From sondheim at panix.com  Wed Sep  1 00:33:56 2004
From: sondheim at panix.com (Alan Sondheim)
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 00:33:56 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] antipassion 
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.60.0409010032110.18342@panix3.panix.com>



antipassion


christ appears from somewhere.
he plays around with his disciples for three days.
nights he spends fucking with mary magdalene.
he develops a terrible disease.
disillusioned he climbs up a cross and stares at the sky.
his body is covered with leper's and syphilitic sores.
he worries about mary magdalene.
he's taken down from the cross.
wands are waved over his body lifting the sores away.
flails speed from the body whispering in the air.
soldiers stand around christ and help him up.
his body is shining and whole again.
he leaves the garden having fun with his disciples.
he eats dinner with them and they toast each other.
judas gives 30 pieces of silver for the terrific meal.
he walks hand in hand with mary magdalene and is on his way.
later that day he figures he might say something on the hill.

__


From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Wed Sep  1 01:37:33 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 00:37:33 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] antipassion
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.4.60.0409010032110.18342@panix3.panix.com>
References: <Pine.NEB.4.60.0409010032110.18342@panix3.panix.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040901003656.02a1dac0@mail.ilstu.edu>

this is why I love alan sondheim

thank you alan, you damn genius

At 11:33 PM 8/31/2004, Alan Sondheim wrote:


>antipassion
>
>
>christ appears from somewhere.
>he plays around with his disciples for three days.
>nights he spends fucking with mary magdalene.
>he develops a terrible disease.
>disillusioned he climbs up a cross and stares at the sky.
>his body is covered with leper's and syphilitic sores.
>he worries about mary magdalene.
>he's taken down from the cross.
>wands are waved over his body lifting the sores away.
>flails speed from the body whispering in the air.
>soldiers stand around christ and help him up.
>his body is shining and whole again.
>he leaves the garden having fun with his disciples.
>he eats dinner with them and they toast each other.
>judas gives 30 pieces of silver for the terrific meal.
>he walks hand in hand with mary magdalene and is on his way.
>later that day he figures he might say something on the hill.
>
>__
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Wed Sep  1 09:22:02 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 09:22:02 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] antipassion
In-Reply-To: <6.0.3.0.2.20040901003656.02a1dac0@mail.ilstu.edu>
References: <Pine.NEB.4.60.0409010032110.18342@panix3.panix.com>
	<6.0.3.0.2.20040901003656.02a1dac0@mail.ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <4135CCFA.6040200@ix.netcom.com>

Shouldn't it be

<nights he spends fucking mary magdalene.>

Not "fucking with". CP


>
>
>> antipassion
>>
>>
>> christ appears from somewhere.
>> he plays around with his disciples for three days.
>> nights he spends fucking with mary magdalene.
>> he develops a terrible disease.
>> disillusioned he climbs up a cross and stares at the sky.
>> his body is covered with leper's and syphilitic sores.
>> he worries about mary magdalene.
>> he's taken down from the cross.
>> wands are waved over his body lifting the sores away.
>> flails speed from the body whispering in the air.
>> soldiers stand around christ and help him up.
>> his body is shining and whole again.
>> he leaves the garden having fun with his disciples.
>> he eats dinner with them and they toast each other.
>> judas gives 30 pieces of silver for the terrific meal.
>> he walks hand in hand with mary magdalene and is on his way.
>> later that day he figures he might say something on the hill.
>>
>> __
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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 anny.ballardini at tin.it  Wed Sep  1 09:46:52 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 15:46:52 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Fw: Congratulations!!
Message-ID: <00cb01c4902a$239f86e0$88df3052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Jeex, who is going to help me spend all this money?

Also note that international Mrs Becky Williams writes with an Italian email
address ...

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <beckywills at tiscali.it>
To: <beckywills at tiscali.it>
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2004 3:37 PM
Subject: Congratulations!!


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REF:PL2/209318/09
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have therefore been approved for a lump sum pay out of Five Hundred Thousand
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Due to mix up of some numbers and names, we ask that you keep your winning
information confidential until your claims has been processed and your money
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claiming
and unwarranted abuse of this program by some participants. All participants
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Email: beckywills at zwallet.com

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__________________________________________________________________
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From JforJames at aol.com  Wed Sep  1 11:26:56 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 11:26:56 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] POETS FOR PEACE reading
Message-ID: <1eb.29648360.2e674440@aol.com>

Wednesday Sept 1, 2004
5-7pm:  POETS FOR PEACE reading:

Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery (Between Blecker and Houston), NYC 10012

7pm: Poetry Superhero March to St. Mark's Church: "Keep the World Safe
for Poetry!"


8pm:  DEMO: A demonstration in words.
 A poetry reading on the RNC, President Bush and the
crisis in Iraq.

St. Mark's Church, 131 E. 10th St. & 2nd Ave., NYC.=20

All events are free!


Poets for Peace Readers include: Bethany Spiers, Cat Tyc, Tomomi
=93Suh-Bay=94 Sano, P.A. Weisman, Mark Lamoureoux, Christina Strong, =
Chris
Bullock, Christopher Stackhouse, Merry Fortune, Steve Dalachinsky,
David Kirschenbaum, Erica Kaufman, Betsy Andrews, Regie Cabico, Corie
Feiner, Brenda Iijima, Fred Arcoleo, Aaron Kiely, Sherry A. Brennan,
Gina Myers, Eve B. Packer, Eliot Katz, Tom Savage, Raymond J. Arendt,
Cynthia Kraman, Susan Brennan, Alicia Ostriker, Paul Johnson, E. Tracy
Grinnell, Anne Waldman


Demo Readers include:=20

Sonia Sanchez, Grace Paley, Carl Hancock Rux, Sapphire, Katha Pollitt,
Mark Doty, Anne Waldman, Cornelius Eady, Vijay Seshadri, Hettie Jones,
Hal Sirowitz, Bob Holman, Grace Schulman, Eileen Myles, Marie Ponsot,
Robert Polito, John Yau, Rodrigo Toscano, Carol Mirakove, Greg Fuchs,
Anselm Berrigan, Laura Elrick, Bruce Andrews, Kathy Engel, Zero Boy,
John Coletti and Kristin Prevallet
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From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Wed Sep  1 11:55:44 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 10:55:44 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] antipassion
In-Reply-To: <4135CCFA.6040200@ix.netcom.com>
References: <Pine.NEB.4.60.0409010032110.18342@panix3.panix.com>
	<6.0.3.0.2.20040901003656.02a1dac0@mail.ilstu.edu>
	<4135CCFA.6040200@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040901105316.02c1bec0@mail.ilstu.edu>

You brute, Carlo. Removing the preposition is barbaric.

What's more, you lose "thuh polysemy" (as Ted Holland says) of "teasing" -- 
which the phrasing "fuck with" also contains.



At 08:22 AM 9/1/2004, R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
>Shouldn't it be
>
><nights he spends fucking mary magdalene.>
>
>Not "fucking with". CP



From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Wed Sep  1 12:09:48 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 12:09:48 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] antipassion
In-Reply-To: <6.0.3.0.2.20040901105316.02c1bec0@mail.ilstu.edu>
References: <Pine.NEB.4.60.0409010032110.18342@panix3.panix.com>	<6.0.3.0.2.20040901003656.02a1dac0@mail.ilstu.edu>	<4135CCFA.6040200@ix.netcom.com>
	<6.0.3.0.2.20040901105316.02c1bec0@mail.ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <4135F44C.1040908@ix.netcom.com>

But it don't scan with the 'with'. Bedsides it don't fit the underlying 
bitterness of the poem which is introduced with the sexually transmitted 
disease that Allan himself would like to give Christ, actually 
Christians.  Allan means fuck not fuck with. But Allan pulled back there 
and you can hear it. I say go for it.

Of course, this conflict in the poem's tone and content between the head 
on assault and Christ as casual protaganist lays bare the central 
weakness of the poem and comports very well with Allan's general 
wishy-washyness. CP

Gabriel Gudding wrote:

> You brute, Carlo. Removing the preposition is barbaric.
>
> What's more, you lose "thuh polysemy" (as Ted Holland says) of 
> "teasing" -- which the phrasing "fuck with" also contains.
>
>
>
> At 08:22 AM 9/1/2004, R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
>
>> Shouldn't it be
>>
>> <nights he spends fucking mary magdalene.>
>>
>> Not "fucking with". CP
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>


From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Wed Sep  1 12:45:58 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 12:45:58 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] antipassion
In-Reply-To: <4135F44C.1040908@ix.netcom.com>
References: <Pine.NEB.4.60.0409010032110.18342@panix3.panix.com>	<6.0.3.0.2.20040901003656.02a1dac0@mail.ilstu.edu>	<4135CCFA.6040200@ix.netcom.com>	<6.0.3.0.2.20040901105316.02c1bec0@mail.ilstu.edu>
	<4135F44C.1040908@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <4135FCC6.4000002@ix.netcom.com>

Besides not 'bedsides'. Also, Allan is Mary Magdelene, a nice fit. The 
clap is accidental? Yet somehow vengeful. And you don't get the clap 
from "teasing." Gabe of all people should know that. CP


R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:

> But it don't scan with the 'with'. Bedsides it don't fit the 
> underlying bitterness of the poem which is introduced with the 
> sexually transmitted disease that Allan himself would like to give 
> Christ, actually Christians.  Allan means fuck not fuck with. But 
> Allan pulled back there and you can hear it. I say go for it.
>
> Of course, this conflict in the poem's tone and content between the 
> head on assault and Christ as casual protaganist lays bare the central 
> weakness of the poem and comports very well with Allan's general 
> wishy-washyness. CP
>
> Gabriel Gudding wrote:
>
>> You brute, Carlo. Removing the preposition is barbaric.
>>
>> What's more, you lose "thuh polysemy" (as Ted Holland says) of 
>> "teasing" -- which the phrasing "fuck with" also contains.
>>
>>
>>
>> At 08:22 AM 9/1/2004, R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
>>
>>> Shouldn't it be
>>>
>>> <nights he spends fucking mary magdalene.>
>>>
>>> Not "fucking with". CP
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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 cc at opus0.com  Wed Sep  1 13:59:24 2004
From: cc at opus0.com (Crisman Cooley)
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 10:59:24 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: antipassion
In-Reply-To: <200409011600.i81G03YD020030@wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Message-ID: <IFEJKAJEJBEOJGHBHOCHEELNCPAA.cc@opus0.com>

Contains the seed of an Idea: 
Time (reversed) heals 
Christ's wounds.
But the timing is confused 
Because he didn't see the disciples during the three days
Only three (or so) times during forty days.
Supper reversed is Breakfast.
The chief priests would sell the Bloody Field, 
And return the money to Judas, 
Who would give it back to them 
In payment for an agreement not to betray-- 
Nothing to do with the meal. 
Christ didn't speak on the hill on Thursday.  

Who loves these blunders? 
Who loves what the author 
Doesn't love?
'antipassion' is ennui.


> antipassion
> 
> 
> christ appears from somewhere.
> he plays around with his disciples for three days.
> nights he spends fucking with mary magdalene.
> he develops a terrible disease.
> disillusioned he climbs up a cross and stares at the sky.
> his body is covered with leper's and syphilitic sores.
> he worries about mary magdalene.
> he's taken down from the cross.
> wands are waved over his body lifting the sores away.
> flails speed from the body whispering in the air.
> soldiers stand around christ and help him up.
> his body is shining and whole again.
> he leaves the garden having fun with his disciples.
> he eats dinner with them and they toast each other.
> judas gives 30 pieces of silver for the terrific meal.
> he walks hand in hand with mary magdalene and is on his way.
> later that day he figures he might say something on the hill.




From JforJames at aol.com  Wed Sep  1 16:27:15 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 16:27:15 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Presidential Elections futures market
Message-ID: <104.4fb5c412.2e678aa3@aol.com>

http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/markets/Pres04_WTA.html

Dear JP, here's a site that may interest you and others
interested in politics. This futures market was formed
at the business school at the University of Iowa, and 
like other futures markets it can predict outcomes of
events based on the buying & selling of contracts.
I learned about this particular market in the book
I'm reading called the Wisdom of Crowds.
Hope your first day of classes went well. If I can
help you get a book on-line let me know.
Love,
Dad
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From mandolin at mac.com  Wed Sep  1 19:44:05 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 19:44:05 -0400
Subject: new poetry listRe: [New-Poetry] Kooser interview
In-Reply-To: <BD58E40B.7225%writerslink@ozemail.com.au>
References: <BD58E40B.7225%writerslink@ozemail.com.au>
Message-ID: <CF817A37-FC70-11D8-B3A7-000393C29586@mac.com>


On Aug 30, 2004, at 12:02 AM, Chris Mansell wrote:

> Can you help for OS X front channel ...I think there might be a few of 
> us.
> Cm


Sure.  There's a free app from Ambrosia called Wiretap  ( 
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/freebies/ ) It records anything 
going through your computer's sound circuitry to mp3.  You can then use 
iTunes to burn the mp3 to disc in either mp3 or aiff format.


> On 27/8/04 10:20 AM, "Michael Snider" <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> Sam, what's your OS? If it's Mac OS X, I can help.  backchannel if you
>> like.
>>
>> On Aug 25, 2004, at 9:57 PM, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:
>>
>>> In a message dated 8/25/2004 8:40:54 PM Central Daylight Time,
>>> jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com writes:
>>>
>>>
>>>  Sam,
>>>  ?
>>>  When you click on "listen to show," you should have an option to 
>>> save
>>> the file somewhere on your computer.? You can either put it in a
>>> special folder, or do as I do and save it on your desktop.
>>>  ?
>>>  From there, you can burn the file to a cd.? Just stick in a blank
>>> CD.? XP should walk you through the rest.
>>>  ?
>>>  Jeff Newberry
>>>
>>> Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> In a message dated 8/23/2004 3:55:13 PM Central Daylight Time,
>>> JforJames at aol.com writes:
>>>
>>>
>>>  The new Laureate in a Q&A...
>>>  ?
>>> http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/08/20040816_b_main.asp
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  James, do you (or anyone out there) know how I can record this
>>> interview from RealPlayer to cd?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>  New-Poetry mailing list
>>>  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>>>  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  Jeff Newberry
>>>
>>>
>>>  It's a direct stream, not a file, I think.? Any other ideas? I just
>>> recorded it on a tape recorder from the computer speakers, but the
>>> sound quality isn't very
>>> good._______________________________________________
>>> 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 mandolin at mac.com  Wed Sep  1 19:52:20 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 19:52:20 -0400
Subject: new poetry listRe: [New-Poetry] Kooser interview -- OS X recording
In-Reply-To: <BD58E40B.7225%writerslink@ozemail.com.au>
References: <BD58E40B.7225%writerslink@ozemail.com.au>
Message-ID: <F6583724-FC71-11D8-9C19-000393C29586@mac.com>

For some reason this didn't come back to me -- trying again
On Aug 30, 2004, at 12:02 AM, Chris Mansell wrote:

> Can you help for OS X front channel ...I think there might be a few of 
> us.
> Cm


Sure.  There's a free app from Ambrosia called Wiretap  ( 
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/freebies/ ) It records anything 
going through your computer's sound circuitry to mp3.  You can then use 
iTunes to burn the mp3 to disc in either mp3 or aiff format.


> On 27/8/04 10:20 AM, "Michael Snider" <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> Sam, what's your OS? If it's Mac OS X, I can help.  backchannel if you
>> like.
>>
>> On Aug 25, 2004, at 9:57 PM, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:
>>
>>> In a message dated 8/25/2004 8:40:54 PM Central Daylight Time,
>>> jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com writes:
>>>
>>>
>>>  Sam,
>>>  ?
>>>  When you click on "listen to show," you should have an option to 
>>> save
>>> the file somewhere on your computer.? You can either put it in a
>>> special folder, or do as I do and save it on your desktop.
>>>  ?
>>>  From there, you can burn the file to a cd.? Just stick in a blank
>>> CD.? XP should walk you through the rest.
>>>  ?
>>>  Jeff Newberry
>>>
>>> Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> In a message dated 8/23/2004 3:55:13 PM Central Daylight Time,
>>> JforJames at aol.com writes:
>>>
>>>
>>>  The new Laureate in a Q&A...
>>>  ?
>>> http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/08/20040816_b_main.asp
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  James, do you (or anyone out there) know how I can record this
>>> interview from RealPlayer to cd?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>  New-Poetry mailing list
>>>  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>>>  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  Jeff Newberry
>>>
>>>
>>>  It's a direct stream, not a file, I think.? Any other ideas? I just
>>> recorded it on a tape recorder from the computer speakers, but the
>>> sound quality isn't very
>>> good._______________________________________________
>>> 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  Thu Sep  2 08:13:46 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 08:13:46 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Presidential Elections futures market
Message-ID: <20.32a0a9da.2e68687a@aol.com>

Duh...sorry for sending a private email to the list yesterday.
Finnegan
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From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep  2 12:53:19 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 11:53:19 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Mandorla #7 -- now available 
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040902115234.02c2b808@mail.ilstu.edu>

PRESS RELEASE        [for immediate distribution]

Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas

Issue 7 of Mandorla: Nueva Escritura de las Am?ricas, guest edited by 
Kristin Dykstra, is now available for sale [see below for ordering 
information].

