Drew Milne Issue number 10, pp. 108 (2001), will include: New poems by: Andrea Brady, Clark Coolidge, Stacy Doris, Chris Emery, Ian Hunt, Ethel Malley, Peter Middleton, Dell Olsen, Keston Sutherland, John Tranter, and John Wilkinson, And new critical essays: Peter Nicholls, 'The Swinburne Nexus' Peter Middleton, 'Charles Olson: A Short History' Drew Milne, 'Speculative assertions: reading J.H.Prynne's POEMS' Will Montgomery, 'Dark here in the driftings: the sacred in the poetry of Susan Howe' Rod Mengham, 'Reading Jennifer Moxley' The journal will appear at the end of April to coincide with this year's Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry (for further details see http://www.cccp.fsnet.co.uk/). Copies of the journal are available at a price of ?5.00 including postage and packing by writing, with a cheque made payable to 'Drew Milne' at the following addres: Drew Milne, Trinity Hall, Trinity Lane, Cambridge CB2 ITJ. For orders from outside the UK, please send a money order in sterling for ?7.50 (to cover additional cost of international postage and bank charges) made payable to 'Drew Milne'. 'Parataxis Editions' and the journal 'Parataxis: modernism and modern writing' is a non-profit making venture, ie. subsidised out of the editor's pocket! All subscriptions and donations help to keep the venture afloat. For information on earlier issues of PARATAXIS EDITIONS: see http://drewmilne.tripod.com From JforJames at aol.com Sun Apr 22 22:24:20 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 22:24:20 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] June Jordan Message-ID: <48.14b6bec3.2814ec54@aol.com> A Poem by June Jordan from KISSING GOD GOODBYE : POEMS, 1991-1997 October Snowpea Poem So as the sun declines below Detroit (the lake a cool assurance of alternatives to hard dark high-rise miscellaneous) the colors of the end of light relax along the horizontal edge of this blue place with burnt sienna rose and oranges that soften into regular domestic tragedies of night without a lover's willing face to stop the desperation of the chase for daytime stars that glint and blur and mix and lift like mica sprinkling on a concrete hieroglyph of altered space where by himself a young black man sits still for no good reason so do I turn to memorize the soft excitement of the homestretch of your lips and close to the hypnosis of your almost closing eyes I spin to the surprise of no pain/no pain whatsoever Copyright (c) 1997 by June Jordan +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ For more June Jordan: http://www.knopfpoetry.com +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ You can sign up for Random House's new monthly African American e-newsletter which will feature excerpts and original content from today's foremost African-American authors. Get the advanced word on the newest work from writers like Colson Whitehead, E. Lynn Harris, Cornel West, Chinua Achebe, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston. Send a blank email to af-am at randomhouse.com to join. From JforJames at aol.com Sun Apr 22 22:37:49 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 22:37:49 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] lack of affect? Message-ID: In a message dated 4/22/01 9:04:19 AM Eastern Daylight Time, rloden at concentric.net writes: << but coldness? That's not what I hear. Rachel L. Rachel, saying Moore "lacked affect" was not a particularly wellthoughtout assertion. Still I'm not sure this poem proves it wrong. Somewhat intellectual & broadbrush in its approach... Finnegan What Are Years? What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe. And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt,-- dumbly calling, deafly listening--that in misfortune, even death, encourages others and in its defeat, stirs the soul to be strong? He sees deep and is glad, who accedes to mortality and in his imprisonment rises upon himself as the sea in a chasm, struggling to be free and unable to be, in its surrendering finds its continuing. So he who strongly feels, behaves. The very bird, grown taller as he sings, steels his form straight up. Though he is captive, his mighty singing says, satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy. This is mortality, this is eternity. --Marianne Moore >> From rloden at concentric.net Mon Apr 23 08:30:25 2001 From: rloden at concentric.net (Rachel Loden) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 05:30:25 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] lack of affect? References: Message-ID: <3AE42061.95217565@concentric.net> Hi Jim, I'm puzzled at the implication that a poem can't be both intellectual and passionate. To my mind, this one bristles with feeling, esp. in the second and third stanzas. Re: "broadbrush," wasn't the knock on Moore over the last few days to do with her supposed obsession with tiny curiosities? So it seems she can't win. Rachel L. JforJames at aol.com wrote: > Rachel, saying Moore "lacked affect" was not a particularly > wellthoughtout assertion. Still I'm not sure this poem proves it > wrong. Somewhat intellectual & broadbrush in its approach... > Finnegan > > > What Are Years? > > What is our innocence, > what is our guilt? All are > naked, none is safe. And whence > is courage: the unanswered question, > the resolute doubt,-- > dumbly calling, deafly listening--that > in misfortune, even death, > encourages others > and in its defeat, stirs > > the soul to be strong? He > sees deep and is glad, who > accedes to mortality > and in his imprisonment rises > upon himself as > the sea in a chasm, struggling to be > free and unable to be, > in its surrendering > finds its continuing. > > So he who strongly feels, > behaves. The very bird, > grown taller as he sings, steels > his form straight up. Though he is captive, > his mighty singing > says, satisfaction is a lowly > thing, how pure a thing is joy. > This is mortality, > this is eternity. > > > --Marianne Moore >> > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry -- Rachel Loden http://www.thepomegranate.com/loden/hotel.html email: rloden at concentric.net From gmcvay at patriot.net Mon Apr 23 09:12:45 2001 From: gmcvay at patriot.net (Gwyn McVay) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 09:12:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] June Jordan In-Reply-To: <48.14b6bec3.2814ec54@aol.com> Message-ID: Am I nuts to see WCW influence? (not only formally, but in the eros of the urban)--Gwyn On Sun, 22 Apr 2001 JforJames at aol.com wrote: > A Poem by June Jordan from KISSING GOD GOODBYE : POEMS, 1991-1997 > > October Snowpea Poem > > So as the sun declines below Detroit > (the lake a cool > assurance of alternatives to hard > dark high-rise > miscellaneous) > the colors of the end of light > relax along the horizontal edge of this > blue place > with burnt sienna > rose and oranges > that soften into regular > domestic tragedies > of night > without a lover's willing > face > to stop the desperation of the chase > for daytime stars > that glint and blur and mix and lift > like mica sprinkling > on a concrete hieroglyph of altered space > where > by himself > a young black man > sits > still > > for no good reason > > so do I turn to memorize > the soft excitement of the homestretch of your lips > and close to the hypnosis > of your almost closing eyes > I spin to the surprise > of no pain/no pain > whatsoever > > > > Copyright (c) 1997 by June Jordan > > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > > For more June Jordan: http://www.knopfpoetry.com > > > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > You can sign up for Random House's new monthly African American e-newsletter > which will feature excerpts and original content from today's foremost > African-American authors. Get the advanced word on the newest work from > writers like Colson Whitehead, E. Lynn Harris, Cornel West, Chinua Achebe, > Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston. Send a blank email to > af-am at randomhouse.com to join. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 23 23:32:29 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 22:32:29 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Swenson Message-ID: Well, actually, this is mainly a test message, to see if my subscription is working again, or if the server is still down. But, for your trouble, here's a poem by May Swenson: That the Soul May Wax Plump May Swenson "He who has reached the highest degree of emptiness will be secure in repose." --A Taoist saying My dumpy little mother on the undertaker's slab had a mannequin's grace. From chin to foot the sheet outlined her, thin and tall. Her face uptilted, bloodless, smooth, had a long smile. Her head rested on a block under her nape, her neck was long, her hair waved, upswept. But later, at "the viewing," sunk in the casket in pink tulle, an expensive present that might spoil, dressed in Eden's green apron, organdy bonnet on, she shrank, grew short again, and yellow. Who put the gold-rimmed glasses on her shut face, who laid her left hand with the wedding ring on her stomach that really didn't seem to be there under the fake lace? Mother's work before she died was self-purification, a regimen of near starvation, to be worthy to go to Our Father, Whom she confused (or, more aptly, fused) with our father, in Heaven long since. She believed in evacuation, an often and fierce purgation, meant to teach the body to be hollow, that the soul may wax plump. At the moment of her death, the wind rushed out from all her pipes at once. Throat and rectum sang together, a galvanic spasm, hiss of ecstasy. Then, a flat collapse. Legs and arms flung wide, like that female Spanish saint slung by the ankles to a cross, her mouth stayed open in a dark O. So, her vigorous soul whizzed free. On the undertaker's slab, she lay youthful, cool, triumphant, with a long smile. From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 23 23:55:12 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 20:55:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Swenson Message-ID: <20010424035512.6768D36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Tue Apr 24 00:01:27 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 00:01:27 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Luck! Message-ID: Those of you who are in or subjecting others to school in this beautiful end of spring term- luck to you. May you turn everything in reasonably on time and/or not burn your stack of grading. May you not succumb to the demons in your head (or spring fever) and frolic naked on the quad. May you not berate various administrators for thinking anything as kooky as a spring term was a good idea. May you take a very long nap when this is all over. -Amber (Sleep? Sleep?) From maxpaul at sfsu.edu Tue Apr 24 00:50:03 2001 From: maxpaul at sfsu.edu (MAXINE CHERNOFF) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 21:50:03 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 12:05:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Mail Delivery Subsystem To: maxpaul at sfsu.edu Subject: Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours ********************************************** ** THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY ** ** YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE ** ********************************************** The original message was received at Mon, 23 Apr 2001 07:59:56 -0700 (PDT) from maxpaul at localhost ----- The following addresses had transient non-fatal errors ----- ----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... Deferred: Connection timed out with wiz.cath.vt.edu. Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours Will keep trying until message is 1 day old -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: MAXINE CHERNOFF Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] lack of affect? Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 07:59:56 -0700 (PDT) Size: 3148 URL: From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 24 01:53:27 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 01:53:27 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Luck! Message-ID: <3b.13b0df6a.28166ed7@cs.com> In a message dated 4/23/01 10:59:20 PM Central Daylight Time, aprentiss at agnesscott.edu writes: > > Those of you who are in or subjecting others to school in this beautiful > end of spring term- luck to you. May you turn everything in reasonably > on time and/or not burn your stack of grading. May you not succumb to > the demons in your head (or spring fever) and frolic naked on the quad. > May you not berate various administrators for thinking anything as kooky > as a spring term was a good idea. May you take a very long nap when this > is all over. > > -Amber (Sleep? Sleep?) My method of making the last week of class easy for my students is to leave town. I promised them that I'd answer all email queries about their research papers. From JforJames at aol.com Tue Apr 24 08:56:32 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 08:56:32 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] lack of affect? Message-ID: <9e.135d8a4f.2816d200@aol.com> This got bounced yesterday due to server woes... > I'm puzzled at the implication that a poem can't be both > intellectual and passionate. To my mind, this one bristles with feeling, > esp. in the second and third stanzas. > > Re: "broadbrush," wasn't the knock on Moore over the last few days to do > with her supposed obsession with tiny curiosities? So it seems she can't > win. Rachel, I don't want to sound overcritical of Moore's poetry....I'm an admirer of her work. By broadbrush, I was referring to the plethora of broadly conceptual words she's deployed in the poem: innocence, guilt, courage, misfortune, etc; and her few "hard images" are uncharacteristically soft focus: "as / the sea in a chasm..." & "The very bird / grown taller as he sings..." To me this poem reads more like the working out of an idea...more intellection than inflection of sentiment. I do believe that the best poems always involve _both_ emotional force and intellectual flourish. In general, I find Moore relies more on the latter element. Then again, so does Stevens, though he tilts more toward pure poetry at times which is his almost successful resisting of intelligence. Finnegan PS: Rereading this poem it occurred to me CP Cavafy's The God Forsakes Antony deals with similar subject matter. > What Are Years? > > What is our innocence, > what is our guilt? All are > naked, none is safe. And whence > is courage: the unanswered question, > the resolute doubt,-- > dumbly calling, deafly listening--that > in misfortune, even death, > encourages others > and in its defeat, stirs > > the soul to be strong? He > sees deep and is glad, who > accedes to mortality > and in his imprisonment rises > upon himself as > the sea in a chasm, struggling to be > free and unable to be, > in its surrendering > finds its continuing. > > So he who strongly feels, > behaves. The very bird, > grown taller as he sings, steels > his form straight up. Though he is captive, > his mighty singing > says, satisfaction is a lowly > thing, how pure a thing is joy. > This is mortality, > this is eternity. > > > --Marianne Moore >> From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Tue Apr 24 09:12:42 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 09:12:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Moore please In-Reply-To: from "MAXINE CHERNOFF" at Apr 23, 2001 09:50:03 pm Message-ID: <200104241312.JAA03561@dept.english.upenn.edu> According to MAXINE CHERNOFF: > > Just back fron AWP, where affect is the thing, emotional outpourings a la > Oprah show, re/every personal trouble from bedwetting and beyond, all in > the high-voiced lamentation style, as if, with the world in ruin, the US > the most privileged enclave on earth, and the marvelous complexity of > consciousness discussed for more than a century, the poor little self and > how it grew up to be a poet is the only topic of interest. Give me > Marianne Moore and her celebration of the world outside of her any day. > > Maxine Chernoff I couldn't agree more w/ you Maxine! I can't say "What Are Years" is a favorite, it seems like somewhat of a miss, and perhaps this is all Finnegan was saying? (tho he seemed also to suggest that it's chief flaw was also Moore's more *general* flaw?) But, hey, I'll stack The Jerboa, New York, Those Various Scalpels, The Labors of Hercules, The Steeplejack, and many others up against anything/anybody's poetry! precisely for what you said: as Emerson put it in "Experience": "The world is all outside. It has no inside." Tell that to my creative writing students! Sheesh. -m. From DICK at watson.ibm.com Tue Apr 24 09:42:49 2001 From: DICK at watson.ibm.com (DICK at watson.ibm.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 01 09:42:49 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] feeling vs (?) intellect Message-ID: <200104241357.JAA18876@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Maxine Chernoff wrote: >> >>Just back fron AWP, where affect is the thing, emotional outpourings a la >>Oprah show, re/every personal trouble from bedwetting and beyond, all in >>the high-voiced lamentation style, as if, with the world in ruin, the US >>the most privileged enclave on earth, and the marvelous complexity of >>consciousness discussed for more than a century, the poor little self and >>how it grew up to be a poet is the only topic of interest. Give me >>Marianne Moore and her celebration of the world outside of her any day. >> >>Maxine Chernoff >> Three cheers!! and three more! The kilter is way out when intellection has somehow come to be perceived to be in contrast to humanity. Emotional kicks come when they come - different strokes, etc. Chess players and bridge players can be ecstatic over the (logical) beauty of a particular game. Computer programmers (trust me) can know delight at the solving of a logical puzzle, or the elegance of a logical structure. Similarly for Marianne Moore's intricate weavings of abstract language. Richard From wasanthony at yahoo.com Tue Apr 24 10:05:54 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 07:05:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] feeling vs (?) intellect In-Reply-To: <200104241357.JAA18876@sp1n189at0.watson.ibm.com> Message-ID: <20010424140554.98048.qmail@web12106.mail.yahoo.com> --- DICK at watson.ibm.com wrote: > Maxine Chernoff wrote: > >> > >>Just back fron AWP, where affect is the thing, emotional > outpourings a la > >>Oprah show, re/every personal trouble from bedwetting and beyond, > all in > >>the high-voiced lamentation style, as if, with the world in ruin, > the US > >>the most privileged enclave on earth, and the marvelous complexity > of > >>consciousness discussed for more than a century, the poor little > self and > >>how it grew up to be a poet is the only topic of interest. Give me > >>Marianne Moore and her celebration of the world outside of her any > day. > >> > >>Maxine Chernoff > >> Missed this due to the server problems, so I'm piggy-backing. Anyway, I'm also just back from AWP and it sounds like I went to a different conference. I suppose that's because I attended only two readings and four panels, and thus spared myself the poetry angst Maxine is describing. Mostly, I hung out with friends and the only pissing and moaning came from the palms whose fronds were thrashed by incessant wind. I even missed the three-point-something earthquake. I wonder, though, if Maxine is referring to the father/daughter poetry reading, which I did attend. - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From tadrichards at prodigy.net Tue Apr 24 10:23:57 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 10:23:57 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] feeling vs (?) intellect References: <20010424140554.98048.qmail@web12106.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <002a01c0ccca$33883b00$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Bring Your Daughter to Work Day? Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "jcervantes" To: Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2001 10:05 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] feeling vs (?) intellect > > --- DICK at watson.ibm.com wrote: > > Maxine Chernoff wrote: > > >> > > >>Just back fron AWP, where affect is the thing, emotional > > outpourings a la > > >>Oprah show, re/every personal trouble from bedwetting and beyond, > > all in > > >>the high-voiced lamentation style, as if, with the world in ruin, > > the US > > >>the most privileged enclave on earth, and the marvelous complexity > > of > > >>consciousness discussed for more than a century, the poor little > > self and > > >>how it grew up to be a poet is the only topic of interest. Give me > > >>Marianne Moore and her celebration of the world outside of her any > > day. > > >> > > >>Maxine Chernoff > > >> > > Missed this due to the server problems, so I'm piggy-backing. Anyway, > I'm also just back from AWP and it sounds like I went to a different > conference. I suppose that's because I attended only two readings and > four panels, and thus spared myself the poetry angst Maxine is > describing. Mostly, I hung out with friends and the only pissing and > moaning came from the palms whose fronds were thrashed by incessant > wind. I even missed the three-point-something earthquake. > > I wonder, though, if Maxine is referring to the father/daughter poetry > reading, which I did attend. > > - Jim > > > ===== > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net > Salt River Review: > "Ripples" @ > Poetserv: > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices > http://auctions.yahoo.com/ > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From maxpaul at sfsu.edu Tue Apr 24 11:41:19 2001 From: maxpaul at sfsu.edu (MAXINE CHERNOFF) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 08:41:19 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 21:50:03 -0700 (PDT) From: MAXINE CHERNOFF Reply-To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Subject: [New-Poetry] Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 12:05:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Mail Delivery Subsystem To: maxpaul at sfsu.edu Subject: Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours ********************************************** ** THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY ** ** YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE ** ********************************************** The original message was received at Mon, 23 Apr 2001 07:59:56 -0700 (PDT) from maxpaul at localhost ----- The following addresses had transient non-fatal errors ----- ----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... Deferred: Connection timed out with wiz.cath.vt.edu. Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours Will keep trying until message is 1 day old -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: MAXINE CHERNOFF Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] lack of affect? Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 07:59:56 -0700 (PDT) Size: 3148 URL: From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 24 11:45:40 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 11:45:40 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP Message-ID: <7a.13ee3622.2816f9a4@cs.com> I missed Cervantes, Graham, and anyone else who's been on the list here except Annie Finch. I did see Maxine Chernoff and was amused by her comments--couldn't bear witness to the justice of them because I didn't attend any readings, only two panels. The book exhibit was impressive. I wonder if that wind Jim Cervantes found so unrelenting wasn't aided by the large amounts of hot air I heard being released around the drinking areas. This was my first AWP, and what I had also vowed would be my last, but I agreed to do a panel in New Orleans next year--some sacrifices have to be made, I suppose. From maxpaul at sfsu.edu Tue Apr 24 11:51:44 2001 From: maxpaul at sfsu.edu (MAXINE CHERNOFF) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 08:51:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] feeling vs (?) intellect In-Reply-To: <20010424140554.98048.qmail@web12106.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Referring to another event which will remain nameless. mc On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, jcervantes wrote: > > --- DICK at watson.ibm.com wrote: > > Maxine Chernoff wrote: > > >> > > >>Just back fron AWP, where affect is the thing, emotional > > outpourings a la > > >>Oprah show, re/every personal trouble from bedwetting and beyond, > > all in > > >>the high-voiced lamentation style, as if, with the world in ruin, > > the US > > >>the most privileged enclave on earth, and the marvelous complexity > > of > > >>consciousness discussed for more than a century, the poor little > > self and > > >>how it grew up to be a poet is the only topic of interest. Give me > > >>Marianne Moore and her celebration of the world outside of her any > > day. > > >> > > >>Maxine Chernoff > > >> > > Missed this due to the server problems, so I'm piggy-backing. Anyway, > I'm also just back from AWP and it sounds like I went to a different > conference. I suppose that's because I attended only two readings and > four panels, and thus spared myself the poetry angst Maxine is > describing. Mostly, I hung out with friends and the only pissing and > moaning came from the palms whose fronds were thrashed by incessant > wind. I even missed the three-point-something earthquake. > > I wonder, though, if Maxine is referring to the father/daughter poetry > reading, which I did attend. > > - Jim > > > ===== > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net > Salt River Review: > "Ripples" @ > Poetserv: > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices > http://auctions.yahoo.com/ > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From MillB at aol.com Tue Apr 24 13:41:26 2001 From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 13:41:26 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP Message-ID: Greetings: I thought AWP was a good conference this year. . . much more organized than Albany. . .I opened the tribute to John Rechy if anyone caught that reading. . .It was nice to see old friends, and I agree that the bookfair was good as well. . .Hard to believe that I attended my first AWP ten years ago in Miami! Would anyone like to comment about their favorite panels? readings? Cheers, Millicent From halvard at earthlink.net Tue Apr 24 13:48:53 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 13:48:53 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I haven't made it to an AWP conference since Washington, but New Orleans? Well, maybe. This weekend Lynda and I were visiting the kids in Baltimore and buying books along the way. In one (*The KGB Bar Book of Poems*, ed. David Lehman and Star Black) I found an amusing poem on--guess what?--AWP. Poets on Poets (notes from AWP) --I'm pretending not to see him so I can eat my lunch. --But who reads that shit? About as true to life as a velvet grape. --I think he judges poetry with his dick. And poets, too. --What's the scoop on her? Is that her husband, or is he just hanging out in her hotel room for the duration? --Personally I prefer not to think about his dick. --His latest work, especially the poems about his dead father, begins to sound human. --Think of it as a conductor's baton. --Granted, she wins *all* the prizes, but talk about grandiose. --The latest inductee into the goddess cult. Like back in the sixties when sex and war were the metaphors for consciousness-raising. --I bet they're really confessional, and she's a total pervert too. --He knows how to network, who to climb, and when. Timing is everything. --Insomnia, maybe chronic fatigue syndrom. I think it's just frayed nerves. --I always admired your work but can't figure out why it's been so marginalized. --You want my phone number? --The illusion of the narrative appears in your work, but there's really a thread of the unspoken narrative, right? --Are you married? Do you have children? --Never even answered my inquiries, the pompous bastard. --That's really sweet. Thank you. --I think I have a blind spot when it comes to his work. --Must be great to get away. --I don't know why they don't just fire the asshole. --Reminds me of a gilt frame with no picture inside. --She's eloquent enough, a nice cocktail poet. --Did you see what he was wearing? --She say it's none of my business what she writes. --Poetry is a private affair. A kind of masturbation. An endless self-portrait. --So what if he is another excellent specimen of the dead father poets. --Where are the dead mother poets? --I like the way you think. --Yet another vapid, beautiful wind-blown babe-poet for the cover of AWP. --Let's go out for a beer somewhere. --I sure wouldn't want to live in his skin. --A local dive would be nice. --The way I see it, you're better off not getting famous too soon. --I never even send out my work. --Nin Andrews Hal Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > -----Original Message----- > From: new-poetry-admin at wiz.cath.vt.edu > [mailto:new-poetry-admin at wiz.cath.vt.edu]On Behalf Of MillB at aol.com > Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2001 1:41 PM > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] AWP > > > Greetings: > > I thought AWP was a good conference this year. . . much more organized than > Albany. . .I opened the tribute to John Rechy if anyone caught that reading. > . .It was nice to see old friends, and I agree that the bookfair was good as > well. . .Hard to believe that I attended my first AWP ten years ago in Miami! > > Would anyone like to comment about their favorite panels? readings? > > Cheers, > > Millicent > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From wasanthony at yahoo.com Tue Apr 24 14:09:47 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 11:09:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP In-Reply-To: <7a.13ee3622.2816f9a4@cs.com> Message-ID: <20010424180947.89510.qmail@web12108.mail.yahoo.com> --- Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote: > I missed Cervantes, Graham, and anyone else who's been on the list > here > except Annie Finch. I did see Maxine Chernoff and was amused by her > comments--couldn't bear witness to the justice of them because I > didn't > attend any readings, only two panels. The book exhibit was > impressive. I > wonder if that wind Jim Cervantes found so unrelenting wasn't aided > by the > large amounts of hot air I heard being released around the drinking > areas. I was there by the pool, though immersed in reuinions most of the time. > This was my first AWP, and what I had also vowed would be my last, > but I > agreed to do a panel in New Orleans next year--some sacrifices have > to be > made, I suppose. My panel, which was cancelled because two members could not show up, was well attended, or so I hear - the cancellation sign was put up on the wrong side of the door! We will do it next year in N.O., and with an additional panelist, and will continue doing it until panelists outnumber AWP attendees. - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Tue Apr 24 14:30:49 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 14:30:49 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP Message-ID: In a message dated 4/24/01 1:10:43 PM Central Daylight Time, wasanthony at yahoo.com writes: > > My panel, which was canceled because two members could not show up, > was well attended, or so I hear - the cancellation sign was put up on > the wrong side of the door! We will do it next year in N.O., and with > an additional panelist, and will continue doing it until panelists > outnumber AWP attendees. > A truly postmodern experience--a canceled panel that was well attended. Minimalist. I heard a good panel on women translators of Greek tragedy--Kizer and Marilyn Nelson. Also a panel on anthologies with Michele Boisseau, David Mason, Michael Waters, and Dana Gioia. From JforJames at aol.com Tue Apr 24 21:27:59 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 21:27:59 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Swenson Message-ID: <11.13323256.2817821f@aol.com> A poem by Sharon Olds from BLOOD, TIN, STRAW The Elopement It was raining upwards, sideways, each tree bursting with rain like brilliant sweat. We stopped at a country store to ask where we could get married. There were vats of pickles, barrels of square yellow crackers, the Prop. gave us the local J. P.'s number. It was gently misting, in there, brine and cracker-salt. The J. P. asked if we'd get married in his church. While he called his minister I wandered, in the dark, store air, past the columns of vertebrate tin. The shelves, and floor, and counters were old wood, there must have been mice in the building, rats, a cat, roaches, beetles, and, in the barrel, whatever makes water pickle, the mother of vinegar, it was a spore Eden, a bestiary, the minister said Yes, come right on over, but maybe we had been married, there, by matter, by the pickles, by the crackers, by the balls of guard-fur, the rats looking away into the long reaches, like the cows in the manger, by the creche, though there's always one who widens her glowing eyes, and gazes--one rat, transfixed by mortal coupling grabbed the Dutch Girl cocoa tin in his arms and spun her in a dervish mazurka, then all the witnesses waltzed, the Campbell's-soup twins, the Gerber baby, Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, the Sun Maid raisin girl, the oats Quaker, the chef of Cream of Wheat, every good, mild, family guest danced at our marriage, cloudy ions in the cucumber-barrel spiraled, our eggs and sperm swam in tandem, in water- ballet, the spores of the sky whirled and kissed on our wedding day. Copyright (c) 1999 by Sharon Olds ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ More Sharon Olds at http://www.knopfpoetry.com From JforJames at aol.com Tue Apr 24 21:49:20 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 21:49:20 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Moore please Message-ID: << I couldn't agree more w/ you Maxine! I can't say "What Are Years" is a favorite, it seems like somewhat of a miss, and perhaps this is all Finnegan was saying? (tho he seemed also to suggest that it's chief flaw was also Moore's more *general* flaw?) But, hey, I'll stack The Jerboa, New York, Those Various Scalpels, The Labors of Hercules, The Steeplejack, and many others up against anything/anybody's poetry! precisely for what you said: as Emerson put it in "Experience": "The world is all outside. It has no inside." Tell that to my creative writing students! Sheesh. -m. >> I don't think anyone was disputing MM' s mastery. The point of contention was, among the Moderns/Late Moderns, whose poetry shows less evidence of emotion/affect than Moore? But since the topic has turned to obsessively ingrown personal poetry, who are the poets (at AWP or at large) making a career/rep on "bedwetting" poems? Emotional force, it goes without saying, is often evident in socio-political poetry. Hardly the stuff of lotus eaters and navel gazers. Finnegan From JforJames at aol.com Tue Apr 24 21:52:01 2001 From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 21:52:01 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Oops, caption should read "Olds Poem" Message-ID: <6a.d752c38.281787c1@aol.com> In a message dated 4/24/01 9:30:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time, JforJames at aol.com writes: << A poem by Sharon Olds from BLOOD, TIN, STRAW The Elopement It was raining upwards, sideways, each tree bursting with rain like brilliant sweat. We stopped at a country store to ask where we could get married. There were vats of pickles, barrels of square yellow crackers, the Prop. gave us the local J. P.'s number. It was gently misting, in there, brine and cracker-salt. The J. P. asked if we'd get married in his church. While he called his minister I wandered, in the dark, store air, past the columns of vertebrate tin. The shelves, and floor, and counters were old wood, there must have been mice in the building, rats, a cat, roaches, beetles, and, in the barrel, whatever makes water pickle, the mother of vinegar, it was a spore Eden, a bestiary, the minister said Yes, come right on over, but maybe we had been married, there, by matter, by the pickles, by the crackers, by the balls of guard-fur, the rats looking away into the long reaches, like the cows in the manger, by the creche, though there's always one who widens her glowing eyes, and gazes--one rat, transfixed by mortal coupling grabbed the Dutch Girl cocoa tin in his arms and spun her in a dervish mazurka, then all the witnesses waltzed, the Campbell's-soup twins, the Gerber baby, Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, the Sun Maid raisin girl, the oats Quaker, the chef of Cream of Wheat, every good, mild, family guest danced at our marriage, cloudy ions in the cucumber-barrel spiraled, our eggs and sperm swam in tandem, in water- ballet, the spores of the sky whirled and kissed on our wedding day. Copyright (c) 1999 by Sharon Olds ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ More Sharon Olds at http://www.knopfpoetry.com >> -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: JforJames at aol.com Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Swenson Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 21:27:59 EDT Size: 3818 URL: From mackechnie at email.msn.com Wed Apr 25 01:03:59 2001 From: mackechnie at email.msn.com (Russ MacKechnie) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 01:03:59 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Take My Pickle . . . Please In-Reply-To: <6a.d752c38.281787c1@aol.com> Message-ID: > << A poem by Sharon Olds from BLOOD, TIN, STRAW > > . . .cloudy ions in the > cucumber-barrel spiraled, our eggs and > sperm swam in tandem, in water- > ballet . . . . Busby Berkeley gametes gamboling in the pickle-barrel of love (earlier, "a spore Eden"). Spermatozoa as synchronized swimmers in cucumber brine. One part Woody Allen; one part Esther Williams; one part Bill Nye the Science Guy. Someone persuade me, please, that this poem drips with irony as well as pickle juice. And to think that some were faulting Logan's verbal thrashing of precisely this kind of mind-boggling metaphor-making. This is the remarkably awful stuff that should sweep the competition in Really Bad Poetry Contests but---mirabile dictu!---keeps Knopf coming back for more. Ka-ching. It's the only explanation. rwm From trbell at home.com Tue Apr 24 23:48:30 2001 From: trbell at home.com (trbell at home.com) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 22:48:30 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] feeling vs (?) intellect References: <20010424140554.98048.qmail@web12106.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <00fe01c0cd3a$980474c0$737c0218@ruthfd1.tn.home.com> the problem that I have with the type angst or Oprah show poetry you mention is not really one of feeling vs. intellect but that the feeling or intellect is an exhibition of the writer's. the reader or listener may as well not be there. i'm talking off the top of my head at the moment or from under my seat maybe, but as i rattle it occurs to me it's somewhat analagous to what i hear from patients all day. the only expression of feeling that matters to me is an expression that leads to change or arouse a feeling in me as a listener. rant maybe? i don't know tom bell ----- Original Message ----- From: "jcervantes" To: Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2001 9:05 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] feeling vs (?) intellect > > --- DICK at watson.ibm.com wrote: > > Maxine Chernoff wrote: > > >> > > >>Just back fron AWP, where affect is the thing, emotional > > outpourings a la > > >>Oprah show, re/every personal trouble from bedwetting and beyond, > > all in > > >>the high-voiced lamentation style, as if, with the world in ruin, > > the US > > >>the most privileged enclave on earth, and the marvelous complexity > > of > > >>consciousness discussed for more than a century, the poor little > > self and > > >>how it grew up to be a poet is the only topic of interest. Give me > > >>Marianne Moore and her celebration of the world outside of her any > > day. > > >> > > >>Maxine Chernoff > > >> > > Missed this due to the server problems, so I'm piggy-backing. Anyway, > I'm also just back from AWP and it sounds like I went to a different > conference. I suppose that's because I attended only two readings and > four panels, and thus spared myself the poetry angst Maxine is > describing. Mostly, I hung out with friends and the only pissing and > moaning came from the palms whose fronds were thrashed by incessant > wind. I even missed the three-point-something earthquake. > > I wonder, though, if Maxine is referring to the father/daughter poetry > reading, which I did attend. > > - Jim > > > ===== > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net > Salt River Review: > "Ripples" @ > Poetserv: > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices > http://auctions.yahoo.com/ > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Wed Apr 25 07:52:38 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 07:52:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Moore please In-Reply-To: from "Amber Prentiss" at Apr 24, 2001 11:22:25 pm Message-ID: <200104251152.HAA09507@dept.english.upenn.edu> According to Amber Prentiss: > > Why don't you tell them so? I have no idea what level you teach at, but > you're the teacher and even if everyone complains, you've got some autonomy. > They've consented to being taught. Just be nice about it and say, "You know, > you've got some great [whatever] here; I was wondering what might result if > you applied it to [the uni, Washington, some subject the poet seems > interested in]." If they like what turns out, maybe they'll icnorporate a > greater variety of subject matter. The worst they can do is ignore you. > -Amber > Amber, I do, I do, all the time (I teach at Wheaton College in MA)! My creative writing courses are reading-heavy, they're as much poetics courses as they are workshops - and that helps. Nonetheless, college is a self-indulgent world and the worshop is often a self-indulgent environment (!); add to that a more complicated issue, namely that many students, particularly ones who feel/are victimized/marginalized in one way or another, want to / need to "tell their stories" "describe themselves" in very normative ways: and they don't necessarily take very readily to Harryette Mullen's point that victimized/marginalized people have plenty of good reasons to trouble their own subjectivity, and that one can approach The Object, the Objective World in a poem without mirroring the process of colonialization, okay? One common experience in my classes, which I consider a valuable one, is the recognition, as they start to read each others work and maybe read some Confessional - Plath/Sexton and post-Plath Sexton, say - poems, that they are representing their personal travails (sometimes quite troubling sometimes utterly mundane or in between) in the most generic way imaginable - which is to say the stories they tell aren't really theirs after all. We recently ended up discussing Plath's "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" alongside June Jordan's "Poem About My Rights" and some sections of Mullen's MUSE & DRUDGE that deal, more obliquely, with violence, symbolic and otherwise, self-directed and otherwise, against women. How narcissitic and, more important perhaps, EASY Plath's poems seem by comparison. And that's something several students picked up on before I said a word. -m. From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Wed Apr 25 10:09:04 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 10:09:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - from Ben Friedlander Message-ID: <200104251409.KAA27440@dept.english.upenn.edu> Hi all, I'm forwarding this back-channel message to me from Ben Friedlander w/ Ben's permission. He makes some excellent points regarding my very rushed description of plath/jordan/mullen as it relates to what goes on in my class room - sometimes. I'm going to respond in a separate email. Until then, -m. According to Ben Friedlander: > > Mike, I probably agree with your taste in poetry and ideas about > poetics much more than I disagree, but I want to take issue with the > way you are framing the work you dislike, and suggest that your > presentation of that frame in the classroom as objective rather than > subjective is worth reflecting upon. > > Here are the passages I question: > > >many students [...] want to / need to "tell their stories" "describe > >themselves" in > >very normative ways > > What is the word "normative" really identifying here? A formal aspect > of the work, or a content? And how does this "normativity" relate to > other aspects of the work--its other flaws or possible virtues? > > Do you ever see such "normativity" in so-called "experimental" > writing--or do you think "experimental" writing is free from > "normativity" by definition? Or is it that some "norms" are more > acceptable to you than others? And is _that_ ever a topic of discussion > in the classroom? > > >One common experience in my classes > [...] is the recognition, as they start to read > >each others work and maybe read some Confessional - Plath/Sexton and > >post-Plath Sexton, say - poems, that they are representing their > >personal > >travails [...] in the most generic way imaginable - which is to say the > >stories they tell aren't really theirs after all. > > I can appreciate calling a poem generic because it isn't any good, but > when you talk about a major and powerful writer like Plath in the same > way (as if she were simply mouthing received ideas), I begin to sense a > failure of imagination on your part--a willful failure to be sure, > since I know you to be an EXTREMELY imaginative reader, and a careful > one to boot. > > Let me put this another way: If the modes of identification and > hyperbolic anger of Plath's "Daddy" are "generic," what makes a poem > that critiques such modes and such hyperbole (say, something by Bruce > Andrews) any less so? The "story" that Bruce Andrews tells belongs to > the genre called "critical theory"; Plath's belongs to some other > genre. What of it? > > >We recently ended up > >discussing Plath's "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" alongside June Jordan's > >"Poem About My Rights" and some sections of Mullen's MUSE & DRUDGE > >[...]