Contributors include: Nathaniel Mackey, Omar P?rez, Eleni Sikelianos, Paul 
Hoover, Roberto Tejada, Jaime Saenz, Forrest Gander, Jay Wright, Reina 
Mar?a Rodr?guez, Kent Johnson, Jos? Lezama Lima, Curtis White, Kass 
Fleisher, Jos? Kozer, et alii [see below for full list].

JOIN US for the LAUNCH of Issue 7:  ?Super Shorts? ? 8:30pm Tuesday 
September 7 at the Center for the Visual Arts, University Art Galleries, 
Illinois State University.

Mandorla, a magazine of international renown, was founded in Mexico City by 
Roberto Tejada in 1991. Mandorla publishes innovative writing in its 
original language--most commonly English or Spanish--and high-quality 
translations of existing material. Visual art and short critical articles 
complement this work. The name of the magazine--mandorla, describing a 
space created by two intersecting circles--alludes to the notion of 
exchange and imaginative dialogue that is an obligation now among the 
Americas. <http://www.litline.org/Mandorla/>http://www.litline.org/Mandorla/

The full complement of Issue 7:  Carlos Aguilera, Rosa Alcal?, Rito Aroche, 
Caridad Atencio, Gabriel Bernal Granados, Joel Bettridge, Susan Briante, 
Alfonso D'Aquino, Rub?n Dar?o, Kristin Dykstra, Kass Fleisher, Roberto 
Gonz?lez Echevarr?a, Ana Rosa Gonz?lez Matute, Forrest Gander, Gabriel 
Gudding, Jorge Guitart, Elizabeth Hatmaker, Paul Hoover, Reynaldo Jim?nez, 
Kent Johnson, Tamara Kamenszain, Caroline Koebel, Jos? Kozer, Vera 
Kutzinski, Nick Lawrence, Henrry Lezama, Jos? Lezama Lima, Jacqueline Loss, 
Nathaniel Mackey, Nancy Gates Madsen, Javier Marim?n, Pedro Marqu?s de 
Armas, Todd Ram?n Ochoa, Peter O'Leary, Omar P?rez, Antonio Jos? Ponte, 
Soleida R?os, Reina Mar?a Rodr?guez, Jaime Saenz, Mark Schafer, Eleni 
Sikelianos, Roberto Tejada, Magali Tercero, Julio Trujillo, Arnaldo Valero, 
Paul Vanouse, Mark Weiss, Curtis White, Jay Wright, Thad Ziolkowski.

Mandorla is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and 
is supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the English Department of 
Illinois State University, the McNulty Chair at SUNY Buffalo, and the 
University of California at San Diego.

Issue 8 will also be produced at Illinois State University and will be 
co-edited by Kristin Dykstra with Roberto Tejada (San Diego) and Gabriel 
Bernal Granados (M?xico DF).

Please write with check, payable to ?Mandorla,? and send to

MANDORLA 

Department of English -- 4240
Illinois State University
Normal, IL  61790-4240
$10 (US) plus shipping & handling for 1 copy, $2.50; 2 copies, $3.30; Each 
additional copy over 2:  add $1.00
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep  2 14:49:28 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 20:49:28 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] pOm
Message-ID: <009601c4911d$9376ebe0$a6a83252@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Slow passing Neptune conjunct Moon

 

 

creates

heavy days - (how's it there) - 

 

the ninth house is calling

when the longing - illogical - usual - falling - 

how used to it in the many re/ cycles - 

 

 

it is magnetic - synchronic - simply pulled out/ up - it autonomously starts running - triggered by nothing - Platonic - through the 9th

 

fresh are its colors - smiling prowess - projected in nonsensual nonsense

 

its month could be May

encompassed in thermic inertia 

effluent

 

in mindful states ripened palms

gothic psalms

stable sample of Hollywood waves

 

they interact 

Moon & Neptune

one pulling the other blending

the vision of wo/man distanced

under earthly psychological strain

 

 

Anny Ballardini


http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome

The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky
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From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep  2 21:01:22 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 21:01:22 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser poem
Message-ID: <1d5.2a422c70.2e691c62@aol.com>

The Man With The Hearing Aid

A man takes out his hearing aid
and falls asleep, his good ear deep
in the pillow. Thousands of bats
fly out of the other ear.
All night they flutter and dive
through laughter, catching the punch lines,
their ears all blood and velvet.
At dawn they return. The weary squeaks
make the old stone cavern ring
with gibberish. As the man awakens
the last of the bats folds into sleep.
His ear is thick with fur and silence.

Ted Kooser
Sure Signs, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1980
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From writerslink at ozemail.com.au  Thu Sep  2 21:55:50 2004
From: writerslink at ozemail.com.au (Chris Mansell)
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 11:55:50 +1000
Subject: new poetry list[New-Poetry] Kooser poem
In-Reply-To: <1d5.2a422c70.2e691c62@aol.com>
Message-ID: <BD5E0C46.74B9%writerslink@ozemail.com.au>

Liked this.
C
On 3/9/04 11:01 AM, "JforJames at aol.com" <JforJames at aol.com> wrote:

The Man With The Hearing Aid
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From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Thu Sep  2 23:00:41 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe)
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 23:00:41 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] (no subject)
Message-ID: <1094180441.4137de599ce5d@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>


Jim,

Don't apologize.

I liked the letter alot.

Best, Kerry



From grahamd at ripon.edu  Fri Sep  3 00:54:55 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 23:54:55 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser poem
In-Reply-To: <1d5.2a422c70.2e691c62@aol.com>
Message-ID: <BD5D634F.AE61%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Sparklers

I scratched your name in longhand
on the night, then you wrote mine.
I couldn't see you, near me,
laughing and chasing my name
through the air, but I could hear
your heart, I think, and feel your breath
against the darkness, hurrying.

One word swirled out of your hand
as you rushed hard to write it
all the way out to its end
before its beginning was gone.
It left a frail red line
trembling along on the darkness,
and that was my name, my name.

--Ted Kooser.  Weather Central.  U Pittsburgh, 1994.



on 9/2/04 8:01 PM, JforJames at aol.com at JforJames at aol.com wrote:

The Man With The Hearing Aid

A man takes out his hearing aid
and falls asleep, his good ear deep
in the pillow. Thousands of bats
fly out of the other ear.
All night they flutter and dive
through laughter, catching the punch lines,
their ears all blood and velvet.
At dawn they return. The weary squeaks
make the old stone cavern ring
with gibberish. As the man awakens
the last of the bats folds into sleep.
His ear is thick with fur and silence.

Ted Kooser
Sure Signs, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1980

_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry




====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================


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From writerslink at ozemail.com.au  Fri Sep  3 05:43:42 2004
From: writerslink at ozemail.com.au (Chris Mansell)
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 19:43:42 +1000
Subject: new poetry listRe: new poetry listRe: [New-Poetry] Kooser
	interview
In-Reply-To: <CF817A37-FC70-11D8-B3A7-000393C29586@mac.com>
Message-ID: <BD5E79EE.7509%writerslink@ozemail.com.au>

Thank you Michael.
On 2/9/04 9:44 AM, "Michael Snider" <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:

> 
> On Aug 30, 2004, at 12:02 AM, Chris Mansell wrote:
> 
>> Can you help for OS X front channel ...I think there might be a few of
>> us.
>> Cm
> 
> 
> Sure.  There's a free app from Ambrosia called Wiretap  (
> http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/freebies/ ) It records anything
> going through your computer's sound circuitry to mp3.  You can then use
> iTunes to burn the mp3 to disc in either mp3 or aiff format.
>



From halvard at gmail.com  Fri Sep  3 11:30:57 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 11:30:57 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] =?iso-8859-1?q?Poems_by_others=3A_Gerardo_Den=EDz?=
	=?iso-8859-1?q?=2C_=22Manifest_Destiny=22?=
In-Reply-To: <f160a1210409030829698d934c@mail.gmail.com>
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJECEBJINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
	<f160a1210409030829698d934c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <f160a121040903083032dd8344@mail.gmail.com>

Manifest Destiny

Upon burying my mother the other day I contemplated
a point in space--prism, three-dimensional volume--
where credibly soon I must decompose.
Since the company won't affect me then,
it won't matter I've forgotten how the discriminating get on.
Given that, I declare: the emptiness
didn't seem bad, not bad at all;
it's in the mountains which I have always preferred;
very far below rise numerous institutions of poor quality
--so in this respect, at least, things won't change.

--Gerardo Den?z

tr. Judith Infante
in Marlboro Review,
No. 8, Summer/Fall, 1999


Halvard Johnson
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard




-- 
Hal      "Those who cast the ballots decide nothing.
            Those who count the ballots decide everything."
                                    --Joseph Stalin
             

Halvard Johnson
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard



From clitophon at yahoo.com  Fri Sep  3 11:42:48 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 08:42:48 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] The Palace of Tears
In-Reply-To: <f160a121040903083032dd8344@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20040903154248.50972.qmail@web40410.mail.yahoo.com>

The Palace of Tears

In memoriam ? Henri Cartier-Bresson

				Here is the Palace of Tears
				A stolid, square building.
				Bustling crowds cross and re-cross
				Enter the U-Bahn, depart.

				For homes, workplaces, infernal
				Dwellings infested with machines.
				Communication is no problem
				For a street has a name.

				People meet, populate cafes, bars
				They have many trivial cares
				And many trivial loves and likes
				Such talk the future soon forgets.

				Beneath the Palace of Tears
				Are the trash cans, broken bottles,
				Rubble, remains, a yesterday
				Broken into, disinterred.

				So the crowd disperses
				It needs to be told what to do 
				So intimately, so easily
				And a crowd can be led.

				Raise a hand, wave a handkerchief
				Read out the latest news:
				Laugh, cry ? the gamut of human emotions.
				The eternal photographer grimaces, unkempt

				His vignettes and silhouettes and Leica
				Camera are everywhere, he is the neatly dressed
man
				On the train, merely immortal,
				Well dressed but cold.

				He fiddles with his Leica
				He says nothing, he retorts (when questioned)
				?I am a photographer and untrained.?
				Not so much a doppelganger

				Your brother, he departs.
				At the Palace of Tears.
				The carriage is chill, not so
				Chill as death but almost so.



		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Fri Sep  3 12:41:13 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 11:41:13 -0500 
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine & age
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A349@mail.ripon.edu>

> David/Kerry, no doubt the years taken their toll...but I think
> it's important to remember that Levine (and other poets of
> his era when they were younger) had  teachers who demanded 
> a tauter, more rhythmic line. In Levine's case it was Yvor Winters,
> and then Berryman. As a whole what we know as 'free verse'
> has loosened up considerably in last 40 years; and poets
> like Levine, Merwin, Rich, etc., have become looser in
> their practice.
> Finnegan
-----------

That's a good point, of course.  And as Levine's very early work shows, he
could employ rhyme and meter just fine.  But what I was thinking of was the
tautness of line and the musical density that you find in what I think of as
his best period, in books like *They Feed They Lion*, *1933,* and *The Names
of the Lost*.  

For me, books like *The Mercy* and *The Simple Truth* are quite fine, with
more than a few echoes of the earlier spark, but ultimately not in the same
league.  Much as I continue to like his work, there are more and more poems
that seem to be like  "relaxed fit" bluejeans.  

It's hardly shocking to find a poet in his 60s and 70s losing a bit of
steam, of course.  It's a problem everyone faces who is lucky enough to
reach that age as a writer, most without Levine's level of success.
============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	JforJames at aol.com
> Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views
> Sent: 	Monday, August 30, 2004 9:03 AM
> To: 	new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> Subject: 	Re: [New-Poetry] Philip Levine, "Philosophy Lesson"
> 
> <<File: ATT2615272.txt>>
> In a message dated 8/30/2004 9:47:19 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> grahamd at ripon.edu writes:
> 
> 	How DOES one guard against, um, losing the spark with age, becoming
> self-
> 	> indulgent?  How does one stay fiercely awake?
> 	> 
> 	> The subject interests me.
> 	> 
> 	> Kerry O'Keefe
> 	> 
> 
> 	Well, good question.  But as Levine might say, it beats the shit out
> of me!
> 
> 	A very very common problem, and not limited to star poets like
> Levine, who
> 	probably doesn't hear No from editors much these days.  But it
> probably has
> 	more to do with age, I think, than with reputation.
> 
>  
> 


From tad at opus40.org  Fri Sep  3 13:07:17 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 13:07:17 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine & age
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A349@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <009701c491d8$79d51e30$6a01a8c0@MoleHQ>

And I think the new work needs some time to separate itself in our minds
from what we think of as the classic work, and breathe on its own.

Witter Bynner's last poems in a way seem slack compared to earlier work, but
in another way, and with the passage of time, among the best he ever wrote.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Graham, David" <GrahamD at ripon.edu>
To: "'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views'"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 03, 2004 12:41 PM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine & age


> > David/Kerry, no doubt the years taken their toll...but I think
> > it's important to remember that Levine (and other poets of
> > his era when they were younger) had  teachers who demanded
> > a tauter, more rhythmic line. In Levine's case it was Yvor Winters,
> > and then Berryman. As a whole what we know as 'free verse'
> > has loosened up considerably in last 40 years; and poets
> > like Levine, Merwin, Rich, etc., have become looser in
> > their practice.
> > Finnegan
> -----------
>
> That's a good point, of course.  And as Levine's very early work shows, he
> could employ rhyme and meter just fine.  But what I was thinking of was
the
> tautness of line and the musical density that you find in what I think of
as
> his best period, in books like *They Feed They Lion*, *1933,* and *The
Names
> of the Lost*.
>
> For me, books like *The Mercy* and *The Simple Truth* are quite fine, with
> more than a few echoes of the earlier spark, but ultimately not in the
same
> league.  Much as I continue to like his work, there are more and more
poems
> that seem to be like  "relaxed fit" bluejeans.
>
> It's hardly shocking to find a poet in his 60s and 70s losing a bit of
> steam, of course.  It's a problem everyone faces who is lucky enough to
> reach that age as a writer, most without Levine's level of success.
> ============================================
> David Graham
> Department of English, Ripon College
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>      Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>      My Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
>
> Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
> ============================================
>
>
> > ----------
> > From: JforJames at aol.com
> > Reply To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views
> > Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 9:03 AM
> > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Philip Levine, "Philosophy Lesson"
> >
> > <<File: ATT2615272.txt>>
> > In a message dated 8/30/2004 9:47:19 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> > grahamd at ripon.edu writes:
> >
> > How DOES one guard against, um, losing the spark with age, becoming
> > self-
> > > indulgent?  How does one stay fiercely awake?
> > >
> > > The subject interests me.
> > >
> > > Kerry O'Keefe
> > >
> >
> > Well, good question.  But as Levine might say, it beats the shit out
> > of me!
> >
> > A very very common problem, and not limited to star poets like
> > Levine, who
> > probably doesn't hear No from editors much these days.  But it
> > probably has
> > more to do with age, I think, than with reputation.
> >
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Fri Sep  3 13:44:40 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 10:44:40 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine & age
Message-ID: <18902320.1094233481253.JavaMail.root@donald.psp.pas.earthlink.net>



-----Original Message-----
From: "Graham, David" <GrahamD at ripon.edu>


It's hardly shocking to find a poet in his 60s and 70s losing a bit of
steam, of course.  It's a problem everyone faces who is lucky enough to
reach that age as a writer, most without Levine's level of success.

Are you talkin to me? Are you talkin to ME?  Are YOU talkin to me?  

- Jim, past 60 but a way to go before 70

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Cervantes:  http://www.poetserv.net/jvchome/index.html
Salt River Review:  http://www.poetserv.org
RelativeLinks: http://www.poetserv.com/relativelinks/home.html


From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Fri Sep  3 14:44:09 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 11:44:09 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine & age
In-Reply-To: <18902320.1094233481253.JavaMail.root@donald.psp.pas.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <20040903184409.95302.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>

I'm so glad that the poem I posted by Philip Levine has generated so much conversation.  I suppose we all have our favorites---and Levine is one of mine--so I tend to overlook what might be glaring inadequacies to others.  Not that I think that "Philosophy Lesson" is a poor.  I do think, however, that it does try to explain itself to the reader.  What I really enjoy about Levine's work is its refusal to be anything than what it is.  I'm thinking of of "1933," in which the speaker sees his father wink at him and some ten lines later "shits handfuls of earth."  (I think that's the quote anyway).
 
When poets age, what happens?  Do their perceptions dampen?  Do they loose a spark they had in their younger ages?  What of Milton, dictating blind to his daughters?  
 
I don't ask these questions seeking any definitve answers--there probably are none.  I suppose it carries through the arts, however.  I mean, the Rolling Stones now are not the Rolling Stones of 1968.  
 
Thanks again for all the great commentary,
 
Jeff Newberry

James Cervantes <jvcervantes at earthlink.net> wrote:


-----Original Message-----
From: "Graham, David" 


It's hardly shocking to find a poet in his 60s and 70s losing a bit of
steam, of course. It's a problem everyone faces who is lucky enough to
reach that age as a writer, most without Levine's level of success.

Are you talkin to me? Are you talkin to ME? Are YOU talkin to me? 

- Jim, past 60 but a way to go before 70

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Cervantes: http://www.poetserv.net/jvchome/index.html
Salt River Review: http://www.poetserv.org
RelativeLinks: http://www.poetserv.com/relativelinks/home.html
_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
		
---------------------------------
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From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Fri Sep  3 16:22:17 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe)
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 16:22:17 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine & age
In-Reply-To: <18902320.1094233481253.JavaMail.root@donald.psp.pas.earthlink.net>
References: <18902320.1094233481253.JavaMail.root@donald.psp.pas.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <1094242937.4138d279e4f64@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>

Yo, yo, Jim, easy there, Dawg, No One is making Any Insinuations about You and 
Age...But I highly approve of the energy brought to the query...!!!  Will NOT 
mess with you!!  

And certainly, truth be known, I just turned fifty, so am simply fretting on my 
own behalf, although the general level of uproar in my life shows no sign of 
abating, I do worry about any form of mildness setting in...But seriously, I 
think sometimes fame has a seductive effect.  People don't have to work so 
hard, and I do think comfort is always beckoning.  It's just human nature.  
Jeff I am glad you mentioned the Rolling Stones - I don't follow them much now 
but I do think Mick Jagger is a case in point.  Does rock and roll at age sixty 
work?  Or should the intensity transform into something like a rich, dangerous 
blues?  I recently was given tickets to Crosby Stills and Nash - went to see 
them and was so moved by the energy with which they played - one felt their 
NEED to be up there working their asses off - which they did to great effect.  
yet the new songs - the writing, i.e., the translating of life - were not so 
interesting.  

I guess I think of the poems of Jack Gilbert do not lose intensity with his 
aging - He practices the capacity to use every bit of what one has seen and 
felt at age sixty-five or seventy - in the poem, and then write the poem that 
could NEVER have been written at the age of forty or fifty, the poem that could 
ONLY be written at the age of seventy. Somehow a matter of keeping the eye, 
heart and mind wide awake.  WIDE awake, yo.

On that note, I have to go take some ginko beloba so I can remember the names 
of my children...

Cheers,

Kerry
 



Quoting James Cervantes <jvcervantes at earthlink.net>:

> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Graham, David" <GrahamD at ripon.edu>
> 
> 
> It's hardly shocking to find a poet in his 60s and 70s losing a bit of
> steam, of course.  It's a problem everyone faces who is lucky enough to
> reach that age as a writer, most without Levine's level of success.
> 
> Are you talkin to me? Are you talkin to ME?  Are YOU talkin to me?  
> 
> - Jim, past 60 but a way to go before 70
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> James Cervantes:  http://www.poetserv.net/jvchome/index.html
> Salt River Review:  http://www.poetserv.org
> RelativeLinks: http://www.poetserv.com/relativelinks/home.html
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 





From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Fri Sep  3 16:54:14 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe)
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 16:54:14 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] From A Burning Building
Message-ID: <1094244854.4138d9f65ddfb@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>


>From a Burning Building

I have lived with the belief
there is no such thing as death.
Just a matter of riding the avalanche
into another intensity. A different
feeling for light.  The heart dissembled
and translated into a different
language.  The body left behind.
But now I am here, emblazoning the faces
of my children on the back of my soul.
Hoping there will be something
we will recognize later.



Kerry O'Keefe



From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Fri Sep  3 18:14:11 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 15:14:11 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine & age
References: <18902320.1094233481253.JavaMail.root@donald.psp.pas.earthlink.net>
	<1094242937.4138d279e4f64@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <4138ECB4.FF748A4C@earthlink.net>



Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe wrote:
> 
>
> 
> I guess I think of the poems of Jack Gilbert do not lose intensity with his
> aging - He practices the capacity to use every bit of what one has seen and
> felt at age sixty-five or seventy - in the poem, and then write the poem that
> could NEVER have been written at the age of forty or fifty, the poem that could
> ONLY be written at the age of seventy. Somehow a matter of keeping the eye,
> heart and mind wide awake.  WIDE awake, yo.

Jack Gilbert is a perfect example.  With some, death comes before the
diminishment of talent - not counting those who chase death early and
catch up to it early.

- Jim


From anna_beth_young at yahoo.com  Fri Sep  3 20:10:19 2004
From: anna_beth_young at yahoo.com (Anna Young)
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 17:10:19 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine & age
In-Reply-To: <4138ECB4.FF748A4C@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <20040904001019.16001.qmail@web51305.mail.yahoo.com>

I like Gilbert a lot too, but a friend showed me some of his newer poems, not yet published (in my understanding) and they are not that interesting... I heard he is ill. ;(

James Cervantes <jvcervantes at earthlink.net> wrote:

Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe wrote:
> 
>
> 
> I guess I think of the poems of Jack Gilbert do not lose intensity with his
> aging - He practices the capacity to use every bit of what one has seen and
> felt at age sixty-five or seventy - in the poem, and then write the poem that
> could NEVER have been written at the age of forty or fifty, the poem that could
> ONLY be written at the age of seventy. Somehow a matter of keeping the eye,
> heart and mind wide awake. WIDE awake, yo.

Jack Gilbert is a perfect example. With some, death comes before the
diminishment of talent - not counting those who chase death early and
catch up to it early.

- Jim
_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sat Sep  4 00:41:40 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 23:41:40 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine
Message-ID: <BD5EB1B4.AEB2%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Salami

Stomach of goat, crushed
sheep balls, soft full
pearls of pig eyes,
snout gristle, fresh earth,
worn iron of trotter, slate
of Zaragoza, dried cat heart,
cock claws.  She grinds
them with one hand and
with the other fists
mountain thyme, basil,
paprika, and knobs of garlic.
And if a tooth of stink thistle
pulls blood from the round
blue marbled hand
all the better for
this ruby of Pamplona,
this bright jewel of Vich,
this stained crown
of Solsona, this
salami.
        The daughter
of mismatched eyes,
36 year old infant smelling
of milk.  Mama, she cries, mama,
but mama is gone,
and the old stone cutter
must wipe the drool
from her jumper.  His puffed fingers
unbutton and point her
to toilet.  Ten, twelve hours
a day, as long as the winter sun
hold up he rebuilds
the unvisited church
of San Martin.  Cheep cheep
of the hammer high above
the town, sparrow cries
lost in the wind or lost
in the mind.  At dusk he leans
to the coal dull wooden Virgin
and asks for blessings on
the slow one and peace
on his grizzled head, asks
finally and each night
for the forbidden, for
the knowledge of every
mysterious stone, and
the words go out on
the overwhelming incense
of salami.
        A single crow
passed high over the house,
I wakened out of nightmare.
The winds had changed,
the Tremontana was tearing
out of the Holy Mountains
to meet the sea winds
in my yard, burning and
scaring the young pines.
The single poplar wailed
in terror.  With salt,
with guilt, with the need
to die, the vestments
of my life flared, I
was on fire, a stranger
staggering through my house
butting walls and falling
over furniture, looking
for a way out.  In the last room
where moonlight slanted
through a broken shutter
I found my smallest son
asleep or dead, floating
on a bed of colorless light.
When I leaned closer
I could smell the small breaths
going and coming, and each
bore its prayer for me,
the true and earthy prayer
of salami.

--Philip Levine.  *They Feed They Lion*.  1972.


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From tad at opus40.org  Sat Sep  4 00:47:51 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 00:47:51 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine
References: <BD5EB1B4.AEB2%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <003c01c4923a$5e06f810$6a01a8c0@MoleHQ>

No slack in that one.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Graham" <grahamd at ripon.edu>
To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 12:41 AM
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine


> Salami
> 
> Stomach of goat, crushed
> sheep balls, soft full
> pearls of pig eyes,
> snout gristle, fresh earth,
> worn iron of trotter, slate
> of Zaragoza, dried cat heart,
> cock claws.  She grinds
> them with one hand and
> with the other fists
> mountain thyme, basil,
> paprika, and knobs of garlic.
> And if a tooth of stink thistle
> pulls blood from the round
> blue marbled hand
> all the better for
> this ruby of Pamplona,
> this bright jewel of Vich,
> this stained crown
> of Solsona, this
> salami.
>         The daughter
> of mismatched eyes,
> 36 year old infant smelling
> of milk.  Mama, she cries, mama,
> but mama is gone,
> and the old stone cutter
> must wipe the drool
> from her jumper.  His puffed fingers
> unbutton and point her
> to toilet.  Ten, twelve hours
> a day, as long as the winter sun
> hold up he rebuilds
> the unvisited church
> of San Martin.  Cheep cheep
> of the hammer high above
> the town, sparrow cries
> lost in the wind or lost
> in the mind.  At dusk he leans
> to the coal dull wooden Virgin
> and asks for blessings on
> the slow one and peace
> on his grizzled head, asks
> finally and each night
> for the forbidden, for
> the knowledge of every
> mysterious stone, and
> the words go out on
> the overwhelming incense
> of salami.
>         A single crow
> passed high over the house,
> I wakened out of nightmare.
> The winds had changed,
> the Tremontana was tearing
> out of the Holy Mountains
> to meet the sea winds
> in my yard, burning and
> scaring the young pines.
> The single poplar wailed
> in terror.  With salt,
> with guilt, with the need
> to die, the vestments
> of my life flared, I
> was on fire, a stranger
> staggering through my house
> butting walls and falling
> over furniture, looking
> for a way out.  In the last room
> where moonlight slanted
> through a broken shutter
> I found my smallest son
> asleep or dead, floating
> on a bed of colorless light.
> When I leaned closer
> I could smell the small breaths
> going and coming, and each
> bore its prayer for me,
> the true and earthy prayer
> of salami.
> 
> --Philip Levine.  *They Feed They Lion*.  1972.
> 
> 
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 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  Sat Sep  4 01:06:34 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 01:06:34 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine
Message-ID: <1c4.1dd3653f.2e6aa75a@cs.com>

I will never look at a salami in the same way again.  Many thanks.

Going-vegan Sam
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sat Sep  4 12:10:35 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 11:10:35 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
Message-ID: <BD5F532B.AED0%grahamd@ripon.edu>

 
_______________________________________________

For some reason I'm on a Levine kick lately.  He's been one of my favorite
contemporaries for good while, and I've been thinking about Tad's
point--that maybe we just can't *hear* very well what he's been up to in his
recent work.  Maybe so.  I do think you probably have to separate out, for
discussion purposes, the question of form (has his work been growing
slacker?) from theme (has it grown more sentimental or glib?).

Levine has been dogged for years, of course, with the charge of
sentimentality.  Naturally, among the William Logans of the critical world,
any poet who expresses sentiment without heavy irony is sentimental--which
is at best a limited view.  And it seems true that mandarin readers like
Helen Vendler seem temperamentally unable to appreciate either his music or
his themes.

In any case, it seems true that as he has developed Levine has grown less
afraid of straightforward expressions of sentiment.  In a very interesting
interview with Ed Hirsch at the Academy of American Poets site he talks
about his book *Mercy*, the different implications of the title word as well
as his desire to mitigate some of the rage in his earlier poetry with
"tenderness."

http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?45442B7C000C04000A70

Anyway, let's have an example, shall we?

Here's the title poem of "The Simple Truth."  Ever since it was published
I've been trying to decide whether I think it's brilliantly simple and
profound, or glibly sentimental.


The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat," she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
                                          Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

     --Philip Levine.  *The Simple Truth*.  Knopf, 1994.
   

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From Thom424 at aol.com  Sat Sep  4 12:42:15 2004
From: Thom424 at aol.com (Thom424 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 12:42:15 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] More on Levine
Message-ID: <86.15284588.2e6b4a67@aol.com>


Somewhere I have a review of Levine's WHAT WORK IS. If I can locate it, I'll 
pass it along to add to the Levine discussion. 

In the meantime, here's a short review of mine of mid-1980s Levine.     

    Title: Sweet Will
    Series: Magill Book Reviews (? 1985)
    Author Information: Levine, Philip
    Publication Information: Publisher: Athenaeum Publishers, 56 pages,
    $12.95; paperback, Athenaeum Publishers, 1985, 56 pages, $7.95; first
    published: 1985

    Abstract: This slim volume--sixteen poems, including a meditation of
    more than five hundred lines--is as rich and powerful as any of Philip
    Levine's previous collections. The urban-industrial landscapes of
    Detroit and New York, the lost souls of America's working class, and
    the solitary man sitting down to perform his daily task of getting the
    world right continue to dominate Levine's poetry.
    
    Document Information: Magill Book Review
    Accession Number: 0080522312
    Database: MagillOnLiterature

                                 
    SWEET WILL by Philip Levine

    In Philip Levine's long poem "A Poem with No Ending," we find a clue to
    undersanding not only this collection but also his impressive canon of
    eleven full-length collections, including most recently SELECTED
    POEMS. In the last stanza, the speaker--who has been recollecting his
    life, from childhood to the present--concludes: "I / see in the ocean
    of memory / the shore birds going out and nothing coming back.... / I
    see beyond / the dark this distant sky breaking / into color and each
    wave taking / shape and rising landward."

    For more than twenty-five years, Levine's world has been the "ocean of
    memory"; again and again he has gone out, looked "beyond / the dark
    distant sky" of the human interior, bringing back with him a vision
    shaped in the language of a poem that is uniquely and distinctly
    Philip Levine's. Repeatedly, he shows us the importance of memory,
    not of what we make with our lives but what we make of our lives,
    ordinary and simple though they may be.

    No other poet--except for James Wright in his Ohio Valley poems and a
    relatively unknown poet, Peter Oresick--writes of the American
    working class with as much clarity, dignity, and empathy as Levine. 
    Far from being romanticized or idealized, Levine's workers are drawn in 
all their
    anger, frustration, and hopelessness of their dreams. By giving a
    voice to those who have none, Levine strengthens all our voices.
    Equivalents of Levine's poems can be found in the paintings of
    Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton; the portraits from Vincent Van
    Gogh's "Dutch period," including "The Potato Eaters"; and Lewis Hine's
    documentary photographs of immigrant laborers. The value of workers
    and their lives and the accompanying urban melancholy constitute major
    themes in Levine's poetry, themes too often neglected in art, and
    about which no one writes with more conviction than Philip Levine.
                              _________________

Thom Tammaro
Moorhead, MN
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From hruggier at localnet.com  Sat Sep  4 13:59:53 2004
From: hruggier at localnet.com (Helen Ruggieri)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 13:59:53 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
References: <BD5F532B.AED0%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <004201c492a8$fbc50290$9f0d9942@Helen>

I think one of the reasons no body but poets read poetry is because we've
removed any possible sentiment from it.   Who cares.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Graham" <grahamd at ripon.edu>
To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 12:10 PM
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment


>
> _______________________________________________
>
> For some reason I'm on a Levine kick lately.  He's been one of my favorite
> contemporaries for good while, and I've been thinking about Tad's
> point--that maybe we just can't *hear* very well what he's been up to in
his
> recent work.  Maybe so.  I do think you probably have to separate out, for
> discussion purposes, the question of form (has his work been growing
> slacker?) from theme (has it grown more sentimental or glib?).
>
> Levine has been dogged for years, of course, with the charge of
> sentimentality.  Naturally, among the William Logans of the critical
world,
> any poet who expresses sentiment without heavy irony is sentimental--which
> is at best a limited view.  And it seems true that mandarin readers like
> Helen Vendler seem temperamentally unable to appreciate either his music
or
> his themes.
>
> In any case, it seems true that as he has developed Levine has grown less
> afraid of straightforward expressions of sentiment.  In a very interesting
> interview with Ed Hirsch at the Academy of American Poets site he talks
> about his book *Mercy*, the different implications of the title word as
well
> as his desire to mitigate some of the rage in his earlier poetry with
> "tenderness."
>
> http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?45442B7C000C04000A70
>
> Anyway, let's have an example, shall we?
>
> Here's the title poem of "The Simple Truth."  Ever since it was published
> I've been trying to decide whether I think it's brilliantly simple and
> profound, or glibly sentimental.
>
>
> The Simple Truth
>
> I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
> took them home, boiled them in their jackets
> and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
> Then I walked through the dried fields
> on the edge of town. In middle June the light
> hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
> and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
> were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
> squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
> into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
> the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
> out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
> praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
> at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
> even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
> she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat," she said,
> "Even if you don't I'll say you did."
>                                           Some things
> you know all your life. They are so simple and true
> they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
> they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
> the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
> in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
> naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
> My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
> before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
> and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
> what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
> of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
> it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
> you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
> it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
> made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
> in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
>
>      --Philip Levine.  *The Simple Truth*.  Knopf, 1994.
>
>
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From Thom424 at aol.com  Sat Sep  4 14:05:23 2004
From: Thom424 at aol.com (Thom424 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 14:05:23 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Leview
Message-ID: <8.56564e7e.2e6b5de3@aol.com>

Here's that Levine review of WHAT WORK IS. It's from CRAZY RIVER (Ohio).   
No. 3.

I apologize for its length.

******************************

Who Shall Speak for Them? 

Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 77 pp. 

The story of blue-collar America has not appeared in our literature often 
enough, nor made its way into mainstream anthologies, though it is central to our 
American life. Now that part of that way of life has passed, who shall tell 
its stories? Who shall speak for those people like my father and tell the sad 
stories of communities such as Homestead and the dozens of other working class 
communities scattered throughout the industrial East and Midwest? A few prose 
writers have told the story: Robert Ward in Red Baker, his novel about an 
unemployed Baltimore steelworker; Ben Hamper in Rivethead, a nonfiction account of 
life on the GM assembly line; and to some degree Michael Moore has told the 
story in his controversial film, Roger and Me. 