. How narcissitic and, more > >important perhaps, EASY Plath's poems seem by comparison. > > Well, Plath was a narcissist, no question (it's nearly epidemic in the > trade: I wonder if you would make the same complaint in the same tone > of voice about David Antin, say, or Bernadette Mayer, two fine writers > of the "experimental" type who are easily as narcissistic as Plath!). I > don't agree at all, however, that Plath is "easy," especially if you > situate her work in the context of her life, her epoch, and in the > lives of her readers and _their_ various epochs. I teach _The Bell > Jar_, for instance, as a book that needs to be read through the frame > of three distinct decades (at least) in order to be fully appreciated: > the 1950s (the time of the narrative), the 1960s (when the novel was > written), and the 1970s (when it finally appeared under Plath's own > name and became a best seller). > > More to the point, however, I question the objectivity of a comparison > between two kinds of writing in which the students are brought to an > understanding of one as superior to the other. Why the emphasis on > comparative _judgment_, for example? And how would you feel if such a > comparison led students to an opposite conclusion: for instance, that > Robert Duncan is more "narcissistic" than Thom Gunn, or that Allen > Ginsberg's imagination of the world is much "easier" than Elizabeth > Bishop's? I suspect you would find the comparison unfair, or wrong, or > beside the point--which is how I see yours. Using Harryette Mullen to > disabuse your students of their interest in Plath hardly does any of > these writers (or your students) a favor. > > I've nothing against advocacy in class--I do it all the time--I just > question the blurring of the difference between advocacy and teaching, > and the use of teacherly authority to mystify the difference. > > Ben > From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Wed Apr 25 11:11:09 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 11:11:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben In-Reply-To: <200104251409.KAA27440@dept.english.upenn.edu> from "Michael Magee" at Apr 25, 2001 10:09:04 am Message-ID: <200104251511.LAA09359@dept.english.upenn.edu> Okay, this is me responding to Ben, hopefully you can refer to the specifics of his email. Ben wrote: "I question the objectivity of a comparison between two kinds of writing in which the students are brought to an understanding of one as superior to the other." Absolutely. Here's one thing that was unclear from my original email: I did not bring up the comparison, let alone force it (that's why I said "we *ended up* discussing . . .) In fact, the three poets I mentioned - Plath, Jordan, Mullen - had been read for separate assignments on separate weeks. On the day we were reading "Poem About My Rights" (along with Baraka's "Three Modes of History and Culture" and Ginsberg's "America") one student brought up Plath and, towards the end of the class, another brought up Mullen. My sense of Jordan's poem and Mullen's M & D as superior to Plath's "Lady Lazarus" is simply my own, not one I foisted on my class. Another thing I had meant to say in my original post and somehow forgot to: I like Plath. But "Fever 103," say, keeps my interest more. I used to think "Lady Lazarus" was interesting b/c of the performance metaphors (strip-tease, circus, etc) and the way they call into question the therapeutic self. And I used to think that the compulsion to appropriate Holocaust and Hiroshima imagery was interesting as a cultural phenomenon. Now I think, well, after you've said the obvious things, what do you got? And, so what? Moreover her "appropriative eye," to coin a phrase, seems very predictable to me these days. Hence my use of the word "easy." So, I accept Ben's question "Why the emphasis on judgement?" so long as it's clear that I wasn't, in the context of my classroom, saying to my students "Can't you see why Plath sucks and Mullen is so great?" Nothing of the sort. My judgement was just me being frank on our little list, for better or worse. Okay, so Ben's other major question went like this: > Here are the passages I question: > > >many students [...] want to / need to "tell their stories" "describe > >themselves" in > >very normative ways > > What is the word "normative" really identifying here? A formal aspect > of the work, or a content? And how does this "normativity" relate to > other aspects of the work--its other flaws or possible virtues? > > Do you ever see such "normativity" in so-called "experimental" > writing--or do you think "experimental" writing is free from > "normativity" by definition? Or is it that some "norms" are more > acceptable to you than others? And is _that_ ever a topic of discussion > in the classroom? To some extent I'll stick to my guns here: a poem which begins, say, "I was eight when I first heard mom question / the lipstick on your white starched collar" and follows the narrative implications of that to its logical conclusion, is, yes indeed-ee, more "normative" than Hejinian's MY LIFE. Now: does Hejinian in writing MY LIFE establish an alternative norm? And is that norm then reproduced, imitated by other "experimental" writers in very unimaginative ways? And is that act just as "normative" in this negative sense as the one which I was critiquing? Sure, you bet. But I don't think that derails my criticism. The more complicated example involves poets using traditional narrative to tell stories which have not been told, or are, in any event less frequently told OR using traditional narrative devices to solidify a group identity which is itself under siege. What the hell am I critiquing when I critique that? And I suppose I would say for starters that if one's semi-autobiographical narrative of life in the ghetto, life under a domineering patriarch, or for that matter a life of "privileged" suburban ennui, resembles the narrative of an after-school special, then maybe the language you're using isn't the most effective "equipment for living," providing liberation is what you're ultimately after. The after-school special seeks resolution *within* the confines of present circumstance. Likewise the McPoem. When someone like Mullen talks about the desire, the necessity, to trouble one's own subjectivity, *even when one is a subject-already-in-trouble* this is what I take her to mean: that there is a need to try on identities outside the Given, or even, as Ellison once put it, "to make chaos out of no-longer-tenable forms of order." I'm up front about allying myself with such an agenda, if that's what you would call it, but it's also worth saying that my tastes are more Catholic than some might surmise from the things I say on Lists like this, and because of the poems I began with I have as many lines of Bishop in my head as I do of Bernadette Mayer. Moreover I'm keen to the fact that poems are written out of many different contextual necessities and motivations. So be it. But the philosophical point which originally prompted me to join the thread is one I stand by: "The world is all outside; it has no inside." I keep this along side Carla Harryman's many statements regarding the public nature of private speech; always public, meaning, always social, each description of Self also a description of an other, though variously so. -m. From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Wed Apr 25 11:59:59 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 11:59:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Moore please In-Reply-To: from "Amber Prentiss" at Apr 25, 2001 12:00:09 pm Message-ID: <200104251600.MAA18841@dept.english.upenn.edu> Amber, are you sure? Because I thought I just group-replied - I mean, I didn't forward it to the list. -m. According to Amber Prentiss: > > > I didn't send this to the list. > -A > -----Original Message----- > From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > Sent: 4/25/2001 7:52 AM > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Moore please > > According to Amber Prentiss: > > > > Why don't you tell them so? I have no idea what level you teach at, > but > > you're the teacher and even if everyone complains, you've got some > autonomy. > > They've consented to being taught. Just be nice about it and say, "You > know, > > you've got some great [whatever] here; I was wondering what might > result if > > you applied it to [the uni, Washington, some subject the poet seems > > interested in]." If they like what turns out, maybe they'll > icnorporate a > > greater variety of subject matter. The worst they can do is ignore > you. > > -Amber > > > > Amber, I do, I do, all the time (I teach at Wheaton College in MA)! My > creative writing courses are reading-heavy, they're as much poetics > courses as they are workshops - and that helps. Nonetheless, college is > a > self-indulgent world and the worshop is often a self-indulgent > environment > (!); add to that a more complicated issue, namely that many students, > particularly ones who feel/are victimized/marginalized in one way or > another, want to / need to "tell their stories" "describe themselves" in > very normative ways: and they don't necessarily take very readily to > Harryette Mullen's point that victimized/marginalized people have plenty > of good reasons to trouble their own subjectivity, and that one can > approach The Object, the Objective World in a poem without mirroring the > process of colonialization, okay? One common experience in my classes, > which I consider a valuable one, is the recognition, as they start to > read > each others work and maybe read some Confessional - Plath/Sexton and > post-Plath Sexton, say - poems, that they are representing their > personal > travails (sometimes quite troubling sometimes utterly mundane or in > between) in the most generic way imaginable - which is to say the > stories they tell aren't really theirs after all. We recently ended up > discussing Plath's "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" alongside June Jordan's > "Poem About My Rights" and some sections of Mullen's MUSE & DRUDGE that > deal, more obliquely, with violence, symbolic and otherwise, > self-directed and otherwise, against women. How narcissitic and, more > important perhaps, EASY Plath's poems seem by comparison. And that's > something several students picked up on before I said a word. > > -m. > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Wed Apr 25 12:04:24 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 12:04:24 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Moore please Message-ID: I don't quite understand 'trouble their own subjectivity.' -Amber -----Original Message----- From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/25/2001 7:52 AM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Moore please According to Amber Prentiss: > > Why don't you tell them so? I have no idea what level you teach at, but > you're the teacher and even if everyone complains, you've got some autonomy. > They've consented to being taught. Just be nice about it and say, "You know, > you've got some great [whatever] here; I was wondering what might result if > you applied it to [the uni, Washington, some subject the poet seems > interested in]." If they like what turns out, maybe they'll icnorporate a > greater variety of subject matter. The worst they can do is ignore you. > -Amber > Amber, I do, I do, all the time (I teach at Wheaton College in MA)! My creative writing courses are reading-heavy, they're as much poetics courses as they are workshops - and that helps. Nonetheless, college is a self-indulgent world and the worshop is often a self-indulgent environment (!); add to that a more complicated issue, namely that many students, particularly ones who feel/are victimized/marginalized in one way or another, want to / need to "tell their stories" "describe themselves" in very normative ways: and they don't necessarily take very readily to Harryette Mullen's point that victimized/marginalized people have plenty of good reasons to trouble their own subjectivity, and that one can approach The Object, the Objective World in a poem without mirroring the process of colonialization, okay? One common experience in my classes, which I consider a valuable one, is the recognition, as they start to read each others work and maybe read some Confessional - Plath/Sexton and post-Plath Sexton, say - poems, that they are representing their personal travails (sometimes quite troubling sometimes utterly mundane or in between) in the most generic way imaginable - which is to say the stories they tell aren't really theirs after all. We recently ended up discussing Plath's "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" alongside June Jordan's "Poem About My Rights" and some sections of Mullen's MUSE & DRUDGE that deal, more obliquely, with violence, symbolic and otherwise, self-directed and otherwise, against women. How narcissitic and, more important perhaps, EASY Plath's poems seem by comparison. And that's something several students picked up on before I said a word. -m. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Wed Apr 25 12:22:23 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 12:22:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Moore please In-Reply-To: from "Amber Prentiss" at Apr 25, 2001 12:04:24 pm Message-ID: <200104251622.MAA23394@dept.english.upenn.edu> According to Amber Prentiss: > > I don't quite understand 'trouble their own subjectivity.' > -Amber Amber I guess what I mean, more or less, is "problematize." Here's a section from my interview w/ Mullen where she talks about this issue. -m. Harryette Mullen: For instance, the idea of problematizing the subject. You know, because our kind of joke of minority (and some women) graduate students was, "It's that white male subjectivity that needs to be. . ." you know, we just put a moratorium on that, and the rest of us need to step up to the plate, you know (laughter). We *need* our subjectivity. And then I began to think, well, in what ways would I want to problematize my black female subjectivity and going to California from Texas was one of the experiences that sort of gave me some ideas about that because, for instance, where I grew up, in Fort Worth, Texas, and I was born in Alabama, you know in the South, basically, you see a black person, you speak to that person whether you know them or not. You sort of assume that there's this brotherly, sisterly attachment, I mean, even if it is in some cases very superficial. In California, no, I walk up to people, they don?t even make eye-contact, or they're, you know, their whole idea of who they are is so utterly different from who I think they might be just because they're black. So, I thought about my first book, Tree Tall Woman, which is very much in the sort of authentic voice mode, you know, of the person who speaks from the black family, from the black community, and, um, you know, that idea of who was a black person - I mean I, without even consciously thinking about it, I think I more or less assumed a black person was someone with Southern roots and someone who ate collard greens and some one who was probably a Protestant, you know, and I had to just rethink all of that. And so those were ways that I began to relate what I did in my work to what they [Language Poets] were doing. You know, I had to reimagine what they were doing in other terms. And maybe that?s answering your question or beginning to answer your question. From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Wed Apr 25 12:48:07 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 12:48:07 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Moore please Message-ID: I think I understand. Reading writers on writing from a more theoretical eprspective can be painful. What she's taalking about, I gather, is using poetry to rethink the labels you see the world with, particularly the ones you identify (or are identified) with. Different point: I don't know if college necessarily inspires navel-gazing. I suppose it depends on the group, the college, and so on. In my experience, many (if not most) of the poems I run across here are not strictly personal. This may be because of the fact that we are a very small community (less than a thousand students) in which your business becomes everyone's business if you don't hold onto it like a winning lottery ticket. I think a lot of us tend to doll up our lives into something signifcantly different in our work. Or maybe not. I'm going through end-of-the-semester amnesia, and I'm stalling on a paper due in an hour, so I ought to quit this. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/25/2001 12:22 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Moore please According to Amber Prentiss: > > I don't quite understand 'trouble their own subjectivity.' > -Amber Amber I guess what I mean, more or less, is "problematize." Here's a section from my interview w/ Mullen where she talks about this issue. -m. Harryette Mullen: For instance, the idea of problematizing the subject. You know, because our kind of joke of minority (and some women) graduate students was, "It's that white male subjectivity that needs to be. . ." you know, we just put a moratorium on that, and the rest of us need to step up to the plate, you know (laughter). We *need* our subjectivity. And then I began to think, well, in what ways would I want to problematize my black female subjectivity and going to California from Texas was one of the experiences that sort of gave me some ideas about that because, for instance, where I grew up, in Fort Worth, Texas, and I was born in Alabama, you know in the South, basically, you see a black person, you speak to that person whether you know them or not. You sort of assume that there's this brotherly, sisterly attachment, I mean, even if it is in some cases very superficial. In California, no, I walk up to people, they don?t even make eye-contact, or they're, you know, their whole idea of who they are is so utterly different from who I think they might be just because they're black. So, I thought about my first book, Tree Tall Woman, which is very much in the sort of authentic voice mode, you know, of the person who speaks from the black family, from the black community, and, um, you know, that idea of who was a black person - I mean I, without even consciously thinking about it, I think I more or less assumed a black person was someone with Southern roots and someone who ate collard greens and some one who was probably a Protestant, you know, and I had to just rethink all of that. And so those were ways that I began to relate what I did in my work to what they [Language Poets] were doing. You know, I had to reimagine what they were doing in other terms. And maybe that?s answering your question or beginning to answer your question. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu Wed Apr 25 17:22:08 2001 From: Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu (Ben Friedlander) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 15:22:08 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben References: <200104251511.LAA09359@dept.english.upenn.edu> Message-ID: Mike: Thanks for the clarification of your teaching--I was reading way too much into too little information, obviously. But let me question you a little more on one point. You say: >To some extent I'll stick to my guns here: a poem which begins, say, "I >was eight when I first heard mom question / the lipstick on your white >starched collar" and follows the narrative implications of that to its >logical conclusion, is, yes indeed-ee, more "normative" than Hejinian's >MY >LIFE. I'll "stick to my guns" too: I still don't know what you mean by "normative," but I suspect that you are speaking of conventional form with the assumption that this brings a guarantee of conventional content (and likewise, that unconventional form brings a guarantee of unconventional content). I myself find this an extremely dubious assumption, but I don't want to put words in your mouth so let me take up the question of "normativity" in another way. The unnamed poem with which you're comparing _My Life_ seems overmatched from the get-go. Would you feel the same way about a comparison of _My Life_ with Audre Lorde's _Zami_? (Even better would be a comparison of Hejinian's _Happily_ with Lorde's _Cancer Journal_, but that's another issue!) How about _ML_ with Merrill's _Becoming a Person_? Frederick Exley's _A Fan's Notes_? Helen Hoover's _The Gift of the Deer_? _Speak, Memory_? _Memories of a Catholic Girlhood_? _The Motion of Light on Water_? Not that I want to play such comparison out. But what I think it would show is that the epithet "normative" only has meaning in relation to some SPECIFIC aspect of writing, and that any book worth reading is bound to be readable in relation to SEVERAL such specifics. Good Lord, I don't think _anyone_ on this list would want to defend writing that's conventional through and through; but some writing that flaunts its unconventionality in one aspect is really quite pedestrian in others. This isn't a swipe at Hejinian. She's a fabulous writer and I admire her keeneness of intellect immensely. _My Life_ is a good example of that keenness: the repetition of key sentences, the numerological structure, the built-in growth and alteration of the narrative are all delightful. Does this method of construction lead me to think about autobiography in a new way? Absolutely. Does it lead me to think about what constitutes a life in a new way? Not really, though I know it does for others. But what I say isn't a knock against the book; when I first read _My Life_ I had already absorbed many of the ideas that readers have used to illuminate Hejinian's intentions. For me, her book was a beautiful illustration of those ideas, not their source. On the other hand, my notions of memory and experience WERE altered by Samuel Delany's _The Motion of Light on Water_. Does this make it a less "normative" book than _My Life_? I would hesitate to say so. I'd rather say that I read it at a time when the force of its originality was most likely to have an impact on my imagination. Timing is important! My own tendency is to think of books as having resources _recoverable_ by reading rather than fixed qualities _identified_ by reading. Some of these resources are obvious, some hidden--some are easily exploited, some take time--some get used up, some seem inexhaustible--some are intended, some unintended--some are delightful, some unfortunate--some are expected, some come as a surprise. Not all of these resources are inherent in the writing itself; many are produced through the alchemy of a book's progress through history. You can't step into the same book twice. Ben From Jholmes at boisestate.edu Wed Apr 25 18:47:08 2001 From: Jholmes at boisestate.edu (Janet Holmes) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 16:47:08 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP, etc. Message-ID: I surfaced from the midden my office has become to go to AWP for a few days, and though I went to lots of CLMP panels (I'm now editing Ahsahta Press, so I need the help) I missed almost all the readings. Sam, I looked for you at Dana Gioia's reading (Alyson Hagy was in the same Graywolf group) but must have missed you. Al told me he ran into you & you were looking for me, but you didn't stay in one place long enough to be found. Met Catherine Daly for the first time--nice to put a face to the name! Also was on a panel on poetic sequence. Spent much too much money & time at the book fair. Sorry I haven't been around since I p!ssed everyone off--but our book was at the printer and I was swamped. Anyone interested in Ahsahta can take a look at http://english.boisestate.edu/mfa/ahsahta_press_.htm for our new look. Janet Holmes (returning to the middle of the heap) From rloden at concentric.net Wed Apr 25 19:31:55 2001 From: rloden at concentric.net (Rachel Loden) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 16:31:55 -0700 Subject: [New-Poetry] queen for a day Message-ID: <3AE75E6B.D39B1240@concentric.net> Hear hear. It's not the suffering per se that drives me crazy but the preciousness of it, the way it's tendered as a gift. That and the lack of any comic sense. So at the end there's a nimbus around the poet, a cloud of epiphanies like cheap cologne. I think I will stubbornly persist in liking "What Are Years?" despite its obvious imperfections. I can't agree with Michael that it's a total misfire. Maybe this is because it was my first Moore poem, a high school handout, and the pleasure it gave me then was sharp and immediate. Not hard to see why it might make people queasy today but (being a contrarian) that only makes me love it more. In any case Moore herself regarded it highly enough to make it the title poem of a collection (in 1941). Rachel L. MAXINE CHERNOFF wrote: > Just back fron AWP, where affect is the thing, emotional outpourings a la > Oprah show, re/every personal trouble from bedwetting and beyond, all in > the high-voiced lamentation style, as if, with the world in ruin, the US > the most privileged enclave on earth, and the marvelous complexity of > consciousness discussed for more than a century, the poor little self and > how it grew up to be a poet is the only topic of interest. Give me > Marianne Moore and her celebration of the world outside of her any day. > > Maxine Chernoff -- Rachel Loden http://www.thepomegranate.com/loden/hotel.html email: rloden at concentric.net From wasanthony at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 19:43:50 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 16:43:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: <20010425234350.75635.qmail@web12104.mail.yahoo.com> I attended a couple of panels focusing on various aspects of electronic publishing and kept hearing the same refrains from the few in the audience who had not yet published in the electronic medium, the main one being a concern over the validity of an electronic publication. I also heard from someone who attended the panel on the future of print publications, where the main concern of print publishers was: we have few subscribers. There's an obvious disjunction here. So, I will ask the members of this list 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any other kind of electronic format? 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published you? Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print magazines that have published you? If so, how many? 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the electronic magazines you submit to? 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free and that people must pay for print magazines? If not, what is your prime consideration in deciding whether to submit to a print magazine or an electronic one? I'm very interested in your responses, especially to the fourth question. - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From moira_russell at hotmail.com Wed Apr 25 20:09:08 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 16:09:08 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: Jim queried: >1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any >other kind of electronic format? yup -- my website and a friend's e-journal, monadnock.net >2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published you? lord, no (not that my publishing history is that vast) > Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print magazines >that have published you? If so, how many? some -- i subscribed to the magazine which published most of my work until it folded >3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the >electronic magazines you submit to? haven't been submitting anywhere for quite a while, but i think i would still go for print rather than an e-zine, unless the e-zine was not available offline or it was something special i wanted to contribute to (like my friend's thing) >4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free and >that people must pay for print magazines? no, i really expect to make no money from poetry....maybe this will change once i publish something and possibly have a chance at grants and readings....also, unlike offline zines, e-zines are perpetually available, never go out of stock (unless the web site is a 404) and have a much potentially wider audience than a small journal....people are more likely to click on a free link than buy a pricey journal moira russell seattle, wa _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From MillB at aol.com Wed Apr 25 21:19:36 2001 From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 21:19:36 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: <89.5ae8bb2.2818d1a8@aol.com> Greetings all fellow AWPers: In a message dated 4/25/01 7:44:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time, wasanthony at yahoo.com writes: << 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any other kind of electronic format? Yes, I have had poems re-produced on web sites and on the electronic versions of journals that printed my work, hard copy. I've also had work appear, advertising readings and such. 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published you? For me to subscribe to all the journals that have published my work, would run me hundreds of dollars. One year, in fact, I added it all up and was shocked that the total was over $700. . .so, in answer to the issue, I rotate my subscriptions: each year, I subscribe to five or six. More if I can afford it. Always, one "big" publication like the New Yorker and then a number of smaller literary journals: Laurel Review, Gettysburg, Georgia, etc. . . 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the electronic magazines you submit to? I do not submit to electronic magazines--I still am old fashioned, I guess. 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free and that people must pay for print magazines? I guess, again, I'm old fashioned and I LIKE to hold the paper in my hands--I like to read books. . . not computer screens. E-mail is great. . so are web sites, but I dislike "reading" poetry or stories online. . .I usually print the work out and it just does not "feel" the same to me. Cheers, Millicent From wasanthony at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 21:49:34 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 18:49:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams In-Reply-To: <89.5ae8bb2.2818d1a8@aol.com> Message-ID: <20010426014934.20086.qmail@web12108.mail.yahoo.com> --- MillB at aol.com wrote: > Greetings all fellow AWPers: > > In a message dated 4/25/01 7:44:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time, > wasanthony at yahoo.com writes: > > << 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any > other kind of electronic format? > > Yes, I have had poems re-produced on web sites and on the electronic > versions > of journals that printed my work, hard copy. I've also had work > appear, > advertising readings and such. > > 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published > you? > For me to subscribe to all the journals that have published my work, > would > run me hundreds of dollars. One year, in fact, I added it all up and > was > shocked that the total was over $700. . .so, in answer to the issue, > I rotate > my subscriptions: each year, I subscribe to five or six. More if I > can > afford it. Always, one "big" publication like the New Yorker and > then a > number of smaller literary journals: Laurel Review, Gettysburg, > Georgia, etc. > . . > > 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs > the > electronic magazines you submit to? > I do not submit to electronic magazines--I still am old fashioned, I > guess. > > 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free > and > that people must pay for print magazines? > I guess, again, I'm old fashioned and I LIKE to hold the paper in my > hands--I > like to read books. . . not computer screens. E-mail is great. . so > are web > sites, but I dislike "reading" poetry or stories online. . .I usually > print > the work out and it just does not "feel" the same to me. I have to go teach a class in a few minutes. But, in regard to your last response: Do you write your work on a computer? - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From wasanthony at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 21:50:42 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 18:50:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP, etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010426015042.79614.qmail@web12101.mail.yahoo.com> --- Janet Holmes wrote: > I surfaced from the midden my office has become to go to AWP for a > few days, and though I went to lots of CLMP panels (I'm now editing > Ahsahta Press, so I need the help) I missed almost all the readings. > Sam, I looked for you at Dana Gioia's reading (Alyson Hagy was in the > same Graywolf group) but must have missed you. Al told me he ran into > you & you were looking for me, but you didn't stay in one place long > enough to be found. > > Met Catherine Daly for the first time--nice to put a face to the > name! Yes, me too! Catherine struck me as very, very sharp and vivacious. - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From MillB at aol.com Wed Apr 25 22:41:47 2001 From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 22:41:47 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: <92.13aea5a1.2818e4eb@aol.com> In a message dated 4/25/01 9:50:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time, wasanthony at yahoo.com writes: << Do you write your work on a computer? >> I compose first on yellow legal pads, with a black Bic pen, then edit. . . then select which pieces I want to carry further and then finally, transfer the work to the computer. I do not compose on the computer. I DO edit a bit on the computer. . . Millicent From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Wed Apr 25 22:47:37 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 22:47:37 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: I like to hold paper. That said, I'm also cheap. I usually figure that if there's something I really like, I can catch it in a chapbook or a collection one day. Electronic journals have the advantage of being free and fairly readily available. (Free is my friend.) -Amber -----Original Message----- From: MillB at aol.com To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/25/2001 9:19 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams I guess, again, I'm old fashioned and I LIKE to hold the paper in my hands--I like to read books. . . not computer screens. E-mail is great. . so are web sites, but I dislike "reading" poetry or stories online. . .I usually print the work out and it just does not "feel" the same to me. Cheers, Millicent _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 25 23:30:41 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 20:30:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] AWP, etc. Message-ID: <20010426033041.DD58136EE@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 25 23:44:54 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 20:44:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: <20010426034454.1DA9B36FA@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Wed Apr 25 23:57:37 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 20:57:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: <20010426035737.8EC343ECC@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Thu Apr 26 01:31:23 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 00:31:23 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] I sound my barbaric AWP over the roofs of the world Message-ID: Counting them up, I discover that Palm Springs was my 11th AWP conference in the past 12 years (I missed 1991, for some reason). A bit better than most, in terms of the masthead and general offerings, I would say, and of course a glorious locale, with the desert in bloom in a number of ways. (Did anyone else visit the Desert Museum, with William Holden's and Robert Montgomery's art collections performing their wild juxtaposition of high and low taste?) And I'm happy to see the AWP continue to pay serious attention to writing pedagogy, among other things. Yet as the years pass, I seem to spend more & more time with friends old and new rather than attending panels and readings. This year I even surpassed previous records. The book fair occupied me a good deal, as always, and I crippled both wallet & back dragging home a ton of new publications. Beyond that, I'm afraid caught almost no panels (not because there weren't some very interesting sounding offerings), and mainly attended readings, including Philip Levine, Stephen Dunn, Mark Doty, and a number of others, mostly in omnibus sessions. I'd never heard Levine read except on tape, so that was a highlight for me. Still, the list of poets I unfortunately managed to miss is embarrassingly lengthy: Yusef Komunyakaa, Ai, Marilyn Chin, Alicia Ostriker, Mark Jarman, Carol Muske-Dukes, Deborah Tall, Carolyn Kizer. . . . As for the Oprah-style emotional outpourings and stunted selfhood that Maxine C. heard, either I missed most of those sessions, or we have differing notions of what constitutes such a thing. In the absence of named names, I guess I shouldn't speculate further about what has caused Maxine and others to turn up their noses, but I do feel the urge to put in a small word here for that much maligned thing, the contemporary autobiographical lyric. I heard a lot of good ones in Palm Springs. From Dan Bellm's self-reflexive, witty long poem "Aspens" to Carol Potter's strange amalgamation of confession with fairy tale and surrealism, I heard any number of ways in which lyricists continue successfully to handle volatile emotional content. I relished Sascha Feinstein's and Al Young's quite different but equally personal takes on jazz music. Tenaya Darlington's rambunctious and loopy alter ego "Madame Deluxe" was the opposite of whiny even as she dove into some perilous emotive waters. Sandra Alcosser's personal poems were feisty and surprising, fully attuned to the complexity of consciousness. And so forth: I'm not suggesting that sentimentality, preciousness, and ponderous earnestness were not at times present, just that plenty else was going on. And a remark by Belle Waring (a marvelously unsentimental autobiographical poet herself who often tackles thorny emotional themes) stuck with me. Appearing on a pedagogical panel, she remarked that students often want to know whether certain events depicted in her poems "really happened," that perennial naive query. She described her own matter-of-fact side-stepping of such questions ("yes, I witnessed those events"), as a way of steering discussion back to matters of craft without condescending to the questioner. And she was careful to point out that it is not simply the naive reader who experiences such curiosity. That got me thinking about *why* poets so often tell us, in such detail, about their personal lives. I think it's not simply narcissism in the poet, though that certainly does happen. It's because we want to know. We long for emotional resonance and seek emotional solidarity, just as we hunger for story. That's not all we do, of course, but the lyric as a genre has been coasting on this particular truth for millennia, and will continue to do so, I think. David Graham ========================= >Hear hear. It's not the suffering per se that drives me crazy but the >preciousness of it, the way it's tendered as a gift. That and the lack >of any comic sense. So at the end there's a nimbus around the poet, a >cloud of epiphanies like cheap cologne. > >I think I will stubbornly persist in liking "What Are Years?" despite >its obvious imperfections. I can't agree with Michael that it's a total >misfire. Maybe this is because it was my first Moore poem, a high school >handout, and the pleasure it gave me then was sharp and immediate. Not >hard to see why it might make people queasy today but (being a >contrarian) that only makes me love it more. In any case Moore herself >regarded it highly enough to make it the title poem of a collection (in >1941). > >Rachel L. > >MAXINE CHERNOFF wrote: > >> Just back fron AWP, where affect is the thing, emotional outpourings a >la >> Oprah show, re/every personal trouble from bedwetting and beyond, all in >> the high-voiced lamentation style, as if, with the world in ruin, the US >> the most privileged enclave on earth, and the marvelous complexity of >> consciousness discussed for more than a century, the poor little self >and >> how it grew up to be a poet is the only topic of interest. Give me >> Marianne Moore and her celebration of the world outside of her any day. >> >> Maxine Chernoff > __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Thu Apr 26 09:18:29 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 09:18:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben In-Reply-To: from "Ben Friedlander" at Apr 25, 2001 03:22:08 pm Message-ID: <200104261318.JAA01990@dept.english.upenn.edu> Ben, and all, quickly, and then more on Friday morning (I want to take up your suggestion of a real specific comparison but just don't have any time today): cording to Ben Friedlander: > > > I'll "stick to my guns" too: I still don't know what you mean by > "normative," but I suspect that you are speaking of conventional form > with the assumption that this brings a guarantee of conventional > content (and likewise, that unconventional form brings a guarantee of > unconventional content). I myself find this an extremely dubious > assumption, but I don't want to put words in your mouth so let me take > up the question of "normativity" in another way. > One thing I would say off the bat here is that you seem to be suggesting that there's a clear separation between form and content: even tho one may "bring a guarantee of" another, they're in a causal relationship which makes them distinct. I would say that form IS A KIND OF content (this is, incidentally, how I've always read Creeley's phrase "extension of"): you can read its meaning and place it in a social or historical context at least as easily (and of course as variously) as you can the word "schooner" or the "content" of a sentence like, "When grandfather was fifteen he cut school,went down to the draft board and signed up to fight the Krauts." (This, by the way, like the "lipstick" example I gave in my last post, is not from someone's poem, good or bad, but just something I made up off the top o' me head.) The point being: if you can talk about "content" at all then you have to be able to talk about form as a kind of content; and when I critique a poems formal properties I'm critiquing it as content. The natural tendency toward ossification in language means this: that a poem tends to naturalize the perspective(s) it puts on the table in the form of "content" and in the form of "form-content." And it takes a great deal of effort either on the part of the poet or the part of the reader to reject that closure. Why does that matter? Because as Dewey wrote (and I won't bore everyone by quoting the whole thing again on this list) any poet interested in the liberation of bodies and mines would be smart to create a poem which implies a world which is not all in, which is in-the-making, which is "open," both formally and mise en scene. This leads me to Ben's last point: > My own tendency is to think of books as having resources _recoverable_ > by reading rather than fixed qualities _identified_ by reading. Some of > these resources are obvious, some hidden--some are easily exploited, > some take time--some get used up, some seem inexhaustible--some are > intended, some unintended--some are delightful, some unfortunate--some > are expected, some come as a surprise. Not all of these resources are > inherent in the writing itself; many are produced through the alchemy > of a book's progress through history. You can't step into the same book > twice. Yes: the reader can mediate against the intent of any author sure. But what does that do for the poet who thinks about her own intentions? Perhaps suggest possibilities of collaboration, but it doesn't relieve one of the responsibility involved in creating a poem. The Heraclitian (sic) observation that, like a river, You can't step into the same book twice is potentially overwelmed by the fact that some books are constructed with the intent of drowning. -m. From TerryP17 at aol.com Thu Apr 26 10:13:22 2001 From: TerryP17 at aol.com (TerryP17 at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 10:13:22 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Print vs. Non-random electrons Message-ID: Jim-- You wrote: <> Interesting set of questions, which I'll address on the side. As some folks on this listserv know, I'm in the position of having funded my own dead-tree publication (with only a very little help on the side and no grants) for years. I simultaneously support a web site that presents excerpts from the hardcopy mag plus a little independent commentary, mostly as a way of scaring up subs for the magazine--which tactic has been moderately successful, BTW. We carry no advertising at the moment in either flavor of the publication because that's not a route we wanted to take, not that we couldn't use the bucks. Fact is, from a publishing standpoint, I'd drop the dead tree version in a minute if I thought I really could and still maintain the prestige (such as we have) of the publication. You can do a lot more with a website these days than you can do on paper. But the fact is, we do publish, as part of our mix, reviews and scholarship from young scholars who aren't going to get into PMLA no matter what they write. And these folks need their stuff to be printed on paper in order for it to have "validity" in the academic environment. The fact that an increasing number of college and public libraries now carry our publication also helps them in this regard. If we only ran the website, I'm not so sure that we'd have academic visibility or that these young scholars would want to publish with us anymore. Unless I am wrong--and for once, I'd be glad to be wrong--it seems to me that the humanities community in academia doesn't appear to value web publications as highly as it does dead tree publications. That is, if a poem or an article were published on a website rather than in a paper magazine, it would be somehow less valid and less serious. Of course, the flip side is, there are so many websites run by amateurs who publish so much desperately bad poetry and "criticism," that the web critics might just be right. It's a sort of chicken or egg thing. I would be delighted some day to go totally web, with a much better, more frequently updated and interactive site. But until I get a clearer sense that my authors would be treated with as much respect as they are now by appearing in a hardcopy pub, I don't see how I can do that. It's a real dilemma. It would save me money and time. Re: authors subscribing to small publications. They don't do it nearly often enough in my experience. On the other hand, if authors felt the need to subscribe to every little rag that published their stuff, the authors would be bankrupt in rather short order. Another dilemma. --Terry From Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu Thu Apr 26 10:52:00 2001 From: Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu (Ben Friedlander) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 08:52:00 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben References: <200104261318.JAA01990@dept.english.upenn.edu> Message-ID: Mike: You say, reasonably enough: >I want to >take up your suggestion of a real specific comparison but just >don't have any time today Before you get going, can I note that my proposed comparisons were hypotheticals? I wanted to suggest that works of literature don't easily fall into neat categories of "normative" and "non-normative." Also, I'm extremely uncomfortable with tabulating the pros and cons of this or that writer's work in a public forum (where the end results will be archived in pereptuity). I've shot my mouth off many times, god knows, but the exercise qua exercise seems counterproductive to me. A very "normative" kind of mapping, if you will. Could we carry on this discussion--which I'm finding very useful--in some other way? I'll write more later, about form and content, and intention. Ben From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Thu Apr 26 11:05:58 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 11:05:58 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Print vs. Non-random electrons Message-ID: I think the biggest problem with electronic journals is that when they go out of print, they go completely out. If you had yor poem published in Uncle Bob's Chicken Hut Review, and then Bob decides to move to Burma and sells his computer, where is anyone going to find it? Another problem is, obviously, that anyone can put out a litmag online. Then again, the content in many print journals isn't always that outstanding, either, but I suppose the logic is that someone's willing to put up the dough for it, so it can't be all that bad. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: TerryP17 at aol.com To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/26/2001 10:13 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Print vs. Non-random electrons Jim-- You wrote: <> Interesting set of questions, which I'll address on the side. As some folks on this listserv know, I'm in the position of having funded my own dead-tree publication (with only a very little help on the side and no grants) for years. I simultaneously support a web site that presents excerpts from the hardcopy mag plus a little independent commentary, mostly as a way of scaring up subs for the magazine--which tactic has been moderately successful, BTW. We carry no advertising at the moment in either flavor of the publication because that's not a route we wanted to take, not that we couldn't use the bucks. Fact is, from a publishing standpoint, I'd drop the dead tree version in a minute if I thought I really could and still maintain the prestige (such as we have) of the publication. You can do a lot more with a website these days than you can do on paper. But the fact is, we do publish, as part of our mix, reviews and scholarship from young scholars who aren't going to get into PMLA no matter what they write. And these folks need their stuff to be printed on paper in order for it to have "validity" in the academic environment. The fact that an increasing number of college and public libraries now carry our publication also helps them in this regard. If we only ran the website, I'm not so sure that we'd have academic visibility or that these young scholars would want to publish with us anymore. Unless I am wrong--and for once, I'd be glad to be wrong--it seems to me that the humanities community in academia doesn't appear to value web publications as highly as it does dead tree publications. That is, if a poem or an article were published on a website rather than in a paper magazine, it would be somehow less valid and less serious. Of course, the flip side is, there are so many websites run by amateurs who publish so much desperately bad poetry and "criticism," that the web critics might just be right. It's a sort of chicken or egg thing. I would be delighted some day to go totally web, with a much better, more frequently updated and interactive site. But until I get a clearer sense that my authors would be treated with as much respect as they are now by appearing in a hardcopy pub, I don't see how I can do that. It's a real dilemma. It would save me money and time. Re: authors subscribing to small publications. They don't do it nearly often enough in my experience. On the other hand, if authors felt the need to subscribe to every little rag that published their stuff, the authors would be bankrupt in rather short order. Another dilemma. --Terry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Thu Apr 26 11:21:17 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 11:21:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben In-Reply-To: from "Ben Friedlander" at Apr 26, 2001 08:52:00 am Message-ID: <200104261521.LAA22260@dept.english.upenn.edu> According to Ben Friedlander: > Also, I'm extremely uncomfortable with tabulating the pros and cons of > this or that writer's work in a public forum (where the end results > will be archived in pereptuity). I've shot my mouth off many times, god > knows, but the exercise qua exercise seems counterproductive to me. A > very "normative" kind of mapping, if you will. Could we carry on this > discussion--which I'm finding very useful--in some other way? Ben, sure, I just sometimes think we listees, and poets generally, don't put our money where our mouth is by saying THIS is how it works in THIS poem, myself very much included, you know? Don't write a check that your ass can't cash, I say to myself. Now the issue of one's opinions blowing up in one's face or being flamed out of existence by a single zealous disciple, those are real issues, especially on listservs. I once criticized a Tom Clark poem on the Buffalo List and, holy hell, somebody (can't remember who) blew up at me like I was talkin about his mama! -m. From maxpaul at sfsu.edu Thu Apr 26 11:56:51 2001 From: maxpaul at sfsu.edu (MAXINE CHERNOFF) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 08:56:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] I sound my barbaric AWP over the roofs of the world In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'm sure many fine readings took place. I went to very few events and have to once again state that what I feel goes wrong in the "contemporary autobiographical lyric" is the sense of pride and preciousness the writer displays at times. Sorry. That's not what I feel poetry is about. MC On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, David Graham wrote: > Counting them up, I discover that Palm Springs was my 11th AWP conference > in the past 12 years (I missed 1991, for some reason). A bit better than > most, in terms of the masthead and general offerings, I would say, and of > course a glorious locale, with the desert in bloom in a number of ways. > (Did anyone else visit the Desert Museum, with William Holden's and Robert > Montgomery's art collections performing their wild juxtaposition of high > and low taste?) And I'm happy to see the AWP continue to pay serious > attention to writing pedagogy, among other things. > > Yet as the years pass, I seem to spend more & more time with friends old > and new rather than attending panels and readings. This year I even > surpassed previous records. The book fair occupied me a good deal, as > always, and I crippled both wallet & back dragging home a ton of new > publications. Beyond that, I'm afraid caught almost no panels (not because > there weren't some very interesting sounding offerings), and mainly > attended readings, including Philip Levine, Stephen Dunn, Mark Doty, and a > number of others, mostly in omnibus sessions. I'd never heard Levine read > except on tape, so that was a highlight for me. Still, the list of poets I > unfortunately managed to miss is embarrassingly lengthy: Yusef Komunyakaa, > Ai, Marilyn Chin, Alicia Ostriker, Mark Jarman, Carol Muske-Dukes, Deborah > Tall, Carolyn Kizer. . . . > > As for the Oprah-style emotional outpourings and stunted selfhood that > Maxine C. heard, either I missed most of those sessions, or we have > differing notions of what constitutes such a thing. > > In the absence of named names, I guess I shouldn't speculate further about > what has caused Maxine and others to turn up their noses, but I do feel the > urge to put in a small word here for that much maligned thing, the > contemporary autobiographical lyric. I heard a lot of good ones in Palm > Springs. From Dan Bellm's self-reflexive, witty long poem "Aspens" to > Carol Potter's strange amalgamation of confession with fairy tale and > surrealism, I heard any number of ways in which lyricists continue > successfully to handle volatile emotional content. I relished Sascha > Feinstein's and Al Young's quite different but equally personal takes on > jazz music. Tenaya Darlington's rambunctious and loopy alter ego "Madame > Deluxe" was the opposite of whiny even as she dove into some perilous > emotive waters. Sandra Alcosser's personal poems were feisty and > surprising, fully attuned to the complexity of consciousness. And so forth: > I'm not suggesting that sentimentality, preciousness, and ponderous > earnestness were not at times present, just that plenty else was going on. > > And a remark by Belle Waring (a marvelously unsentimental autobiographical > poet herself who often tackles thorny emotional themes) stuck with me. > Appearing on a pedagogical panel, she remarked that students often want to > know whether certain events depicted in her poems "really happened," that > perennial naive query. She described her own matter-of-fact side-stepping > of such questions ("yes, I witnessed those events"), as a way of steering > discussion back to matters of craft without condescending to the > questioner. And she was careful to point out that it is not simply the > naive reader who experiences such curiosity. > > That got me thinking about *why* poets so often tell us, in such detail, > about their personal lives. I think it's not simply narcissism in the > poet, though that certainly does happen. It's because we want to know. We > long for emotional resonance and seek emotional solidarity, just as we > hunger for story. That's not all we do, of course, but the lyric as a > genre has been coasting on this particular truth for millennia, and will > continue to do so, I think. > > David Graham > ========================= > > > >Hear hear. It's not the suffering per se that drives me crazy but the > >preciousness of it, the way it's tendered as a gift. That and the lack > >of any comic sense. So at the end there's a nimbus around the poet, a > >cloud of epiphanies like cheap cologne. > > > >I think I will stubbornly persist in liking "What Are Years?" despite > >its obvious imperfections. I can't agree with Michael that it's a total > >misfire. Maybe this is because it was my first Moore poem, a high school > >handout, and the pleasure it gave me then was sharp and immediate. Not > >hard to see why it might make people queasy today but (being a > >contrarian) that only makes me love it more. In any case Moore herself > >regarded it highly enough to make it the title poem of a collection (in > >1941). > > > >Rachel L. > > > >MAXINE CHERNOFF wrote: > > > >> Just back fron AWP, where affect is the thing, emotional outpourings a > >la > >> Oprah show, re/every personal trouble from bedwetting and beyond, all in > >> the high-voiced lamentation style, as if, with the world in ruin, the US > >> the most privileged enclave on earth, and the marvelous complexity of > >> consciousness discussed for more than a century, the poor little self > >and > >> how it grew up to be a poet is the only topic of interest. Give me > >> Marianne Moore and her celebration of the world outside of her any day. > >> > >> Maxine Chernoff > > > > __________________ > David Graham > grahamd at mail.ripon.edu > __________________ > > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Thu Apr 26 12:19:23 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 11:19:23 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: I sound my barbaric AWP over the roofs of the world In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Well of course, Maxine. I don't think poetry is "about" preciousness, either. I do feel, however, that what goes wrong with the contemporary autobiographical lyric is pretty much what goes wrong with any lyric, at any time. Sentimentality, crippling pride, etc.--these are not exactly new sins, and I would even venture to say they're not limited to the mainstream AWP verse you allude to so sweepingly. But, in the absence of further specifics from anyone, I suppose this thread has spun itself out. David Graham ___________________________ >I'm sure many fine readings took place. I went to very few events and >have to once again state that what I feel goes wrong in the "contemporary >autobiographical lyric" is the sense of pride and preciousness the writer >displays at times. Sorry. That's not what I feel poetry is about. MC > __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Thu Apr 26 18:35:36 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 18:35:36 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: <6a.d81f9c6.2819fcb8@cs.com> In a message dated 4/25/01 10:45:49 PM Central Daylight Time, CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > .cath.vt.edu > > > > 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any > other kind of electronic format? Yes. > 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published you? > Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print magazines > that have published you? If so, how many? Yes, but not at the same time. I usually try to take at least a year's worth of a mag that publishes me. Right now I get Hudson, Sewanee, Tar RiverPoetry, and New Criterion. > 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the > electronic magazines you submit to? 10% vs. 90%. > 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free and > that people must pay for print magazines? No. > If not, what is your prime consideration in deciding whether to submit > to a print magazine or an electronic one? In the former case I do so only if requested to submit. From halvard at earthlink.net Thu Apr 26 22:11:20 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 22:11:20 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams In-Reply-To: <20010425234350.75635.qmail@web12104.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > Jim Cervantes requests: > So, I will ask the members of this list > > 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any > other kind of electronic format? Yes. > 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published you? No. > Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print magazines > that have published you? If so, how many? I wouldn't subscribe to a magazine just because it published me. I do subscribe or have subscribed to magazines that have published me. How many? No idea. Over the years, I would guess quite a few. > 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the > electronic magazines you submit to? Nowadays--print 20%; electronic 80% > 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free and > that people must pay for print magazines? No. > If not, what is your prime consideration in deciding whether to submit > to a print magazine or an electronic one? Ars longa, vita brevis. > I'm very interested in your responses, especially to the fourth > question. > > - Jim And would you respond to your own survey for all the rest of us, Jim? Hal ""Anything is art if an artist says it is." --Marcel Duchamp Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 26 22:35:29 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 22:35:29 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams References: Message-ID: <003801c0cec2$ba754a00$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Halvard Johnson" To: Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2001 10:11 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams > > Jim Cervantes requests: > > > So, I will ask the members of this list > > > > 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any > > other kind of electronic format? > Yes. > > > 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published you? > No. > > > Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print magazines > > that have published you? If so, how many? > Right now, probably only one or two > > > 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the > > electronic magazines you submit to? > Probably about 75% - 25% > > 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free and > > that people must pay for print magazines? > No. > > > If not, what is your prime consideration in deciding whether to submit > > to a print magazine or an electronic one? > Probably has something to do with whether I can find a stamped self-addressed envelope or not. I don't mean to be all that flippant. But I don't have a prejudice for or against either format. > > > I'm very interested in your responses, especially to the fourth > > question. > > > > - Jim > > And would you respond to your own survey for all the rest of us, > Jim? > > Hal ""Anything is art if an artist says it is." > --Marcel Duchamp > Halvard Johnson > =============== > email: halvard at earthlink.net > website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From halvard at earthlink.net Thu Apr 26 22:51:29 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 22:51:29 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Some years ago now Message-ID: in an interview in the Journal of Contemporary Arts, Alex Katz was asked "What are some of the things in your life that you saw or heard or came on and you thought, 'Yeah, now that's new'?" Katz's list: "Lester Young. Billie Holliday. Be Bop. Stan Kenton. Dizzy Gillespie. Manchito. Charlie Parker. Stan Getz. Miles Davis. Sonny Rollins's 'Wagon Wheels.' Man Ray. Charles Lamb. George Braque's 1913 black and white collages. Pablo Picasso's sculptures. Malevich's Suprematist painting. Henri Matisse's collages. Jackson Pollock. Barnett Newman. Clifford Still. Roy Lichtenstein, early 1960s. James Rosenquist, early 1960s. Eva Hesse. Jeff Koons. Mike Kelley's rugs. Richard Avedon's fashion photos, 1960s. Red Groom's early happenings. Paul Taylor, late 1950s. William Dunas, early 1970s. Samuel Beckett's *Happy Days* with Ruth White. John Jesuran's "Red House." Meredith Monk's theater and music pieces. Godard's *Breathless*. Andy Warhol's *Chelsea Girls*. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's *The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant*. Antonioni's *L'Avventura*. Rudy Burkhardt's city and country films without actings. 1960s vinyl coats, white or black. Guillaume Apollinaire. John Ashbery's "Skaters." Color TV. Ads. Football. Wide-angle technicolor movies." My own list is still in the works. Hal ""Anything is art if an artist says it is." --Marcel Duchamp Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Thu Apr 26 22:57:45 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 19:57:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: <20010427025745.EE5BF36F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From gut22 at post.tau.ac.il Fri Apr 27 00:25:11 2001 From: gut22 at post.tau.ac.il (Karen Gut) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 06:25:11 +0200 Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams References: <003801c0cec2$ba754a00$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Message-ID: <006e01c0ced2$10bdc4a0$325b4284@toshiba> > > > Jim Cervantes requests: > > > > > So, I will ask the members of this list > > > > > > 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any > > > other kind of electronic format? > > > Yes. > > > > > 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published you? > > > No. > > > > > Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print magazines > > > that have published you? If so, how many? > >it varies. Right now I'm subscribed to 2 mags that i've never submitted to! > > > > > 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the > > > electronic magazines you submit to? > > At the moment I'm not submitting, but e-mags have an edge with me because I live in Israel and mail takes over a week and sometimes gets lost. > > > 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free and > > > that people must pay for print magazines? > > > No. > > > > > If not, what is your prime consideration in deciding whether to submit > > > to a print magazine or an electronic one? > i like reading poetry on the screen -- i like the surprise when a poem suddenly comes up on the screen. i like the electronic possibilities in the poem's presentation. i also like the immediate contact with an editor that e-mail gives. > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From shaileen.beyer at yale.edu Thu Apr 26 23:46:27 2001 From: shaileen.beyer at yale.edu (Shaileen Beyer) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 23:46:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: finding out about new books In-Reply-To: <200104201404.f3KE42j14623@wiz.cath.vt.edu> Message-ID: Hello All--I'm posting for the first time in hopes that someone can help me. I'm eager to review new books of poems but sometimes miss good books when they come out; I wish there were a publication that kept a running list of books of poems that are brand-new or soon-to-appear. (It wd be nice if the publication also included quotations from the books, so you cd tell whether or not you might like them....) Does such a publication exist? If not, can anyone recommend an efficient way for me to find out about new books quickly? Thanks for your help! Best wishes, Shaileen From tadrichards at prodigy.net Thu Apr 26 23:53:01 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 23:53:01 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: finding out about new books References: Message-ID: <008f01c0cecd$8ed1b720$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Poetry Daily -- www.poems.com -- does a pretty good job. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shaileen Beyer" To: Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2001 11:46 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: finding out about new books > Hello All--I'm posting for the first time in hopes that someone can help > me. I'm eager to review new books of poems but sometimes miss good books > when they come out; I wish there were a publication that kept a running > list of books of poems that are brand-new or soon-to-appear. (It wd be > nice if the publication also included quotations from the books, so you cd > tell whether or not you might like them....) Does such a publication > exist? If not, can anyone recommend an efficient way for me to find out > about new books quickly? Thanks for your help! Best wishes, Shaileen > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From MillB at aol.com Fri Apr 27 00:43:13 2001 From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 00:43:13 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: finding out about new books Message-ID: In a message dated 4/26/01 11:47:29 PM Eastern Daylight Time, shaileen.beyer at yale.edu writes: << I wish there were a publication that kept a running list of books of poems that are brand-new or soon-to-appear. (It wd be nice if the publication also included quotations from the books, so you cd tell whether or not you might like them....) Does such a publication exist? If not, can anyone recommend an efficient way for me to find out about new books quickly? Thanks for your help! >> AWP Chronicle lists new books by members at the end of every issue--a title and author only. Poetry (magazine) has reviews and lists poetry books that it receives every month. Spring Church Book Company (discount poetry catalogue, mail order) lists new poetry books in each catalogue. Hope this helps. Mill From Edward.Byrne at valpo.edu Fri Apr 27 01:12:25 2001 From: Edward.Byrne at valpo.edu (Edward Byrne) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 00:12:25 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: finding out about new books In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You might check out the "Recent and Recommended Books" page in _Valparaiso Poetry Review_ at the following web address: http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/recentbooks.html --Edward Byrne > << I wish there were a publication that kept a running > list of books of poems that are brand-new or soon-to-appear. (It wd be > nice if the publication also included quotations from the books, so > you cd tell whether or not you might like them....) Does such a > publication exist? If not, can anyone recommend an efficient way for > me to find out about new books quickly? Thanks for your help! >> > > AWP Chronicle lists new books by members at the end of every issue--a > title and author only. Poetry (magazine) has reviews and lists poetry > books that it receives every month. > > Spring Church Book Company (discount poetry catalogue, mail order) > lists new poetry books in each catalogue. > > Hope this helps. > > Mill -------------------------------------------------- Edward Byrne Department of English 322 Huegli Hall Valparaiso University Valparaiso, IN 46383-6493 E-mail: edward.byrne at valpo.edu http://www.valpo.edu/home/faculty/ebyrne/homepage/ Editor, Valparaiso Poetry Review E-mail: vpr at valpo.edu http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/ Office Phone: (219) 464-5278 Fax: (219) 464-5511 -------------------------------------------------- From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Fri Apr 27 03:24:02 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 03:24:02 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: In a message dated 4/26/01 9:58:44 PM Central Daylight Time, CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > Sam, > > You are attributing the following comments to the wrong person. I did not > write those answers. > > Bob Cobb > > --- Rsgwynn1 at cs.com > > wrote: > >In a message dated 4/25/01 10:45:49 PM Central Daylight Time, > >CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com writes: > > > >> .cath.vt.edu > >> > >> > >> > >> 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any > >> other kind of electronic format? > > > >Yes. > > > >> 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published you? > >> Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print magazines > >> that have published you? If so, how many? > > > >Yes, but not at the same time. I usually try to take at least a year's > worth > >of a mag that publishes me. Right now I get Hudson, Sewanee, Tar > >RiverPoetry, and New Criterion. > > > >> 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the > >> electronic magazines you submit to? > > > >10% vs. 90%. > >> 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free and > >> that people must pay for print magazines? No. > > > > > >> If not, what is your prime consideration in deciding whether to submit > >> to a print magazine or an electronic one? > > > >In the former case I do so only if requested to submit. > OK, I'm totally confused. These are my answers. I think. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Apr 27 06:21:23 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 06:21:23 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams References: <20010425234350.75635.qmail@web12104.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3AE94823.68A1@nut-n-but.net> 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any other kind of electronic format? Yes, at Light & Dust and (now that I think about it) quite a few other places. I also have several websites, the most important being Comprepoetica, address below. 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published you? Pretty much, but that's not saying much as I am publishing almost nothing new currently. Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print magazines that have published you? If so, how many? The few that publish me pay in subscriptions. I think I don't subscribe to ANY print magazines that do poetry, but get a lot free as a reviewer and simply because I'm friends with many editors. I might add that about the only print publications I'm interested in are micro-press publications of the kind that go out automatically to contributors, a few friends of the editor, and almost no one else. 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the electronic magazines you submit to? I don't know. At this stage of my "career," I send material, if I have any, just about only to people who have asked for it, and I don't pay much attention to what kind of publication it will be in. 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free and that people must pay for print magazines? No. If not, what is your prime consideration in deciding whether to submit to a print magazine or an electronic one? Answered: being asked to send something is about the only consideration for me. Comments: I still much prefer reading hard copy to reading screen copy. Visual poems of the kind I specialize in don't come out too well electronically yet--but are much cheaper to reproduce in color. While electronic zines can fold, the ones I'm involved with seem durable, and give one much more exposure than the print zines I can get into. And there is greater likelihood of permanance with electronic publication. For instance, Light & Dust will almost certainly be taken over by some university once Karl Young, its site-master, no longer wants to, or can, run it. I'm confident that I can get someone to keep my Comprepoetica site going when I have to, too, though not so certain a university would at least archive it (though I don't see why not since it takes up little space, and archiving costs very little--and any site like mine is bound to have at least a little material that would interest posterity). In short, I perceive electronic publication as a viable route to permanence. --Bob G. -------------- next part -------------- Bob Grumman BobGrumman at Nut-N-But.Net http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492 Comprepoetica, the Poetry-Data-Collection Site From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Fri Apr 27 06:27:11 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 06:27:11 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: finding out about new books References: Message-ID: <3AE9497F.9A6@nut-n-but.net> I'm not aware of any publication that keeps track of new books though, as others have reported, there are a few that are trying. One problem is that micro-publishers (me, for instance) haven't time, often, to announce our output. And few publications are much interested in what I call otherstream publications. It certainly would be great if someone could keep a running list of new poetry publications on the net--and got well-enough known that the thousands who would be need for the task would report books as they appeared--and summarize their contents. Here, again, is where a list of schools would be helpful. If there was one that most people more or less agreed on, it would simplify categorizing books on the list to help people know which would be of most interest to them. --Bob G. From Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu Fri Apr 27 09:28:02 2001 From: Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu (Ben Friedlander) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 07:28:02 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben References: <200104261318.JAA01990@dept.english.upenn.edu> Message-ID: Mike: I hear what you're saying about "putting my money where my mouth is" vis-a-vis a comparison of texts. Let me say a few things about form in the abstract and let's go from there. >One thing I would say off the bat here is that you seem to be suggesting >that there's a clear separation between form and content [...] >I would say that form IS A KIND OF content (this is, >incidentally, how I've always read Creeley's phrase "extension of"): you >can read its meaning and place it in a social or historical context >at least as easily (and of course as variously) as you can the word >"schooner" or the "content" of a sentence like, "When grandfather was >fifteen he cut school,went down to the draft board and signed up to >fight >the Krauts." [...] >The point being: if you can talk about >"content" at all then you have to be able to talk about form as a kind >of >content; and when I critique a poems formal properties I'm critiquing it >as content. My favorite Rortyism is "a fuzzy distinction is still a distinction." Sure, form and content blur into one another (for instance, in a picture poem, where the shape of the words on the page provides a visual representation of the thing described), but I still find the form-content distinction useful, even necessary, when thinking or writing about poetry. The part of your post that I disagree with most vehemently is your suggestion that a poem's form can be read "as easily" and "as variously" as its content. I just don't see this and never have. Yes, formal decisions are meaningful. Dickinson's dashes extend her work's overall tendency toward ambiguity by introducing syntactic ambiguities that conventional punctuation would resolve. And yes, individual instances of form can have readable meanings that contribute to one's understanding of the overall poem (as in James Merrill's twelve-step poem, "Family Week at Oracle Ranch," where the poem's division into twelve sections puts _us_ into group therapy too). But the number and significance of such instances of meaningful form are vastly overrated. Moreover, even when a form does have content in its own right, this "content" is rarely very articulate. (Merrill's twelve-stanza division, for instance, is very witty, but it isn't one-twelfth as witty as the poem proper.) This isn't to diminish the importance of form, only to emphasize that its primary function isn't to draw attention to itself or be articulate in its own right, but to draw attention to the content and make _the content_ articulate. Look at Lyn Hejinian's _My Life_: the number of sections and number of sentences in each section tell us how old the poet was when she wrote the poem--and that's all!! The pleasure we take in this aspect of the poem (and I myself take a great deal of pleasure in it) is all out of proportion with its meaningfulness. Here, as in a sonnet, the value of the form is overwhelmingly aesthetic. Similarly, the repetition of sentences in _My Life_ is meaningful, but the value of this repetition shows most notably in its impact on our understanding of the content. The _content_ is what matters most, at least if we want to talk about the poem as autobiography. The META-autobiographical features of this poem are wonderful, both in their conception and in execution, but comparing these meta-autobiographical qualities with the autobiographical features of some other piece of writing seems to me an apples and oranges affair. This is too long already. I'll set the question of intention aside for now. Let me say, though, that I'm really enjoying the chance to think out loud about these issues, which are very important to me. I hope you find the exchange useful too. Ben From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Fri Apr 27 10:13:28 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 10:13:28 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List Message-ID: I'm planning on dragging my poetry education kicking and screaming out of the 19th century. I read journals, so I know about Right Now, and I graduated from high school, so I know some about Back Then, but inbetween, enh. They have a tendency to offer courses in poetry when I can't take them, round here. Any poetry books anyone finds particularly interesting or important in the 20th century! (Apparently, this is not going to be a little project.) -Amber From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Fri Apr 27 11:26:46 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 10:26:46 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Some years ago now In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Nice little prose poem by Alex Katz, Hal. Reminds me of the scene in Woody Allen's *Manhattan* where the Allen character makes a list of things that make life worth living, ending with Mariel Hemingway's face. For a slightly different perspective regarding "what's new," here's a quote from jazz pianist Bill Evans, in an interview done in the 1970s: "It's this preoccupation with 'who's the most modern' instead of 'who's making the most beautiful, human music.' [The most beautiful] may very well be the most modern thing as well, but to make the avant-garde the criteria has gotten to be almost a sickness, especially in jazz." {fr. *Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece*, by Ashley Kahn} Evans's words struck me recently while listening to some poetry readings in which the poet essentially broke no radical new ground, wondering why I could nonetheless be so moved by conventional themes and techniques. One answer to that, I know, is that in many ways I'm a conventional guy. Yet I'm certainly not one of those iambs-are-everything fanatics, either. So another way to come at it is as Evans does--in which degree of innovation or traditionalism is an interesting aspect of the work, but not definitive of quality. David Graham __________________ >in an interview in the Journal of Contemporary >Arts, Alex Katz was asked "What are some of >the things in your life that you saw or heard or >came on and you thought, 'Yeah, now that's new'?" > >Katz's list: "Lester Young. Billie Holliday. Be Bop. >Stan Kenton. Dizzy Gillespie. Manchito. Charlie >Parker. Stan Getz. Miles Davis. Sonny Rollins's >'Wagon Wheels.' Man Ray. Charles Lamb. George >Braque's 1913 black and white collages. Pablo >Picasso's sculptures. Malevich's Suprematist >painting. Henri Matisse's collages. Jackson Pollock. >Barnett Newman. Clifford Still. Roy Lichtenstein, >early 1960s. James Rosenquist, early 1960s. Eva >Hesse. Jeff Koons. Mike Kelley's rugs. Richard >Avedon's fashion photos, 1960s. Red Groom's >early happenings. Paul Taylor, late 1950s. William >Dunas, early 1970s. Samuel Beckett's *Happy Days* >with Ruth White. John Jesuran's "Red House." >Meredith Monk's theater and music pieces. Godard's >*Breathless*. Andy Warhol's *Chelsea Girls*. Rainer >Werner Fassbinder's *The Bitter Tears of Petra von >Kant*. Antonioni's *L'Avventura*. Rudy Burkhardt's >city and country films without actings. 