But the story has not been told often enough nor well enough by our poets, 
though James Wright did it well when he wrote about the industrial Ohio Valley, 
as does the too-little known Meridel LeSueur, whose portraits of rural and 
urban workers of the Midwest are as fine as any. Younger contemporaries such as 
Jim Daniels and Peter Oresick tell the story well, too. Philip Levine comes 
closest to our national poetic chronicler of working class America. He has done 
so remarkably well over the last thirty years, in such collections as Not This 
Pig (1968), They Feed, They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), The Names of the Lost 
(1976), Ashes: Poems Old and New (1979), One for the Rose (1981), and Sweet Will 
(1985). His Selected Poems  (1984) was overlooked by Pulitzer Prize and 
National Book Award panels, an unpardonable sin if there ever was one. Finally 
coming to their senses, members of the National Book Award panel awarded the 1991 
National Book Award to What Work Is, Levine's fifteenth collection of poems. 
Simultaneously published with What Work Is was New Selected Poems, a somewhat 
expanded edition of the 1984 Selected Poems. 

What Work Is is a journey through the underworld of American labor, beginning 
with Lewis Hines's haunting cover photograph, "Spinner, cotton mill, 
1908-1909," in which a young girl--probably no older than twelve--stares through us, 
as she rests momentarily, from her adult labor and seems to balance herself 
precariously, one hand on the window sill and the other on the spinning mill 
frame. Through her eyes, we enter the bleak history of working class America as 
the book charts our course through the Charybdis and Scylla of the American 
industrial landscape. What Work Is is a meditation on the nature of work and the 
ways it consumes our lives. It is about jobs that are done with more hand and 
less head and heart, jobs for which we wait with 

          the sad refusal to give in to 
          rain, to the hours wasted waiting, 
          to the knowledge that somewhere ahead 
          a man is waiting who will say "No 
          we're not hiring today," for any 
          reason he wants. 

It is ironic that so many of us define ourselves by and through the work we 
do, while within that very work lurks the potential demon which will grind us 
down, wear us out, diminish us, if we are not careful. 

The twenty-five poems in the four sections of What Work Is are classic, 
mature Levine: mostly stanzaless, seamless free verse lines with a hint of prosody; 
words squeezed into verticality like Giacometti sculptures; moody, often 
lyrical stories told in the first person voices of generation descendants of 
turn-of-the-century eastern and southern European immigrants who supplied the sweat 
and brawn for the factories of the Midwest; sharp, sometimes laconic voices; 
language that is often flat and conversational; what the poems lack in music 
they make up for in the intensity of their honesty and truthfulness, which has 
a music of its own making. Cumulatively, these stories assume a 
documentary-like quality, with an affect much like reading the individual oral histories in 
Studs Terkel's powerful collection, Working. 

As we have come to expect, many of the poems share Detroit as their setting, 
another cursive twist of the Levine signature. Levine has always been a 
connoisseur of memory. Many of the poems, such as "Growth," a Whitmanesque paean to 
work in which a fourteen year old boy is awakened to working life in a soap 
factory 

          where I hammered and sawed, singing 
          my new life of working and earning, 
          outside in the fresh air of Detroit
          in 1942, a year of growth 

draw us back to the 1940s and 50s of Levine's teens and early adolescence. 
Other poems, such as "Fear and Fame" and "Innocence," find ways of drawing hope 
and meaning from the numbing, destructive yet vitalizing rigors of work. 

The speakers in the poems shift back and forth between the autobiographical 
"I" and the persona voices of individual men and women workers; likewise, the 
settings shift from the Detroit of Levine's youth to the Fresno, California, 
region of his middle years. In "Angus Dei" Levine recalls "[his] little sister 
[creating] the Lamb of God" from "used-up dust mops / and coat hangers," and in 
"Gin" Levine remembers "The first time [he] drank gin" and "thought it must 
be hair tonic." Perhaps the most stunning poems in the collection, ones I would 
rank among the best Levine poems to date, are "My Grave" and "Burned," an 
eighteen-page, 600+ line poem whose central metaphor of fire and burning 
cauterize the collage-like memories of this autobiographical mid-life reverie. 

Many Levine poems, like "Every Day Blessing," are mini tour de forces. They 
begin in ordinary life, filled with the rich, sensual details and imagery of 
the common world. Someone is going somewhere, doing something or describing 
something, usually work or something that has happened at work, and it is not very 
important. The quotidian world is rendered in all its harshness and 
loveliness. And by the end of the poems, there is a recognition that something has been 
lost or discovered, and that the human spirit is in constant struggle with 
those forces which would diminish it. Here are the concluding lines of "Every 
Day Blessing": 

          Where he's going or where he is 
          he doesn't ask himself, he 
          doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off 
          at the familiar corner, crosses 
          the emptying parking lots 
          toward Chevy Gear & Axle #3. 
          In a few minutes he will hold 
          his time card above a clock, 
          and he can drop it in 
          and hear the moment crunching 
          down, or he can not, for 
          either way the day will last 
          forever. So he lets it fall. 
          If he feels the elusive calm 
          his father spoke of and searched 
          for all his short life, there's 
          no way of telling, for now he's 
          laughing among them, older men 
          and kids. He's saying, "Damn, 
          we've got it made." He's 
          lighting up or chewing with 
          others, thousands of miles 
          from their forgotten homes, each 
          and every one his father's son. 

No American writer writes about the working class with as much clarity, 
integrity, dignity and empathy as Philip Levine. When you read a book of Levine's 
poetry, you are fooled into thinking you are reading a book of poems about 
invented lives, but when you reach its end, you realize and understand that your 
father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt could be speaking these 
words, thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions. Such has been--and 
continues to be--the strength of Philip Levine's poetry. 

Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to discover the poetry of Philip Levine. I 
continue to depend on Levine to tell the story of working class Americans. In 
Levine's poetry, I find the story of my father's life, told with honesty and 
care and compassion. I want to send Levine's books to all the managers in 
America's factories and work places and tell them to put down their Total Quality 
Management manuals and listen to the voices speaking through Philip Levine's 
poems.   According to Levine, work is not the struggle to get a job done and 
turn a profit, but rather the struggle to remain human in the face of the 
grinding pressure to get a job done and turn a profit.   Until the Reagans and the 
Iacoccas and the Roger Smiths and the other managers of America understand this, 
we must stop using the word ?total? as a way of characterizing management.   
We will not have ?TQM? until we understand:

          How long it has been since you told [your bother]
          you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
          opened your eyes wide and said those words,
          and maybe kissed his cheek?   You?ve never 
          done something so simple, so obvious
          not because you?re too young or too dumb,
          not because you?re jealous or even mean
          or incapable of crying in 
          the presence of another man, no,
          just because you don?t know what work is.

Reading Levine, I am reminded of the story Yeats tells in his Memoirs about 
meeting the Irish poet and dramatist John Millington Synge in a Paris hotel in 
1896, where the twenty-five year old Synge was trying to write critical 
articles about French Literature and about Racine, specifically.   Yeats told Synge 
to give up criticism?that Arthur Symons would always be a better critic of 
French literature?and go to the Aran Islands, where Yeats himself had just 
returned, ?and find expression for a life that is lacked.?   Wisely, Synge took 
Yeats? advice.

For more than thirty years, Philip Levine has been finding language and 
giving expression to a life and people who lack it.   Nowhere has this life been 
expressed so vividly, so powerfully, so honestly as in the poetry of Philip 
Levine, for as he says in ?Coming Close,? ?Make no mistake, this place has a 
language.?   Make no mistake: Philip Levine is one of our great national 
treasures.

                                        **********************
Thom Tammaro
Moorhead, MN
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sat Sep  4 16:06:40 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 15:06:40 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
In-Reply-To: <004201c492a8$fbc50290$9f0d9942@Helen>
Message-ID: <BD5F8A80.AEDD%grahamd@ripon.edu>

No argument from me that removing sentiment from poetry would be silly
indeed.  Even if possible.

But quite honestly I don't recognize the bulk of mainstream American poetry
in that generalization.  From Lucille Clifton to Robert Bly, Sherman Alexie
to Richard Wilbur, contemporary American poetry seems well stocked in the
sentiment department.

In fact, some would say (have said--visit the Buffalo Poetics list, e.g.)
that the mainstream regularly indulges quite heavily not only in sentiment,
but sentimentality.

As a one-size-fits-all generalization that one doesn't work for me very
well, either.  

My pet peeves would definitely include critics who don't see the difference
between sentiment and sentimentality.

on 9/4/04 12:59 PM, Helen Ruggieri at hruggier at localnet.com wrote:

> I think one of the reasons no body but poets read poetry is because we've
> removed any possible sentiment from it.   Who cares.
> ----- Original Message -----


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Sat Sep  4 17:42:22 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe)
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 17:42:22 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
In-Reply-To: <8.56564e7e.2e6b5de3@aol.com>
References: <8.56564e7e.2e6b5de3@aol.com>
Message-ID: <1094334142.413a36beef25d@mail-www3.oit.umass.edu>

Forgive me for what may seem like an irreverent question, but when exactly, 
during this thirty year period of writing about the working class, did Phil 
Levine, um, start to teach in the university system. My impression, and I am 
thoroughly willing to be wrong, is that he has been fairly OUT of the working 
class for along time...  That his last factory job was, maybe, in the distant 
past.  

I guess I have this sense, amidst we enlightened artists looking 
sympathetically into the world of the factory workers, etc. is there is, yes, 
MUCH empathy, tons of sympathy, and an utter blind spot to the presence of 
SATISFACTIONS and depth in those lives, amidst all the damn struggles.  Dear 
God, I feel sorry for the doctors of Westchester!!  The housewives of Essex.  
And MANY of the papery academics I see drifting around Amherst.  I go to Wal-
Mart from time to time and look with ENVY at the lady behind the cash register 
who seems to require much LESS of life than I do and thus has a greater chance 
of happiness.  I dunno, I guess I just find some of the sentiment ABOUT Levine 
and his poetry of the working class a little cloying.

K.

Quoting Thom424 at aol.com:

> Here's that Levine review of WHAT WORK IS. It's from CRAZY RIVER (Ohio).   
> No. 3.
> 
> I apologize for its length.
> 
> ******************************
> 
> Who Shall Speak for Them? 
> 
> Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 77 pp. 
> 
> The story of blue-collar America has not appeared in our literature often 
> enough, nor made its way into mainstream anthologies, though it is central to
> our 
> American life. Now that part of that way of life has passed, who shall tell 
> its stories? Who shall speak for those people like my father and tell the sad
> 
> stories of communities such as Homestead and the dozens of other working
> class 
> communities scattered throughout the industrial East and Midwest? A few prose
> 
> writers have told the story: Robert Ward in Red Baker, his novel about an 
> unemployed Baltimore steelworker; Ben Hamper in Rivethead, a nonfiction
> account of 
> life on the GM assembly line; and to some degree Michael Moore has told the 
> story in his controversial film, Roger and Me. 
> 
> But the story has not been told often enough nor well enough by our poets, 
> though James Wright did it well when he wrote about the industrial Ohio
> Valley, 
> as does the too-little known Meridel LeSueur, whose portraits of rural and 
> urban workers of the Midwest are as fine as any. Younger contemporaries such
> as 
> Jim Daniels and Peter Oresick tell the story well, too. Philip Levine comes 
> closest to our national poetic chronicler of working class America. He has
> done 
> so remarkably well over the last thirty years, in such collections as Not
> This 
> Pig (1968), They Feed, They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), The Names of the Lost 
> (1976), Ashes: Poems Old and New (1979), One for the Rose (1981), and Sweet
> Will 
> (1985). His Selected Poems  (1984) was overlooked by Pulitzer Prize and 
> National Book Award panels, an unpardonable sin if there ever was one.
> Finally 
> coming to their senses, members of the National Book Award panel awarded the
> 1991 
> National Book Award to What Work Is, Levine's fifteenth collection of poems.
> 
> Simultaneously published with What Work Is was New Selected Poems, a somewhat
> 
> expanded edition of the 1984 Selected Poems. 
> 
> What Work Is is a journey through the underworld of American labor, beginning
> 
> with Lewis Hines's haunting cover photograph, "Spinner, cotton mill, 
> 1908-1909," in which a young girl--probably no older than twelve--stares
> through us, 
> as she rests momentarily, from her adult labor and seems to balance herself 
> precariously, one hand on the window sill and the other on the spinning mill
> 
> frame. Through her eyes, we enter the bleak history of working class America
> as 
> the book charts our course through the Charybdis and Scylla of the American 
> industrial landscape. What Work Is is a meditation on the nature of work and
> the 
> ways it consumes our lives. It is about jobs that are done with more hand and
> 
> less head and heart, jobs for which we wait with 
> 
>           the sad refusal to give in to 
>           rain, to the hours wasted waiting, 
>           to the knowledge that somewhere ahead 
>           a man is waiting who will say "No 
>           we're not hiring today," for any 
>           reason he wants. 
> 
> It is ironic that so many of us define ourselves by and through the work we 
> do, while within that very work lurks the potential demon which will grind us
> 
> down, wear us out, diminish us, if we are not careful. 
> 
> The twenty-five poems in the four sections of What Work Is are classic, 
> mature Levine: mostly stanzaless, seamless free verse lines with a hint of
> prosody; 
> words squeezed into verticality like Giacometti sculptures; moody, often 
> lyrical stories told in the first person voices of generation descendants of
> 
> turn-of-the-century eastern and southern European immigrants who supplied the
> sweat 
> and brawn for the factories of the Midwest; sharp, sometimes laconic voices;
> 
> language that is often flat and conversational; what the poems lack in music
> 
> they make up for in the intensity of their honesty and truthfulness, which
> has 
> a music of its own making. Cumulatively, these stories assume a 
> documentary-like quality, with an affect much like reading the individual
> oral histories in 
> Studs Terkel's powerful collection, Working. 
> 
> As we have come to expect, many of the poems share Detroit as their setting,
> 
> another cursive twist of the Levine signature. Levine has always been a 
> connoisseur of memory. Many of the poems, such as "Growth," a Whitmanesque
> paean to 
> work in which a fourteen year old boy is awakened to working life in a soap 
> factory 
> 
>           where I hammered and sawed, singing 
>           my new life of working and earning, 
>           outside in the fresh air of Detroit
>           in 1942, a year of growth 
> 
> draw us back to the 1940s and 50s of Levine's teens and early adolescence. 
> Other poems, such as "Fear and Fame" and "Innocence," find ways of drawing
> hope 
> and meaning from the numbing, destructive yet vitalizing rigors of work. 
> 
> The speakers in the poems shift back and forth between the autobiographical 
> "I" and the persona voices of individual men and women workers; likewise, the
> 
> settings shift from the Detroit of Levine's youth to the Fresno, California,
> 
> region of his middle years. In "Angus Dei" Levine recalls "[his] little
> sister 
> [creating] the Lamb of God" from "used-up dust mops / and coat hangers," and
> in 
> "Gin" Levine remembers "The first time [he] drank gin" and "thought it must 
> be hair tonic." Perhaps the most stunning poems in the collection, ones I
> would 
> rank among the best Levine poems to date, are "My Grave" and "Burned," an 
> eighteen-page, 600+ line poem whose central metaphor of fire and burning 
> cauterize the collage-like memories of this autobiographical mid-life
> reverie. 
> 
> Many Levine poems, like "Every Day Blessing," are mini tour de forces. They 
> begin in ordinary life, filled with the rich, sensual details and imagery of
> 
> the common world. Someone is going somewhere, doing something or describing 
> something, usually work or something that has happened at work, and it is not
> very 
> important. The quotidian world is rendered in all its harshness and 
> loveliness. And by the end of the poems, there is a recognition that
> something has been 
> lost or discovered, and that the human spirit is in constant struggle with 
> those forces which would diminish it. Here are the concluding lines of "Every
> 
> Day Blessing": 
> 
>           Where he's going or where he is 
>           he doesn't ask himself, he 
>           doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off 
>           at the familiar corner, crosses 
>           the emptying parking lots 
>           toward Chevy Gear & Axle #3. 
>           In a few minutes he will hold 
>           his time card above a clock, 
>           and he can drop it in 
>           and hear the moment crunching 
>           down, or he can not, for 
>           either way the day will last 
>           forever. So he lets it fall. 
>           If he feels the elusive calm 
>           his father spoke of and searched 
>           for all his short life, there's 
>           no way of telling, for now he's 
>           laughing among them, older men 
>           and kids. He's saying, "Damn, 
>           we've got it made." He's 
>           lighting up or chewing with 
>           others, thousands of miles 
>           from their forgotten homes, each 
>           and every one his father's son. 
> 
> No American writer writes about the working class with as much clarity, 
> integrity, dignity and empathy as Philip Levine. When you read a book of
> Levine's 
> poetry, you are fooled into thinking you are reading a book of poems about 
> invented lives, but when you reach its end, you realize and understand that
> your 
> father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt could be speaking these 
> words, thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions. Such has been--and
> 
> continues to be--the strength of Philip Levine's poetry. 
> 
> Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to discover the poetry of Philip Levine. I
> 
> continue to depend on Levine to tell the story of working class Americans. In
> 
> Levine's poetry, I find the story of my father's life, told with honesty and
> 
> care and compassion. I want to send Levine's books to all the managers in 
> America's factories and work places and tell them to put down their Total
> Quality 
> Management manuals and listen to the voices speaking through Philip Levine's
> 
> poems.   According to Levine, work is not the struggle to get a job done and
> 
> turn a profit, but rather the struggle to remain human in the face of the 
> grinding pressure to get a job done and turn a profit.   Until the Reagans
> and the 
> Iacoccas and the Roger Smiths and the other managers of America understand
> this, 
> we must stop using the word ???total??? as a way of characterizing
> management.   
> We will not have ???TQM??? until we understand:
> 
>           How long it has been since you told [your bother]
>           you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
>           opened your eyes wide and said those words,
>           and maybe kissed his cheek?   You???ve never 
>           done something so simple, so obvious
>           not because you???re too young or too dumb,
>           not because you???re jealous or even mean
>           or incapable of crying in 
>           the presence of another man, no,
>           just because you don???t know what work is.
> 
> Reading Levine, I am reminded of the story Yeats tells in his Memoirs about 
> meeting the Irish poet and dramatist John Millington Synge in a Paris hotel
> in 
> 1896, where the twenty-five year old Synge was trying to write critical 
> articles about French Literature and about Racine, specifically.   Yeats told
> Synge 
> to give up criticism???that Arthur Symons would always be a better critic of
> 
> French literature???and go to the Aran Islands, where Yeats himself had just
> 
> returned, ???and find expression for a life that is lacked.???   Wisely,
> Synge took 
> Yeats??? advice.
> 
> For more than thirty years, Philip Levine has been finding language and 
> giving expression to a life and people who lack it.   Nowhere has this life
> been 
> expressed so vividly, so powerfully, so honestly as in the poetry of Philip 
> Levine, for as he says in ???Coming Close,??? ???Make no mistake, this place
> has a 
> language.???   Make no mistake: Philip Levine is one of our great national 
> treasures.
> 
>                                         **********************
> Thom Tammaro
> Moorhead, MN
> 





From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sat Sep  4 18:16:19 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 00:16:19 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
References: <8.56564e7e.2e6b5de3@aol.com>
	<1094334142.413a36beef25d@mail-www3.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <001d01c492cc$ce1c95a0$cfab3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Hi Jane,

your mail is so full of inputs that I feel compelled to answer something.

A couple of days ago, it was a hot sunny day and it slowed me down when I
got outside, hit by the heat, and the colors, and life. I ran to the small
supermarket after a meeting and ended up being the last customer. The lady
at the cash register was a girl, as soon as she gave me my change she opened
the register and started counting the money. That is where I thought of all
her problems, if anything was missing, her anxiousness in wanting to get out
of there, the repetitiveness of her job. And of how lucky I was, dumb and
staring at the beauty of the day, which I was noticing for the first time at
7 p.m.

With Philip Levine you will have to go back almost a century. Conditions
were hard, and yes, I believe in some of his poetry.

Now things are different. I remember one kid who didn't study but became an
electrician or a plumber, he ended up with a wonderful cottage, a great car,
while I am still here with my dusty books, aloof, envied by many, and with
little but thoughts. On the other hand, I would have been terribly lost
behind a cash register, I don't like to drink, and parties have become
boring for me.

So yes, I am with you, and I like it where I am, take care,

Anny Ballardini
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome


From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" <jkok at hfa.umass.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 11:42 PM


> Forgive me for what may seem like an irreverent question, but when
exactly,
> during this thirty year period of writing about the working class, did
Phil
> Levine, um, start to teach in the university system. My impression, and I
am
> thoroughly willing to be wrong, is that he has been fairly OUT of the
working
> class for along time...  That his last factory job was, maybe, in the
distant
> past.
>
> I guess I have this sense, amidst we enlightened artists looking
> sympathetically into the world of the factory workers, etc. is there is,
yes,
> MUCH empathy, tons of sympathy, and an utter blind spot to the presence of
> SATISFACTIONS and depth in those lives, amidst all the damn struggles.
Dear
> God, I feel sorry for the doctors of Westchester!!  The housewives of
Essex.
> And MANY of the papery academics I see drifting around Amherst.  I go to
Wal-
> Mart from time to time and look with ENVY at the lady behind the cash
register
> who seems to require much LESS of life than I do and thus has a greater
chance
> of happiness.  I dunno, I guess I just find some of the sentiment ABOUT
Levine
> and his poetry of the working class a little cloying.
>
> K.
>
> Quoting Thom424 at aol.com:
>
> > Here's that Levine review of WHAT WORK IS. It's from CRAZY RIVER (Ohio).
> > No. 3.
> >
> > I apologize for its length.
> >
> > ******************************
> >
> > Who Shall Speak for Them?
> >
> > Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 77 pp.
> >
> > The story of blue-collar America has not appeared in our literature
often
> > enough, nor made its way into mainstream anthologies, though it is
central to
> > our
> > American life. Now that part of that way of life has passed, who shall
tell
> > its stories? Who shall speak for those people like my father and tell
the sad
> >
> > stories of communities such as Homestead and the dozens of other working
> > class
> > communities scattered throughout the industrial East and Midwest? A few
prose
> >
> > writers have told the story: Robert Ward in Red Baker, his novel about
an
> > unemployed Baltimore steelworker; Ben Hamper in Rivethead, a nonfiction
> > account of
> > life on the GM assembly line; and to some degree Michael Moore has told
the
> > story in his controversial film, Roger and Me.
> >
> > But the story has not been told often enough nor well enough by our
poets,
> > though James Wright did it well when he wrote about the industrial Ohio
> > Valley,
> > as does the too-little known Meridel LeSueur, whose portraits of rural
and
> > urban workers of the Midwest are as fine as any. Younger contemporaries
such
> > as
> > Jim Daniels and Peter Oresick tell the story well, too. Philip Levine
comes
> > closest to our national poetic chronicler of working class America. He
has
> > done
> > so remarkably well over the last thirty years, in such collections as
Not
> > This
> > Pig (1968), They Feed, They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), The Names of the
Lost
> > (1976), Ashes: Poems Old and New (1979), One for the Rose (1981), and
Sweet
> > Will
> > (1985). His Selected Poems  (1984) was overlooked by Pulitzer Prize and
> > National Book Award panels, an unpardonable sin if there ever was one.
> > Finally
> > coming to their senses, members of the National Book Award panel awarded
the
> > 1991
> > National Book Award to What Work Is, Levine's fifteenth collection of
poems.
> >
> > Simultaneously published with What Work Is was New Selected Poems, a
somewhat
> >
> > expanded edition of the 1984 Selected Poems.
> >
> > What Work Is is a journey through the underworld of American labor,
beginning
> >
> > with Lewis Hines's haunting cover photograph, "Spinner, cotton mill,
> > 1908-1909," in which a young girl--probably no older than twelve--stares
> > through us,
> > as she rests momentarily, from her adult labor and seems to balance
herself
> > precariously, one hand on the window sill and the other on the spinning
mill
> >
> > frame. Through her eyes, we enter the bleak history of working class
America
> > as
> > the book charts our course through the Charybdis and Scylla of the
American
> > industrial landscape. What Work Is is a meditation on the nature of work
and
> > the
> > ways it consumes our lives. It is about jobs that are done with more
hand and
> >
> > less head and heart, jobs for which we wait with
> >
> >           the sad refusal to give in to
> >           rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
> >           to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
> >           a man is waiting who will say "No
> >           we're not hiring today," for any
> >           reason he wants.
> >
> > It is ironic that so many of us define ourselves by and through the work
we
> > do, while within that very work lurks the potential demon which will
grind us
> >
> > down, wear us out, diminish us, if we are not careful.
> >
> > The twenty-five poems in the four sections of What Work Is are classic,
> > mature Levine: mostly stanzaless, seamless free verse lines with a hint
of
> > prosody;
> > words squeezed into verticality like Giacometti sculptures; moody, often
> > lyrical stories told in the first person voices of generation
descendants of
> >
> > turn-of-the-century eastern and southern European immigrants who
supplied the
> > sweat
> > and brawn for the factories of the Midwest; sharp, sometimes laconic
voices;
> >
> > language that is often flat and conversational; what the poems lack in
music
> >
> > they make up for in the intensity of their honesty and truthfulness,
which
> > has
> > a music of its own making. Cumulatively, these stories assume a
> > documentary-like quality, with an affect much like reading the
individual
> > oral histories in
> > Studs Terkel's powerful collection, Working.
> >
> > As we have come to expect, many of the poems share Detroit as their
setting,
> >
> > another cursive twist of the Levine signature. Levine has always been a
> > connoisseur of memory. Many of the poems, such as "Growth," a
Whitmanesque
> > paean to
> > work in which a fourteen year old boy is awakened to working life in a
soap
> > factory
> >
> >           where I hammered and sawed, singing
> >           my new life of working and earning,
> >           outside in the fresh air of Detroit
> >           in 1942, a year of growth
> >
> > draw us back to the 1940s and 50s of Levine's teens and early
adolescence.
> > Other poems, such as "Fear and Fame" and "Innocence," find ways of
drawing
> > hope
> > and meaning from the numbing, destructive yet vitalizing rigors of work.
> >
> > The speakers in the poems shift back and forth between the
autobiographical
> > "I" and the persona voices of individual men and women workers;
likewise, the
> >
> > settings shift from the Detroit of Levine's youth to the Fresno,
California,
> >
> > region of his middle years. In "Angus Dei" Levine recalls "[his] little
> > sister
> > [creating] the Lamb of God" from "used-up dust mops / and coat hangers,"
and
> > in
> > "Gin" Levine remembers "The first time [he] drank gin" and "thought it
must
> > be hair tonic." Perhaps the most stunning poems in the collection, ones
I
> > would
> > rank among the best Levine poems to date, are "My Grave" and "Burned,"
an
> > eighteen-page, 600+ line poem whose central metaphor of fire and burning
> > cauterize the collage-like memories of this autobiographical mid-life
> > reverie.
> >
> > Many Levine poems, like "Every Day Blessing," are mini tour de forces.
They
> > begin in ordinary life, filled with the rich, sensual details and
imagery of
> >
> > the common world. Someone is going somewhere, doing something or
describing
> > something, usually work or something that has happened at work, and it
is not
> > very
> > important. The quotidian world is rendered in all its harshness and
> > loveliness. And by the end of the poems, there is a recognition that
> > something has been
> > lost or discovered, and that the human spirit is in constant struggle
with
> > those forces which would diminish it. Here are the concluding lines of
"Every
> >
> > Day Blessing":
> >
> >           Where he's going or where he is
> >           he doesn't ask himself, he
> >           doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off
> >           at the familiar corner, crosses
> >           the emptying parking lots
> >           toward Chevy Gear & Axle #3.
> >           In a few minutes he will hold
> >           his time card above a clock,
> >           and he can drop it in
> >           and hear the moment crunching
> >           down, or he can not, for
> >           either way the day will last
> >           forever. So he lets it fall.
> >           If he feels the elusive calm
> >           his father spoke of and searched
> >           for all his short life, there's
> >           no way of telling, for now he's
> >           laughing among them, older men
> >           and kids. He's saying, "Damn,
> >           we've got it made." He's
> >           lighting up or chewing with
> >           others, thousands of miles
> >           from their forgotten homes, each
> >           and every one his father's son.
> >
> > No American writer writes about the working class with as much clarity,
> > integrity, dignity and empathy as Philip Levine. When you read a book of
> > Levine's
> > poetry, you are fooled into thinking you are reading a book of poems
about
> > invented lives, but when you reach its end, you realize and understand
that
> > your
> > father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt could be speaking
these
> > words, thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions. Such has
been--and
> >
> > continues to be--the strength of Philip Levine's poetry.
> >
> > Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to discover the poetry of Philip
Levine. I
> >
> > continue to depend on Levine to tell the story of working class
Americans. In
> >
> > Levine's poetry, I find the story of my father's life, told with honesty
and
> >
> > care and compassion. I want to send Levine's books to all the managers
in
> > America's factories and work places and tell them to put down their
Total
> > Quality
> > Management manuals and listen to the voices speaking through Philip
Levine's
> >
> > poems.   According to Levine, work is not the struggle to get a job done
and
> >
> > turn a profit, but rather the struggle to remain human in the face of
the
> > grinding pressure to get a job done and turn a profit.   Until the
Reagans
> > and the
> > Iacoccas and the Roger Smiths and the other managers of America
understand
> > this,
> > we must stop using the word ??ototal??? as a way of characterizing
> > management.
> > We will not have ??oTQM??? until we understand:
> >
> >           How long it has been since you told [your bother]
> >           you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
> >           opened your eyes wide and said those words,
> >           and maybe kissed his cheek?   You??Tve never
> >           done something so simple, so obvious
> >           not because you??Tre too young or too dumb,
> >           not because you??Tre jealous or even mean
> >           or incapable of crying in
> >           the presence of another man, no,
> >           just because you don??Tt know what work is.
> >
> > Reading Levine, I am reminded of the story Yeats tells in his Memoirs
about
> > meeting the Irish poet and dramatist John Millington Synge in a Paris
hotel
> > in
> > 1896, where the twenty-five year old Synge was trying to write critical
> > articles about French Literature and about Racine, specifically.   Yeats
told
> > Synge
> > to give up criticism??"that Arthur Symons would always be a better
critic of
> >
> > French literature??"and go to the Aran Islands, where Yeats himself had
just
> >
> > returned, ??oand find expression for a life that is lacked.???   Wisely,
> > Synge took
> > Yeats??T advice.
> >
> > For more than thirty years, Philip Levine has been finding language and
> > giving expression to a life and people who lack it.   Nowhere has this
life
> > been
> > expressed so vividly, so powerfully, so honestly as in the poetry of
Philip
> > Levine, for as he says in ??oComing Close,??? ??oMake no mistake, this
place
> > has a
> > language.???   Make no mistake: Philip Levine is one of our great
national
> > treasures.
> >
> >                                         **********************
> > Thom Tammaro
> > Moorhead, MN
> >
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry




From upwardcat at sbcglobal.net  Sat Sep  4 18:55:28 2004
From: upwardcat at sbcglobal.net (Wendy Battin)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 18:55:28 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
In-Reply-To: <BD5F8A80.AEDD%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <BD5F8A80.AEDD%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <841F38C2-FEC5-11D8-BDFB-000A9573C758@sbcglobal.net>

On Sep 4, 2004, at 4:06 PM, David Graham wrote:
> My pet peeves would definitely include critics who don't see the 
> difference
> between sentiment and sentimentality.

I agree with the sentiment, David, but then a _sentiment_ is something 
that asks for agreement.  It's at some remove from feeling, as I 
understand the words, and it decays into opinion or posture rather 
easily.  Is a sentiment the after-effect of having felt something, the 
conclusion that's left when the argument is over?  Surely poetry can do 
better than that.

Just a quibble, maybe.  But I think it's a useful distinction.

Wendy

Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

--------------------------
A cow gave birth to a fire; she wanted to lick it, but it burned; she 
wanted to leave it, but she could not because it was her own child.



From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sat Sep  4 19:01:08 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 18:01:08 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
In-Reply-To: <1094334142.413a36beef25d@mail-www3.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <BD5FB364.AEE3%grahamd@ripon.edu>

on 9/4/04 4:42 PM, Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe at jkok at hfa.umass.edu wrote:

> Forgive me for what may seem like an irreverent question, but when exactly,
> during this thirty year period of writing about the working class, did Phil
> Levine, um, start to teach in the university system. My impression, and I am
> thoroughly willing to be wrong, is that he has been fairly OUT of the working
> class for along time...  That his last factory job was, maybe, in the distant
> past. 

I first read "irreverent" as "irrelevant" in the above, and that seems about
right to me, frankly.  Yes, Levine taught at the college level for decades
before his retirement.  But so what?  His memory poems are set in the past,
after all--it's not as though he's trying to make us believe he still works
at Chevy Gear & Axle.

Whether he romanticizes the working class unduly is another question, seems
to me.  Any examples of that?