1960s vinyl >coats, white or black. Guillaume Apollinaire. John >Ashbery's "Skaters." Color TV. Ads. Football. >Wide-angle technicolor movies." > >My own list is still in the works. > >Hal __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Fri Apr 27 11:42:20 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 11:42:20 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List Message-ID: I guess a better way to put it is: Which 20th century poetry books do you like and think are essential? -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Amber Prentiss To: 'new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu' Sent: 4/27/2001 10:13 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List I'm planning on dragging my poetry education kicking and screaming out of the 19th century. I read journals, so I know about Right Now, and I graduated from high school, so I know some about Back Then, but inbetween, enh. They have a tendency to offer courses in poetry when I can't take them, round here. Any poetry books anyone finds particularly interesting or important in the 20th century! (Apparently, this is not going to be a little project.) -Amber _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com Fri Apr 27 11:42:08 2001 From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 11:42:08 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List Message-ID: In a message dated 4/27/01 9:11:35 AM Central Daylight Time, aprentiss at agnesscott.edu writes: > Any poetry books anyone finds particularly interesting or > important in the 20th century! (Apparently, this is not going to be a little > project.) > Get Robert Mezey's Modern Library editions of Robinson and Hardy. From halvard at earthlink.net Fri Apr 27 12:11:09 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:11:09 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > I guess a better way to put it is: Which 20th century poetry books do you > like and think are essential? > -Amber One that you'll find to be inexpensive at your local outlet mall bookstore is the compilation of John Ashbery's first four (or was it five?) books. Snap it up. It's only five or six bucks for some of his best early work. Hal ""Anything is art if an artist says it is." --Marcel Duchamp Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Fri Apr 27 12:22:02 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 11:22:02 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A 20th century reading list in poetry probably should be either 26 pages long, or very short. Here are two short suggestions. 1. Read early Robert Frost, not in one of the collected or selected editions, but as he published, one amazing book at a time. Dover Thrift Editions reprints his first two volumes unabridged under one cover for a dollar, (*A Boy's Will and North of Boston*) and *Mountain Interval* (called *The Road Not Taken and Other Poems*, for some reason) is available separately, also at a dollar. It's wonderful to encounter the monuments like "Home Burial" and "After Apple-Picking" in their original context, I think--and to learn that RF has many marvelous poems that don't always make the anthologies: "The Code," "The Black Cottage," "The Housekeeper," "The Fear," "A Hundred Collars," "Hyla Brook," "Putting in the Seed," "Snow". . . . (It's great fun to go back and look at the original volumes for other poets, too, naturally, including Stevens, Williams, Yeats, Moore. . . .) 2. A contemporary poet left out of many anthologies is Fred Chappell. His long poem *Midquest* is amazingly good, and too little known. It's a technical tour de force as well as one of the most readable long poems I've ever seen. *Midquest* showcases just about every poetic mode, from heroic couplets to epistolary verse, terza rima, syllabics, chant royal, dramatic monologue, free verse and more. Chappell achieves a faceted richness that reminds me of Eliot, while avoiding the structural problems that bedevil *Paterson* and *The Cantos*: how to make it all cohere? Chappell's comment on this quality in his work is typically homespun: "With this variety of forms I hoped to suggest a kind of melting pot American quality, and in fact my model was that elder American art form, the sampler, each form standing for a different fancy stitch. . . . Ours is the time of the brilliant autobiographical lyric. Many of the fine qualities of this sort of poem--intensity, urgency, metaphysical trial, emotional revelation--are absent from *Midquest*. I wished to capture, to restore to my work other qualities sometimes lacking in the larger body of contemporary poetry: detachment, social scope, humor, portrayal of character and background, discursiveness, wide range of subject matter. So that *Midquest* is to some degree a reactionary work." [from the Preface. *Midquest*. Louisiana State U P, 1981] I think Chappell's wrong about any lack of intensity or revelation in his book, but he's right about its virtues, especially social scope, humor, and character. I wish that this poem were more widely known. David Graham __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From acgold01 at gwise.louisville.edu Fri Apr 27 12:55:50 2001 From: acgold01 at gwise.louisville.edu (Alan C. Golding) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:55:50 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy Message-ID: It's been an instructive pleasure to see/hear Mike and Ben discussing this topic, and since I'll probably be writing about it for the next x number of years, I'll emerge from my customary lurkerdom. In particular I want to respond to some things in your last post, Ben. Like you, I think the traditional form-content distinction can retain some usefulness, but you seem to argue more firmly for form as primarily a pointer toward content, or as subordinate to content, than I would want to. (Also, in your framework, "content" seems to be equated with something like "paraphraseable statement," though I suspect I may be misunderstanding you on that.) Anyway, I want to think about form as a form of content in itself, and the connection of that to teaching (variously understood). Take the example of *My Life.* There I think the procedural form tells us more than you're suggesting. It suggests notions of overt artifice, convention, method as applied to autobiography, in contrast to an alternative way of thinking about autobiography (an alternative set of conventions) that involves ideas of naturalness, transparency, straightforward "storytelling," perhaps as represented in the much-maligned contemporary autobiographical lyric. I'm not particularly making a value judgment here, though I have my preferences; my point is more to invoke the debates of a particular literary historical moment in the late '70s-early '80s. (All this is really perhaps a version of "The art that displays itself vs. the art that conceals itself": that's a different, though related, conversation, one in which it's often amused me to think that someone like Merrill could meet someone like Hejinian or Bernstein [though not in terms of the intent of the foregrounded artifice, obviously].) Anyway, to the extent that the form of *My Life* (a book always popular with students, btw) makes a statement about or takes a position on particular ways of thinking about autobiography, the book "teaches" or proposes those ways of thinking through its form. That's how the form becomes a (pedagogical) form of content, though *not* totally co-extensive with all the other contents of the book. Creeley's famous aphorism suggests an extreme version of organic form (or was taken as such through the 1960s), in which form and content are co-extensive. That claim to co-extensiveness may be what you and Mike are disagreeing about. I find it useful to bring in Bernstein's revision of RC, "All writing is an extension of method"--a statement vulnerable to the stereotypical misunderstanding of LP as theory-driven but that was really meant, I think, as a deliberately provocative intervention in a specific debate. All writing is an extension of method insofar as the formal methods imply a poetics and an intention, and they thus become a form of purposeful content. Back to the proceduralism of ML, and teaching. I'm interested in form as itself instructive, but there are pragmatic classroom issues here too. While they can recognize more obvious visual structures (quatrains, whatever), typically students (well, my students) don't recognize the presence of procedural form like Hejinian's. So on the one hand it's highly artificial, and on the other it seems concealed. One has to teach them that this form is there trying to teach them something . . . (Which is, I guess, a big part of the job for those of us who teach poetry.) And as for someone like Howe, initially they see that not as form but just as mess--though they quickly get pretty interested, and quite acute and inventive in their own reading, once they start to realize that some very specific formal choices are being made. But that's yet another conversation . . . Alan From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Fri Apr 27 13:08:57 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 13:08:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List In-Reply-To: from "Amber Prentiss" at Apr 27, 2001 11:42:20 am Message-ID: <200104271708.NAA24149@dept.english.upenn.edu> According to Amber Prentiss: > > > I guess a better way to put it is: Which 20th century poetry books do you > like and think are essential? > -Amber Okay, I'll play: WC Williams Collected (2 vols) - endless, endless wonderful machines to be found there! -m. ps- thanks to Alan Golding for his wonderful post today. Trying to find time to respond... From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Fri Apr 27 14:00:59 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 14:00:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy In-Reply-To: from "Alan C. Golding" at Apr 27, 2001 12:55:50 pm Message-ID: <200104271800.OAA01987@dept.english.upenn.edu> Hi folks, I'd like to respond to this section from Alan G's last post: According to Alan C. Golding: > Take the example of *My Life.* There I think the procedural form tells us > more than you're suggesting. It suggests notions of overt artifice, > convention, method as applied to autobiography, in contrast to an > alternative way of thinking about autobiography (an alternative set of > conventions) that involves ideas of naturalness, transparency, > straightforward "storytelling," perhaps as represented in the > much-maligned contemporary autobiographical lyric. I'm not particularly > making a value judgment here, though I have my > preferences; my point is more to invoke the debates of a particular > literary historical moment in the late '70s-early '80s. (All this is > really perhaps a version of "The art that displays itself vs. the art > that conceals itself": > that's a different, though related, conversation, one in which it's > often amused me to think that someone like Merrill could meet someone > like Hejinian or Bernstein [though not in terms of the intent of the > foregrounded artifice, ob! viously].) I'm particularly interested in what he says about "naturalness" or "transparency" in relation to the debate over "the art that dsplays itself vs. the art that conceals itself." I'd like to think about this in relation to the question of how formal choices affect how the Object being described in a poem, the Object under scrutiny, is represented - if one were separarting form and content, that Object (or series of objects) might be called content. Or, put it this way perhaps: a traditional narrative using standard English syntax is often the Story of a Subject relating to objects, be those objects people, trees, dollar bills or ideas (which are things). Okay, so what I wanted to say is that as far as form goes, I'm most interested in poems which use form to disrupt what John Dewey calls "the spectator theory of knowledge," where "the real object is the object so fixed in its regal aloofness that it is a king to any beholding mind that may gaze upon it." The spectator theory of knowledge, Dewey argues, flows "from the separation (set up in the interest of the quest for absolute certainty) between theory and practice, knowledge and action." Only if the object under scrutiny is believed to be autonomously "true" will it remain unknowable; and its unknowableness is central to its status as regal: the hierarchy which makes the object of knowledge (a poem for instance) king and the model of practice serf is cemented by the premise that that object is simultaneously a fixed truth and an unattainable one. Remove this premise and theory and practice can no longer remain separate. I think first, in this regard of Stein's "portraits" (Picasso, Mabel Dodge et al) but since I've never written about those and don't have time at the moment to write something, I'm including something from an article of mine on WC Williams and Ralph Ellison (I realize this is a somewhat lame thing to do) which may help explain how I'm thinking about poetic form as a kind of content. It's more or less just a reading of a Williams poem, here's the poem: PORTRAIT OF A LADY Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Which sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady's slipper. Your knees are a southern breeze - - or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard? - - as if that answered anything. Ah, yes - - below the knees, since the tune drops that way, it is one of those white summer days, the tall grass of your ankles flickers upon the shore - - Which shore? - - the sand clings to my lips - - Which shore? Agh, petals maybe. How should I know? Which shore? Which shore? I said petals from an appletree. The poem is an assault on English metaphor through dialogic interruption, though even before the irritating questioner (who I would like to read as the "Lady" herself) begins her obstruction one is struck by the visual inadequacies of the metaphor and, soon, by its arbitrariness: "The sky / where Watteau hung a lady's / slipper" - Williams has gotten his paintings mixed up (the speaker is thinking of Fragonard's, "The Swing") but the nonchalance, the seeming randomness, of his answer suggests that it doesn't matter much. Likewise with his next attempt, "Your knees / are a southern breeze - - or / a gust of snow." The first choice of metaphor seems dictated entirely by sound; it is a joke on the symbolic constraints brought about by the need to rhyme, the metaphor quickly undone by the suggestion of an alternate metaphor which is in fact the opposite of the first. (It is also a pretty clear relative of Dickinson's use of dashes and "multiple choice" - the kind one finds in a poem like "The brain - is wider than the sky" for instance.) The speaker's guttural "Agh!" is a gesture towards dispensing with metaphor entirely, even as he seems to have realized his mistake regarding the painting - who cares? the poem implies. From this point forward anything which might be construed as "high" or "English" speech is suffused with irony. "Ah, yes. . .it is / one of those white summer days" - here we have something quite intentionally similar to the "peculiarly English" portrait with which Henry James begins his Portrait of Lady: "Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." But Williams has spliced into the middle of his proper speech a sort of gag, indicating that the poem is in the process of being written: "below / the knees, since the tune / drops that way" - Williams is working his way down the page. This insistence on the act of writing over and against the "portrait" was another version of his insistence on the local. As he put it in reference to Burke, "writing is made up of words, of nothing else. These have a contour and complexion imposed upon them by the weather, by the shapes of men's lives in places." "Which shore? Which shore?" That's the question; the one the Lady keeps insisting on; the one which frustrates attempts at portraiture. It too is a joke - the pun on "sure" signifying on the speakers lack of surety, the insistence on location meant to remind the male speaker and the reader of what shore they were dealing with: this Lady, in contrast to James's and Eliot's, was on the American shore (the shore, let's say, of American immigrant vernaculars), and she was making the point which Williams himself was always making: "that observation about us engenders the very opposite of what we seek: triviality, crassness and intellectual bankruptcy." For my money, "Portrait of Lady" is Williams's most explicitly feminist poem (it may have helped that he had appetizing targets in James and, particularly, Eliot to play off of). The American woman speaks, but more importantly, she is entangled with the other speaker in the poem - it is impossible to unravel who states the final two questions. As Brian Bremen has said in reference to In the American Grain, in Williams's best work "notions of 'identification' and 'empathy' maintain this paradox of identity and difference by moving beyond power relations to achieve greater intersubjective understanding." At the conclusion of "Portrait of a Lady" we cannot call the two characters identical but they are, as I say, *entangled* - and the poem is prolegomenon to some future expression of their intersubjective identity. So that's it. I might mention that having pumped old WCW up in this little section, I go on to kill him for his portraits of African Americans, which I think participate in the very "spectator theory of knowledge" which "portrait of a Lady" deconstructs. But that's a story for another time, For now I hope it illuminates my position vis a vis my ongoing conversation with Ben and Alan's latest post. -m. From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Fri Apr 27 14:51:07 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 14:51:07 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: So who are these autobiographical lyricists, anyhow? I keep running across them: autobiographical writers, navel gazers, those who write poetry "larded with homely anecdotes that pant for readers' sympathy" (from commentary in Painted Bride Quarterly's current issue at www.webdelsol.com/pbq). Taking out the pejoratives, what do people mean by this? How does anyone know something is autobiographical, and in what sense? Does it mean that their literary focus is on themselves, or themselves in relation to family, community, whatever? Most importantly, who the hell are these people? Substitute 'they' for any time you see something that, translated, means "autobiographical poet," and you see that it seems like a big shadowy force (rather conspiracy-theory). Any takers? -Amber From mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu Fri Apr 27 15:13:08 2001 From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 15:13:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? In-Reply-To: from "Amber Prentiss" at Apr 27, 2001 02:51:07 pm Message-ID: <200104271913.PAA13092@dept.english.upenn.edu> According to Amber Prentiss: > > So who are these autobiographical lyricists, anyhow? I keep running across > them: autobiographical writers, navel gazers, those who write poetry "larded > with homely anecdotes that pant for readers' sympathy" (from commentary in > Painted Bride Quarterly's current issue at www.webdelsol.com/pbq). Taking > out the pejoratives, what do people mean by this? How does anyone know > something is autobiographical, and in what sense? Does it mean that their > literary focus is on themselves, or themselves in relation to family, > community, whatever? Most importantly, who the hell are these people? > Substitute 'they' for any time you see something that, translated, means > "autobiographical poet," and you see that it seems like a big shadowy force > (rather conspiracy-theory). Any takers? > > -Amber Amber, here's the beginning of Dave Smith's poem, "Treading Clams at Egg Island" (1990): Among us the fathers labored like seals and we would come behind them, crotch- deep, tiptoeing the motherly waters, each naked foot kicked out where sand humped, darkness hiding its treasures, then body's tumble and thrust to make the fetal coil, to begin a weightless grope downward through broken swells of milky bottom. Now, one can argue about whether this bears any relation to a REAL event experienced by the REAL Dave Smith - but that's actually not as important to the question of whether this is "autobiographical lyric" as one might think - because authobiographical lyric, like autobiography proper, is just a convention, just a model for assembling words, images, etc. Even if Dave Smith the guy went clam diggin as a kid - that seems to me to be quite secondary to what's going on in the poem, which fulfills the expectations of autobiographical lyric - in this case to give us the properly "deep" Oedipal narrative of every male autobiographical lyricist worth his salt. -m. From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Fri Apr 27 04:15:45 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 03:15:45 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Merrill review Message-ID: To pick up an old thread on James Merrill's poetry, here's a paragraph of a new review of his Collected Poems in the new New Republic online, which can be accessed at the following address: http://www.thenewrepublic.com/050701/kirsch050701.html "If the fact of Merrill's achievement is clear, however, its exact quality and its proper stature are not at all clear. The fear of giving hostages to the Philistines has prevented a recognition that his poetry is, finally and even consciously, superficial; it is profoundly concerned with surfaces. This is its strength and its considerable limitation. This fact of Merrill's art is often euphemized by calling him a comic poet or a Mozartian poet. But such appellations are misleading if they suggest that Merrill was artistically happy, that his gifts found free and ideal expression in his chosen forms and subjects. The Collected Poems only intermittently gives the sense of a complete achievement. Like a Renaissance fresco painter, Merrill often seems to lay his brilliant colors onto a weak and crumbling material; his themes are rarely equal to the language in which he clothes them. He presents the spectacle, rare in the last two centuries, of a serious poet whose language outstrips what he has to say." Paul Lake From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Fri Apr 27 04:30:25 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 03:30:25 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Merrill review Message-ID: Another paragraph from the TNR Merrill review: "The Book of Ephraim contains some of Merrill's finest writing, but the system that it is meant to expound is intellectually unacceptable and imaginatively complacent. It is not necessary, of course, to write a long poem in order to be a major poet; but there are qualities of the major poet whose absence from Merrill's work is confirmed in his long poem. There is more discovery, and therefore more beauty, in the brief and homely Collected Poems of Larkin than in the many golden pages of Merrill." Paul Lake From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 16:17:14 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:17:14 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Merrill review Message-ID: Paul cited: >http://www.thenewrepublic.com/050701/kirsch050701.html "Merrill presents himself as the defender of aristocratic humanism against the modern tide of ugliness, brutality, mass thought. As he writes in another poem, "Form's what affirms." Yet if we ask what Merrill's form affirms, the answer can only be: form itself." Bah. I detect two nasty prejudices in this essay-review: 1) against "art for art's sake" or art that is too _pretty,_ whatever that means (and one wonders what this fellow would make of Keats); and 2) against the lyric. Alas, if you write short lyrics, you will never be as Great as those who wrote epics. (Of course, you don't _have_ to write a long poem to be a good poet; but if you don't, phooey on you.) I also consider it particularly bad taste for a reviewer to spend time writing about the books _he_ wishes the writer under review had written rather than the books the writer produced (verse autobiography? what about all those childhood sequences?). There is more "discovery" in Philip Larkin's poems than Merrill's? Gee, this couldn't possibly be because Larkin had a fairly nasty, glum, grim view of life, could it? (He was the one who said depression was for him what daffodils were for Wordsworth.) "It's too pretty, too perfect, too facile, not enough difficulty or ugliness in it" -- Bah again. And as for long poems which have nasty supporting systems and philosophies -- what about Yeats' own, for heaven's sake? Pound's famous Fascistic tendencies? What is the "system" behind "Paterson"? Behind Milton? Something about "justifying God's ways to man," wasn't it? What would this critic think of that? I think I may have said it on this list before but if I have I'll say it again: I was pretty much unaware of Merrill as the author of anything other than a couple of good poems and "The Changing Light" which I regarded as a sort of verse version of "A Vision." Not only did I discover his translation of "Palme," which I immediately fell in love with, but also some poems that absolutely sparkle -- cliche, yes, but they are gems -- like one (I don't have the book with me at work right now) about teaching submission to a dog and how short a time it takes him what it took Merrill so long to learn. This book is a great resurrection of Merrill's work, and usually a poet has to wait quite a long while for it. This may sound like hyperbole but now there is a chance for a whole new generation of people interested in poetry, both reading and writing it, to hear some beautiful new music. And to have such a handsome _big_ volume of poetry making a bit of a splash, what about saying something about that? But no, it is far more interesting, "critically," to sadly muse upon how this poet's work was unwritten (which sounds like something about the bald King of Finland: what about what we have here and now?) rather than saying something about the actual thing itself, which appears to be the poetry volume of the season. (Amazon.com has it in stock and shipping within twenty-four hours, for heaven's sake. And interestingly enough, nothing by Adam Kirsch!) This reviewer reads as if he were mustering up the guts to pinch-hit for William Logan. Grump grump. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 16:23:42 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:23:42 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poem by Merrill Critic from Poetry Daily Message-ID: Heroes Have the Whole Earth for Their Tomb Tonight I read of an ancient war Once thought self-evidently great, Out-blazoning all that came before, Each battlefield a hinge of fate, And marvel once more at how the gain Or loss of some extinguished city Could cause defeated men such pain And win for the conqueror such glory. Who wondered then if Amphipolis Merited agonizing death, Or doubted that mighty Brasidas Would, for as long as men drew breath, Shine forth in his dear-bought renown? And when did the majesty of act Imperceptibly dwindle down To indifferent, objective fact? Athens and Sparta gripped each other For thirty years; all those who died Piled in a single trench together Could not for an hour have pacified Insatiable Passchendaele; the dead Rise in an exponential series From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 16:27:51 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:27:51 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] More Paragraphs from Adam Kirsch Message-ID: "It is interesting, however, that even McClatchy calls Lowell the more gifted and ambitious poet; and while he explains Lowell's eclipse as the product of a turn toward a more private and apolitical poetry, he does not pass judgment on that turn. Bishop's influence on contemporary poetry is clear, but it is not clear that it has been salutary. She seems to have licensed the use of a kind of mournful, meandering descriptiveness used to express quiet self-pity, a mode that can be found in much of the poetry Chappell deals with. Perhaps we need the example of Lowell's musicality, force, and, yes, ambition to counteract that turn." from http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/04-20-98/boston_books_2.html collected http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/archives/authors/boston_adamkirsch.html Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 16:28:57 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:28:57 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Adam Kirsch on James Tate Message-ID: "Strange though it may sound, American poetry today is more sentimental, more reassuring, easier on the reader, than at any time in the last 100 years. Not on the surface, of course: the techniques of modernism are by now deeply ingrained, and just about no major poet writes a direct, lyrical, declarative verse. But while poets today may still use modernist techniques -- free association, surrealism, complex allusion -- the modernist temper is gone; poetry has to a large degree resumed its 19th-century role as a comfort and consolation, a retreat from the rigors of the world." http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/26/reviews/980426.26kirscht.html _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Fri Apr 27 16:32:53 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 16:32:53 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poem by Merrill Critic from Poetry Daily Message-ID: Fails the I-can-read-it-aloud test. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Moira Russell To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/27/2001 4:23 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Poem by Merrill Critic from Poetry Daily Heroes Have the Whole Earth for Their Tomb Tonight I read of an ancient war Once thought self-evidently great, Out-blazoning all that came before, Each battlefield a hinge of fate, And marvel once more at how the gain Or loss of some extinguished city Could cause defeated men such pain And win for the conqueror such glory. Who wondered then if Amphipolis Merited agonizing death, Or doubted that mighty Brasidas Would, for as long as men drew breath, Shine forth in his dear-bought renown? And when did the majesty of act Imperceptibly dwindle down To indifferent, objective fact? Athens and Sparta gripped each other For thirty years; all those who died Piled in a single trench together Could not for an hour have pacified Insatiable Passchendaele; the dead Rise in an exponential series From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 16:34:59 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:34:59 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] one more Message-ID: Thought Kirsch on Olds' "Blood, Tin, Straw" might be interested, as William Logan was already cited. http://www.thenewrepublic.com/122799/kirsch122799.html Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From jdavis at panix.com Fri Apr 27 16:39:54 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 16:39:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Merrill review In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > tendencies? What is the "system" behind "Paterson"? Moira - I realize I'm in arrears for a substantiation of my six-word defense of M Moore, and the horrible cartesian work/life duality seems to be draining away any time I thought I might give to my public education - but I take the rhetorical force of your question above to mean that you see *no* system behind Paterson - am I reading you right? Paterson as near as I can tell is Williams trying to integrate the phenomenology of his Spring and All period with his local/American history streak (see In The American Grain). It ain't the most comely of systems, but it does represent an attempt to work out some ideas that he had - as opposed to articulating a fully-formed worldview (as acknowledged and parodied in ((at least the title of)) Baraka's famous "System of Dante's Hell"). Have a good one - Jordan From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Fri Apr 27 16:48:58 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 16:48:58 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: So, does that mean it has to be one-size-fits-many? Is every poem that has an 'I' or 'my' in it autobiographical? Is it just any poem in which the speaker details an event (or events) from its life? Does it have to seem fairly plausible? Etc, etc? -Amber -----Original Message----- From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/27/2001 3:13 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? According to Amber Prentiss: > > So who are these autobiographical lyricists, anyhow? I keep running across > them: autobiographical writers, navel gazers, those who write poetry "larded > with homely anecdotes that pant for readers' sympathy" (from commentary in > Painted Bride Quarterly's current issue at www.webdelsol.com/pbq). Taking > out the pejoratives, what do people mean by this? How does anyone know > something is autobiographical, and in what sense? Does it mean that their > literary focus is on themselves, or themselves in relation to family, > community, whatever? Most importantly, who the hell are these people? > Substitute 'they' for any time you see something that, translated, means > "autobiographical poet," and you see that it seems like a big shadowy force > (rather conspiracy-theory). Any takers? > > -Amber Amber, here's the beginning of Dave Smith's poem, "Treading Clams at Egg Island" (1990): Among us the fathers labored like seals and we would come behind them, crotch- deep, tiptoeing the motherly waters, each naked foot kicked out where sand humped, darkness hiding its treasures, then body's tumble and thrust to make the fetal coil, to begin a weightless grope downward through broken swells of milky bottom. Now, one can argue about whether this bears any relation to a REAL event experienced by the REAL Dave Smith - but that's actually not as important to the question of whether this is "autobiographical lyric" as one might think - because authobiographical lyric, like autobiography proper, is just a convention, just a model for assembling words, images, etc. Even if Dave Smith the guy went clam diggin as a kid - that seems to me to be quite secondary to what's going on in the poem, which fulfills the expectations of autobiographical lyric - in this case to give us the properly "deep" Oedipal narrative of every male autobiographical lyricist worth his salt. -m. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 16:52:45 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:52:45 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Merrill review Message-ID: >an attempt to work out some ideas that he had - >as opposed to articulating a fully-formed worldview Well, that was what I meant; the much more hazy "attempt to work out some ideas," thematic, rather than something as highly structured as Dante or even (when you understand his theories about recurrence cycles etc.) some of Yeats. "Paterson's" structure seems to me to break down pretty badly towards the end (I don't have the book with me here in Seattle so unfortunately I can't get really specific unless I go to the library). Does this invalidate Williams as a poet? My point was, as I see it the critic was faulting Merrill because the "system" behind Merrill's long poem was faulty and thus this also revealed faults about Merrill the poet. But how many poetic sequences or long poems do not have some flaw about their structure? It's very difficult to keep something like a long poem going and going and going. That is a more fully articulated version of what I meant to say. People don't usually read Yeats in order to understand his whacky worldview, they read Yeats because he wrote great poems. And so on. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Fri Apr 27 17:16:58 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 16:16:58 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE:Autobiographical lyric? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Most people, when they say "autobiographical lyric," know at some level that what they actually mean is something like "poem in first person which is or appears to be fully or partially autobiographical in nature, or wishes for rhetorical purpose to give such an impresion." But that's too much of a mouthful, so we get the usual shorthand. One problem, of course, is that when you use such shorthand often enough, not just the phrasing but the idea tends to get elided or simplified. Mike Magee's right, I think, in noting that autobiography is essentially a convention (or set of conventions). I've mentioned Philip Levine's poems in this light before: they are full of fictionalized details, by the author's own testimony, so a term like "autobiographical" is ultimately misleading. Unless we're intimately acquainted with the author, we really only have the words on the page as testimony--so matters of fidelity to fact become, as Mike M. says, secondary. In Kate Sontag and my forthcoming collection of essays on the subject (*After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography*), we tend to favor the phrase "lyric-I" as a little less troublesome than "autobiographical lyric." I think that the entire category of "autobiographical lyric" (along with its even poorer sister "the confessional poem") is heavily in need of re-thinking today--hence our anthology, naturally. But matters of terminology aside, it seems self-evident to me, but apparently not to others, that the realm of the lyric-I is as splendidly various today as it ever was. Dave Smith is and always was a writer of swollen purple rhetoric, but that doesn't mean he is in any way representative of the best lyric-I poems being written today. I'll post a couple lyric-I poems separately, in case anyone wants to spin this thread further via example. David Graham _____________________________ > >So, does that mean it has to be one-size-fits-many? Is every poem that has >an 'I' or 'my' in it autobiographical? Is it just any poem in which the >speaker details an event (or events) from its life? Does it have to seem >fairly plausible? Etc, etc? > >-Amber >-----Original Message----- >From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu >To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu >Sent: 4/27/2001 3:13 PM >Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? > >According to Amber Prentiss: >> >> So who are these autobiographical lyricists, anyhow? I keep running >across >> them: autobiographical writers, navel gazers, those who write poetry >"larded >> with homely anecdotes that pant for readers' sympathy" (from >commentary in >> Painted Bride Quarterly's current issue at www.webdelsol.com/pbq). >Taking >> out the pejoratives, what do people mean by this? How does anyone know >> something is autobiographical, and in what sense? Does it mean that >their >> literary focus is on themselves, or themselves in relation to family, >> community, whatever? Most importantly, who the hell are these people? >> Substitute 'they' for any time you see something that, translated, >means >> "autobiographical poet," and you see that it seems like a big shadowy >force >> (rather conspiracy-theory). Any takers? >> >> -Amber > >Amber, here's the beginning of Dave Smith's poem, "Treading Clams at Egg >Island" (1990): > >Among us the fathers labored like seals >and we would come behind them, crotch- >deep, tiptoeing the motherly waters, >each naked foot kicked out where sand >humped, darkness hiding its treasures, > >then body's tumble and thrust to make >the fetal coil, to begin a weightless >grope downward through broken swells >of milky bottom. > >Now, one can argue about whether this bears any relation to a REAL event >experienced by the REAL Dave Smith - but that's actually not as >important >to the question of whether this is "autobiographical lyric" as one might >think - because authobiographical lyric, like autobiography proper, is >just a convention, just a model for assembling words, images, etc. Even >if Dave Smith the guy went clam diggin as a kid - that seems to me to be >quite secondary to what's going on in the poem, which fulfills the >expectations of autobiographical lyric - in this case to give us the >properly "deep" Oedipal narrative of every male autobiographical >lyricist >worth his salt. > >-m. > > __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From wasanthony at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 17:14:46 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 14:14:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poem by Merrill Critic from Poetry Daily In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010427211446.33296.qmail@web12105.mail.yahoo.com> Gack! - Jim --- Moira Russell wrote: > Heroes Have the Whole Earth for Their Tomb > > Tonight I read of an ancient war > Once thought self-evidently great, > Out-blazoning all that came before, > Each battlefield a hinge of fate, > > And marvel once more at how the gain > Or loss of some extinguished city > Could cause defeated men such pain > And win for the conqueror such glory. > > Who wondered then if Amphipolis > Merited agonizing death, > Or doubted that mighty Brasidas > Would, for as long as men drew breath, > > Shine forth in his dear-bought renown? > And when did the majesty of act > Imperceptibly dwindle down > To indifferent, objective fact? > > Athens and Sparta gripped each other > For thirty years; all those who died > Piled in a single trench together > Could not for an hour have pacified > > Insatiable Passchendaele; the dead > Rise in an exponential series > From units in the Megarid > Up to the hundred thousand bodies > > Now nourishing the green Ardennes. > If trophies were to be built for all, > The urns would leave no room for men, > The names would require an endless wall. > > History that the Greeks released, > Unconscious of evil, from the lamp, > Now finds its scale so far increased > That atom-bomb and murder-camp > > Draw less profusion from the heart > Than a few soldiers killed at sea > When Pericles, in the crowded mart, > Read out his invented eulogy. > > Adam Kirsch > Partisan Review > Volume LXVII, Number 4 > Fall 2000 > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From wasanthony at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 17:22:59 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 14:22:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams In-Reply-To: <20010425234350.75635.qmail@web12104.