 
> 
> I guess I have this sense, amidst we enlightened artists looking
> sympathetically into the world of the factory workers, etc. is there is, yes,
> MUCH empathy, tons of sympathy, and an utter blind spot to the presence of
> SATISFACTIONS and depth in those lives, amidst all the damn struggles.  Dear
> God, I feel sorry for the doctors of Westchester!!  The housewives of Essex.
> And MANY of the papery academics I see drifting around Amherst.  I go to Wal-
> Mart from time to time and look with ENVY at the lady behind the cash register
> who seems to require much LESS of life than I do and thus has a greater chance
> of happiness.  I dunno, I guess I just find some of the sentiment ABOUT Levine
> and his poetry of the working class a little cloying.
> 
> K.
> 

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From Edward.Byrne at valpo.edu  Sat Sep  4 20:28:37 2004
From: Edward.Byrne at valpo.edu (Edward Byrne)
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 19:28:37 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
In-Reply-To: <BD5F8A80.AEDD%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <SIMEON.10409041937.A@muahost.valpo.edu>

David,

In my review (http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/byrneessay.html) of 
The Mercy, I addressed this issue in Levine's poetry:

Over the years, there have been accusations that Levine's poems often 
offer easily apparent situations evoking false sentimentality.? One 
of his harshest critics has been Helen Vendler who once commented in 
The Music of What Happens (Harvard University Press, 1988), "I am not 
convinced that Levine's observations and reminiscences belong in 
lyric poems, since he seems so inept at what he thinks of as the 
obligatory hearts-and-flowers endings of 'poems.'"? As much as there 
may be a few individual endings of poems in past works where this 
kind of complaint is justified, any general statement suggesting this 
as a continuous problem in Levine's poetry is exaggeration, or any 
comment such as Vendler's assertion Levine's poetry "is only one step 
away from Lois Wyse or Rod McKuen" is clearly overblown.? In fact, in 
poem after poem the language filling Levine's lines takes the risk of 
being seen as simply sentimental, but instead offers the reader the 
greater rewards of genuine sentiment, emotions earned through scenes 
rendered in simple language. ??? 

In "Joe Gould's Pen," Levine even speaks of the "earned word": 

??????? Perhaps he knew that when 
??????? he gave back the last hard breath 
??????? each earned word would disappear 
??????? the way the golden halo 
??????? goes when the dawn shreds the rose 
??????? into dust, the way a voice fades 
??????? in an empty room, the way 
??????? the pomegranate fallen from 
??????? the tree scatters the seeds of 
??????? its resurrection, the way 
??????? these lines are vanishing now. 

??? The Mercy, with the personal allusions or the private attachments 
present in its title poem and its dedication, a book full of 
rear-view mirror reflections published by Levine as he enters his 
seventies, probably risks criticism of sentimentality and nostalgia 
even more than any previous work.? Nevertheless, the poems gathered 
in this volume defy such easy terms of dismissal.? Rather, studying 
these poems one discovers lingering lines, evocative images, and 
powerful portraits arising out of Levine's memory that will remain 
now in the reader's consciousness and cannot easily be dismissed in 
any sense of the word -- lines, images, and portraits that will 
remain like those scattered seeds of the pomegranate.... 

--Ed 

David Graham wrote:
My pet peeves would definitely include critics who don't see the 
difference between sentiment and sentimentality. 

--------------------------------------------------

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 cstroffo at earthlink.net  Sat Sep  4 21:49:43 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 17:49:43 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
Message-ID: <200409050031.i850V4K6024082@pimout2-ext.prodigy.net>

jane---

I'm not replying about Levine per se; for I sometimes find said "cloying"
feeling in some of that poetry. The reason why I'm posting is because of
your first paragraph in which "factory job" and "working class" are equated.
I guess I just don't believe that a university teacher job is necessarily
"OUT of the working class." It probably depends on how we define class.
In my case, being at least a generation younger than Levine (my dad was born
in 1939 and I in 1963), I saw the factory's die in my little town, and
like many others of my generation, was duped with promises that "white
collar" meant "upward mobility." Not that being "poor" or "working class"
should necessarily be anything to be ashamed of (and I can understand and
appreciate your envy of people at Wallmart, or Barbara E's Nickle and Dimed
perpsective), but I think the "factory"=="working class" association still
lingers on even as the reality of it, for much of America, is a relic of the
past.....And, yes, I think most professors are working class. Sure, maybe
not Levine if he's one of the few who gets to teach one course a year for
$100,000, but for most others.

Chris

----------
>From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" <jkok at hfa.umass.edu>
>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
>Date: Sat, Sep 4, 2004, 1:42 PM
>

> Forgive me for what may seem like an irreverent question, but when exactly,
> during this thirty year period of writing about the working class, did Phil
> Levine, um, start to teach in the university system. My impression, and I am
> thoroughly willing to be wrong, is that he has been fairly OUT of the working
> class for along time...  That his last factory job was, maybe, in the distant
> past.
>
> I guess I have this sense, amidst we enlightened artists looking
> sympathetically into the world of the factory workers, etc. is there is, yes,
> MUCH empathy, tons of sympathy, and an utter blind spot to the presence of
> SATISFACTIONS and depth in those lives, amidst all the damn struggles.  Dear
> God, I feel sorry for the doctors of Westchester!!  The housewives of Essex.
> And MANY of the papery academics I see drifting around Amherst.  I go to Wal-
> Mart from time to time and look with ENVY at the lady behind the cash register
> who seems to require much LESS of life than I do and thus has a greater chance
> of happiness.  I dunno, I guess I just find some of the sentiment ABOUT Levine
> and his poetry of the working class a little cloying.
>
> K.
>
> Quoting Thom424 at aol.com:
>
>> Here's that Levine review of WHAT WORK IS. It's from CRAZY RIVER (Ohio).
>> No. 3.
>>
>> I apologize for its length.
>>
>> ******************************
>>
>> Who Shall Speak for Them?
>>
>> Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 77 pp.
>>
>> The story of blue-collar America has not appeared in our literature often
>> enough, nor made its way into mainstream anthologies, though it is central to
>> our
>> American life. Now that part of that way of life has passed, who shall tell
>> its stories? Who shall speak for those people like my father and tell the sad
>>
>> stories of communities such as Homestead and the dozens of other working
>> class
>> communities scattered throughout the industrial East and Midwest? A few prose
>>
>> writers have told the story: Robert Ward in Red Baker, his novel about an
>> unemployed Baltimore steelworker; Ben Hamper in Rivethead, a nonfiction
>> account of
>> life on the GM assembly line; and to some degree Michael Moore has told the
>> story in his controversial film, Roger and Me.
>>
>> But the story has not been told often enough nor well enough by our poets,
>> though James Wright did it well when he wrote about the industrial Ohio
>> Valley,
>> as does the too-little known Meridel LeSueur, whose portraits of rural and
>> urban workers of the Midwest are as fine as any. Younger contemporaries such
>> as
>> Jim Daniels and Peter Oresick tell the story well, too. Philip Levine comes
>> closest to our national poetic chronicler of working class America. He has
>> done
>> so remarkably well over the last thirty years, in such collections as Not
>> This
>> Pig (1968), They Feed, They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), The Names of the Lost
>> (1976), Ashes: Poems Old and New (1979), One for the Rose (1981), and Sweet
>> Will
>> (1985). His Selected Poems  (1984) was overlooked by Pulitzer Prize and
>> National Book Award panels, an unpardonable sin if there ever was one.
>> Finally
>> coming to their senses, members of the National Book Award panel awarded the
>> 1991
>> National Book Award to What Work Is, Levine's fifteenth collection of poems.
>>
>> Simultaneously published with What Work Is was New Selected Poems, a somewhat
>>
>> expanded edition of the 1984 Selected Poems.
>>
>> What Work Is is a journey through the underworld of American labor, beginning
>>
>> with Lewis Hines's haunting cover photograph, "Spinner, cotton mill,
>> 1908-1909," in which a young girl--probably no older than twelve--stares
>> through us,
>> as she rests momentarily, from her adult labor and seems to balance herself
>> precariously, one hand on the window sill and the other on the spinning mill
>>
>> frame. Through her eyes, we enter the bleak history of working class America
>> as
>> the book charts our course through the Charybdis and Scylla of the American
>> industrial landscape. What Work Is is a meditation on the nature of work and
>> the
>> ways it consumes our lives. It is about jobs that are done with more hand and
>>
>> less head and heart, jobs for which we wait with
>>
>>           the sad refusal to give in to
>>           rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
>>           to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
>>           a man is waiting who will say "No
>>           we're not hiring today," for any
>>           reason he wants.
>>
>> It is ironic that so many of us define ourselves by and through the work we
>> do, while within that very work lurks the potential demon which will grind us
>>
>> down, wear us out, diminish us, if we are not careful.
>>
>> The twenty-five poems in the four sections of What Work Is are classic,
>> mature Levine: mostly stanzaless, seamless free verse lines with a hint of
>> prosody;
>> words squeezed into verticality like Giacometti sculptures; moody, often
>> lyrical stories told in the first person voices of generation descendants of
>>
>> turn-of-the-century eastern and southern European immigrants who supplied the
>> sweat
>> and brawn for the factories of the Midwest; sharp, sometimes laconic voices;
>>
>> language that is often flat and conversational; what the poems lack in music
>>
>> they make up for in the intensity of their honesty and truthfulness, which
>> has
>> a music of its own making. Cumulatively, these stories assume a
>> documentary-like quality, with an affect much like reading the individual
>> oral histories in
>> Studs Terkel's powerful collection, Working.
>>
>> As we have come to expect, many of the poems share Detroit as their setting,
>>
>> another cursive twist of the Levine signature. Levine has always been a
>> connoisseur of memory. Many of the poems, such as "Growth," a Whitmanesque
>> paean to
>> work in which a fourteen year old boy is awakened to working life in a soap
>> factory
>>
>>           where I hammered and sawed, singing
>>           my new life of working and earning,
>>           outside in the fresh air of Detroit
>>           in 1942, a year of growth
>>
>> draw us back to the 1940s and 50s of Levine's teens and early adolescence.
>> Other poems, such as "Fear and Fame" and "Innocence," find ways of drawing
>> hope
>> and meaning from the numbing, destructive yet vitalizing rigors of work.
>>
>> The speakers in the poems shift back and forth between the autobiographical
>> "I" and the persona voices of individual men and women workers; likewise, the
>>
>> settings shift from the Detroit of Levine's youth to the Fresno, California,
>>
>> region of his middle years. In "Angus Dei" Levine recalls "[his] little
>> sister
>> [creating] the Lamb of God" from "used-up dust mops / and coat hangers," and
>> in
>> "Gin" Levine remembers "The first time [he] drank gin" and "thought it must
>> be hair tonic." Perhaps the most stunning poems in the collection, ones I
>> would
>> rank among the best Levine poems to date, are "My Grave" and "Burned," an
>> eighteen-page, 600+ line poem whose central metaphor of fire and burning
>> cauterize the collage-like memories of this autobiographical mid-life
>> reverie.
>>
>> Many Levine poems, like "Every Day Blessing," are mini tour de forces. They
>> begin in ordinary life, filled with the rich, sensual details and imagery of
>>
>> the common world. Someone is going somewhere, doing something or describing
>> something, usually work or something that has happened at work, and it is not
>> very
>> important. The quotidian world is rendered in all its harshness and
>> loveliness. And by the end of the poems, there is a recognition that
>> something has been
>> lost or discovered, and that the human spirit is in constant struggle with
>> those forces which would diminish it. Here are the concluding lines of "Every
>>
>> Day Blessing":
>>
>>           Where he's going or where he is
>>           he doesn't ask himself, he
>>           doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off
>>           at the familiar corner, crosses
>>           the emptying parking lots
>>           toward Chevy Gear & Axle #3.
>>           In a few minutes he will hold
>>           his time card above a clock,
>>           and he can drop it in
>>           and hear the moment crunching
>>           down, or he can not, for
>>           either way the day will last
>>           forever. So he lets it fall.
>>           If he feels the elusive calm
>>           his father spoke of and searched
>>           for all his short life, there's
>>           no way of telling, for now he's
>>           laughing among them, older men
>>           and kids. He's saying, "Damn,
>>           we've got it made." He's
>>           lighting up or chewing with
>>           others, thousands of miles
>>           from their forgotten homes, each
>>           and every one his father's son.
>>
>> No American writer writes about the working class with as much clarity,
>> integrity, dignity and empathy as Philip Levine. When you read a book of
>> Levine's
>> poetry, you are fooled into thinking you are reading a book of poems about
>> invented lives, but when you reach its end, you realize and understand that
>> your
>> father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt could be speaking these
>> words, thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions. Such has been--and
>>
>> continues to be--the strength of Philip Levine's poetry.
>>
>> Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to discover the poetry of Philip Levine. I
>>
>> continue to depend on Levine to tell the story of working class Americans. In
>>
>> Levine's poetry, I find the story of my father's life, told with honesty and
>>
>> care and compassion. I want to send Levine's books to all the managers in
>> America's factories and work places and tell them to put down their Total
>> Quality
>> Management manuals and listen to the voices speaking through Philip Levine's
>>
>> poems.   According to Levine, work is not the struggle to get a job done and
>>
>> turn a profit, but rather the struggle to remain human in the face of the
>> grinding pressure to get a job done and turn a profit.   Until the Reagans
>> and the
>> Iacoccas and the Roger Smiths and the other managers of America understand
>> this,
>> we must stop using the word ???total??? as a way of characterizing
>> management.
>> We will not have ???TQM??? until we understand:
>>
>>           How long it has been since you told [your bother]
>>           you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
>>           opened your eyes wide and said those words,
>>           and maybe kissed his cheek?   You???ve never
>>           done something so simple, so obvious
>>           not because you???re too young or too dumb,
>>           not because you???re jealous or even mean
>>           or incapable of crying in
>>           the presence of another man, no,
>>           just because you don???t know what work is.
>>
>> Reading Levine, I am reminded of the story Yeats tells in his Memoirs about
>> meeting the Irish poet and dramatist John Millington Synge in a Paris hotel
>> in
>> 1896, where the twenty-five year old Synge was trying to write critical
>> articles about French Literature and about Racine, specifically.   Yeats told
>> Synge
>> to give up criticism???that Arthur Symons would always be a better critic of
>>
>> French literature???and go to the Aran Islands, where Yeats himself had just
>>
>> returned, ???and find expression for a life that is lacked.???   Wisely,
>> Synge took
>> Yeats??? advice.
>>
>> For more than thirty years, Philip Levine has been finding language and
>> giving expression to a life and people who lack it.   Nowhere has this life
>> been
>> expressed so vividly, so powerfully, so honestly as in the poetry of Philip
>> Levine, for as he says in ???Coming Close,??? ???Make no mistake, this place
>> has a
>> language.???   Make no mistake: Philip Levine is one of our great national
>> treasures.
>>
>>                                         **********************
>> Thom Tammaro
>> Moorhead, MN
>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Sat Sep  4 21:09:58 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 18:09:58 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
In-Reply-To: <200409050031.i850V4K6024082@pimout2-ext.prodigy.net>
Message-ID: <20040905010958.8589.qmail@web52602.mail.yahoo.com>

I suppose I was drawn to Levine's poetry because I could identify with so much of it.  I grew up in a town that rotted in the shadow of a paper mill, and when it closed, my hometown pretty much died.  Of my friends, I was only one to make it out and escape the shadow of that mill.
 
But so what if I romanticize my past in my own work?  So what if Levine romanticizes the working class?  I don't see a problem here.  It's not, as David pointed out, that he really wants us to believe that he still works at one of those car factories.  He finds transcendence in that type of work using images drawn from his past (and invented.  Read *The Bread of Time*.  Levine's pretty open about the uses of fiction in his work).
 
Now--are college professors working class?  Geez.  I brought up working class on this list once and was almost chased out of the country.  I teach a 5/5 load.  I chair a committee and advise a college quiz team.  I teach 2 in the summer.  90% of what I teach is freshman comp, the very dregs of the English department.  However, I enjoy what I do.  I really love teaching, so am I working class?  Does loving what you do have anything to do with your class?  And hell no, I'd never trade places with those people at Wal-mart.  I was a butcher for a time in my early 20s.  No way in hell would I go back.  I also used to unload produce trucks.  No way in hell would I go back.  
 
Thanks to everyone--once again--for this thread.  I've really enjoyed.  By the way, I think that Levine's new book is out the 8th of September.
 
Jeff Newberry


Chris Stroffolino <cstroffo at earthlink.net> wrote:
jane---

I'm not replying about Levine per se; for I sometimes find said "cloying"
feeling in some of that poetry. The reason why I'm posting is because of
your first paragraph in which "factory job" and "working class" are equated.
I guess I just don't believe that a university teacher job is necessarily
"OUT of the working class." It probably depends on how we define class.
In my case, being at least a generation younger than Levine (my dad was born
in 1939 and I in 1963), I saw the factory's die in my little town, and
like many others of my generation, was duped with promises that "white
collar" meant "upward mobility." Not that being "poor" or "working class"
should necessarily be anything to be ashamed of (and I can understand and
appreciate your envy of people at Wallmart, or Barbara E's Nickle and Dimed
perpsective), but I think the "factory"=="working class" association still
lingers on even as the reality of it, for much of America, is a relic of the
past.....And, yes, I think most professors are working class. Sure, maybe
not Levine if he's one of the few who gets to teach one course a year for
$100,000, but for most others.

Chris

----------
>From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" 
>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" 
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
>Date: Sat, Sep 4, 2004, 1:42 PM
>

> Forgive me for what may seem like an irreverent question, but when exactly,
> during this thirty year period of writing about the working class, did Phil
> Levine, um, start to teach in the university system. My impression, and I am
> thoroughly willing to be wrong, is that he has been fairly OUT of the working
> class for along time... That his last factory job was, maybe, in the distant
> past.
>
> I guess I have this sense, amidst we enlightened artists looking
> sympathetically into the world of the factory workers, etc. is there is, yes,
> MUCH empathy, tons of sympathy, and an utter blind spot to the presence of
> SATISFACTIONS and depth in those lives, amidst all the damn struggles. Dear
> God, I feel sorry for the doctors of Westchester!! The housewives of Essex.
> And MANY of the papery academics I see drifting around Amherst. I go to Wal-
> Mart from time to time and look with ENVY at the lady behind the cash register
> who seems to require much LESS of life than I do and thus has a greater chance
> of happiness. I dunno, I guess I just find some of the sentiment ABOUT Levine
> and his poetry of the working class a little cloying.
>
> K.
>
> Quoting Thom424 at aol.com:
>
>> Here's that Levine review of WHAT WORK IS. It's from CRAZY RIVER (Ohio).
>> No. 3.
>>
>> I apologize for its length.
>>
>> ******************************
>>
>> Who Shall Speak for Them?
>>
>> Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 77 pp.
>>
>> The story of blue-collar America has not appeared in our literature often
>> enough, nor made its way into mainstream anthologies, though it is central to
>> our
>> American life. Now that part of that way of life has passed, who shall tell
>> its stories? Who shall speak for those people like my father and tell the sad
>>
>> stories of communities such as Homestead and the dozens of other working
>> class
>> communities scattered throughout the industrial East and Midwest? A few prose
>>
>> writers have told the story: Robert Ward in Red Baker, his novel about an
>> unemployed Baltimore steelworker; Ben Hamper in Rivethead, a nonfiction
>> account of
>> life on the GM assembly line; and to some degree Michael Moore has told the
>> story in his controversial film, Roger and Me.
>>
>> But the story has not been told often enough nor well enough by our poets,
>> though James Wright did it well when he wrote about the industrial Ohio
>> Valley,
>> as does the too-little known Meridel LeSueur, whose portraits of rural and
>> urban workers of the Midwest are as fine as any. Younger contemporaries such
>> as
>> Jim Daniels and Peter Oresick tell the story well, too. Philip Levine comes
>> closest to our national poetic chronicler of working class America. He has
>> done
>> so remarkably well over the last thirty years, in such collections as Not
>> This
>> Pig (1968), They Feed, They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), The Names of the Lost
>> (1976), Ashes: Poems Old and New (1979), One for the Rose (1981), and Sweet
>> Will
>> (1985). His Selected Poems (1984) was overlooked by Pulitzer Prize and
>> National Book Award panels, an unpardonable sin if there ever was one.
>> Finally
>> coming to their senses, members of the National Book Award panel awarded the
>> 1991
>> National Book Award to What Work Is, Levine's fifteenth collection of poems.
>>
>> Simultaneously published with What Work Is was New Selected Poems, a somewhat
>>
>> expanded edition of the 1984 Selected Poems.
>>
>> What Work Is is a journey through the underworld of American labor, beginning
>>
>> with Lewis Hines's haunting cover photograph, "Spinner, cotton mill,
>> 1908-1909," in which a young girl--probably no older than twelve--stares
>> through us,
>> as she rests momentarily, from her adult labor and seems to balance herself
>> precariously, one hand on the window sill and the other on the spinning mill
>>
>> frame. Through her eyes, we enter the bleak history of working class America
>> as
>> the book charts our course through the Charybdis and Scylla of the American
>> industrial landscape. What Work Is is a meditation on the nature of work and
>> the
>> ways it consumes our lives. It is about jobs that are done with more hand and
>>
>> less head and heart, jobs for which we wait with
>>
>> the sad refusal to give in to
>> rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
>> to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
>> a man is waiting who will say "No
>> we're not hiring today," for any
>> reason he wants.
>>
>> It is ironic that so many of us define ourselves by and through the work we
>> do, while within that very work lurks the potential demon which will grind us
>>
>> down, wear us out, diminish us, if we are not careful.
>>
>> The twenty-five poems in the four sections of What Work Is are classic,
>> mature Levine: mostly stanzaless, seamless free verse lines with a hint of
>> prosody;
>> words squeezed into verticality like Giacometti sculptures; moody, often
>> lyrical stories told in the first person voices of generation descendants of
>>
>> turn-of-the-century eastern and southern European immigrants who supplied the
>> sweat
>> and brawn for the factories of the Midwest; sharp, sometimes laconic voices;
>>
>> language that is often flat and conversational; what the poems lack in music
>>
>> they make up for in the intensity of their honesty and truthfulness, which
>> has
>> a music of its own making. Cumulatively, these stories assume a
>> documentary-like quality, with an affect much like reading the individual
>> oral histories in
>> Studs Terkel's powerful collection, Working.
>>
>> As we have come to expect, many of the poems share Detroit as their setting,
>>
>> another cursive twist of the Levine signature. Levine has always been a
>> connoisseur of memory. Many of the poems, such as "Growth," a Whitmanesque
>> paean to
>> work in which a fourteen year old boy is awakened to working life in a soap
>> factory
>>
>> where I hammered and sawed, singing
>> my new life of working and earning,
>> outside in the fresh air of Detroit
>> in 1942, a year of growth
>>
>> draw us back to the 1940s and 50s of Levine's teens and early adolescence.
>> Other poems, such as "Fear and Fame" and "Innocence," find ways of drawing
>> hope
>> and meaning from the numbing, destructive yet vitalizing rigors of work.
>>
>> The speakers in the poems shift back and forth between the autobiographical
>> "I" and the persona voices of individual men and women workers; likewise, the
>>
>> settings shift from the Detroit of Levine's youth to the Fresno, California,
>>
>> region of his middle years. In "Angus Dei" Levine recalls "[his] little
>> sister
>> [creating] the Lamb of God" from "used-up dust mops / and coat hangers," and
>> in
>> "Gin" Levine remembers "The first time [he] drank gin" and "thought it must
>> be hair tonic." Perhaps the most stunning poems in the collection, ones I
>> would
>> rank among the best Levine poems to date, are "My Grave" and "Burned," an
>> eighteen-page, 600+ line poem whose central metaphor of fire and burning
>> cauterize the collage-like memories of this autobiographical mid-life
>> reverie.
>>
>> Many Levine poems, like "Every Day Blessing," are mini tour de forces. They
>> begin in ordinary life, filled with the rich, sensual details and imagery of
>>
>> the common world. Someone is going somewhere, doing something or describing
>> something, usually work or something that has happened at work, and it is not
>> very
>> important. The quotidian world is rendered in all its harshness and
>> loveliness. And by the end of the poems, there is a recognition that
>> something has been
>> lost or discovered, and that the human spirit is in constant struggle with
>> those forces which would diminish it. Here are the concluding lines of "Every
>>
>> Day Blessing":
>>
>> Where he's going or where he is
>> he doesn't ask himself, he
>> doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off
>> at the familiar corner, crosses
>> the emptying parking lots
>> toward Chevy Gear & Axle #3.
>> In a few minutes he will hold
>> his time card above a clock,
>> and he can drop it in
>> and hear the moment crunching
>> down, or he can not, for
>> either way the day will last
>> forever. So he lets it fall.
>> If he feels the elusive calm
>> his father spoke of and searched
>> for all his short life, there's
>> no way of telling, for now he's
>> laughing among them, older men
>> and kids. He's saying, "Damn,
>> we've got it made." He's
>> lighting up or chewing with
>> others, thousands of miles
>> from their forgotten homes, each
>> and every one his father's son.
>>
>> No American writer writes about the working class with as much clarity,
>> integrity, dignity and empathy as Philip Levine. When you read a book of
>> Levine's
>> poetry, you are fooled into thinking you are reading a book of poems about
>> invented lives, but when you reach its end, you realize and understand that
>> your
>> father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt could be speaking these
>> words, thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions. Such has been--and
>>
>> continues to be--the strength of Philip Levine's poetry.
>>
>> Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to discover the poetry of Philip Levine. I
>>
>> continue to depend on Levine to tell the story of working class Americans. In
>>
>> Levine's poetry, I find the story of my father's life, told with honesty and
>>
>> care and compassion. I want to send Levine's books to all the managers in
>> America's factories and work places and tell them to put down their Total
>> Quality
>> Management manuals and listen to the voices speaking through Philip Levine's
>>
>> poems. According to Levine, work is not the struggle to get a job done and
>>
>> turn a profit, but rather the struggle to remain human in the face of the
>> grinding pressure to get a job done and turn a profit. Until the Reagans
>> and the
>> Iacoccas and the Roger Smiths and the other managers of America understand
>> this,
>> we must stop using the word ???total??? as a way of characterizing
>> management.
>> We will not have ???TQM??? until we understand:
>>
>> How long it has been since you told [your bother]
>> you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
>> opened your eyes wide and said those words,
>> and maybe kissed his cheek? You???ve never
>> done something so simple, so obvious
>> not because you???re too young or too dumb,
>> not because you???re jealous or even mean
>> or incapable of crying in
>> the presence of another man, no,
>> just because you don???t know what work is.
>>
>> Reading Levine, I am reminded of the story Yeats tells in his Memoirs about
>> meeting the Irish poet and dramatist John Millington Synge in a Paris hotel
>> in
>> 1896, where the twenty-five year old Synge was trying to write critical
>> articles about French Literature and about Racine, specifically. Yeats told
>> Synge
>> to give up criticism???that Arthur Symons would always be a better critic of
>>
>> French literature???and go to the Aran Islands, where Yeats himself had just
>>
>> returned, ???and find expression for a life that is lacked.??? Wisely,
>> Synge took
>> Yeats??? advice.
>>
>> For more than thirty years, Philip Levine has been finding language and
>> giving expression to a life and people who lack it. Nowhere has this life
>> been
>> expressed so vividly, so powerfully, so honestly as in the poetry of Philip
>> Levine, for as he says in ???Coming Close,??? ???Make no mistake, this place
>> has a
>> language.??? Make no mistake: Philip Levine is one of our great national
>> treasures.
>>
>> **********************
>> Thom Tammaro
>> Moorhead, MN
>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry

_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
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Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
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From tad at opus40.org  Sat Sep  4 22:55:33 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 22:55:33 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
References: <BD5F8A80.AEDD%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <006301c492f3$d1b82130$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

I'd add Marilyn Nelson, W.D. Snodgrass to the powerful sentiment group.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Graham" <grahamd at ripon.edu>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 4:06 PM
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment


> No argument from me that removing sentiment from poetry would be silly
> indeed.  Even if possible.
>
> But quite honestly I don't recognize the bulk of mainstream American
poetry
> in that generalization.  From Lucille Clifton to Robert Bly, Sherman
Alexie
> to Richard Wilbur, contemporary American poetry seems well stocked in the
> sentiment department.
>
> In fact, some would say (have said--visit the Buffalo Poetics list, e.g.)
> that the mainstream regularly indulges quite heavily not only in
sentiment,
> but sentimentality.
>
> As a one-size-fits-all generalization that one doesn't work for me very
> well, either.
>
> My pet peeves would definitely include critics who don't see the
difference
> between sentiment and sentimentality.
>
> on 9/4/04 12:59 PM, Helen Ruggieri at hruggier at localnet.com wrote:
>
> > I think one of the reasons no body but poets read poetry is because
we've
> > removed any possible sentiment from it.   Who cares.
> > ----- Original Message -----
>
>
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From tad at opus40.org  Sat Sep  4 22:57:56 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 22:57:56 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
References: <BD5F8A80.AEDD%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<841F38C2-FEC5-11D8-BDFB-000A9573C758@sbcglobal.net>
Message-ID: <007d01c492f4$266e87f0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

I'd suggest a reading of Annie Finch's article on the sentimentist
tradition.

http://www.ablemuse.com/art/a-finch_poetess.htm



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wendy Battin" <upwardcat at sbcglobal.net>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment


> On Sep 4, 2004, at 4:06 PM, David Graham wrote:
> > My pet peeves would definitely include critics who don't see the
> > difference
> > between sentiment and sentimentality.
>
> I agree with the sentiment, David, but then a _sentiment_ is something
> that asks for agreement.  It's at some remove from feeling, as I
> understand the words, and it decays into opinion or posture rather
> easily.  Is a sentiment the after-effect of having felt something, the
> conclusion that's left when the argument is over?  Surely poetry can do
> better than that.
>
> Just a quibble, maybe.  But I think it's a useful distinction.
>
> Wendy
>
> Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
> http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html
>
> --------------------------
> A cow gave birth to a fire; she wanted to lick it, but it burned; she
> wanted to leave it, but she could not because it was her own child.
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>




From upwardcat at sbcglobal.net  Sat Sep  4 23:09:40 2004
From: upwardcat at sbcglobal.net (Wendy Battin)
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 23:09:40 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
In-Reply-To: <007d01c492f4$266e87f0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
References: <BD5F8A80.AEDD%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<841F38C2-FEC5-11D8-BDFB-000A9573C758@sbcglobal.net>
	<007d01c492f4$266e87f0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <06C3B3E8-FEE9-11D8-BDFB-000A9573C758@sbcglobal.net>

On Sep 4, 2004, at 10:57 PM, The Old Mole wrote:
> I'd suggest a reading of Annie Finch's article on the sentimentist
> tradition.
> http://www.ablemuse.com/art/a-finch_poetess.htm

I've read it, Tad. Your point?

Wendy

______________________________________
Wendy Battin      wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

Hold short services for minor gods.
Nepalese 



From tad at opus40.org  Sun Sep  5 00:58:29 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 00:58:29 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
References: <BD5F8A80.AEDD%grahamd@ripon.edu><841F38C2-FEC5-11D8-BDFB-000A9573C758@sbcglobal.net><007d01c492f4$266e87f0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
	<06C3B3E8-FEE9-11D8-BDFB-000A9573C758@sbcglobal.net>
Message-ID: <001401c49304$fe370f30$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

The note wasn't directed at you in any negative way, Wendy. My point was,
here's an interesting article on sentiment in American poetry, which we're
discussing now.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wendy Battin" <upwardcat at sbcglobal.net>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 11:09 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment


> On Sep 4, 2004, at 10:57 PM, The Old Mole wrote:
> > I'd suggest a reading of Annie Finch's article on the sentimentist
> > tradition.
> > http://www.ablemuse.com/art/a-finch_poetess.htm
>
> I've read it, Tad. Your point?
>
> Wendy
>
> ______________________________________
> Wendy Battin      wjbat at conncoll.edu
> http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html
>
> Hold short services for minor gods.
> Nepalese
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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  Sun Sep  5 02:40:41 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 22:40:41 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
Message-ID: <200409050522.i855M2K6202204@pimout2-ext.prodigy.net>

Auden (in that little "work, labor, and play" essay) would answer "no" to 
the second question.
I tend to agree. If you want me to scrounge for the quote, I could.

Chris

----------
From: Jeff Newberry <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
Date: Sat, Sep 4, 2004, 5:09 PM


freshman comp, the very dregs of the English department.  However, I enjoy
what I do.  I really love teaching, so am I working class?  Does loving what
you do have anything to do with your class?  
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From halvard at gmail.com  Sun Sep  5 09:00:35 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 09:00:35 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Call for poetry submissions -- Hamilton Stone Review
Message-ID: <f160a12104090506004a9db390@mail.gmail.com>

Although Hamilton Stone Review is not yet open to unsolicited
fiction submissions, it is inviting poetry submissions from now 
until Dec. 15 for Issue #5, which will be out in February 2005. 

Poetry submissions should go directly to Halvard Johnson at 
		mailto:halvard at earthlink.net or
		mailto:halvard at gmail.com.
=====
Hamilton Stone Review, Issue 3, Summer 2004, Now Online!

This all-poetry issue features Jordan Davis, Harriet Zinnes,
Edward Field, Gene Frumkin, Zan Ross, Barry Alpert, Hugh Seidman,
Alvin Greenberg, and Mary Rising Higgins.

http://www.hamiltonstone.org/hsr.html

Hamilton Stone Review, Issue 4, Fall, 2004, an all-fiction issue, 
will soon be out.

Hal         "Cross / a border every day, and leave
                your luggage in the station."
                                  --Wendy Battin 
Halvard Johnson
===============
email: mailto:halvard at earthlink.net
         mailto:halvard at gmail.com
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard


From hruggier at localnet.com  Sun Sep  5 10:50:06 2004
From: hruggier at localnet.com (Helen Ruggieri)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 10:50:06 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
References: <20040905010958.8589.qmail@web52602.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <00b001c49357$a3ff9390$350b9942@Helen>

If you're an adjunct teaching six comp. sections at three different colleges making $20,000 or so in a good year
are you working class?  Is this an economic classification, a "job " classification

what? 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jeff Newberry 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views 
  Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 9:09 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review


  I suppose I was drawn to Levine's poetry because I could identify with so much of it.  I grew up in a town that rotted in the shadow of a paper mill, and when it closed, my hometown pretty much died.  Of my friends, I was only one to make it out and escape the shadow of that mill.

  But so what if I romanticize my past in my own work?  So what if Levine romanticizes the working class?  I don't see a problem here.  It's not, as David pointed out, that he really wants us to believe that he still works at one of those car factories.  He finds transcendence in that type of work using images drawn from his past (and invented.  Read *The Bread of Time*.  Levine's pretty open about the uses of fiction in his work).

  Now--are college professors working class?  Geez.  I brought up working class on this list once and was almost chased out of the country.  I teach a 5/5 load.  I chair a committee and advise a college quiz team.  I teach 2 in the summer.  90% of what I teach is freshman comp, the very dregs of the English department.  However, I enjoy what I do.  I really love teaching, so am I working class?  Does loving what you do have anything to do with your class?  And hell no, I'd never trade places with those people at Wal-mart.  I was a butcher for a time in my early 20s.  No way in hell would I go back.  I also used to unload produce trucks.  No way in hell would I go back.  