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20010427212259.43700.qmail@web12104.mail.yahoo.com> Well, I pretty much anticipated the tenor of the responses my litle questionnaire elicited, though of course I could not have anticipated the particulars. Now I will answer my own questionnaire and use that as a response to your responses. > 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any > other kind of electronic format? Yes, and I edit an electronic journal, though in the late seventies and early eighties I edited and published a print magazine (Porch), a chapbook series and a pamphlet series (Inland Boat) that published many of the writers who were at this recent AWP (Rita Dove, Peter Cooley, Eric Tretheway, Susan Ludvigson, Jim Peterson, John Morgan and others) as well as other poets who went on to make names for themselves (Tess Gallagher, Laura Jensen, Michael Burkard etc.) A number of these had never published in an electronic format until I requested work from them for The Salt River Review, and which they sent because of the reputation of Porch - for a few issues, SRR had as its subtitle, "the magazine formerly known as Porch." Naturally, I see little difference in quality between print and electronic publications, with the small difference resulting perhaps from the reluctance of many poets and writers to publish electronically, which of course narrows the field of choice. Granted, there's a lot of trash out there on the web and, because it's so easy to mount an electronic publication, a bigger trash-to-quality ratio (heavy on the trash). Though I'm not going to go into particulars, Bob Grumman would be happy to know I keep a mental list of electronic publishing "schools," with names like "sampler" - the online Mississippi Review would be an example; "techno-lit" - hyper-hypertext being form AND content, exemplified by magazines like BeeHive and Riding the Meridian;"bells & whistles" - high on fancy html, animation etc., but low on literary content; "MY-e-zine" (I hate the term "e-zine," by the way) - these tend to have titles like "Poetry Flowers" and originate from free, isp-provided webspace; "all-but-print" - I think SRR is of that school, eschewing technological wizardry in favor of content and a more print-like presentation; and "true-e-zine" - Mudlark, Blue Moon Review or CrossConnect (though CrossConnect also publishes a print version) are examples. > 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published > you? > Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print > magazines > that have published you? If so, how many? Like I others here, I subscribe to 3 or 4 print magazines, all of which have published my work. I once subscribed to two magazines that have never published my work: Poetry Northwest and Poetry. > 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the > electronic magazines you submit to? It used to be 99% print/1% electronic, but the ration has gradually narrowed to about 60/40. Reason? The same one Hal gave as his answer to the last question below: Ars longa, vita brevis. The whole submission-acceptance/rejection-publication process of print magazines take too long, and the time seems to get longer the older one gets. Another take on "Ars longa, vita brevis": Someone remarked that he/she didn't submit to electronic publications because there was no gurantee the publication would be around for any appreciable length of time. Well, that is also true of print publications. It might hearten some to know that one of the primary concerns among electronic publishers is the archiving issue and many have allied themselves in organizations like the International Literary Editors Fellowship (ILEF) and Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) to work toward solving problems in archiving. > 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free > and > that people must pay for print magazines? No. > If not, what is your prime consideration in deciding whether to > submit > to a print magazine or an electronic one? There is no longer a major deciding factor for me. Getting published in the "right" magazines is no longer a major goal, probably because I no longer feel a need for the "vetting" that comes with publishing in the "right" places. Also, I consider the paper medium and the electronic medium just that: mediums. A poem does not occur BECAUSE OF paper and ink, nor is it FOR paper and ink; what we TAKE FROM a poem is not dependent upon the medium in which a poem is presented. Is it not true that when a poem occurs to us, it is both "virtual" and "real?" In other words, it has the same sort of "reality" that inhabits ink and paper, and the "virtuality" that is ascribed to non-random electrons. So why would presenting it in one medium be more valid than presenting it in another? - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Fri Apr 27 17:25:52 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 16:25:52 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] The Lyric-I/some examples Message-ID: homage to my hips these hips are big hips they need space to move around in. they don't fit into little petty places. these hips are free hips. they don't like to be held back. these hips have never been enslaved, they go where they want to go they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips. i have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top! --Lucille Clifton ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ON THE PORCH AT THE FROST PLACE, FRANCONIA, N. H. So here the great man stood, fermenting malice and poems we have to be nearly as fierce against ourselves as he not to misread by their disguises. Blue in dawn haze, the tamarack across the road is new since Frost and thirty feet tall already. No doubt he liked to scorch off morning fog by simply staring through it long enough so that what he saw grew visible. "Watching the dragon come out of the Notch," his children used to call it. And no wonder he chose a climate whose winter and house whose isolation could be stern enough to his wrath and pity as to make them seem survival skills he'd learned on the job, farming fifty acres of pasture and woods. For cash crops he had sweat and doubt and moralizing rage, those staples of the barter system. And these swift and aching summers, like the blackberries I've been poaching down the road from the house where no one's home -- acid at first and each little globe of the berry too taut and distinct from the others, then they swell to hold the riot of their juices and briefly the fat berries are perfected to my taste, and then they begin to leak and blob and under their crescendo of sugar I can taste how they make it through winter. . . . By the time I'm back from a last, six-berry raid, it's almost dusk, and more and more mosquitos will race around my ear their tiny engines, the speedboats of the insect world. I won't be longer on the porch than it takes to look out once and see what I've taught myself in two months here to discern: night restoring its opacities, though for an instant as intense and evanescent as waking from a dream of eating blackberries and almost being able to remember it, I think I see the parts -- haze, dusk, light broken into grains, fatigue, the mineral dark of the White Mountains, the wavering shadows steadying themselves -- separate, then joined, then seamless: the way, in fact, Frost's great poems, like all great poems, conceal what they merely know, to be predicaments. However long it took to watch what I thought I saw, it was dark when I was done, everywhere and on the porch, and since nothing stopped my sight, I let it go. --William Matthews ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Timberwolf So, you are feeling ironical about my sentimentality? Well I feel ironical about that. This kid may be small but he sure isn't fat. You start using the word "romantic" as a blowtorch I can leave the building. You won't miss me? Fine. I can go to San Francisco, hey ho, or maybe to some non-vicious milieu in the midwest. Pluralism cuts both ways, what? Goodbye, thanks for the chat. Pat, this game isn't over yet! That's right Tony, and this man plays ball right down to the final second regardless of the scoreboard and Tony, you can't ask for more than that. That's right, Pat. It has not been a precision type of game - - let's get a word with Sedale during this timeout. We made some mistakes but we kept on coming. Thanks Sedale. Mistakes, Tony, they come with the territory but this young man sits up very late with strong dark tea bombarded by photographs that keep announcing in shiny voices This is over while the carpet is obviously dirty as the carpet was in Providence twenty-two years back and the clock needs oil and so not to let it all make terrible sense takes a type of resistance. Okay, he's not young, he was but now he's not, Pat. The pile of cassettes topples over. It has not been a precision type of game. But Tony, if he is 45 it is a twisty 45, though he loves the semicolons because they show respect he knows you don't want to get caught staring at those big electric numbers and he can cope with the commas, so many commas, are you saying a big hero then? No, not that, Pat, but this guy is living minute by minute; he concedes nothing that's right Tony. You might say self-absorbed like a character in Ann Beattie someone might say but oh, but oh when he squints in fluorescent 2 a.m. it's to slide past the grapple of what would be too plain for all of us, Pat, for every player in the league; admittedly the word "slide' he has used too often but as an ex-almost-priest said to me more than once we do what we can. It's to live in the perpetual heart-smirch and heart-slice without just tanking and without denying that it is heart-life including indeed heartbreak. Well, but you haven't earned that word "heartbreak" oh haven't I? Who said I was through? My eyes itch. This man is only 46, Tony, and when his plane touches down in San Francisco he grabs his Timberwolves tote bag so firmly. And here outside our studio there's an old man riding a brown bicycle past Verna Funeral Parlor and the big radio tied to the handlebars is playing "Angel Eyes". --Mark Halliday +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ GEOCENTRIC Indecent, self-soiled, bilious reek of turnip and toadstool decay, dribbling the black oil of wilted succulents, the brown fester of rotting orchids, in plain view, that stain of stinkhorn down your front, that leaking roil of bracket fungi down your back, you purple-haired, grainy-fuzzed smolder of refuse, fathering fumes and boils and powdery mildews, enduring the constant interruptions of sink-mire flatulence, contagious with ear-wax, corn smut, blister rust, backwash and graveyard debris, rich with manure bog and dry-rot harboring not only egg-addled garbage and wrinkled lip of orange-peel mold but also the clotted breath of overripe radish and burnt leek, bearing every dank, malodorous rut and scarp, all sulphur fissures and fetid hillside seepages, old, old, dependable, engendering forever the stench and stretch and warm seethe of inevitable putrefaction, nobody loves you as I do. --Pattiann Rogers __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From yakub_beg at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 17:40:29 2001 From: yakub_beg at yahoo.com (K. Lorraine Graham) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 17:40:29 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE:Autobiographical lyric? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Would anyone distinguish autobiographical lyric from narrative poetry? -Lorraine -----Original Message----- From: new-poetry-admin at wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto:new-poetry-admin at wiz.cath.vt.edu]On Behalf Of David Graham Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 5:17 PM To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Subject: [New-Poetry] RE:Autobiographical lyric? Most people, when they say "autobiographical lyric," know at some level that what they actually mean is something like "poem in first person which is or appears to be fully or partially autobiographical in nature, or wishes for rhetorical purpose to give such an impresion." But that's too much of a mouthful, so we get the usual shorthand. One problem, of course, is that when you use such shorthand often enough, not just the phrasing but the idea tends to get elided or simplified. Mike Magee's right, I think, in noting that autobiography is essentially a convention (or set of conventions). I've mentioned Philip Levine's poems in this light before: they are full of fictionalized details, by the author's own testimony, so a term like "autobiographical" is ultimately misleading. Unless we're intimately acquainted with the author, we really only have the words on the page as testimony--so matters of fidelity to fact become, as Mike M. says, secondary. In Kate Sontag and my forthcoming collection of essays on the subject (*After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography*), we tend to favor the phrase "lyric-I" as a little less troublesome than "autobiographical lyric." I think that the entire category of "autobiographical lyric" (along with its even poorer sister "the confessional poem") is heavily in need of re-thinking today--hence our anthology, naturally. But matters of terminology aside, it seems self-evident to me, but apparently not to others, that the realm of the lyric-I is as splendidly various today as it ever was. Dave Smith is and always was a writer of swollen purple rhetoric, but that doesn't mean he is in any way representative of the best lyric-I poems being written today. I'll post a couple lyric-I poems separately, in case anyone wants to spin this thread further via example. David Graham _____________________________ > >So, does that mean it has to be one-size-fits-many? Is every poem that has >an 'I' or 'my' in it autobiographical? Is it just any poem in which the >speaker details an event (or events) from its life? Does it have to seem >fairly plausible? Etc, etc? > >-Amber >-----Original Message----- >From: mmagee at dept.english.upenn.edu >To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu >Sent: 4/27/2001 3:13 PM >Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? > >According to Amber Prentiss: >> >> So who are these autobiographical lyricists, anyhow? I keep running >across >> them: autobiographical writers, navel gazers, those who write poetry >"larded >> with homely anecdotes that pant for readers' sympathy" (from >commentary in >> Painted Bride Quarterly's current issue at www.webdelsol.com/pbq). >Taking >> out the pejoratives, what do people mean by this? How does anyone know >> something is autobiographical, and in what sense? Does it mean that >their >> literary focus is on themselves, or themselves in relation to family, >> community, whatever? Most importantly, who the hell are these people? >> Substitute 'they' for any time you see something that, translated, >means >> "autobiographical poet," and you see that it seems like a big shadowy >force >> (rather conspiracy-theory). Any takers? >> >> -Amber > >Amber, here's the beginning of Dave Smith's poem, "Treading Clams at Egg >Island" (1990): > >Among us the fathers labored like seals >and we would come behind them, crotch- >deep, tiptoeing the motherly waters, >each naked foot kicked out where sand >humped, darkness hiding its treasures, > >then body's tumble and thrust to make >the fetal coil, to begin a weightless >grope downward through broken swells >of milky bottom. > >Now, one can argue about whether this bears any relation to a REAL event >experienced by the REAL Dave Smith - but that's actually not as >important >to the question of whether this is "autobiographical lyric" as one might >think - because authobiographical lyric, like autobiography proper, is >just a convention, just a model for assembling words, images, etc. Even >if Dave Smith the guy went clam diggin as a kid - that seems to me to be >quite secondary to what's going on in the poem, which fulfills the >expectations of autobiographical lyric - in this case to give us the >properly "deep" Oedipal narrative of every male autobiographical >lyricist >worth his salt. > >-m. > > __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 17:57:24 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 13:57:24 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] RE:Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: >Would anyone distinguish autobiographical lyric from narrative poetry? Autobiographical lyric -- Thomas Hardy, "Lizbie Brown" Narrative poetry -- Thomas Hardy, "The Dynasts" Dramatic monolog -- Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess" Booklength poem (narrative?) -- Robert Browning, "The Ring and the Book" I don't think "The Wasteland" is a narrative poem. Maybe "Paterson" is. "Four Quartets," maybe. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From cstroffo at earthlink.net Fri Apr 27 17:49:38 2001 From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (chris stroffolino) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 17:49:38 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Adam Kirsch on James Tate References: Message-ID: <3AE9E972.B27B3933@earthlink.net> Moira, very curious in what your take on these quotes by Kirsch are--- The thing I buckle at (and, granted, Kirsch is not the only one to do this) is the last two lines...and the reductive characterization of "19th century mode" as "comfort and consolation." What on earth can he mean? Dickinson really comforts and consoles... as does Shelley and Byron... chris Moira Russell wrote: > "Strange though it may sound, American poetry today is more sentimental, > more reassuring, easier on the reader, than at any time in the last 100 > years. Not on the surface, of course: the techniques of modernism are by now > deeply ingrained, and just about no major poet writes a direct, lyrical, > declarative verse. But while poets today may still use modernist techniques > -- free association, surrealism, complex allusion -- the modernist temper is > gone; poetry has to a large degree resumed its 19th-century role as a > comfort and consolation, a retreat from the rigors of the world." > > http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/26/reviews/980426.26kirscht.html > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 19:25:57 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 15:25:57 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Adam Kirsch on James Tate Message-ID: >Moira, >very curious in what your take on these quotes by Kirsch are--- Well, not trying to play dog pile on the rabbit, but a review like this seems to confirm that he would prefer a "difficult" poetry, and that in his opinion while modernist techniques are in use they are not supported by what you might call a modernist sensibility (although I don't think he gives any clear idea of what that is). Such a reviewer seems nearly congenitally determined to dislike Merrill, who is -- well, it's definitely a _modern_ voice, with modern concerns, but he does have roots in Baudelaire and other French romantics, which Kirsh mentions disapprovingly in his review. This sounds to me like the old, old dichotomy between Art and Entertainment -- Art is good for you but tastes bad, like medicine, and Entertainment tastes good but is bad for you, like pastries. Therefore someone who writes with obvious concern for beauty, even luxury in words, as Merrill does, is not a "true" poet. He sounds to me like writing instructors I knew in graduate school who faulted works by students for having a "conventional" plot or a "linear" structure. I thought it was interesting to compare his review of Olds to the one of Merrill as well -- his dismissal of Olds as writing "testimony, but definitely not art." I would have to wonder what his definition of art is. I also don't know what he means by his statement "just about no major poet writes a direct, lyrical, declarative verse" unless it again depends on his definition of the word "major," and frankly, I'm not really interested enough in his opinions to try to sound that out. What I objected to in his review and what perhaps made me sound vehement was his refusal to _enter into_ what Merrill was doing -- it was more like, Merrill doesn't fit my idea of what great poetry is, therefore, Merrill does not equal great poet. It reminds me of the constant practice of the "New York Times Book Review" of assigning controversial books to reviewers who are likely to detest them in order to get a crackling piece. I'm not crazy about, say, Shelley, but if I were a poetry reviewer and someone came up with a new book about Shelley's poetic theory and I was required to review it, I would try to at least understand the ideas and techniques covered in the book before dismissing it. I love Randall Jarrell's reviews because they are very witty and well-written but I think he unfortunately helped start the precedent (along with Dorothy Parker in prose) of writing reviews which were wittily dismissive rather than _considering,_ as a lot of Edmund Wilson's book reviews are. (In other fields -- I would consider James Agee a _considering_ critic in film, but Pauline Kael is an adept at being wittily, even witheringly, dismissive.) (And I don't think you have to wind up saying you like something, or puff a book, in order to be considering.) And I do think the publication of Merrill's book a really nice thing for poetry in general, and I think that should have been mentioned _somewhere_ in the damned review. Knopf comes out with a what is it 400+ hardcover book of poetry? True, it's the collected poems of a dead poet, but isn't that at least a small sign of hope in these publishing times? And yes, I do think of poetry as a solace, a comfort and consolation, something I treasure. I expect most people on this list do, although I'm not sure what "19th-century" mental ghosts he is fighting -- Emily Dickinson? Walt Whitman? Thomas Hardy? Robert Browning? I have a sneaking suspicion in mind he means something like "The Old Oaken Bucket" or "Jenny Kissed Me" or other popular 19th-century poetry, but does he really want to compare Merrill to that? *** "Strange though it may sound, American poetry today is more sentimental, more reassuring, easier on the reader, than at any time in the last 100 years. Not on the surface, of course: the techniques of modernism are by now deeply ingrained, and just about no major poet writes a direct, lyrical,declarative verse. But while poets today may still use modernist techniques -- free association, surrealism, complex allusion -- the modernist temper is gone; poetry has to a large degree resumed its 19th-century role as a comfort and consolation, a retreat from the rigors of the world." _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 19:32:02 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 15:32:02 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: I am tempted when this question comes up to just quote Lynn Sharon Schwartz: "Everything I write is autobiographical. Nothing I write is autobiographical. It's the same for any writer." But obviously there are certain poems which gain, or want to gain, an authenticity or sincerity or weight in having as an underlying subtext, _This really happened, to me._ I'm thinking of Sharon Olds in particular (she just happens to be in my mind right now) as a modern example, although Molly Peacock is another poet, although working in form, who comes to mind. The aspect of _telling a story from my life_ matters. Although there are certainly dramatic monologs where authors take on characters and speak "personally" through them, and there was at least one famous faux pas where because Anne Sexton was a "confessional" poet a lot of people assumed she had a brother who died in the War because she wrote a poem about it. Sometimes autobiography is used in a "false" manner -- I once took a trip up to Mt Tesuque with a group of friends for our college Oktoberfest celebration, but in the poem which resulted it sounded as if only one other person had been with me. I didn't mean that to happen; the poem more or less wrote itself that way. Likewise, Anne Sexton's Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Live or Die" is, she claims in the Author's Note, in absolutely chronological order; her biographer reveals "she fudged the dates when she had to" in order to make the poetry read as a narrative in chronological order. I do think the emphasis in most writing workshops now is on writing from personal experience and, to some degree, on writing-as-therapy (one woman in a writing workshop with me wrote poems about her divorce for every session, never once choosing another topic). It is the rare, rare writing workshop I have been in, prose or poetry, which encourages students to take on new forms or voices, to try to extend themselves to grasp experiences beyond their own. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 19:35:10 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 15:35:10 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poem by Merrill Critic from Poetry Daily Message-ID: >Gack! > >- Jim Well, it was the only poem of his I could find on the Net. Does anyone have any information about the books he may have written and his aesthetic? In the main his work seems to be poetic criticism. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From jdavis at panix.com Fri Apr 27 19:41:53 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 19:41:53 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poem by Merrill Critic from Poetry Daily In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > Well, it was the only poem of his I could find on the Net. Does anyone have > any information about the books he may have written and his aesthetic? In > the main his work seems to be poetic criticism. I may have this wrong but I was under the impression that he was a student of H Vendler's at Harvard, and that he is under 30. No books, and not so many articles. And before today, I hadn't heard of any poems. Gack, indeed. Jordan From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 19:40:14 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 15:40:14 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Adam Kirsch on James Tate - correction Message-ID: This came out wrong. "if I were a poetry reviewer and someone came up with a new book about Shelley's poetic theory and I was required to review it, I would try to at least understand the ideas and techniques covered in the book before dismissing it" Yeah, like I would give the criminal every chance before I decided to hang him. That should have read: "I would try to at least understand the ideas and techniques covered in the book RATHER THAN dismissing it" Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 19:55:06 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 15:55:06 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: As an addendum to this: Robert Lowell supposedly wrote the last two stanzas of "Skunk Hour" first, and then the next to, so that the poem at first started with the stanza about the love-cars on the hill like a skull. But it seemed too revealing to him, and so he worked up the first four stanzas with the careful depiction of the environment. Apparently there's textual evidence that he did not follow this precisely, but it's revealing this is how he chose to describe one of the seminal poems in Confessional poetry (by Confessional I mean specifically the late-fifties-early-sixties poets who valued writing about subjective experience rather than the "well-made poem"). He also said the incident of spying on love-cars was not him, but rather, Walt Whitman in his old age; yet how many people reading the poem would twig on this and realize it's "not Lowell" in the poem? The way I would look on "Skunk Hour" is there is a difference between Lowell-as-poet and Lowell-as-persona -- Dianne Wood Middlebrook emphasizes this constantly in her biography of Anne Sexton. There was the writer Anne Sexton and then there was the character on the page, who was, in however many ways the details of her "life" corresponded to the writer's, a _created character._ However, with poets such as Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Lucille Clifton, Gary Snyder, etc., etc. I think the division between character and creator is so slight again the emphasis is on "_I_ saw this; this _happened_ to me." It's also interesting to go back to earlier poems; Shakespeare's sonnets certainly reveal all kinds of interesting details about his love life. Thomas Hardy's poetry about the death of his wife is agonizing. Yet would we call these "confessional" poems? A lot of Maxine Kumin's work is very personal, yet, unlike Sexton, she is not typically considered a confessional poet. I guess what I'm haphazardly arguing is I see a wide spectrum, from dramatic monolog (which can often be extremely revealing -- like Robert Browning's "Andrea del Sarto") to necessarily autobiographical work (that's Wordsworth there, sitting above Tintern Abbey and musing on those lines) to work which has the _emphasis_ on sounding autobiographical, in which the effect of reporting of direct experience is a primary value. Robert Lowell may not have gone peeking in the love-cars, but the first-person character created in the poem does. Because of the label "confessional" I think a lot of people are likely to equate Lowell with the character in the poem, though. I think in pretty much any first-person poem which is not identified in the title as being _someone else's thoughts_ may be tacitly identified as the feelings/idea of the poet. When I read Merrill's poem about teaching his dog submissiveness, which I mentioned earlier, does it matter if Merrill grasped his doggy and actually _had_ that thought right then and reached for a pen, or recalled the occasion months later and then made the insight? Does the fact that it's a poem by Merrill about Merrill's dog depend on it actually happening the way it does in the poem? It would be interesting to do some kind of pop quiz and ask poets how many apparently nakedly autobiographical poems are the product of at least some considered time and thought. One last interesting bit (and then I promise I will shut up) -- in Elizabeth Bishop's letters, she mentioned she was "unable to write about anything except what happens to me" -- for example she really caught the fish in "The Fish" (although she carefully distinguished in a letter to a friend that _her_ fish had _two_ hooks, not _four_), she really had the encounter with the American who thought her wasp's nest was ugly, she apparently really saw the pink dog in Rio, and so on. Yet does anyone, ever, think of Bishop as a "confessional" or even heavy-duty autobiographical poet? Moira Russell blithering on and on in Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 19:59:13 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 15:59:13 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poem by Merrill Critic from Poetry Daily Message-ID: Jordan wrote: >No books, and not so many articles. And before today, I hadn't heard of any >poems. Gack, indeed. I hadn't heard of him at all, but I am exceedingly out of the poetic swim of things. (When I read poetry criticism, which is rare, I tend to read narrowly concentrated studies on poets/topics which interest me (recently finished a book on "The Modernist Long Poem" for example) or writers whose style I enjoy (Randall Jarrell is a good example). I find a lot of poetic reviews puffery, as Kirsch himself says in one of his reviews. I know I should probably keep up regularly with at least "Parnassus" and "Poetry," but if I kept up with all the things I should keep up with, there would be no time to do anything else.) This seems to be swinging back around to our poet-as-critic and poetry-critic discussion some time earlier. Yes, I know, I promised to shut up. Sorry. Shutting-up shutting up now. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From trbell at home.com Fri Apr 27 17:56:43 2001 From: trbell at home.com (trbell at home.com) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 16:56:43 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben References: <200104261318.JAA01990@dept.english.upenn.edu> Message-ID: <08f301c0cf64$f319afc0$737c0218@ruthfd1.tn.home.com> Ben, it strikes me obliquely here that there is maybe some thing to be said for discarding the binary logic of form and content. each always has elements of the other and the very binaryism of this way of looking at poetry may be a hindrance to thinking and feeling? I'm not advocating discarding the distinction here and this may well have been stated before, but I think it has portential as i jot this out. tom bell=<}}}}}}}}}****((((((((&&&&&&&&&~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Metaphor/Metonym for health at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/metaphor/metapho.htm Black Winds Press at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/blackwin.html From trbell at home.com Fri Apr 27 18:44:16 2001 From: trbell at home.com (trbell at home.com) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 17:44:16 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: finding out about new books References: <3AE9497F.9A6@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <095b01c0cf6b$976c95a0$737c0218@ruthfd1.tn.home.com> Bob, My interest are somewhat tangential here, as a poet and selling of used print and micropoetry but I think you put the fingter on the problem, particularly with amazon's takeovers recently. There does not seem to be one alternative listing source and small press traffic so far is limited to print. tom bell From halvard at earthlink.net Fri Apr 27 21:59:36 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 21:59:36 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams In-Reply-To: <20010427212259.43700.qmail@web12104.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Just a little addendum here, Jim. You asked in your survey about subscribing to magazines, not about buying them. I myself probably buy individual issues of far more magazines/journals than I ever subscribe to. Hal ""Anything is art if an artist says it is." --Marcel Duchamp Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > Well, I pretty much anticipated the tenor of the responses my litle > questionnaire elicited, though of course I could not have anticipated > the particulars. Now I will answer my own questionnaire and use that > as a response to your responses. > > > 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic journal or in any > > other kind of electronic format? > > Yes, and I edit an electronic journal, though in the late seventies and > early eighties I edited and published a print magazine (Porch), a > chapbook series and a pamphlet series (Inland Boat) that published many > of the writers who were at this recent AWP (Rita Dove, Peter Cooley, > Eric Tretheway, Susan Ludvigson, Jim Peterson, John Morgan and others) > as well as other poets who went on to make names for themselves (Tess > Gallagher, Laura Jensen, Michael Burkard etc.) A number of these had > never published in an electronic format until I requested work from > them for The Salt River Review, and which they sent because of the > reputation of Porch - for a few issues, SRR had as its subtitle, "the > magazine formerly known as Porch." > > Naturally, I see little difference in quality between print and > electronic publications, with the small difference resulting perhaps > from the reluctance of many poets and writers to publish > electronically, which of course narrows the field of choice. Granted, > there's a lot of trash out there on the web and, because it's so easy > to mount an electronic publication, a bigger trash-to-quality ratio > (heavy on the trash). Though I'm not going to go into particulars, Bob > Grumman would be happy to know I keep a mental list of electronic > publishing "schools," with names like "sampler" - the online > Mississippi Review would be an example; "techno-lit" - hyper-hypertext > being form AND content, exemplified by magazines like BeeHive and > Riding the Meridian;"bells & whistles" - high on fancy html, animation > etc., but low on literary content; "MY-e-zine" (I hate the term > "e-zine," by the way) - these tend to have titles like "Poetry Flowers" > and originate from free, isp-provided webspace; "all-but-print" - I > think SRR is of that school, eschewing technological wizardry in favor > of content and a more print-like presentation; and "true-e-zine" - > Mudlark, Blue Moon Review or CrossConnect (though CrossConnect also > publishes a print version) are examples. > > > 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines that have published > > you? > > Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some of the print > > magazines > > that have published you? If so, how many? > > Like I others here, I subscribe to 3 or 4 print magazines, all of which > have published my work. I once subscribed to two magazines that have > never published my work: Poetry Northwest and Poetry. > > > 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines you submit to vs the > > electronic magazines you submit to? > > It used to be 99% print/1% electronic, but the ration has gradually > narrowed to about 60/40. Reason? The same one Hal gave as his answer > to the last question below: Ars longa, vita brevis. The whole > submission-acceptance/rejection-publication process of print magazines > take too long, and the time seems to get longer the older one gets. > > Another take on "Ars longa, vita brevis": Someone remarked that he/she > didn't submit to electronic publications because there was no gurantee > the publication would be around for any appreciable length of time. > Well, that is also true of print publications. It might hearten some > to know that one of the primary concerns among electronic publishers is > the archiving issue and many have allied themselves in organizations > like the International Literary Editors Fellowship (ILEF) and > Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) to work toward solving > problems in archiving. > > > 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic magazines are free > > and > > that people must pay for print magazines? > > No. > > > If not, what is your prime consideration in deciding whether to > > submit > > to a print magazine or an electronic one? > > There is no longer a major deciding factor for me. Getting published > in the "right" magazines is no longer a major goal, probably because I > no longer feel a need for the "vetting" that comes with publishing in > the "right" places. Also, I consider the paper medium and the > electronic medium just that: mediums. A poem does not occur BECAUSE OF > paper and ink, nor is it FOR paper and ink; what we TAKE FROM a poem is > not dependent upon the medium in which a poem is presented. > > Is it not true that when a poem occurs to us, it is both "virtual" and > "real?" In other words, it has the same sort of "reality" that > inhabits ink and paper, and the "virtuality" that is ascribed to > non-random electrons. So why would presenting it in one medium be more > valid than presenting it in another? > > - Jim > > > > > > > > > > > ===== > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net > Salt River Review: > "Ripples" @ > Poetserv: > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices > http://auctions.yahoo.com/ > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 22:52:29 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 18:52:29 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: >Just a little addendum here, Jim. You asked in your survey about >subscribing to magazines, not about buying them. And what about the classic complaint: rejection slips which arrive with invitations to subscribe enclosed with them? The "best" example of this kind I ever saw began, "We realize you might not be feeling warmly towards us just now, but...." Insult to injury -- to coin a phrase. I second Jim's observation about the much, much shorter time it takes for online journals (bowing to his dislike for the word "e-zine") to not only decide but to _publish_ -- something very gratifying about it. Not to start off a shooting war, but one writer, in an article about multiple submissions, calculated that if he sent a story to an editor who held it for a maximum of one month before he got word of the decision, it would take him a little less than a year to get it published. IMHO paper journals face serious competition from online ones in the matters of turnaround time, print run costs, availability of archives (I can get back issues of a magazine which archives itself online much more easily than a paper version), and simple reader preference for clicking on over to a free journal rather than trying to hunt down an expensive paper one. But online journals make little money, if that, and don't have the "prestige" offline ones do, not to mention the glaring issues about electronic copyright, reprints and swipability (you used to have to type out a copy of a poem. Now all you have to do is click, highlight, click, copy, click, paste). I'm no prophet (even though I have no honor in my own country, wherever that may be) so I have no idea how this dust will all settle in the end. I'm particularly interested in the "Times" online copyright lawsuit, though. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 22:59:40 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 18:59:40 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] James Merill, Poem on Philip Larkin Message-ID: Having read Adam Kirsch comparing Merrill to Larkin, unfavorably, I was pleased to find this while flipping through my Merrill just now (and if I could make every poet I knew, of whatever school, buy it, I would. Yes, I know it costs $40....it's worth it): PHILIP LARKIN (1922-1985) He's gone somewhere But left his writing, Plain and inviting As a Windsor chair. The sitters? Every sort. Each struck that artless pose We face our maker in. God knows The likeness hurt. His signature's Worm-drill and gleam of cherry -- Vacant now? Unwary Reader, all yours. -- James Merrill _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Fri Apr 27 23:27:01 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 23:27:01 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: Is it fair or good to expect the workshop setting to shape American poetry? I suppose they might be helpful in disseminating information on how to do formal poetry; it would help to have someone there to shake her head and say, "I know you're trying, but this ain't blank verse, sugar." But as for encouraging certain forms of content: if people are showing little innovation, ought they be pushed off the cliff, or should they be left to stand there? -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Moira Russell To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/27/2001 7:32 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? It is the rare, rare writing workshop I have been in, prose or poetry, which encourages students to take on new forms or voices, to try to extend themselves to grasp experiences beyond their own. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 23:29:52 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 19:29:52 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] James Merill, "Cosmo" Message-ID: The poem I remembered so vividly is actually part of a sequence, called "Cosmo," and he is the subject of other loving poems (and before you sneer, Auden wrote a poem to _his_ cat. And "Not all that glisters is gold" is from another poem about a cat). 3 Alpha males? That's what your other Daddy and I must practice being -- to which end we wrestle your Feistiness onto its back (lucky you're still a puppy). The hand of the cradling arm clasps your hind feet, my right hand lightly steadying your jaw. Now a mesmeric "gaze of dominance" initiates convulsions. Whimperings. Two or three mortifying yawns. Eyes rolling like an oracle's, Ego fades into the submissive trance.... There! You learn quickly. It took me decades. This stuck in my mind like a shard of painted glass. An exquisite little gem, yes -- but with an edge, surely. And I don't see it as "comic" or "Mozartian" -- it's reflective, a summing-up poem, rueful, even slightly bitter. Merrill is playing a bit even with the stereotype about submissive/dominant partners in same-sex pairings ("Who is the man and who is the woman?"), but also about submission to love, submission in the name of love, to experience even -- as well as a wonderful portrait of the odd mirrors pets can be in our lives, amplifying hidden issues and concerns. (In the preceding poem in the sequence, Merrill wryly remarks "We want you to grow up to be All Dog, / the way they wanted me All Boy.") I have to wonder how much of the opinions about Merrill are influenced by his financial ease -- growing up in _that_ Merrill family, with more than enough money, time to write without worry, and so on -- it certainly did pop up in Karsch's review. But as far as I know no one ever looked down on Wallace Stevens because he was a banker. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From moira_russell at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 23:33:08 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 19:33:08 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: Amber wrote: >Is it fair or good to expect the workshop setting to shape American poetry? I think, for better or worse, it does for the most part. >But as for encouraging certain forms of content: if people are showing >little innovation, ought they be pushed off the cliff, or should they be >left to stand there? Isn't that why we try to become educated -- to learn new things, different things, different ways of looking at things? And what do you mean by "pushed off the cliff" -- expelled? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From Jandhodge at aol.com Fri Apr 27 23:49:21 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 23:49:21 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List Message-ID: David Graham writes: A contemporary poet left out of many anthologies is Fred Chappell. His long poem *Midquest* is amazingly good, and too little known. ____ I'll hitch a ride on this to plug Chappell's latest, *Family Gathering.* A bit uneven but some gems here, and some lively wit. Here is part 3 of "Adventures in Perception": Aunt Beth and Uncle Philip disagree And yet agree. Misunderstanding keeps their marriage fit, Unsplit By jealous quarrels, for each secretly And all alone Believes that one of them has married down. She thinks it's she. He he. ____ He's also a warm and marvellous novelist. Jan From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Sat Apr 28 00:35:10 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 00:35:10 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: Sorry about the "pushed" thing. Basically, an instructor yelling "Stop IT! Not your dog, not your cat, not your father and not /you/, just once!" would be what I meant by "pushed off the cliff," though a real person would likely have to be nicer. As for the educated thing, I think it would generally be odd to start a poetry workshop (as opposed to, say, an astronomy course) without having been exposed to some sort of poetry. The different things are there, in poetry, sitting in lending libraries in books that haven't been checked out in the past year. As soon as a person figures out what it is that they need/want to read, well, there's an education. Is a workshop really necessary? If people don't want to learn new things (like your divorcee writer), is there reason to bother? Blah blah blah? (I think I've completely deteriorated into nonsense.) -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Moira Russell To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/27/2001 11:33 PM Subject: RE: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Amber wrote: >Is it fair or good to expect the workshop setting to shape American poetry? I think, for better or worse, it does for the most part. >But as for encouraging certain forms of content: if people are showing >little innovation, ought they be pushed off the cliff, or should they be >left to stand there? Isn't that why we try to become educated -- to learn new things, different things, different ways of looking at things? And what do you mean by "pushed off the cliff" -- expelled? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu Sat Apr 28 00:49:31 2001 From: Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu (Ben Friedlander) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 22:49:31 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy References: Message-ID: Alan: It's good to have your comments here. I don't want to get too hung up on generalizations about the form-content relationship (it would be more useful to look at specific instances), but I do think your paraphrase simplifies what I was saying. You write: >you seem to argue more firmly for form as primarily a pointer toward >content, or as subordinate to content, than I would want to. (Also, in >your framework, "content" seems to be equated with something like >"paraphraseable statement," though I suspect I may be misunderstanding >you on that.) There are certainly poems where the form is subordinate to the content (and vice versa as well), but what I talked about in my last post wasn't subordination so much as relationship. More precisely, I said: >This isn't to diminish the importance of form, only to >emphasize that its primary function isn't to draw attention to itself >or be articulate in its own right, but to draw attention to the content >and make _the content_ articulate. Note that while I did speak of "pointing," this was mostly to insist that form ought not to be the whole poem (and this to my mind is what the notion of form-as-content tends toward: a poetry in which the form is both the form and the content, leaving "content" in the usual sense on the outside looking in). Note also that this "pointing" isn't the whole story. Form's other function--it's highest calling, if I might put it so--is articulating the content. Indeed, if I were starting over in this exchange I'd be tempted to define form as just that: articulation (the only problem with this definition being that it leaves out those poems where articulation isn't the point). I'm not sure what I wrote that gave you the impression that I think of content as little more than "paraphraseable statement." It's precisely because I'm interested in recovering for poetry the power to marshall ALL of language's resources that I tend to privilege a notion of form as articulation. If anything, I think it's the emphasis on form-as-content that leads to an impoverished sense of what a poem can do or say. Here's something I scribbled in my notebook today while thinking about this exchange: In poems where the content isn't the point, form is what we end up discussing (Jackson Mac Low's poetry would be a good example of this). Here the form does become a kind of content by default, but it strikes me as a pretty meager one. What ISN"T meager is the form. Mac Low's poetry can be spectacularly beautiful and a moving sonic experience in performance. His writing is NOT meager. But to speak of his form as "meaningful" is to turn his poetry into an illustration of its assumed poetics, is to make the poem a "meta-poem": an example of a kind of writing in which the ACTUAL writing is only necessary as proof that "it can be done." I find such a reading of Mac Low at once hyperbolic and diminishing: hyperbolic because it tends to make exorbitant claims ("the writing is an escape from the strictures of the ego"), and diminishing because the writing itself becomes irrelevant. Every poem ends up saying the exact same thing. I must sound like a terrible phillistine writing this, but my resistance isn't to the poetry; it's the claims made for the poetry--and the modes of reading upon which those claims seem to depend--that I resist. I don't know about the "much-maligned contemporary autobiographical lyric." I frankly don't read that work and so its exposure as bad writing by other kinds of writing doesn't capture my imagination. I mentioned Merrill in my post to Mike because I've been reading his _Collected Poems_ and taught some of his work last week, but he, of course, felt as great a revulsion for simplistic autobiographical narrative as anyone. That makes him, as you say, an interesting counterpoint to Hejinian and Bernstein. I've only touched on a small portion of your post, but this is already too long. Perhaps we can turn to the pedagogy part of all this and ease up on the generalization for a while! Ben From Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu Sat Apr 28 00:55:58 2001 From: Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu (Ben Friedlander) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 22:55:58 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben References: <200104261318.JAA01990@dept.english.upenn.edu> <08f301c0cf64$f319afc0$737c0218@ruthfd1.tn.home.com> Message-ID: trbell at home.com writes: >it strikes me obliquely here that there is maybe some thing to be said >for discarding the binary logic of form and content. If nothing else, I'm getting awfully sick of the words "form" and "content"! Ben From trbell at home.com Fri Apr 27 22:51:51 2001 From: trbell at home.com (trbell at home.com) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 21:51:51 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben References: <200104261318.JAA01990@dept.english.upenn.edu> <08f301c0cf64$f319afc0$737c0218@ruthfd1.tn.home.com> Message-ID: <0a1101c0cf8e$2daea5e0$737c0218@ruthfd1.tn.home.com> not only that as i ramble on, writing, reading or viewing a poem is a unitary experience as experience, the analysis comes later and from an intellectual place, almost a metapoem? tom ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ben Friedlander" To: Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 11:55 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben > trbell at home.com writes: > >it strikes me obliquely here that there is maybe some thing to be said > >for discarding the binary logic of form and content. > > If nothing else, I'm getting awfully sick of the words "form" and > "content"! > > Ben > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From dzauhar at uic.edu Sat Apr 28 09:02:00 2001 From: dzauhar at uic.edu (David Zauhar) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 08:02:00 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've spent most of my adult life trying to get through a summer reading list I compiled in college.I'm still nowhere near finished, largely because the damn thing keeps growing. I'm hoping since we are now in the 21st century (chronologically if not yet culturally), I can finally make some headway. Still, when I first looked at the list and realized 1) how much was on it and 2) the fact that I wasn't going to live to be 350 years old, I was a little depressed. But then I realized that this state of affairs was cause for celebration: I was never going to run out of poems to read. Might I suggest Diane DiPrima's _Loba_, H.D.'s _Helen in Egypt_, Jack Spicer's _Collected Books of Jack Spicer_, Thomas McGrath's _Letter to an Imaginary Friend_ and Lorine Neidecker's selected works in _The Granite Pail_. A brief, random and ultimately arbitrary selection, and therefore (except for the "brief" part) very representative of the century. David Zauhar "i have a city to cover with lines" --d.a. levy On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Amber Prentiss wrote: > I'm planning on dragging my poetry education kicking and screaming out of > the 19th century. I read journals, so I know about Right Now, and I > graduated from high school, so I know some about Back Then, but inbetween, > enh. They have a tendency to offer courses in poetry when I can't take them, > round here. Any poetry books anyone finds particularly interesting or > important in the 20th century! (Apparently, this is not going to be a little > project.) > > -Amber > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From Jandhodge at aol.com Sat Apr 28 11:50:27 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 11:50:27 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: Good question from Amber: >if people are showing >little innovation, ought they be pushed off the cliff, or should they be >left to stand there? And Moira's response: Isn't that why we try to become educated -- to learn new things, different things, different ways of looking at things? This from Keats [with apologies for not being able to duplicate his spontaneous editings]: The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this--in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all [the] horror of a bare shoulderd Creature--in the former case, our shoulders are fledge, and we go thro' the same air and space without fear . . . Maybe we all stand on the cliff? And maybe an occasional nudge in the direction of a [relatively] safe path through strange territory can be a good thing? And a parallel point from a different perspective, this from Flannery O'Connor: St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: "The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon." No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller. Jan From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sat Apr 28 12:05:22 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 11:05:22 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Monitor's Poetry Page Message-ID: Perhaps I am the last one to notice, but I have just discovered that the Christian Science Monitor presents a fairly extensive archive page of poetry links, including recent reviews, interviews, poems, student work, feature articles, and news: http://www.csmonitor.com/atcsmonitor/specials/poetry/poetryindex.html David Graham __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From languagethief at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 12:03:25 2001 From: languagethief at yahoo.com (The Old Mole) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 09:03:25 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams In-Reply-To: <20010427212259.43700.qmail@web12104.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20010428160325.84770.qmail@web12203.mail.yahoo.com> Actually, one of the reasons why I've somewhat slacked off submitting to electronic journals, after some initial enthusiasm, is that I almost never get a response from them at all, which I find more than a little annoying. Tad Richards --- jcervantes wrote: > Well, I pretty much anticipated the tenor of the > responses my litle > questionnaire elicited, though of course I could not > have anticipated > the particulars. Now I will answer my own > questionnaire and use that > as a response to your responses. > > > 1) Have you ever been published in an electronic > journal or in any > > other kind of electronic format? > > Yes, and I edit an electronic journal, though in the > late seventies and > early eighties I edited and published a print > magazine (Porch), a > chapbook series and a pamphlet series (Inland Boat) > that published many > of the writers who were at this recent AWP (Rita > Dove, Peter Cooley, > Eric Tretheway, Susan Ludvigson, Jim Peterson, John > Morgan and others) > as well as other poets who went on to make names for > themselves (Tess > Gallagher, Laura Jensen, Michael Burkard etc.) A > number of these had > never published in an electronic format until I > requested work from > them for The Salt River Review, and which they sent > because of the > reputation of Porch - for a few issues, SRR had as > its subtitle, "the > magazine formerly known as Porch." > > Naturally, I see little difference in quality > between print and > electronic publications, with the small difference > resulting perhaps > from the reluctance of many poets and writers to > publish > electronically, which of course narrows the field of > choice. Granted, > there's a lot of trash out there on the web and, > because it's so easy > to mount an electronic publication, a bigger > trash-to-quality ratio > (heavy on the trash). Though I'm not going to go > into particulars, Bob > Grumman would be happy to know I keep a mental list > of electronic > publishing "schools," with names like "sampler" - > the online > Mississippi Review would be an example; "techno-lit" > - hyper-hypertext > being form AND content, exemplified by magazines > like BeeHive and > Riding the Meridian;"bells & whistles" - high on > fancy html, animation > etc., but low on literary content; "MY-e-zine" (I > hate the term > "e-zine," by the way) - these tend to have titles > like "Poetry Flowers" > and originate from free, isp-provided webspace; > "all-but-print" - I > think SRR is of that school, eschewing technological > wizardry in favor > of content and a more print-like presentation; and > "true-e-zine" - > Mudlark, Blue Moon Review or CrossConnect (though > CrossConnect also > publishes a print version) are examples. > > > 2) Do you subscribe to all the print magazines > that have published > > you? > > Leading question, so: Do you subscribe to some > of the print > > magazines > > that have published you? If so, how many? > > Like I others here, I subscribe to 3 or 4 print > magazines, all of which > have published my work. I once subscribed to two > magazines that have > never published my work: Poetry Northwest and > Poetry. > > > 3) What is the ratio between the print magazines > you submit to vs the > > electronic magazines you submit to? > > It used to be 99% print/1% electronic, but the > ration has gradually > narrowed to about 60/40. Reason? The same one Hal > gave as his answer > to the last question below: Ars longa, vita brevis. > The whole > submission-acceptance/rejection-publication process > of print magazines > take too long, and the time seems to get longer the > older one gets. > > Another take on "Ars longa, vita brevis": Someone > remarked that he/she > didn't submit to electronic publications because > there was no gurantee > the publication would be around for any appreciable > length of time. > Well, that is also true of print publications. It > might hearten some > to know that one of the primary concerns among > electronic publishers is > the archiving issue and many have allied themselves > in organizations > like the International Literary Editors Fellowship > (ILEF) and > Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) to work > toward solving > problems in archiving. > > > 4) Is it a consideration for you that electronic > magazines are free > > and > > that people must pay for print magazines? > > No. > > > If not, what is your prime consideration in > deciding whether to > > submit > > to a print magazine or an electronic one? > > There is no longer a major deciding factor for me. > Getting published > in the "right" magazines is no longer a major goal, > probably because I > no longer feel a need for the "vetting" that comes > with publishing in > the "right" places. Also, I consider the paper > medium and the > electronic medium just that: mediums. A poem does > not occur BECAUSE OF > paper and ink, nor is it FOR paper and ink; what we > TAKE FROM a poem is > not dependent upon the medium in which a poem is > presented. > > Is it not true that when a poem occurs to us, it is > both "virtual" and > "real?" In other words, it has the same sort of > "reality" that > inhabits ink and paper, and the "virtuality" that is > ascribed to > non-random electrons. So why would presenting it in > one medium be more > valid than presenting it in another? > > - Jim > > > > > > > > > > > ===== > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & > jvcervantes at earthlink.net > Salt River Review: > "Ripples" @ > Poetserv: > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great > prices > http://auctions.yahoo.com/ > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From JackKerouac25 at aol.com Sat Apr 28 12:13:19 2001 From: JackKerouac25 at aol.com (JackKerouac25 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 12:13:19 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Narrative Poetry Message-ID: In a message dated 4/27/01 4:40:07 PM Central Daylight Time, yakub_beg at yahoo.com writes: > Would anyone distinguish autobiographical lyric from narrative poetry? I certainly would. To begin with, narrative poetry and lyric poetry are two different animals. In his _How to Read Poem_, Ed Hirsch speaks of the immediacy that a lyric poem has--he uses a Paul Celan metaphor: a poem is a message in a bottle. Lyric poems aren't narrative poems. Lyric poems these days tend to be meditative verse or pretentious and horrible deep-image poems. In _The Reaper Essays_, Robert McDowell and Mark Jarman go to great lengths to show what narrative poetry is. They include a whole checklist of "How to Write Narrative Poetry," but just to highlight what Jarman and McDowell say, I'll add that, like them, I think that a narrative poem must be a complete and whole story--that is, as Jarman and McDowell argue, a narrative poem must have a "beginning, a middle, and an end." Too often, poets become "enamored" of a fragment, a piece of an idea. Narrative poetry must have complete story. As narrative as they may seem, Phil Levine's poems rarely qualify. He, like too many other poets, focuses on one detail and doesn't flesh that detail out--his "Burning" from _What Work Is_ is a prime example. Jarman and McDowell also argue for complete character development. They believe that narrative poem, like narrative prose, must have interesting characters to compel the reader to keep reading. Jeffrey L. Newberry Adjunct Instructor Department of English and Foreign Languages University of West Florida 11000 University Parkway Pensacola, FL 32514 850.474.2923 850.473.7330 From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sat Apr 28 12:30:37 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 11:30:37 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Narrative Poetry In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The categories of narrative and lyric are usefully distinguished, I would agree. But of course one of the features of poetry in our age is the eagerness with which poets have mixed and blurred generic distinctions. For example, a poem like Philip Levine's "No One Remembers," from *The Names of the Lost*, is neither pure lyric nor pure narrative; that's one reason why the term "dramatic lyric" was invented, I guess. And it's a wonderful and fully realized poem, even though it certainly doesn't tell the whole story. I'll mention Fred Chappell's long poem *Midquest* one more time. To my taste, the big problem for long poems is structural. It's difficult to sustain a long poem using just lyric methods, I've always felt (I know this is a highly debatable issue). One reason Chappell's book is so readable, in any event, is that he is a very skillful narrative poet; many sections of that book spin wonderful yarns. All his experience with novels and short stories certainly helps *Midquest* to cohere, I would say. David Graham _______________ >In a message dated 4/27/01 4:40:07 PM Central Daylight Time, >yakub_beg at yahoo.com writes: > >> Would anyone distinguish autobiographical lyric from narrative poetry? > >I certainly would. To begin with, narrative poetry and lyric poetry are two >different animals. In his _How to Read Poem_, Ed Hirsch speaks of the >immediacy that a lyric poem has--he uses a Paul Celan metaphor: a poem is a >message in a bottle. Lyric poems aren't narrative poems. Lyric poems these >days tend to be meditative verse or pretentious and horrible deep-image >poems. In _The Reaper Essays_, Robert McDowell and Mark Jarman go to great >lengths to show what narrative poetry is. They include a whole checklist of >"How to Write Narrative Poetry," but just to highlight what Jarman and >McDowell say, I'll add that, like them, I think that a narrative poem must be >a complete and whole story--that is, as Jarman and McDowell argue, a >narrative poem must have a "beginning, a middle, and an end." Too often, >poets become "enamored" of a fragment, a piece of an idea. Narrative poetry >must have complete story. As narrative as they may seem, Phil Levine's poems >rarely qualify. He, like too many other poets, focuses on one detail and >doesn't flesh that detail out--his "Burning" from _What Work Is_ is a prime >example. > >Jarman and McDowell also argue for complete character development. They >believe that narrative poem, like narrative prose, must have interesting >characters to compel the reader to keep reading. > >Jeffrey L. Newberry >Adjunct Instructor >Department of English and Foreign Languages >University of West Florida >11000 University Parkway >Pensacola, FL 32514 >850.474.2923 >850.473.7330 >_______________________________________________ >New-Poetry mailing list >New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu >http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Sat Apr 28 13:16:32 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 13:16:32 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? Message-ID: Thought that might get your attention. I keep running across essays in different places such as Rattle (http://www.rattle.com/rattle13/poetry/mmadias.html), Painted Bride Quarterly (http://pbq.rutgers.edu/issues/65/ConnellyEssay.htm), a four-year-old issue of New York Quarterly (print), and the grouchy Boston Comment (http://webdelsol.com/f-bostoncomment.htm), whose author even quotes everyone's favorite Mr. Logan. Are these just old-timers' I-remember-the-days crotchets, or is there really some sort of mad poetry blight? Basically, these essays say "contemporary American poetry really, really sucks." Does it? Why? -Amber Prentiss From wasanthony at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 13:47:45 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 10:47:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams In-Reply-To: <20010428160325.84770.qmail@web12203.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20010428174745.85963.qmail@web12104.mail.yahoo.com> --- The Old Mole wrote: > Actually, one of the reasons why I've somewhat slacked > off submitting to electronic journals, after some > initial enthusiasm, is that I almost never get a > response from them at all, which I find more than a > little annoying. Those slaggards! Give me their names (hope I'm not among them ;-) and I'll make voodoo dolls. Actually, I have lost two submissions in 4 years and, in both cases, when I went into the trash to recoup them I discovered the system had emptied the trash file. One of those people wrote me later and I apologized and asked them to resubmit. Never heard back from the other. I usually get back to folks within two weeks. Which reminds me I need to tend to the backlog that accumulated during Palm Sprngs and this past week. - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From calpoet at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 12:15:47 2001 From: calpoet at yahoo.com (Fred Moramarco) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 09:15:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010427161547.12090.qmail@web11808.mail.yahoo.com> Amber, here are a few 20th century American poetry titles that might keep you busy this summer. Complete and Collected Poems need not be read cover to cover, but you might want to dip into some of these. Of course there are many others I've left out.... The Complete Poems of Wallace Stevens The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot E.E. Cummings, Complete Poems W.C. Williams, Collected Poems Marianne Moore, Collected Poems A Gertrude Stein Reader Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems Robert Frost, Complete Poems Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III John Ashbery, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror Adrienne Rich, New and Selected Poems Sylvia Plath, Ariel Anne Sexton, Complete Poems Mary Oliver, Selected Poems Allen Ginsberg, Selected Poems Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems Fred Moramarco Amber Prentiss wrote: I guess a better way to put it is: Which 20th century poetry books do you like and think are essential? -Amber -----Original Message----- From: Amber Prentiss To: 'new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu' Sent: 4/27/2001 10:13 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Summer Reading List I'm planning on dragging my poetry education kicking and screaming out of the 19th century. I read journals, so I know about Right Now, and I graduated from high school, so I know some about Back Then, but inbetween, enh. They have a tendency to offer courses in poetry when I can't take them, round here. Any poetry books anyone finds particularly interesting or important in the 20th century! (Apparently, this is not going to be a little project.) -Amber _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From moira_russell at hotmail.com Sat Apr 28 17:15:18 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 13:15:18 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] Autobiographical lyric? Message-ID: >Sorry about the "pushed" thing. Basically, an instructor yelling "Stop IT! >Not your dog, not your cat, not your father and not /you/, just once!" >would be what I meant by "pushed off the cliff," though a real person would >likely have to be nicer. Well, a real professor would be thinking of student evaluations and tenure track, and most writing instructors do tend to be nicer than that anyway. >Is a workshop really necessary? Well, self-education can really only go so far (and I say this as a mostly self-educated person). Especially in writing, it's always valuable to get another pair of eyes, another mind, to see what you may not be able to see about what you've been working on. But in my experience, writing workshops generally tend to be such tepid places you don't really get much useful criticism. Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From halvard at earthlink.net Sat Apr 28 18:07:23 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 18:07:23 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams In-Reply-To: <20010428160325.84770.qmail@web12203.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Thanks a lot, Tad. You just reminded me that I've had five or six submissions to print mags over the last year or two that are/were either lost in the mail or not responded to. Sheesh! Maybe they're behind somebody's couch. Hal "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." --Samuel Butler Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > Actually, one of the reasons why I've somewhat slacked > off submitting to electronic journals, after some > initial enthusiasm, is that I almost never get a > response from them at all, which I find more than a > little annoying. > > Tad Richards From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Sat Apr 28 19:06:04 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 16:06:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams Message-ID: <20010428230604.3170636F9@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu Sat Apr 28 20:27:00 2001 From: Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu (Ben Friedlander) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 18:27:00 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy References: <200104271800.OAA01987@dept.english.upenn.edu> Message-ID: Mike: A terrific reading of the Williams poem but I'm not sure what it proves vis-a-vis our discussion of "form as content." Though the poem is certainly structured in the form of dialogue, the poem is also a _description_ of this dialogue: the _illusion_ of immediacy is what makes the poem so delightful. That this illusion is persuasive--is "transparent," if you will--shows in the fact that you speak of a "dialogic interruption." The poem is, of course, an uninterrupted flow of words written by one person. It's only because we enter into this illusion that we can speak of interruptions and dialogue at all. That isn't a criticism of either the poem or your reading, but it's precisely why I think your previous posts have overestimated the significance of form while underestimating the complexities of content. I wonder, for example, what keeps you from reading Plath with the same sympathy, for surely Plath's poetry is as rhetorically complex as "Portrait of a Lady." (Plath, you'll recall, was what started this discussion!) Since you quoted from something you've already written, let me do the same. Here's part of an email I sent to a friend last year explaining why I love a short poem by Anselm Hollo. I suspect you will find this poem too "normative" to be praiseworthy. The subjectivity isn't troubled, the artifice isn't foregrounded, and the form isn't absorbed into the poem as a content in its own right. Even so, the canniness of this poem's construction--the complexity of the connections between its parts, the brevity of its articulation--makes it as savvy a piece of writing as the Williams (and personally, I prefer it to the WIlliams). I copy this commentary out because it clarifies what I meant when I said that poems have resources _recovered_ by reading rather than qualities _identified_ by reading: THE TENTH OF MAY (1988) Jane is out being a delegate when she comes home we'll light the candle & have some spinach spaghetti with Mr. Paul Newman his sauce his good cause sauce & smiling face on the label I do add a dash of Worcestershire a little garlic & some white pepper oh Eros we thank thee for thy gifts this day the day of the great book burnings in Deutschland fifty-five years ago --Anselm Hollo It seems to me a perfect poem and it's one of those rare ones I wish I could have written myself. I mean I wish I could write a poem with so light a touch, say so much so unpretentiously--project myself and my place in the world so casually. The poem's quotidian realism masks an amazingly precise structure, a set of resemblances and differences that chart the changes of the century and the ironies of life in secular free-market America without beating us over the head: electoral politics vs. philanthropy vs. fascism // European-born Anselm as house-husband vs. Southern belle Jane as a delegate // Paul Newman's smiling face vs. Eros // the candle at the dinner table vs. the public burning of books // the gifts of love vs. the poet's gifts (the latter--implicitly called to mind by the anniversary in question--put in the service of the form). The poem answers those folks who say that the lyric is "merely" personal expression by marking Anselm's own domestic peace as a global and historical achievement. Has there ever been a poem that celebrated political memory so sweetly? And without a corresponding increase in sentimentality? Would any other poet use "Deutschland" in the same spot? And would "Germany" have anything like the same resonance or grace? For that poem alone I rank Anselm high as a chronicler of our epoch. Ben From wasanthony at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 21:12:15 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 18:12:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] more re: Palm Screams In-Reply-To: <20010428230604.3170636F9@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: <20010429011215.92142.qmail@web12107.mail.yahoo.com> Nope, not related in any way. - Jim --- "Robert R.Cobb" wrote: > Jim, > > While browsing the "Listening Booth," I discovered Lorna Dee > Cervantes, and listened to her poem, "Freeway 280," which I liked a > lot. My wife's name is Lorna Rae. Lorna > is not all that common a first name. Anyhow, I thought, > perhaps this Lorna might be related to you, possibly. > > Bob Cobb > > --- jcervantes > > wrote: > > > >--- The Old Mole wrote: > >> Actually, one of the reasons why I've somewhat slacked > >> off submitting to electronic journals, after some > >> initial enthusiasm, is that I almost never get a > >> response from them at all, which I find more than a > >> little annoying. > > > >Those slaggards! Give me their names (hope I'm not among them ;-) > and > >I'll make voodoo dolls. Actually, I have lost two submissions in 4 > >years and, in both cases, when I went into the trash to recoup them > I > >discovered the system had emptied the trash file. One of those > people > >wrote me later and I apologized and asked them to resubmit. Never > >heard back from the other. I usually get back to folks within two > >weeks. Which reminds me I need to tend to the backlog that > accumulated > >during Palm Sprngs and this past week. > > > >- Jim > > > > > >===== > >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > >James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net > >Salt River Review: > >"Ripples" @ > >Poetserv: > >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > > >__________________________________________________ > >Do You Yahoo!? > >Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices > >http://auctions.yahoo.com/ > >_______________________________________________ > >New-Poetry mailing list > >New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > >http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > == > Poetry Catamaran > > "Just how advanced a poetic craft need be to sail along the'known > mainstream' down to the poetic sea?" > > Robert R. Cobb > AMONG FRIENDS, original art and poetry. > http://rrcobb.tripod.com > > _____________________________________________________________ > ----- > Check out my portfolio at www.talent.com > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 29 06:52:31 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 06:52:31 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? References: Message-ID: <3AEBF26F.70BF@nut-n-but.net> The question might be better put as: why do so many people write that contemporary American poetry sucks? One answer, I think, is that there's so many different kinds of it (back to my schools obsession) that it seems to many poets that their own kind is not getting the kind of exposure it ought to--since 95% of the poetry in print is of rival schools. Another answer is that the main publishers of poetry are very limited in scope--the old Wilbur to Ashbury continuum--and thus readily raise the ire of those whose poetry isn't in that continuum. Being excluded is much greater motivation for writing about the scene than being included, so you have a lot of anti-establishment essays, but few David Graham essays. My final answer is that 90% of any time's poets will be mediocre or bad, so it will always be true that comtemporary poetry will seem generally poor. My own feeling is that the poetry of our time is superior to all others in diversity, and equal to any in percentage of good poets. My one criticism of it is its lack of poets who seem to me major the way Eliot, Frost, Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Jeffers and several others were contemporaneously major. But I'm probably too close to and too involved in the scene to be a good judge of that. --Bob G. From halvard at earthlink.net Sun Apr 29 07:32:05 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 07:32:05 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? In-Reply-To: <3AEBF26F.70BF@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: > My one criticism of it is > its lack of poets who seem to me major the way Eliot, Frost, > Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Jeffers and several others were > contemporaneously major. But I'm probably too close to and > too involved in the scene to be a good judge of that. > > --Bob G. On the other hand, the year 1926 alone brought into the world W. D. Snodgrass, A. R. Ammons, James Merrill, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Paul Blackburn, and Robert Bly. The next year, 1927, added John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, and James Wright. I'll brook no quibbles about the nature of major-ity. If these aren't Majors, let's call 'em Major Minors. Hal "The bacon too carries on its modest love affair." --Tony Towle Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson From anastasios at hell.com Sun Apr 29 08:51:54 2001 From: anastasios at hell.com (Anastasios Kozaitis) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 08:51:54 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? References: <3AEBF26F.70BF@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <002e01c0d0ab$2b513060$3c19fea9@kozaitis> Someone I know shared with me an observation he has. He claims that many (American) poets suffer from bitterness, which turns into LBO, literary body odor. It's a fair claim in my mind. Bob, I agree with your comments to an extent. I think another question that has to be asked of contemporary American poetry is, "What is at stake for American poets or for American poetry?" Look at your favorite books published during the past 12 mos. What are they? Why? What do they have in common? Rexroth used to suggest that reader open and read from 4 books simultaneously in order to give the reader a perspective among the poets and their poetry. Another issue comes into the dogma some readers of poetry subscribe to. How many readers would be able to read, say, Mark Strand and Pierre Joris or Cole Swensen and Gertrude Schnackenberg or Claudia Rankine and Louise Gluck and enjoy/appreciate/etc. the poets for their form and content? There is usually a reaction to one thing or the other. And, I'm sure that in the dialogisms that I just set up readers would line either behind the Joris, Swensen, Rankine line or the Strand, Schnackenberg, Gluck line. Right? There some sort of orthodoxy when it comes to either "school(s)". >>>My one criticism of it is > its lack of poets who seem to me major the way Eliot, Frost, > Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Jeffers and several others were > contemporaneously major. But I'm probably too close to and > too involved in the scene to be a good judge of that.--Bob G. Question: Why is there this lack and according to whom? What made Eliot, Frost, Pound, Stevens Cummings, Jeffers, et al more "major" than contemporary poets? --Ak From wasanthony at yahoo.com Sun Apr 29 11:11:05 2001 From: wasanthony at yahoo.com (jcervantes) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 08:11:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] panelist needed Message-ID: <20010429151105.33879.qmail@web12103.mail.yahoo.com> I would like one more panelist for "The Unconscious Muse," which I'm proposing for AWP in New Orleans (March 6-9, 2002) - it's the panel that had to be cancelled in Palm Springs but which was well-attended nonetheless. I could go with three panelists, but the new guidelines seem to strongly suggest four as a minimum. The other panelists are Wendy Battin, poet and founder of C.A.P.A., and John Morgan, both of whom have already made their reservations with the conference hotel (as I have). I will be a participating moderator. Contact me backchannel if you're interested. And, remember, proposing a panel is no guarantee of acceptance. - Jim ===== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ James Cervantes: wasanthony at yahoo.com & jvcervantes at earthlink.net Salt River Review: "Ripples" @ Poetserv: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 29 12:13:50 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 12:13:50 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? References: <3AEBF26F.70BF@nut-n-but.net> <002e01c0d0ab$2b513060$3c19fea9@kozaitis> Message-ID: <3AEC3DBE.331B@nut-n-but.net> Anastasios Kozaitis wrote: > Bob, I agree with your comments to an extent. I think > another question that has to be asked of contemporary > American poetry is, "What is at stake for American poets > or for American poetry?" Sorry, Anastasios, but I'm not sure what you're asking. I think what is at stake, always, for any poet, is public recognition, or evidence that one is making a contribution to one's society. > Look at your favorite books published during the past > 12 mos. What are they? Why? What do they have in > common? Rexroth used to suggest that reader open > and read from 4 books simultaneously in order to give > the reader a perspective among the poets and > their poetry. > > Another issue comes into the dogma some readers of poetry > subscribe to. How many readers would be able to read, say, > Mark Strand and Pierre Joris or Cole Swensen and Gertrude > Schnackenberg or Claudia Rankine and Louise Gluck > and enjoy/appreciate/etc. the poets for their form and > content? There is usually a reaction to one thing or the > other. And, I'm sure that in the dialogisms that I just set > up readers would line either behind the Joris, > Swensen, Rankine line or the Strand, Schnackenberg, Gluck > line. Right? There some sort of orthodoxy when it comes to > either "school(s)". Yes, and those are just two schools of many, which was my point. > > My one criticism of (the contemporary poetry scene) is > > its lack of poets who seem to me major the way Eliot, Frost, > > Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Jeffers and several others were > > contemporaneously major. But I'm probably too close to and > > too involved in the scene to be a good judge of that.--Bob G. Question: Why is there this lack and according to whom? What made Eliot, Frost, Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Jeffers, et al more "major" than contemporary poets? It is only my own impression that this lack exists. Logic suggests that we should have more major poets today, the population having grown as much as it has. But there is so much going on, that any of them's gaining visibility is much more difficult. It may be that back in the middle of the twentieth-century there weren't that many dead masters in American poetry to write about, so living masters got more attention than they get now. It's much more complicated than that, but I was just making a passing remark in a brief reply to Amber's question, so am not prepared to say much more. --Bob G. From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sun Apr 29 12:41:01 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 11:41:01 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? In-Reply-To: <3AEBF26F.70BF@nut-n-but.net> References: Message-ID: I agree absolutely with this comment by Bob G: >The question might be better put as: why do so many >people write that contemporary American poetry sucks? This is an intriguing socio-aesthetic question, to my mind: why the particular flurry of screeds in recent years against poetry's glut and mediocrity? Why is it so important for many readers to believe in a kind of Golden Age mythology of poetry's diminished importance and quality? For as Bob also notes, the majority of poems in any given era are weak in various ways. Mediocrity is the norm. So as a generalization, Poetry Today Sucks is always true, and always fairly unhelpful as insight. But Bob himself falls a bit into the Golden Age trap, I feel, when he notes that there are no giants on the earth today, poets like Eliot, Frost, or Pound. My guess is that there are, but we just can't recognize or agree on who they are. As for the "few David Graham essays," that is a sad fact of our times which *does* indicate the imminent downfall of western civilization. . . . Editors interested in averting this catastophe should contact me backchannel with solitications at once. David Graham _______________________________________ >One answer, I think, is that there's so many different >kinds of it (back to my schools obsession) that it >seems to many poets that their own kind is not getting >the kind of exposure it ought to--since 95% of the poetry >in print is of rival schools. > >Another answer is that the main publishers of poetry >are very limited in scope--the old Wilbur to Ashbury >continuum--and thus readily raise the ire of those >whose poetry isn't in that continuum. Being excluded >is much greater motivation for writing about the scene >than being included, so you have a lot of anti-establishment >essays, but few David Graham essays. > >My final answer is that 90% of any time's poets will be mediocre >or bad, so it will always be true that comtemporary poetry >will seem generally poor. My own feeling is that the poetry >of our time is superior to all others in diversity, and equal >to any in percentage of good poets. My one criticism of it is >its lack of poets who seem to me major the way Eliot, Frost, >Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Jeffers and several others were >contemporaneously major. But I'm probably too close to and >too involved in the scene to be a good judge of that. > > --Bob G. __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From cstroffo at earthlink.net Sun Apr 29 12:15:31 2001 From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (chris stroffolino) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 12:15:31 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? References: Message-ID: <3AEC3E23.8539144D@earthlink.net> Amber--- thanks for this info.... I guess on one level the titles of these pieces are marketing devices... they catch the "ear" of the discontent (like Kristen Prevallet's "Why Poetry Criticism Sucks" piece too)... and, yes, William Packard (editor of NYQ---don't know if he's still alive; heard he was very sick a few years back) is older, and has always been a bit of a funny iconoclast with his magazine, whose questionaires and merciless faux classifieds I loved in the late 1980s (as I also loved the fact, if memory serves me well, that none other but John Ashbery was enlisted to name the award for best poem in a particular issue in the early 70s, and chose Charles Bukowski...there's a kind of justice there)- As for the PBQ piece, which (as a former editor of) I took a look at, I assume Christopher Connelly is young. I know Nestor (who I met once) is, and I am sympathetic to (or, better, with) his statement there---not only because he seems to be trying to find a niche for himself and the stuff he likes, and doesn't fit into the readymades (hey I too thought most contemporary american poetry sucked-- even in the WILBUR---GRUMMON CONTINUUM!--until it became clearer to me that I was considered, by others, to be a contemporary american poet, you know 811'54, etc...), but also because of the invocation of European poetry which, even in translation, combines lyric subjectivity with politics in a way that is rather not as present in American poetic balkanization (I think Paul Vangelisti makes a good point about this in his introduction to Baraka's TRANSBLUENCY....) Chris Amber Prentiss wrote: > Thought that might get your attention. I keep running across essays in > different places such as Rattle > (http://www.rattle.com/rattle13/poetry/mmadias.html), Painted Bride > Quarterly (http://pbq.rutgers.edu/issues/65/ConnellyEssay.htm), a > four-year-old issue of New York Quarterly (print), and the grouchy Boston > Comment (http://webdelsol.com/f-bostoncomment.htm), whose author even quotes > everyone's favorite Mr. Logan. Are these just old-timers' > I-remember-the-days crotchets, or is there really some sort of mad poetry > blight? Basically, these essays say "contemporary American poetry really, > really sucks." Does it? Why? > > -Amber Prentiss > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From mbales at cybergate.net Sun Apr 29 13:34:57 2001 From: mbales at cybergate.net (Marcus Bales) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 13:34:57 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why are Bob Grumman's views so often suspect? In-Reply-To: <3AEC3DBE.331B@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: Because he writes as if he believes that any claim he makes can be validated by offering glittering generalities about it, and then pleading lack of time in which to discuss it: Bob Grumman: >.... It's much more complicated than that, but I > was just making a passing remark in a brief reply to Amber's > question, so am not prepared to say much more. It's always "more complicated than that", you see, Bob -- and genuine discussion has as its goal to explore those complications, not to try to dismiss them with an airy wave as if you had all the answers but just not enough time to gift your ignorant auditors with your great wisdom. mbales at cybergate.net From anastasios at hell.com Sun Apr 29 13:29:15 2001 From: anastasios at hell.com (Anastasios Kozaitis) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 13:29:15 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? References: <3AEBF26F.70BF@nut-n-but.net> <002e01c0d0ab$2b513060$3c19fea9@kozaitis> <3AEC3DBE.331B@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <009a01c0d0d1$ea41d8a0$3c19fea9@kozaitis> > Bob, I agree with your comments to an extent. I think > another question that has to be asked of contemporary > American poetry is, "What is at stake for American poets > or for American poetry?" >>>>Sorry, Anastasios, but I'm not sure what you're asking. I think what is at stake, always, for any poet, is public recognition, or evidence that one is making a contribution to one's society. I think the dialectic that you set up, Bob, is one that should be explored at length. Many are much more concerned with the recognition than with the "art" itself. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 29 13:52:41 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 13:52:41 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why are Bob Grumman's views so often suspect? References: Message-ID: <3AEC54E9.A68@nut-n-but.net> Marcus Bales wrote: > > Because he writes as if he believes that any claim he makes can > be validated by offering glittering generalities about it, and then > pleading lack of time in which to discuss it: > > Bob Grumman: > >.... It's much more complicated than that, but I > > was just making a passing remark in a brief reply to Amber's > > question, so am not prepared to say much more. > > It's always "more complicated than that", you see, Bob -- and > genuine discussion has as its goal to explore those complications, > not to try to dismiss them with an airy wave as if you had all the > answers but just not enough time to gift your ignorant auditors with > your great wisdom. You got it, Marcus. But my tactics seem to be working: look how Chris Stroffolino has replaced Ashbury in the "Wilbur to Ashbury" continuum with my name--albeit misspelled. But thanks for characterizing my views as "so often suspect" rather than getting it untactfully right. --Bob G. From artwords at idirect.com Sun Apr 29 14:07:48 2001 From: artwords at idirect.com (Tanya Adele Koehnke) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 14:07:48 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry Message-ID: <3AEC5874.436B@idirect.com> Dear Members, I am wondering if someone could provide me with a definition of "found poetry." From what I have thus far gleaned, I gather that found poetry contains direct snippets of text that one finds in quotidian situations--i.e., advertising copy, recipe ingredients, overheard conversations on a subway, the ramblings of disc jockeys, the musings of an everyman/woman in a local pub, etc. Is my interpretation of found poetry correct? If not, I would appreciate a more informed answer. I am also wondering if anyone knows of a recently published book of found poetry. I look forward to your replies! Tanya Adele Koehnke From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 29 14:10:06 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 14:10:06 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? References: <3AEBF26F.70BF@nut-n-but.net> <002e01c0d0ab$2b513060$3c19fea9@kozaitis> <3AEC3DBE.331B@nut-n-but.net> <009a01c0d0d1$ea41d8a0$3c19fea9@kozaitis> Message-ID: <3AEC58FE.3C9A@nut-n-but.net> Anastasios: "I think the dialectic that you set up, Bob, is one that should be explored at length. Many are much more concerned with the recognition than with the 'art' itself." That may be so, but I don't really know. My impression is that most of us in poetry try to make the best poems we can, then bemoan not being able to get them published, or get them published but bemoan not having them reviewed, and so on. We want to do well AND be recognized for it. I've known quite a few fellow poets who claim not to care about recognition but seem to; which doesn't keep them from persisting in their kind of poetry, regardless of its lack of wide recognition. There is also the problem of money, which has to be a factor with many of us--recognition can win grants which can win the leisure to compose full-time. It makes a very difficult mix to work out, even for someone analyzing his own motives as I sometimes do: a simple current example is my now going into large full-color visual poems. I know I'm doing it because I like color, believe in visual poetry, and think I can do some worthwhile big colored poems. But why that instead of something else equally enticing to me? One reason is that I think there may be a chance of being able to . . . sell (forgive me) my pieces as visual art, for which there may be a much better market than for poems on the page. And how much weight am I giving to the probability that simply coloring my pieces will make them more appealing to a general audience. Etc. Interesting, sometimes, to think about, but hard to reach any kind of final conclusions about. Is this what you were thinking about or have I gone off on a tangent? --Bob G. From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 29 14:24:37 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 14:24:37 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry References: <3AEC5874.436B@idirect.com> Message-ID: <3AEC5C65.C13@nut-n-but.net> I'm no authority on found poetry but think your definition quite acceptable. I believe aficionados distinguish between untreated and treated found poetry; the former is the truest form of found poetry, each poem consisting of just one unaltered found text--from a street sign, say--all by itself on the page. Treated found poetry is really just collage that happens to use quotidian texts taken from advertising and similar mundane or non-aesthetic places (generally). Bern Porter is a leader in the use of found texts. My Runaway Spoon Press did a set of four of his books of found texts, many of them "pure"--i.e., just a single found text acting as a poem: Neverends, Numbers, Signs and Symbols; each is approximately 4" by 5" and costs $3 but you can have the set for $10. --Bob G. From halvard at earthlink.net Sun Apr 29 14:45:45 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 14:45:45 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry In-Reply-To: <3AEC5874.436B@idirect.com> Message-ID: You might have to hunt to find this one, Tanya, but in the 1973 anthology called *Open Poetry* edited by George Quasha and Ronald Gross there's a section on found poetry, with an introduction by John Robert Colombo and examples by such poets as David Antin, Eleanor Antin, Michael Benedikt, Kirby Congdon, John Giorno, Walter Lowenfels, Jackson Mac Low, Edwin Morgan, Bern Porter, Jerome Rothenberg, Hannah Weiner, and others. Also, many of Blaise Cendrars later poems were found poems. Also, a few years ago there was a journal called *Synaesthetic* edited by Alex Cigale, which specialized in found poems. Hal "You are at the highest level. There are no folders above this one." Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > Dear Members, > > I am wondering if someone could provide me with a definition of "found > poetry." From what I have thus far gleaned, I gather that found poetry > contains direct snippets of text that one finds in quotidian > situations--i.e., advertising copy, recipe ingredients, overheard > conversations on a subway, the ramblings of disc jockeys, the musings of > an everyman/woman in a local pub, etc. Is my interpretation of found > poetry correct? If not, I would appreciate a more informed answer. I > am also wondering if anyone knows of a recently published book of found > poetry. I look forward to your replies! > > Tanya Adele Koehnke From Jandhodge at aol.com Sun Apr 29 14:51:33 2001 From: Jandhodge at aol.com (Jandhodge at aol.com) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 14:51:33 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry Message-ID: Would "treated" "found poetry" include providing or creating context, which in turn creates as much as clarifies "meaning"? Specifically, would this qualify as a "legitimate" "found poem" [not that the label itself is essential]? A "Found" Allegory A funeral home in Fargo guards a one-way street, inviting all to "Enter Here." You see too late: "No exit." Jan From BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net Sun Apr 29 14:59:03 2001 From: BobGrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 14:59:03 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry References: Message-ID: <3AEC6477.3E7D@nut-n-but.net> Your poem discusses the found texts so wouldn't be a found poem, I wouldn't think, Jan. --Bob G. From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Sun Apr 29 16:00:43 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 15:00:43 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hollo poem In-Reply-To: References: <200104271800.OAA01987@dept.english.upenn.edu> Message-ID: I'm enjoying the discussion of specific poems lately, even if (boo hoo) they're not the specific poems *I've* posted. About Anselm Hollo's "The Tenth of May," though, I have a few questions in the wake of Ben F's remarks. I don't see where the allusions to a "southern belle," a house husband, etc. come from. Do they depend on prior knowledge of this poet & his situation? Likewise with the fact of Hollo being European-born--is this information available within the lyric? If not, I wonder whether this fact might impact on one's assessment of the poem. I've little desire to bash this lyric, which I find very pleasant and smoothly handled. But the large claims made for it have me scratching my head a little bit, I confess. I'm not sure, for instance, how the poem celebrates political memory, exactly. Maybe more precisely, I see how allusion is being made to Nazi Germany, of course, but I just don't that the poem is adopting much of a stance toward this huge historical fact. So I do wonder if this poem will seem as powerful to readers who don't know Hollo's work and life already, and whether that fact might matter. David Graham ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > >Since you quoted from something you've already written, let me do the >same. Here's part of an email I sent to a friend last year explaining >why I love a short poem by Anselm Hollo. I suspect you will find this >poem too "normative" to be praiseworthy. The subjectivity isn't >troubled, the artifice isn't foregrounded, and the form isn't absorbed >into the poem as a content in its own right. Even so, the canniness of >this poem's construction--the complexity of the connections between its >parts, the brevity of its articulation--makes it as savvy a piece of >writing as the Williams (and personally, I prefer it to the WIlliams). > >I copy this commentary out because it clarifies what I meant when I >said that poems have resources _recovered_ by reading rather than >qualities _identified_ by reading: > > THE TENTH OF MAY (1988) > > Jane is out being a delegate > when she comes home > we'll light the candle & have some spinach spaghetti > with Mr. Paul Newman his sauce > his good cause sauce & smiling face on the label > > I do add a dash of Worcestershire > a little garlic & some white pepper > > oh Eros we thank thee for thy gifts > this day the day > of the great book burnings in Deutschland > fifty-five years ago > > --Anselm Hollo > >It seems to me a perfect poem and it's one of those rare ones I wish I >could have written myself. I mean I wish I could write a poem with so >light a touch, say so much so unpretentiously--project myself and my >place in the world so casually. The poem's quotidian realism masks an >amazingly precise structure, a set of resemblances and differences that >chart the changes of the century and the ironies of life in secular >free-market America without beating us over the head: electoral >politics vs. philanthropy vs. fascism // European-born Anselm as >house-husband vs. Southern belle Jane as a delegate // Paul Newman's >smiling face vs. Eros // the candle at the dinner table vs. the public >burning of books // the gifts of love vs. the poet's gifts (the >latter--implicitly called to mind by the anniversary in question--put >in the service of the form). The poem answers those folks who say that >the lyric is "merely" personal expression by marking Anselm's own >domestic peace as a global and historical achievement. Has there ever >been a poem that celebrated political memory so sweetly? And without a >corresponding increase in sentimentality? Would any other poet use >"Deutschland" in the same spot? And would "Germany" have anything like >the same resonance or grace? > >For that poem alone I rank Anselm high as a chronicler of our epoch. > >Ben >_______________________________________________ __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From Kimmelman at NJIT.EDU Sun Apr 29 16:00:16 2001 From: Kimmelman at NJIT.EDU (Kimmelman, Burt) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 16:00:16 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Found Poetry Message-ID: Alex Cigale put out a sumptous magazine for a few years of wonderful found poetry in many guises (I forget the name of the mag at the moment). - Burt Kimmelman -----Original Message----- From: Bob Grumman To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/29/01 2:59 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry Your poem discusses the found texts so wouldn't be a found poem, I wouldn't think, Jan. --Bob G. _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From artwords at idirect.com Sun Apr 29 17:12:04 2001 From: artwords at idirect.com (Tanya Adele Koehnke) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 17:12:04 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Found Poetry Message-ID: <3AEC83A4.39E3@idirect.com> I just want to thank Bob, Halvard, and Burt for attempting to clarify the definition of "found poetry." I was curious to read the distinction between untreated and treated found poetry, and will try to seek out "Open Poetry" and "Synaesthetic" for further information. In the meantime, I am still confused about how to *create* found poetry (oxymoron, oxymoron). Personally speaking, I have a little packet of "Abracadabra Fancy Bubble Bath" (of all things!) whose backside copy reads, in one paragraph, "Somewhere within the crystal rainbows of these sparkling mountains of tingly, crackling bubbles, there is a laughing, splashing being taking a bath." By taking this delightful copy and arbitrarily dividing it into lines, do I produce a found poem, as follows? Abracadabra Fancy Bubble Bath Somewhere within the crystal rainbows of these sparkling mountains of tingly, crackling bubbles, there is a laughing, splashing being taking a bath. If perchance I have created a found poem with the above lines, will I, like Jan, negate its foundness by adding my *own* lines? And what if I add the last line, "Solipsism is lonely and magical"? Will this line deter from the poem's foundness? Furthermore, are there copyright laws that pertain to found poetry or should found poets always select text that is universal and which belongs to everyone? In the case of the bubble bath packet, the text belongs to every consumer, and yet, the copy is still the property of the copywriter, no? Contrarily, in the case of a traffic STOP sign, the text belongs to every driver rather than the pen of one writer, no? Tanya Adele Koehnke From halvard at earthlink.net Sun Apr 29 17:18:34 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 17:18:34 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Found Poetry In-Reply-To: <3AEC83A4.39E3@idirect.com> Message-ID: I'd say you're on the right track, Tanya, if it's found poetry you want to do. There are many shades of foundness, as Burt suggested, but the poles are sometimes called "pure" and "impure" found poetry. In the former, the poet arranges the found text into lines and stanzas as you have below, sticking to the text as found, and in the latter the poet alters the wording, adds material, etc. etc. etc. There are all sorts of possibilities. While you're exploring, you might want to check out the term "intertextuality," which has to do with, let's say very roughly, texts relating in various ways to other texts. Hal "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." --Samuel Butler Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > In the meantime, I am still confused about how to *create* found poetry > (oxymoron, oxymoron). Personally speaking, I have a little packet of > "Abracadabra Fancy Bubble Bath" (of all things!) whose backside copy > reads, in one paragraph, "Somewhere within the crystal rainbows of these > sparkling mountains of tingly, crackling bubbles, there is a laughing, > splashing being taking a bath." By taking this delightful copy and > arbitrarily dividing it into lines, do I produce a found poem, as > follows? > > > Abracadabra Fancy Bubble Bath > > Somewhere within the crystal rainbows > of these sparkling mountains > of tingly, crackling bubbles, > there is a laughing, splashing > > being > > taking a bath. > > > If perchance I have created a found poem with the above lines, will I, > like Jan, negate its foundness by adding my *own* lines? And what if I > add the last line, "Solipsism is lonely and magical"? Will this line > deter from the poem's foundness? > > Furthermore, are there copyright laws that pertain to found poetry or > should found poets always select text that is universal and which > belongs to everyone? In the case of the bubble bath packet, the text > belongs to every consumer, and yet, the copy is still the property of > the copywriter, no? Contrarily, in the case of a traffic STOP sign, the > text belongs to every driver rather than the pen of one writer, no? > > Tanya Adele Koehnke > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Sun Apr 29 17:25:07 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 17:25:07 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hollo poem Message-ID: I don't read Southern belle or house husband, and I suppose an American who had taken German might want to put Deutschland in the spot. Still, an American didn't write it. I like what it does. It passes the three line test (that is, can I get through the first three lines without wandering?) I think it shows how the big bad things of the past just can't horrify enough once time has gone. etc, etc. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: David Graham To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/29/01 4:00 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Hollo poem I'm enjoying the discussion of specific poems lately, even if (boo hoo) they're not the specific poems *I've* posted. About Anselm Hollo's "The Tenth of May," though, I have a few questions in the wake of Ben F's remarks. I don't see where the allusions to a "southern belle," a house husband, etc. come from. Do they depend on prior knowledge of this poet & his situation? Likewise with the fact of Hollo being European-born--is this information available within the lyric? If not, I wonder whether this fact might impact on one's assessment of the poem. I've little desire to bash this lyric, which I find very pleasant and smoothly handled. But the large claims made for it have me scratching my head a little bit, I confess. I'm not sure, for instance, how the poem celebrates political memory, exactly. Maybe more precisely, I see how allusion is being made to Nazi Germany, of course, but I just don't that the poem is adopting much of a stance toward this huge historical fact. So I do wonder if this poem will seem as powerful to readers who don't know Hollo's work and life already, and whether that fact might matter. David Graham ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > >Since you quoted from something you've already written, let me do the >same. Here's part of an email I sent to a friend last year explaining >why I love a short poem by Anselm Hollo. I suspect you will find this >poem too "normative" to be praiseworthy. The subjectivity isn't >troubled, the artifice isn't foregrounded, and the form isn't absorbed >into the poem as a content in its own right. Even so, the canniness of >this poem's construction--the complexity of the connections between its >parts, the brevity of its articulation--makes it as savvy a piece of >writing as the Williams (and personally, I prefer it to the WIlliams). > >I copy this commentary out because it clarifies what I meant when I >said that poems have resources _recovered_ by reading rather than >qualities _identified_ by reading: > > THE TENTH OF MAY (1988) > > Jane is out being a delegate > when she comes home > we'll light the candle & have some spinach spaghetti > with Mr. Paul Newman his sauce > his good cause sauce & smiling face on the label > > I do add a dash of Worcestershire > a little garlic & some white pepper > > oh Eros we thank thee for thy gifts > this day the day > of the great book burnings in Deutschland > fifty-five years ago > > --Anselm Hollo > >It seems to me a perfect poem and it's one of those rare ones I wish I >could have written myself. I mean I wish I could write a poem with so >light a touch, say so much so unpretentiously--project myself and my >place in the world so casually. The poem's quotidian realism masks an >amazingly precise structure, a set of resemblances and differences that >chart the changes of the century and the ironies of life in secular >free-market America without beating us over the head: electoral >politics vs. philanthropy vs. fascism // European-born Anselm as >house-husband vs. Southern belle Jane as a delegate // Paul Newman's >smiling face vs. Eros // the candle at the dinner table vs. the public >burning of books // the gifts of love vs. the poet's gifts (the >latter--implicitly called to mind by the anniversary in question--put >in the service of the form). The poem answers those folks who say that >the lyric is "merely" personal expression by marking Anselm's own >domestic peace as a global and historical achievement. Has there ever >been a poem that celebrated political memory so sweetly? And without a >corresponding increase in sentimentality? Would any other poet use >"Deutschland" in the same spot? And would "Germany" have anything like >the same resonance or grace? > >For that poem alone I rank Anselm high as a chronicler of our epoch. > >Ben >_______________________________________________ __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From barr at mail.rochester.edu Sun Apr 29 17:58:30 2001 From: barr at mail.rochester.edu (Brandon Thomas Barr) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 17:58:30 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Found Poetry In-Reply-To: <3AEC83A4.39E3@idirect.com> Message-ID: Tanya, Found poems, like Duchamp's readymades, depend on recontextualization for their power. Usually, the text used in a found poem is something "unpoetic"--a news story, washing directions, etc. The more lyrical the found text, the less successful the recontextualization. Usually, the linebreaks are anything but arbitrary, since the linebreaks are all the poet adds to the poem, really. I don't really do them, but here is one i did from a few years ago. --- Clipping Authorities said a 16-year-old Springfield boy fell Saturday Dustin Rook fell 75 feet from Sam's Throne It's believed the boy was testing his rope when it broke The boy was taken to Springdale Memorial Hospital but died enroute No one else was hurt --- The text is word for word from my hometown newspaper. The power, if there is any, is from the breaks of the lines. Brandon Barr University of Rochester On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Tanya Adele Koehnke wrote: > I just want to thank Bob, Halvard, and Burt for attempting to clarify > the definition of "found poetry." I was curious to read the distinction > between untreated and treated found poetry, and will try to seek out > "Open Poetry" and "Synaesthetic" for further information. > > In the meantime, I am still confused about how to *create* found poetry > (oxymoron, oxymoron). Personally speaking, I have a little packet of > "Abracadabra Fancy Bubble Bath" (of all things!) whose backside copy > reads, in one paragraph, "Somewhere within the crystal rainbows of these > sparkling mountains of tingly, crackling bubbles, there is a laughing, > splashing being taking a bath." By taking this delightful copy and > arbitrarily dividing it into lines, do I produce a found poem, as > follows? > > > Abracadabra Fancy Bubble Bath > > Somewhere within the crystal rainbows > of these sparkling mountains > of tingly, crackling bubbles, > there is a laughing, splashing > > being > > taking a bath. > > > If perchance I have created a found poem with the above lines, will I, > like Jan, negate its foundness by adding my *own* lines? And what if I > add the last line, "Solipsism is lonely and magical"? Will this line > deter from the poem's foundness? > > Furthermore, are there copyright laws that pertain to found poetry or > should found poets always select text that is universal and which > belongs to everyone? In the case of the bubble bath packet, the text > belongs to every consumer, and yet, the copy is still the property of > the copywriter, no? Contrarily, in the case of a traffic STOP sign, the > text belongs to every driver rather than the pen of one writer, no? > > Tanya Adele Koehnke > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > From anastasios at hell.com Sun Apr 29 19:43:59 2001 From: anastasios at hell.com (Anastasios Kozaitis) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 19:43:59 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? References: <3AEBF26F.70BF@nut-n-but.net> <002e01c0d0ab$2b513060$3c19fea9@kozaitis> <3AEC3DBE.331B@nut-n-but.net> <009a01c0d0d1$ea41d8a0$3c19fea9@kozaitis> <3AEC58FE.3C9A@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <004c01c0d106$45278240$3c19fea9@kozaitis> Bob-- Yes and no. I appreciate the honesty, and agree with most of what you are saying. But, I think the economics of the thing which you brushed upon can have very deleterious effects on the poetry. I think that the "contests" and "fellowships" etc. make people aim their poetry at a certain poetry reading population/segment, which compromises integrity. Perhaps, I am way off base here, but it is always fascinating to me to who wins what and why. I think sometimes the economics dictate aesthetics and dilute integrity. I also think that poets need to understand economics better, and many do, indeed. But, there are poets who I talk to who say things like "I have no idea about economics, etc." Why not? Economics make the world go round; poets should be interested in 'stuff' like that. --Ak ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Grumman" To: Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2001 2:10 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? > Anastasios: > > "I think the dialectic that you set up, Bob, is one > that should be explored at length. Many are much more > concerned with the recognition than with the 'art' itself." > > That may be so, but I don't really know. My impression is > that most of us in poetry try to make the best poems we can, > then bemoan not being able to get them published, or get them > published but bemoan not having them reviewed, and so on. > > We want to do well AND be recognized for it. > > I've known quite a few fellow poets who claim not to care about > recognition but seem to; which doesn't keep them from persisting > in their kind of poetry, regardless of its lack of wide recognition. > There is also the problem of money, which has to be a factor > with many of us--recognition can win grants which can win the > leisure to compose full-time. It makes a very difficult mix > to work out, even for someone analyzing his own motives as I > sometimes do: a simple current example is my now going into > large full-color visual poems. I know I'm doing it because I > like color, believe in visual poetry, and think I can do some > worthwhile big colored poems. But why that instead of something > else equally enticing to me? One reason is that I think there > may be a chance of being able to . . . sell (forgive me) my > pieces as visual art, for which there may be a much better > market than for poems on the page. And how much weight > am I giving to the probability that simply coloring my pieces > will make them more appealing to a general audience. Etc. > Interesting, sometimes, to think about, but hard to reach > any kind of final conclusions about. > > Is this what you were thinking about or have I gone off on > a tangent? > > --Bob G. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu Sun Apr 29 22:21:25 2001 From: Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu (Ben Friedlander) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 20:21:25 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Hollo poem References: <200104271800.OAA01987@dept.english.upenn.edu> Message-ID: David: Your questions gave me pause. Clearly, the poem has much more resonance for a reader who knows that Hollo was born in Helsinki. The poem itself contains no allusion to this, but Hollo's work in general is an ongoing chronicle of his life and times (this is why I posted the poem in the context of my conversation with Mike: as a positive example of autobiographical poetry), and his background wouldn't be an arcane fact for anyone who reads the book in which that poem appears. Quite apart from the bio note on the back cover, there's a poem that contains the lines: Papa wanted me to marry the Finnish language Mama chemistry (her father's life) both kept me away from Finnish-speaking women with all their might so I went to Germania & married a German speaker but couldn't make a living in those countries so ended up in England thus changing my great love affair with the English (specifically American) language into a lifetime commitment/marriage For the record, the book is called _Outlying Districts_ [Coffee House Press, 1990], and it bears the dedication "For Jane / from her querimonious querido." I suspect that Jane _isn't_ the German speaker cited above, but I don't know Anselm's bio well enough to say for sure--which indicates just how many degrees of understanding even the most straightforward poetry affords. And indicates why it's better to conceive of meaning as discoverable resource rather than identified quality (OK, I'll get off that hobby horse). I don't think "The Tenth of May (1988)" loses all that much if you don't know the author's background, and I'm not sure that the background of his wife is important at all. You say: >I've little desire to bash this lyric, which I find very pleasant and >smoothly handled. But the large claims made for it have me scratching >my >head a little bit, I confess. I'm not sure, for instance, how the poem >celebrates political memory, exactly. Maybe more precisely, I see how >allusion is being made to Nazi Germany, of course, but I just don't that >the poem is adopting much of a stance toward this huge historical fact. I don't hear you bashing at all, but if I made large claims for this poem I take them back (I said the poem is perfect, but that was just a way of saying I can't find anything to fault in it). The celebration of political memory isn't exactly hidden: it's right there in the title and explained in the last three lines--the fifty-fifth anniversary of "the great book burnings" in Nazi Germany. As for the poem's stance, it isn't only a matter of direct statement. This, in fact, is why I cited the poem in the first place: to show that the content of a poetic utterance isn't simply what's said, but what that "saying" allows the reader to think and feel. In this poem, for instance, the poet _says_ that domestic happiness is a gift of the gods (though it's the shadow of history that invests this statement with meaning, not religious sentiment). But we miss the point, I think, if we don't attend to the particular form of domestic happiness being celebrated, for that too is part of the poem's content, and in coming to terms with this content we begin to appreciate more fully the difference between 1933 and 1988. For me, this appreciation is the source of the poem's power, and it doesn't come from anything the poet says directly, but from the activity of reading. Does that clarify? Ben From gmcvay at patriot.net Sun Apr 29 22:25:29 2001 From: gmcvay at patriot.net (Gwyn McVay) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 22:25:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>>If nothing else, I'm getting awfully sick of the words "form" and "content"! Ben "Form is nothing more than an expression of malcontent." --Charles Bernstein Gwyn From Edward.Byrne at valpo.edu Mon Apr 30 00:55:53 2001 From: Edward.Byrne at valpo.edu (Edward Byrne) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 23:55:53 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? In-Reply-To: <004c01c0d106$45278240$3c19fea9@kozaitis> Message-ID: This evening I was reading an essay on Keats by Sydney Lea and came across the following that seems an appropriate response for this thread in which some have quoted critics lamenting that nowadays there are so many poets, but unlike the Modern era, few yet recognized as major: "Ours is a poetic era often sneered at for producing so many poets but so few great ones. If, however, a progressively democratic spirit is to attend the unfolding of human history (and I for one must believe it will, so that I can remain a hopeful man), can't we conceive of our era as the excellent one forecast by Keats in his letter to [John] Reynolds?" [Keats wrote of his vision of a future era: "...Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Furse and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees."] Lea concludes: "Can't we conceive of the world as one in which a _collective_ expression of beauty will offer the vision to sustain us? Can't we take heart from the many kinds of voice that are chanting their way into the so-called canon?" --Edward Byrne -------------------------------------------------- Edward Byrne Department of English 322 Huegli Hall Valparaiso University Valparaiso, IN 46383-6493 E-mail: edward.byrne at valpo.edu http://www.valpo.edu/home/faculty/ebyrne/homepage/ Editor, Valparaiso Poetry Review E-mail: vpr at valpo.edu http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/ Office Phone: (219) 464-5278 Fax: (219) 464-5511 -------------------------------------------------- From tadrichards at prodigy.net Mon Apr 30 02:08:17 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 02:08:17 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry References: <3AEC6477.3E7D@nut-n-but.net> Message-ID: <015201c0d13b$f3e01b00$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Here's a found first stanza, the rest by me. As a listener once asked Carl Sandburg, "are these real poems, or do you just make 'em up yourself?" THE CROCODILE PEOPLE They used to practice cannibalism, until they went away from the river when the colonists came. It's said they have some power over the crocodiles. But since they pulled back, humans are scarce, reptiles live in trees. Oh, you'll still hear the odd story - a child crunch'd, a maiden bathing surprised by one, two, three, shuffling from the bank. Mostly, though, things change. You lose the taste for long pig, and make a virtue of it. Crocodiles, neglected, no longer smile for you. Their memory is ancient, but shallow. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Grumman" To: Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2001 2:59 PM Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry > Your poem discusses the found texts so wouldn't be > a found poem, I wouldn't think, Jan. > > --Bob G. > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From tadrichards at prodigy.net Mon Apr 30 02:11:43 2001 From: tadrichards at prodigy.net (OTIS RICHARDS) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 02:11:43 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Found Poetry References: <3AEC83A4.39E3@idirect.com> Message-ID: <016c01c0d13c$6e93d940$6401a8c0@ibm25310> Tanya - the only rule that matters is - does it make a good poem? I enjoyed the bath "foundie." No reason why you can't do more with it, though, if you want to. Tad Richards "Well said, old mole." The Old Mole Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet of the MoleNet Act I, Scene 5 http://pages.prodigy.net/tadrichards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tanya Adele Koehnke" To: Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2001 5:12 PM Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Found Poetry > I just want to thank Bob, Halvard, and Burt for attempting to clarify > the definition of "found poetry." I was curious to read the distinction > between untreated and treated found poetry, and will try to seek out > "Open Poetry" and "Synaesthetic" for further information. > > In the meantime, I am still confused about how to *create* found poetry > (oxymoron, oxymoron). Personally speaking, I have a little packet of > "Abracadabra Fancy Bubble Bath" (of all things!) whose backside copy > reads, in one paragraph, "Somewhere within the crystal rainbows of these > sparkling mountains of tingly, crackling bubbles, there is a laughing, > splashing being taking a bath." By taking this delightful copy and > arbitrarily dividing it into lines, do I produce a found poem, as > follows? > > > Abracadabra Fancy Bubble Bath > > Somewhere within the crystal rainbows > of these sparkling mountains > of tingly, crackling bubbles, > there is a laughing, splashing > > being > > taking a bath. > > > If perchance I have created a found poem with the above lines, will I, > like Jan, negate its foundness by adding my *own* lines? And what if I > add the last line, "Solipsism is lonely and magical"? Will this line > deter from the poem's foundness? > > Furthermore, are there copyright laws that pertain to found poetry or > should found poets always select text that is universal and which > belongs to everyone? In the case of the bubble bath packet, the text > belongs to every consumer, and yet, the copy is still the property of > the copywriter, no? Contrarily, in the case of a traffic STOP sign, the > text belongs to every driver rather than the pen of one writer, no? > > Tanya Adele Koehnke > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com Mon Apr 30 08:09:52 2001 From: CobbCoStudioArts at pro.talentx.com (Robert R.Cobb) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 05:09:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry Message-ID: <20010430120952.150EF36FA@sitemail.everyone.net> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 30 09:05:11 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 09:05:11 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] [New Poetry] Found Poetry In-Reply-To: <20010430120952.150EF36FA@sitemail.everyone.net> Message-ID: There's enough credit to go around and as little money as per usual. Hal "A poet is someone from whom nothing must be taken and to whom nothing must be given." --Anna Akhmatova Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > Re: Found Poetry > > Who gets credit? The finder? The original writer? Some poet who assumes ownership? An enterprising editor/publisher? > If there is money to be made, who gets paid? > > Bob Cobb > > --- "Halvard Johnson" > > wrote: > >You might have to hunt to find this one, Tanya, but in the 1973 anthology > >called *Open Poetry* edited by George Quasha and Ronald Gross there's > >a section on found poetry, with an introduction by John Robert Colombo > >and examples by such poets as David Antin, Eleanor Antin, Michael Benedikt, > >Kirby Congdon, John Giorno, Walter Lowenfels, Jackson Mac Low, Edwin > >Morgan, Bern Porter, Jerome Rothenberg, Hannah Weiner, and others. > > > >Also, many of Blaise Cendrars later poems were found poems. > > > >Also, a few years ago there was a journal called *Synaesthetic* edited > >by Alex Cigale, which specialized in found poems. > > > >Hal "You are at the highest level. There are > > no folders above this one." > > > >Halvard Johnson > >=============== > >email: halvard at earthlink.net > >website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > > > > > >> Dear Members, > >> > >> I am wondering if someone could provide me with a definition of "found > >> poetry." From what I have thus far gleaned, I gather that found poetry > >> contains direct snippets of text that one finds in quotidian > >> situations--i.e., advertising copy, recipe ingredients, overheard > >> conversations on a subway, the ramblings of disc jockeys, the musings of > >> an everyman/woman in a local pub, etc. Is my interpretation of found > >> poetry correct? If not, I would appreciate a more informed answer. I > >> am also wondering if anyone knows of a recently published book of found > >> poetry. I look forward to your replies! > >> > >> Tanya Adele Koehnke > > > >_______________________________________________ > >New-Poetry mailing list > >New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > >http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry > > == > Poetry Catamaran > > "Just how advanced a poetic craft need be to sail along the'known mainstream' down to the poetic sea?" > > Robert R. Cobb > AMONG FRIENDS, original art and poetry. > http://rrcobb.tripod.com > > _____________________________________________________________ > ----- > Check out my portfolio at www.talent.com > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu Mon Apr 30 09:55:20 2001 From: Ben_Friedlander at umit.maine.edu (Ben Friedlander) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 07:55:20 -0600 Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry and Pedagogy - my response to Ben References: Message-ID: gmcvay at patriot.net writes: >Ben >"Form is nothing more than an expression of malcontent." > --Charles Bernstein Gwyn: Guess that makes me a formalist. Ben From halvard at earthlink.net Mon Apr 30 10:25:37 2001 From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 10:25:37 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Found poem: "The Wordless Life" Message-ID: Here's a found poem of mine. It consists of 13 sentences/passages from a book by John Hawkes, who died not very long ago. If I published this in print, I'd like at least one full page for each section. Here, there are about two screens for each. The sentences/passages were chosen while sort of flipping through the pages of Hawkes's book. These leapt out at me, grabbed me by the throat. Don't worry. I'll count this as my "poetical" contribution for May *and* June. BTW, I'd call this a found poem of the "pure" variety. I haven't tampered with the sentences as found. Also, onscreen these work especially well if you click on the glide-bar down-arrow and just let the sentences slide by. Hal Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard at earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson ------ \|/ The Wordless Life (in memoriam John Hawkes) 1. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. 2. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. 3. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. 4. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. 5. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies came out of hiding. 6. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. Staring sadly toward the gate, they parted in the middle of the road. 7. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. Because he loved color, he paid the child to unclog the drain. 8. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. "What's going on this morning?" she asked, tucked beneath her mother's wing. 9. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. Six o'clock and the room was shadowed; guests were falling from the ceiling. 10. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. A young woman holding a wet bundle sat in the corner. 11. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. The wordless life. The lifting of his chin for a fight, the tossing of his head for a kiss. 12. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. Sleeping, not knowing what they had missed. 13. Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." Learning his silences, she thought, "This is the real thing." --Halvard Johnson [source: *Lunar Landscapes* by John Hawkes] From grahamd at mail.ripon.edu Mon Apr 30 11:33:21 2001 From: grahamd at mail.ripon.edu (David Graham) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 10:33:21 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? In-Reply-To: References: <004c01c0d106$45278240$3c19fea9@kozaitis> Message-ID: Edward, Where does this essay by Sydney Lea appear? I'm not sure I can entirely endorse the sentiments he expresses, myself (perhaps lingering elitism in my soul?). But I would agree that one thing that consistently seems to be ignored or downplayed in the discussion of poetry's supposed glut and decline in our era is the degree to which aesthetic options have proliferated since WWII, as previously unheard voices began to sound more loudly within the canonical groves. Whether you're talking book sales, the lack of consensus on who's major, the many competing aesthetics, the phenomenon of regional "fame," the growth of non-academic poetical activity such as slams, or any number of other issues, poetry's trend toward democratization must be dealt with. In this regard, the poverty of imagination in a critic like Harold Bloom is really stunning, I think. He has no ears for so many different kinds of contemporary poetry (especially those based in the oral tradition) that his particular brand of elitism just seems ludicrous. David Graham ______________________ >This evening I was reading an essay on Keats by Sydney Lea and came >across the following that seems an appropriate response for this thread >in which some have quoted critics lamenting that nowadays there are so >many poets, but unlike the Modern era, few yet recognized as major: > >"Ours is a poetic era often sneered at for producing so many poets but >so few great ones. If, however, a progressively democratic spirit is >to attend the unfolding of human history (and I for one must believe it >will, so that I can remain a hopeful man), can't we conceive of our era >as the excellent one forecast by Keats in his letter to [John] >Reynolds?" > >[Keats wrote of his vision of a future era: "...Humanity instead of >being a wide heath of Furse and Briars with here and there a remote Oak >or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees."] > >Lea concludes: "Can't we conceive of the world as one in which a >_collective_ expression of beauty will offer the vision to sustain us? >Can't we take heart from the many kinds of voice that are chanting >their way into the so-called canon?" > >--Edward Byrne > >-------------------------------------------------- __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ From aprentiss at agnesscott.edu Mon Apr 30 12:07:51 2001 From: aprentiss at agnesscott.edu (Amber Prentiss) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 12:07:51 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? Message-ID: However, some of the complaints I've read are more along the lines of saying that American poetry isn't punchy enough and has become too safe in its self-observations. In short, that it's boring and predictable. Boring isn't so much a formal problem as a content and language problem. Of course, a remedy to sheer boredom would be to see more voices in print. Some aren't decring democratization; some seem to beg for it. -Amber -----Original Message----- From: David Graham To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu Sent: 4/30/2001 11:33 AM Subject: [New-Poetry] Why does contemporary American poetry suck? Edward, Where does this essay by Sydney Lea appear? I'm not sure I can entirely endorse the sentiments he expresses, myself (perhaps lingering elitism in my soul?). But I would agree that one thing that consistently seems to be ignored or downplayed in the discussion of poetry's supposed glut and decline in our era is the degree to which aesthetic options have proliferated since WWII, as previously unheard voices began to sound more loudly within the canonical groves. Whether you're talking book sales, the lack of consensus on who's major, the many competing aesthetics, the phenomenon of regional "fame," the growth of non-academic poetical activity such as slams, or any number of other issues, poetry's trend toward democratization must be dealt with. In this regard, the poverty of imagination in a critic like Harold Bloom is really stunning, I think. He has no ears for so many different kinds of contemporary poetry (especially those based in the oral tradition) that his particular brand of elitism just seems ludicrous. David Graham ______________________ >This evening I was reading an essay on Keats by Sydney Lea and came >across the following that seems an appropriate response for this thread >in which some have quoted critics lamenting that nowadays there are so >many poets, but unlike the Modern era, few yet recognized as major: > >"Ours is a poetic era often sneered at for producing so many poets but >so few great ones. If, however, a progressively democratic spirit is >to attend the unfolding of human history (and I for one must believe it >will, so that I can remain a hopeful man), can't we conceive of our era >as the excellent one forecast by Keats in his letter to [John] >Reynolds?" > >[Keats wrote of his vision of a future era: "...Humanity instead of >being a wide heath of Furse and Briars with here and there a remote Oak >or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees."] > >Lea concludes: "Can't we conceive of the world as one in which a >_collective_ expression of beauty will offer the vision to sustain us? >Can't we take heart from the many kinds of voice that are chanting >their way into the so-called canon?" > >--Edward Byrne > >-------------------------------------------------- __________________ David Graham grahamd at mail.ripon.edu __________________ _______________________________________________ New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry From cstroffo at earthlink.net Mon Apr 30 11:33:31 2001 From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (chris stroffolino) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 11:33:31 -0400 Subject: [New-Poetry] May Events Message-ID: <3AED85CA.60C0A84E@earthlink.net> Two events, you might be interested in. 1) Musical Performance at Cooper Union. Kristen Stuart (vocals) Chris Stroffolino (keyboards, perhaps mouth kazoo) Angus Forbes (drums, of the NYC band Red Soda) Sasha Bell (flute, of Ladybug Transistor and Essex Green fame) Shawn Vandor (guitar, of recently defunct band "Man & Wife.") The five of us, at least three who are poets areself, will be loosely interpreting the little-known rockband the poet Anne Sexton pieced together in the late 80s, as part of a larger Anne Sexton forum, tribute to be held at COOPER UNION (the building with the Starbucks in it, not the one from which Lincoln spoke) at 7PM on THURSDAY MAY 17th (Astor Place). For more info, you might want to call the PSA, I'm told J.D McClatchy and other luminaries will be there-- and maybe they should wear earplugs because the Anne Sexton band is much more like Patti Smith than I, at least, would have expected--- 2) Poetry Reading with Chris Stroffolino Noelle Kocot Droog Ardner Zinc Bar, 90 West Houston St. (actually I need to check on that) Basement Sunday May 20th, 630ish in the evening For more info, feel free to email me.... From jdavis at panix.com Mon Apr 30 12:16:37 2001 From: jdavis at panix.com (Jordan Davis) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 12:16:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] epic tasks In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Moira - To follow up (tho without either of our posts handy): The critical chestnut about a writer's project in an epic has *some* connection to real-reader concerns. An epic demands a big block of time and attention, and if the poet is working from silly assumptions, such as, everybody ought to know about me and my ouija board, or, everybody ought to know about me, mercantile policy, and shipwrecks, well, there's a chance things will get wearisome. But you never know: I think I'm a fan of Cowper's The Task. That said, Kirsch's poem leads me to believe he was handed a template, a hierarchy of acceptable projects for epics. This is one of those triangulation problems, I think - reader, critic, poet. You have to know how you feel about at least two of the markers on those places to understand what's going on with the third. Jordan Davis From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu Mon Apr 30 01:11:41 2001 From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 00:11:41 -0500 Subject: [New-Poetry] Merrill, Wealth, etc. Message-ID: >"I have to wonder how much of the opinions about Merrill are influenced by >his financial ease -- growing up in _that_ Merrill family, with more than >enough money, time to write without worry, and so on -- it certainly did pop >up in Karsch's review. But as far as I know no one ever looked down on >Wallace Stevens because he was a banker." >Moira Russell I have to admit, Moira, that I once did let my class resentment of Stevens affect my judgment of his work, though,it wasn't only his moneyed ease that bothered me, but how it affected his attitude about certain subjects. My article, which appeared originally in the Wallace Stevens Journal, follows, for anyone interested. The special issue of the Stevens Journal was devoted to Poets on Stevens, hence my personal reaction in part two of the essay (where I address the effects of Stevens' wealth). Paul Lake * * * The Malady of the Quotidian 1 In poems such as "Tintern Abbey" and The Prelude Wordsworth created a new type of poetry. Harold Bloom has described this new poetry as one that took consciousness and the poetic imagination as its principal subject. Wallace Stevens, throughout his own long career, followed his great precursor's example, and in poems such as "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" extended the tradition into this century, adding to it a mode of irony we have come to recognize as Modernist. But Wordsworth also wrote a second type of poetry that finds no echo in Stevens, a poetry we find chiefly in Lyrical Ballads. M. H. Abrams in his essay "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age" describes Wordsworth as having two voices; he suggests that in this second voice Wordsworth undertook something different from the exploration of consciousness. Quoting the preface to Lyrical Ballads, he writes that Wordsworth also attempted "to represent realistic `incidents and situations from common life' in ordinary language and to employ `humble and rustic life' as the main source of the simple characters and the model for the plain speech." In this essay I hope to explore this difference between Wordsworth and Stevens and, in doing so, to trace the source in Stevens' poetry of what I will call, after Stevens himself, "The malady of the quotidian," a malady which haunts his work from first to last. Wordsworth successfully fused his two voices in one poetic vocation and in his greatest poetry achieved a wholeness of utterance that eluded Stevens. Though it's no longer fashionable to speak in such terms, I think Stevens failed to achieve a similar wholeness because he limited himself to a poetry of consciousness alone. The malady of mind and spirit that resulted derives at least partly from Stevens' unwillingness or inability to engage "incidents and situations from common life." Men and women, when they exist at all in his poetry, serve merely as objects of contemplation. Unlike the various vagrants and pedlars and leech gatherers one encounters in the poetry of Wordsworth, people in Stevens' poetry exist primarily as things. Let's begin with Wordsworth's famous formulation in "Tintern Abbey." In that poem, Wordsworth writes that he is a "lover" of "all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear--both what they half create, / And what perceive." This is very different from Stevens' formulation in "The Idea of Order at Key West." In the following stanza, the woman Stevens describes does far more than "half create" the mighty world of eye and ear: She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. In this, as in other passages, Stevens advocates an idealism as radical as Bishop Berkeley's. The world has no reality except as idea. In other poems Stevens suggests a consciousness-created reality strikingly similar to that espoused by some theorists of quantum physics. Consider these lines from "Description Without a Place": There might be, too, a change immenser than A poet's metaphors in which being would Come true, a point in the fire of music where Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe, And observing is completing and we are content, In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole . . . Reading a passage like the above, one might recall experiments in quantum physics in which an electron's attributes are said not to exist until measured by an observing consciousness. Stevens' lines also suggest another phenomenon familiar to us from science: the way photons of light exist as waves until their sudden collapse into particles as they hit the retina of a conscious observer. Yet prescient as some of Stevens' poetic conjectures seem in regard to modern scientific theories, it is their relationship to Wordsworth's very different ideas about the nature of man and the world which concern us here. Recall that Wordsworth described himself as a "lover" of "all the mighty world / of eye and ear . . . ." In his own lines, by contrast, Stevens is very much the neutral observer; he uses two forms of the word in the passage above. This might seem a minor point, but it has large ramifications for the rest of his work. The lyrical "I" in Wordsworth's poetry, as Abrams and others have pointed out, is Wordsworth himself speaking to a reader without a mask--a "man speaking to men," in the words of his preface to Lyrical Ballads. Even The Prelude, for all its Miltonic ambition, was addressed to a particular friend: Coleridge. Stevens, on the other hand, speaks through masks; the self in his poems is most frequently a fictive self: scholar, rabbi, philosopher; the man on the dump, the man whose pharynx was bad; Crispin, the interior paramour. In poem after poem, we find Wordsworth ranging over the landscape, encountering flowers, streams, rivers, cities, women and men. The speakers in Stevens' poems often appear to be observing the world through a window or contemplating it over a book, as in "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm." Nature in Stevens' poetry is most often the sort the poet might have encountered in a garden or out the window of his Hartford home: flowers, birds, clouds, rain, sunlight, snow. Wordsworth writes a poetry of encounter; Stevens, a poetry of detached contemplation. Nowhere is Wordsworth's difference from Stevens more apparent than in Book Thirteen of The Prelude. Here Wordsworth writes of . . . those watchful thoughts Which, seeing little worthy or sublime In what the Historian's pen so much delights To blazon--power and energy detached From moral purpose--early tutored me To look with feelings of fraternal love Upon the unassuming things that hold A silent station in this beauteous world. Thus moderated, thus composed, I found Once more in Man an object of delight, Of pure imagination, and of love. Milton Bates and others have commented on Stevens' desire to create a "pure poetry" of the imagination, to make "medium man" or "major man" the object of his poetic contemplation; rarely are men and women the objects of love in Stevens' poetry. Similarly, one doesn't find Stevens contemplating "the unassuming things that hold / A silent station in this beauteous world" with "fraternal love." In Stevens' poetry, even a man or woman most often becomes merely another object of thought, an occasion for meditating on the ideal. By contrast, in The Prelude Wordsworth describes how he gained A more judicious knowledge of the worth And dignity of individual man, No composition of the brain, but man Of whom we read, the man whom we behold With our own eyes . . . No composition of the brain, he writes, but the man whom we behold. When Wordsworth encounters the leech gatherer of "Resolution and Independence," the beggars of the poem of that title, the various gypsies and vagrants and pedlars of The Prelude and the lyrics and ballads, he greets them with "fraternal love"; he speaks to them "without reserve" and sees into "the depth" of their "human souls." To use the terms of the philosopher Martin Buber, he meets them in an I-Thou relationship. Having mentioned Buber, I would now like to examine his ideas more carefully and then apply them to Stevens. Buber writes of two types of relationship: an I-Thou relationship and an I-It relationship. The I-It relationship does not apply only to inanimate objects. "Without a change in the primary word," Buber writes, "one of the words He and She can replace It". He further writes, "If I face a human being as my Thou and say the primary word I-Thou to him, he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things." Applied to the poetry of Stevens, these words have a disturbing significance: The I-Thou relationship Buber describes is conspicuous by its almost total absence from Stevens' poetry. Eschewing dialogue and narrative, Stevens writes a poetry of lyrical meditation, yet the lyrical "I," as we've seen, is generally as fictive as the world it contemplates, a thing among things. Buber supplies an interesting commentary on this situation. I will quote two passages at some length because of their remarkable bearing on Stevens' entire corpus. Here's the first: The life of human beings is not passed in the sphere of transitive verbs alone. It does not exist in virtue of activities alone which have some thing for their object. I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something. I feel something. I think something. The life of human beings does not consist of all this and the like alone. This and the like together establish the realm of It. But the realm of Thou has a different basis. When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds. When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation. Now let's turn to one of Stevens' most ambitious poems, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." I don't propose to explain all of this perplexing poem; rather, I want to illuminate a few brief passages in the light of Buber's thought. Stevens divides his poem into three principal sections. The title of the first is It Must Be Abstract. In Part X of that section, he writes, The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle . . . The speaker then describes a Chaplinesque figure in pantaloons and concludes this section of the poem with the following lines: It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound. Yet for all of Stevens' eloquent attempts to describe "major man" in this poem, he never gets beyond propounding "the idea of man." In Buber's terms, he addresses man as an It rather than a Thou. Buber writes, "No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between I and Thou." And then in a passage that seems almost as if it were written to explain Stevens' lifelong attempt to create a "Supreme Fiction" that reconciles the real and the ideal, Buber comments, Appeal to a "world of ideas" as a third factor above this opposition will not do away with its essential twofold nature. For I speak of nothing else but the real man, of you and of me, of our life and of our world--not of an I, or a state of being, in itself alone. The real boundary for the actual man cuts right across the world of ideas as well. To be sure, many a man who is satisfied with the experience and use of the world of things has raised over or about himself a structure of ideas, in which he finds refuge and repose from the oncoming of nothingness. . . . But the mankind of mere It that is imagined, postulated, and propagated by such a man has nothing in common with a living mankind where Thou may truly be spoken. The noblest fiction is a fetish, the loftiest fictitious sentiment is depraved. Ideas are no more enthroned above our heads than resident in them; they wander amongst us and accost us. The man who leaves the primary word unspoken is to be pitied; but the man who addresses instead these ideas with an abstraction or a password, as if it were their name, is contemptible. As a judgement on Stevens, I think this is unduly harsh. Stevens has given us great poetry, and when we see the intellectual gusto and brilliant humor with which he presents his fictions, we must certainly temper Buber's criticism with admiration and gratitude. Yet even a reader who loves Stevens' work can't help feeling the shock of recognition when reading the above passage. Stevens himself seems to have achieved a similar recognition in the opening of "Arrival at the Waldorf": Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf. This arrival in the wild country of the soul, All approaches gone, being completely there, Where the wild poem is a substitute For the woman one loves or ought to love, One wild rhapsody a fake for another. He goes on to speak of "The world in a verse," and of "men remoter than mountains, / Women invisible in music . . . . Returning to "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (Part X of It Must Give Pleasure), we see Stevens addressing the world itself--that "Fat girl, terrestrial." At the end of this section he concludes, They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational, Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo. . . . He looks forward to a time when he can escape his abstractions and address the earth herself by name--as Thou. Stevens rarely attempts to address another being as Thou in his poetry--yet he sometimes seems conscious of a desire to do so. One of these moments occurs in Part VI of It Must Change, from "Notes," a passage which has been variously interpreted. Yet if we keep Buber's comments in mind as we look at the passage, its significance will be clear. The section begins Bethou me, said the sparrow, to the crackled blade And you, and you, bethou me as you blow, When in my coppice you behold me be. I don't find the word bethou in the OED and take it to be a word Stevens coined on the order of befriend. The sparrow insists--both to the "crackled blade" and "you, and you,"--that he be addressed as thou. In the next stanza, the "bloody wren," the "felon jay," and the "jug-throated robin" pick up the cry, "Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade." Returning to a description of the sparrow in the concluding stanza of this section, the speaker of the poem adjures the reader to "Bethou him, you / And you, bethou him and bethou. It is / A sound like any other. It will end." In his letter to Hi Simons of January 12, 1943, Stevens refers to this passage and notes that it is "an old-fashioned poem of the onomatopoeia of a summer afternoon. I suppose that insistent be-thou is a catbird." But there is far more involved in the catbird's cry then onomatopoeia, as Stevens suggests later. For in his letter of January 28 of the same year, Stevens writes the following to Simons: We have in our garden half a dozen evergreens in a group which, for convenience, we call our coppice; for no particular reason a change of sound takes place in the coppice. Of course, there may be a psychological reason for the development of the idea. The change is an ingratiating one and intended to be so. When the sparrow begins calling be-thou: Bethou me (I have already said it probably was a catbird) he expresses one's own liking for the change . . . Bethou is intended to be heard; it and ke-ke, which is inimical, are opposing sounds. Bethou is the spirit's own seduction. Holly Stevens, who edited her father's letters, notes that where Stevens wrote "Bethou me," in his letter, he added in the margin, "Tutoyez-moi." There's no mistake: the sparrow--or catbird--asks to be addressed by the familiar tu rather than by vous; he asks to be addressed as Thou. It is interesting that Stevens suggests in his letter that there may be "a psychological reason for the development of the idea" of this change of sound in the bird's cry. The meaning of this section is problematical in relation to the development of the whole poem. But two sections later in Part VIII of It Must Change, Stevens describes the attempt of Nanzio Nunzio to address Ozymandias; stripping herself naked before him, she declares, "I am the spouse," and asks to be clothed in "the final filament / So that I tremble with such love . . . " But Ozymandias replies that "the spouse, the bride / Is never naked. A fictive covering / Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind." A clear suggestion that it is impossible to know or possess the other in her essential being; that a "fictive covering" forever prevents our addressing another as Thou. II I have admired Stevens' poetry since I first began writing poetry in my teens. I used to accept the general opinion that Stevens was one of the great Modernists of this century, along with Pound, Eliot, and Williams, but I now see him as the last great poet of the Romantic tradition that began with Wordsworth and Blake. His poetry of consciousness seems an extension of Wordsworth's, and his belief in the power of the poetic imagination and in the existence of ideal or "major" man seems closely related to ideas held by Blake. Unlike the other Modernists I've mentioned, Stevens wrote most of his best poetry in blank verse, a fact which perhaps explains why Hugh Kenner, one of the high priests of Modernism, dislikes his work so much. As with Stevens, most of my own best work is metrical. Yet for all my admiration of Stevens' formal mastery and verbal daring, I've never felt the desire to emulate him. I think this has to do in large part with the fact that Stevens failed (in Wordsworth's words again in The Prelude) to dwell "Upon the vulgar forms of present things / The actual world of our familiar days." Much of Stevens' poetry enacts an escape from reality into a more "noble" world of ideas and abstractions. Milton Bates in his book Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self shows how even in his love letters to his fiancee Stevens erected dream castles and created imaginary landscapes into which he wished them to escape. This same desire to escape vulgar reality appears in various forms in his poetry. In this mode, Stevens appears rather more like Shelley than any of his other Romantic forebears or Modernist contemporaries. Dana Gioia in his essay "Business and Poetry" writes of how Stevens' career in business provided him with the success and security one rarely associates with a life spent writing poetry. Gioia further suggests that a job in business might have "sheltered [Stevens] from the economic consequences of writing without an audience, and possibly even tutored him in surviving alienation." He adds that a poet in such a situation can write for himself, without autobiographical exposition, and develop difficult ideas and private symbolisms since he is writing primarily for himself. "The routines of office life might have been anaesthetizing," Gioia avers, "but this very feature also had its advantages for a poet." Though I think Gioia is largely correct, I suggest that the routines Stevens chose for himself had less advantageous consequences as well. In "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad," the poem from which I take my title, Stevens writes, The time of year has grown indifferent. Mildew of summer and the deepening snow Are both alike in the routine I know. I am too dumbly in my being pent. To read this as simply the speech of the man of the poem's title would be naive. Through his mask, Stevens has perhaps identified the source of the "malady of the quotidian" he writes of in the poem's third stanza. The word "quotidian" has among its meanings, "belonging to each day", "everyday," "routine." Stevens appears to recognize here that the routine he chose for himself has resulted in his being too dumbly "pent" in his own being. Later in the poem he wishes something could "penetrate" so that he might become less "diffident." But quotidian also has another meaning: "commonplace, ordinary." As a reader, I have often wished that Stevens had been content to dwell more in this realm of the quotidian. Instead, he fled from the commonplace and ordinary in a way that most of us couldn't emulate even if we wanted to. His corporate position, his financial security, his impressive Hartford home insulated him from the economic and social shocks to which most of us are heir. Wordsworth spoke with beggars and vagrants. Stevens retired behind the walls of his Hartford office and study. Like others near the bottom of the American middle class, I find Stevens' approach to the higher slopes of Parnassus barred by the avenging angel of necessity. For the kind of poetry I write, poetry that includes people whose lives are shaped by vulgar and commonplace realities, Wordsworth rather than Stevens offers a model. I've found an even more useful model in Robert Frost, whose poetic career might be read as an attempt to extend and correct Wordsworth. Frost writes of the "humble and rustic" life of men and women without Wordsworth's occasional idealizing sentimentality. Frost's Nature is much less the anthropomorphic being of Wordsworth's poetry than the more inhuman one revealed by modern science; it is a nature sometimes frighteningly indifferent to our wishes. In his attitude toward this world, Frost is more a Roman Stoic than a Romantic enthusiast--a poise better suited to this century's more terrible history. Yet despite his stoicism, Frost in his lyrics, narratives, and monologues, presents us with people, often commonplace and ordinary, endowed with a substance and depth like our own. Whether in his own person or through an imaginary character, Frost is able to speak to our essential being--as a "man speaking to men." That seems to me an accomplishment far greater than the creation of any fiction, no matter how beautifully written or supremely conceived. Still, I'm grateful to Stevens for showing us how far a poet might venture into the abstract on the winged horse of the imagination. For all his refusal to embrace the quotidian, his poetry possesses immense intelligence and humor and, at times, great feeling. I can almost hear Stevens' mocking voice as he looks down from the ramparts of his Supreme Fiction and, in the words of an early poem, "Gubbinal," answers my criticism. That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad. That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly And the people are sad. I hope he's escaped the quotidian at last and found a more celestial jungle-world where his fierce, lyrical being is at home. Works Cited M. H. Abrams, "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age," in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970). Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Martin Buber, I and Thou, second ed., trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribners, 1958). Dana Gioia, "Business and Poetry," Poetry After Modernism, ed. Robert McDowell (Brownsville: Story Line Press, 1991). Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966). Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play (New York: Vintage, 1971). William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. by Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). From languagethief at yahoo.com Mon Apr 30 13:33:11 2001 From: languagethief at yahoo.com (The Old Mole) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 10:33:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] Found poem: "The Wordless Life" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010430173311.88593.qmail@web12202.mail.yahoo.com> I think this is particularly suited for the scrolling motion of the computer screen. I find it fascinating this way. Tad --- Halvard Johnson wrote: > Here's a found poem of mine. It consists of 13 > sentences/passages > from a book by John Hawkes, who died not very long > ago. If I > published this in print, I'd like at least one full > page for each section. > Here, there are about two screens for each. The > sentences/passages > were chosen while sort of flipping through the pages > of Hawkes's > book. These leapt out at me, grabbed me by the > throat. > > Don't worry. I'll count this as my "poetical" > contribution for May > *and* June. BTW, I'd call this a found poem of the > "pure" variety. > I haven't tampered with the sentences as found. > > Also, onscreen these work especially well if you > click on the glide-bar > down-arrow and just let the sentences slide by. > > Hal > > Halvard Johnson > =============== > email: halvard at earthlink.net > website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson > ------ > > \|/ > > The Wordless Life > (in memoriam John Hawkes) > 1. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > I'll be a room of the tall booted hunter. > > > 2. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > Prayerbook in hand, the parson grunted. > > > 3. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > Storms and sudden fortresses sprang into the air. > > > 4. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > He sat with his chin lifted, face toward the sun. > > > 5. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came out of hiding. > In the garden, early in the evening, the fireflies > came === message truncated === __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From languagethief at yahoo.com Mon Apr 30 13:39:50 2001 From: languagethief at yahoo.com (The Old Mole) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 10:39:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [New-Poetry] epic tasks In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20010430173950.40150.qmail@web12207.mail.yahoo.com> I have a new book coming out sometime in May (I think) which will be an epic of sorts -- a book-length narrative poem entitled "Situations." It uses Rime of the Ancient Mariner format (left-margin glosses) and rhymed iambic pentameter quatrains. And it is, actually, based on an incredibly sill assumption, but one which I explain in a preface. --- Jordan Davis wrote: > Moira - > > To follow up (tho without either of our posts > handy): > > The critical chestnut about a writer's project in an > epic has *some* > connection to real-reader concerns. An epic demands > a big block of time > and attention, and if the poet is working from silly > assumptions, such as, > everybody ought to know about me and my ouija board, > or, everybody ought > to know about me, mercantile policy, and shipwrecks, > well, there's a > chance things will get wearisome. But you never > know: I think I'm a fan of > Cowper's The Task. > > That said, Kirsch's poem leads me to believe he was > handed a template, a > hierarchy of acceptable projects for epics. > > This is one of those triangulation problems, I think > - reader, critic, > poet. You have to know how you feel about at least > two of the markers on > those places to understand what's going on with the > third. > > Jordan Davis > > _______________________________________________ > New-Poetry mailing list > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From moira_russell at hotmail.com Mon Apr 30 14:05:24 2001 From: moira_russell at hotmail.com (Moira Russell) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 10:05:24 -0800 Subject: [New-Poetry] epic tasks Message-ID: Jordan wrote: >That said, Kirsch's poem leads me to believe he was handed a template, a >hierarchy of acceptable projects for epics. Would be genuinely interested in whatever might have made you think that -- I didn't get much from his poem, except a certain stiff glumness. I wondered what other people thought of it, too (Jim's "Gack!" was certainly vivid). Whaling and mercantilism? This isn't Melville, is it? Moira Russell Seattle, WA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com From MillB at aol.com Mon Apr 30 21:41:39 2001 From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 21:41:39 EDT Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Other Lists Message-ID: Greetings all: I know that this is a tad off topic, but I appeal to your compassion. . . my boyfriend is an artist (figurative oil painting), and he asked me to write my list group to find out if anyone knew of a newsgroup (like this one) that was devoted to painting or art. If anyone has a tip or a suggestion, let me know. So we don't clutter up the list, please write to me directly at MillB at aol.com. Many thanks, Mill