  Thanks to everyone--once again--for this thread.  I've really enjoyed.  By the way, I think that Levine's new book is out the 8th of September.

  Jeff Newberry


  Chris Stroffolino <cstroffo at earthlink.net> wrote:
    jane---

    I'm not replying about Levine per se; for I sometimes find said "cloying"
    feeling in some of that poetry. The reason why I'm posting is because of
    your first paragraph in which "factory job" and "working class" are equated.
    I guess I just don't believe that a university teacher job is necessarily
    "OUT of the working class." It probably depends on how we define class.
    In my case, being at least a generation younger than Levine (my dad was born
    in 1939 and I in 1963), I saw the factory's die in my little town, and
    like many others of my generation, was duped with promises that "white
    collar" meant "upward mobility." Not that being "poor" or "working class"
    should necessarily be anything to be ashamed of (and I can understand and
    appreciate your envy of people at Wallmart, or Barbara E's Nickle and Dimed
    perpsective), but I think t! he "factory"=="working class" association still
    lingers on even as the reality of it, for much of America, is a relic of the
    past.....And, yes, I think most professors are working class. Sure, maybe
    not Levine if he's one of the few who gets to teach one course a year for
    $100,000, but for most others.

    Chris

    ----------
    >From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" 
    >To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" 
    >Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
    >Date: Sat, Sep 4, 2004, 1:42 PM
    >

    > Forgive me for what may seem like an irreverent question, but when exactly,
    > during this thirty year period of writing about the working class, did Phil
    > Levine, um, start to teach in the university system. My impression, and I am
    > thoroughly willing to be wrong, is that he has been fairly OUT of the working
    > class for along time... That his last factory job w! as, maybe, in the distant
    > past.
    >
    > I guess I have this sense, amidst we enlightened artists looking
    > sympathetically into the world of the factory workers, etc. is there is, yes,
    > MUCH empathy, tons of sympathy, and an utter blind spot to the presence of
    > SATISFACTIONS and depth in those lives, amidst all the damn struggles. Dear
    > God, I feel sorry for the doctors of Westchester!! The housewives of Essex.
    > And MANY of the papery academics I see drifting around Amherst. I go to Wal-
    > Mart from time to time and look with ENVY at the lady behind the cash register
    > who seems to require much LESS of life than I do and thus has a greater chance
    > of happiness. I dunno, I guess I just find some of the sentiment ABOUT Levine
    > and his poetry of the working class a little cloying.
    >
    > K.
    >
    > Quoting Thom424 at aol.com:
    >
    >> Here's that Levine review of WHAT WORK IS. It's! from CRAZY RIVER (Ohio).
    >> No. 3.
    >>
    >> I apologize for its length.
    >>
    >> ******************************
    >>
    >> Who Shall Speak for Them?
    >>
    >> Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 77 pp.
    >>
    >> The story of blue-collar America has not appeared in our literature often
    >> enough, nor made its way into mainstream anthologies, though it is central to
    >> our
    >> American life. Now that part of that way of life has passed, who shall tell
    >> its stories? Who shall speak for those people like my father and tell the sad
    >>
    >> stories of communities such as Homestead and the dozens of other working
    >> class
    >> communities scattered throughout the industrial East and Midwest? A few prose
    >>
    >> writers have told the story: Robert Ward in Red Baker, his novel about an
    >> un! employed Baltimore steelworker; Ben Hamper in Rivethead, a nonfiction
    >> account of
    >> life on the GM assembly line; and to some degree Michael Moore has told the
    >> story in his controversial film, Roger and Me.
    >>
    >> But the story has not been told often enough nor well enough by our poets,
    >> though James Wright did it well when he wrote about the industrial Ohio
    >> Valley,
    >> as does the too-little known Meridel LeSueur, whose portraits of rural and
    >> urban workers of the Midwest are as fine as any. Younger contemporaries such
    >> as
    >> Jim Daniels and Peter Oresick tell the story well, too. Philip Levine comes
    >> closest to our national poetic chronicler of working class America. He has
    >> done
    >> so remarkably well over the last thirty years, in such collections as Not
    >> This
    >> Pig (1968), They Feed, They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), Th! e Names of the Lost
    >> (1976), Ashes: Poems Old and New (1979), One for the Rose (1981), and Sweet
    >> Will
    >> (1985). His Selected Poems (1984) was overlooked by Pulitzer Prize and
    >> National Book Award panels, an unpardonable sin if there ever was one.
    >> Finally
    >> coming to their senses, members of the National Book Award panel awarded the
    >> 1991
    >> National Book Award to What Work Is, Levine's fifteenth collection of poems.
    >>
    >> Simultaneously published with What Work Is was New Selected Poems, a somewhat
    >>
    >> expanded edition of the 1984 Selected Poems.
    >>
    >> What Work Is is a journey through the underworld of American labor, beginning
    >>
    >> with Lewis Hines's haunting cover photograph, "Spinner, cotton mill,
    >> 1908-1909," in which a young girl--probably no older than twelve--stares
    >> through us,
    >> as ! she rests momentarily, from her adult labor and seems to balance herself
    >> precariously, one hand on the window sill and the other on the spinning mill
    >>
    >> frame. Through her eyes, we enter the bleak history of working class America
    >> as
    >> the book charts our course through the Charybdis and Scylla of the American
    >> industrial landscape. What Work Is is a meditation on the nature of work and
    >> the
    >> ways it consumes our lives. It is about jobs that are done with more hand and
    >>
    >> less head and heart, jobs for which we wait with
    >>
    >> the sad refusal to give in to
    >> rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
    >> to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
    >> a man is waiting who will say "No
    >> we're not hiring today," for any
    >> reason he wants.
    >>
    >> It is ironic that so many of us define ourselves by and through the w! ork we
    >> do, while within that very work lurks the potential demon which will grind us
    >>
    >> down, wear us out, diminish us, if we are not careful.
    >>
    >> The twenty-five poems in the four sections of What Work Is are classic,
    >> mature Levine: mostly stanzaless, seamless free verse lines with a hint of
    >> prosody;
    >> words squeezed into verticality like Giacometti sculptures; moody, often
    >> lyrical stories told in the first person voices of generation descendants of
    >>
    >> turn-of-the-century eastern and southern European immigrants who supplied the
    >> sweat
    >> and brawn for the factories of the Midwest; sharp, sometimes laconic voices;
    >>
    >> language that is often flat and conversational; what the poems lack in music
    >>
    >> they make up for in the intensity of their honesty and truthfulness, which
    >> has
    >> a! music of its own making. Cumulatively, these stories assume a
    >> documentary-like quality, with an affect much like reading the individual
    >> oral histories in
    >> Studs Terkel's powerful collection, Working.
    >>
    >> As we have come to expect, many of the poems share Detroit as their setting,
    >>
    >> another cursive twist of the Levine signature. Levine has always been a
    >> connoisseur of memory. Many of the poems, such as "Growth," a Whitmanesque
    >> paean to
    >> work in which a fourteen year old boy is awakened to working life in a soap
    >> factory
    >>
    >> where I hammered and sawed, singing
    >> my new life of working and earning,
    >> outside in the fresh air of Detroit
    >> in 1942, a year of growth
    >>
    >> draw us back to the 1940s and 50s of Levine's teens and early adolescence.
    >> Other poems, such as "Fear and Fame" and "In! nocence," find ways of drawing
    >> hope
    >> and meaning from the numbing, destructive yet vitalizing rigors of work.
    >>
    >> The speakers in the poems shift back and forth between the autobiographical
    >> "I" and the persona voices of individual men and women workers; likewise, the
    >>
    >> settings shift from the Detroit of Levine's youth to the Fresno, California,
    >>
    >> region of his middle years. In "Angus Dei" Levine recalls "[his] little
    >> sister
    >> [creating] the Lamb of God" from "used-up dust mops / and coat hangers," and
    >> in
    >> "Gin" Levine remembers "The first time [he] drank gin" and "thought it must
    >> be hair tonic." Perhaps the most stunning poems in the collection, ones I
    >> would
    >> rank among the best Levine poems to date, are "My Grave" and "Burned," an
    >> eighteen-page, 600+ line poem whose central metaphor of fire and burning
    >> cauterize the collage-like memories of this autobiographical mid-life
    >> reverie.
    >>
    >> Many Levine poems, like "Every Day Blessing," are mini tour de forces. They
    >> begin in ordinary life, filled with the rich, sensual details and imagery of
    >>
    >> the common world. Someone is going somewhere, doing something or describing
    >> something, usually work or something that has happened at work, and it is not
    >> very
    >> important. The quotidian world is rendered in all its harshness and
    >> loveliness. And by the end of the poems, there is a recognition that
    >> something has been
    >> lost or discovered, and that the human spirit is in constant struggle with
    >> those forces which would diminish it. Here are the concluding lines of "Every
    >>
    >> Day Blessing":
    >>
    >> Where he's going or where he is
    >> he do! esn't ask himself, he
    >> doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off
    >> at the familiar corner, crosses
    >> the emptying parking lots
    >> toward Chevy Gear & Axle #3.
    >> In a few minutes he will hold
    >> his time card above a clock,
    >> and he can drop it in
    >> and hear the moment crunching
    >> down, or he can not, for
    >> either way the day will last
    >> forever. So he lets it fall.
    >> If he feels the elusive calm
    >> his father spoke of and searched
    >> for all his short life, there's
    >> no way of telling, for now he's
    >> laughing among them, older men
    >> and kids. He's saying, "Damn,
    >> we've got it made." He's
    >> lighting up or chewing with
    >> others, thousands of miles
    >> from their forgotten homes, each
    >> and every one his father's son.
    >>
    >> No American write! r writes about the working class with as much clarity,
    >> integrity, dignity and empathy as Philip Levine. When you read a book of
    >> Levine's
    >> poetry, you are fooled into thinking you are reading a book of poems about
    >> invented lives, but when you reach its end, you realize and understand that
    >> your
    >> father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt could be speaking these
    >> words, thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions. Such has been--and
    >>
    >> continues to be--the strength of Philip Levine's poetry.
    >>
    >> Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to discover the poetry of Philip Levine. I
    >>
    >> continue to depend on Levine to tell the story of working class Americans. In
    >>
    >> Levine's poetry, I find the story of my father's life, told with honesty and
    >>
    >> care and compassion. I want to send Levine's books to all t! he managers in
    >> America's factories and work places and tell them to put down their Total
    >> Quality
    >> Management manuals and listen to the voices speaking through Philip Levine's
    >>
    >> poems. According to Levine, work is not the struggle to get a job done and
    >>
    >> turn a profit, but rather the struggle to remain human in the face of the
    >> grinding pressure to get a job done and turn a profit. Until the Reagans
    >> and the
    >> Iacoccas and the Roger Smiths and the other managers of America understand
    >> this,
    >> we must stop using the word ???total??? as a way of characterizing
    >> management.
    >> We will not have ???TQM??? until we understand:
    >>
    >> How long it has been since you told [your bother]
    >> you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
    >> opened your eyes wide and said those words,
    >> and maybe kissed ! his cheek? You???ve never
    >> done something so simple, so obvious
    >> not because you???re too young or too dumb,
    >> not because you???re jealous or even mean
    >> or incapable of crying in
    >> the presence of another man, no,
    >> just because you don???t know what work is.
    >>
    >> Reading Levine, I am reminded of the story Yeats tells in his Memoirs about
    >> meeting the Irish poet and dramatist John Millington Synge in a Paris hotel
    >> in
    >> 1896, where the twenty-five year old Synge was trying to write critical
    >> articles about French Literature and about Racine, specifically. Yeats told
    >> Synge
    >> to give up criticism???that Arthur Symons would always be a better critic of
    >>
    >> French literature???and go to the Aran Islands, where Yeats himself had just
    >>
    >> returned, ???and find expression for a life that is lacked.??? Wisely,
    >> Synge took
    >> Yeats??? advice.
    >>
    >> For more than thirty years, Philip Levine has been finding language and
    >> giving expression to a life and people who lack it. Nowhere has this life
    >> been
    >> expressed so vividly, so powerfully, so honestly as in the poetry of Philip
    >> Levine, for as he says in ???Coming Close,??? ???Make no mistake, this place
    >> has a
    >> language.??? Make no mistake: Philip Levine is one of our great national
    >> treasures.
    >>
    >> **********************
    >> Thom Tammaro
    >> Moorhead, MN
    >>
    >
    >
    >
    > _______________________________________________
    > New-Poetry mailing list
    > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
    > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry

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From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Sun Sep  5 12:57:46 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe)
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 12:57:46 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
In-Reply-To: <001d01c492cc$ce1c95a0$cfab3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
References: <8.56564e7e.2e6b5de3@aol.com>
	<1094334142.413a36beef25d@mail-www3.oit.umass.edu>
	<001d01c492cc$ce1c95a0$cfab3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <1094403466.413b458a40163@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>

Dear Anny and Chris,

There is so much richness now in all of this dialogue...

I guess as I read the responses of others,it clarifies my own thinking.  As a, 
forgive the cliche, single working mother (age fifty, kids 11 and 12 )working a 
low-paying academic administrative job and depending on renting the apartment 
in my house and the continued faithful payments of a churlish ex-husband, it 
may be the case that I get a little prickly around matters of class, having 
been raised as quite the Irish princess (long ago) now living in a world that 
is utterly precarious.  So it could be that this sense of seperation between 
the artist/subject and the "working class person"/object - may rub me a little 
thin.  Since I am both.  Your point, therefore about the time difference in the 
worlds that he is writing about, is well taken.  Then there was more of a 
marked difference between groups of people and their sensibilities and 
experiences than now, when it seems, MOST of us feel ourselves to be heartily 
enmeshed in the working class.  My daily struggle is to find beauty and 
inspiration and simply MY OWN THOUGHTS in the midst of many, MANY dull chores 
ranging from keeping track of language students to driving to sports practices, 
Stop & Shop, Daves Pet and Soda world, etc. etc. 

I have never read a poem of Phil Levine's where I felt embarassed by his 
rendition of any kind of situation.  But I do feel that in general there is a 
delicacy involved in terms of, well, appropriating material on an indefinitie 
basis when one is in a more cloistered, luxurious situation.  The dilemma of 
Bruce Springsteen, now that he is utterly rich and successful.  He no longer 
lives in that Jersey world - how can he honor it and respect the struggles of 
those people when they are no longer his struggles.  He seems to do it well - 
and with consciousness of his own situation  as now being outside.

And finally, I watch the temptation (and I do not necessarily accuse PL of this 
since, in truth, I have not followed all of his career) of poets making 
a "career" out of one thing.  Being a Vietnam vet or having an incestuous 
father relationship or having grown up poor - there is so much to write in all 
of these landscapes but of course, the price of not moving on when it is time - 
or the temptation to write them to death out of not being able to match the 
intensity of those experiences in other areas...for me it's always something to 
watch.  It ups the ante for having to keep the present alive.

But finally, the fact of the love and deep usefulness of Levine's work speaks 
for itself, I would think.

Best to you, Kerry
Quoting Anny Ballardini <anny.ballardini at tin.it>:

> Hi Jane,
> 
> your mail is so full of inputs that I feel compelled to answer something.
> 
> A couple of days ago, it was a hot sunny day and it slowed me down when I
> got outside, hit by the heat, and the colors, and life. I ran to the small
> supermarket after a meeting and ended up being the last customer. The lady
> at the cash register was a girl, as soon as she gave me my change she opened
> the register and started counting the money. That is where I thought of all
> her problems, if anything was missing, her anxiousness in wanting to get out
> of there, the repetitiveness of her job. And of how lucky I was, dumb and
> staring at the beauty of the day, which I was noticing for the first time at
> 7 p.m.
> 
> With Philip Levine you will have to go back almost a century. Conditions
> were hard, and yes, I believe in some of his poetry.
> 
> Now things are different. I remember one kid who didn't study but became an
> electrician or a plumber, he ended up with a wonderful cottage, a great car,
> while I am still here with my dusty books, aloof, envied by many, and with
> little but thoughts. On the other hand, I would have been terribly lost
> behind a cash register, I don't like to drink, and parties have become
> boring for me.
> 
> So yes, I am with you, and I like it where I am, take care,
> 
> Anny Ballardini
> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
> 
> 
> From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" <jkok at hfa.umass.edu>
> Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 11:42 PM
> 
> 
> > Forgive me for what may seem like an irreverent question, but when
> exactly,
> > during this thirty year period of writing about the working class, did
> Phil
> > Levine, um, start to teach in the university system. My impression, and I
> am
> > thoroughly willing to be wrong, is that he has been fairly OUT of the
> working
> > class for along time...  That his last factory job was, maybe, in the
> distant
> > past.
> >
> > I guess I have this sense, amidst we enlightened artists looking
> > sympathetically into the world of the factory workers, etc. is there is,
> yes,
> > MUCH empathy, tons of sympathy, and an utter blind spot to the presence of
> > SATISFACTIONS and depth in those lives, amidst all the damn struggles.
> Dear
> > God, I feel sorry for the doctors of Westchester!!  The housewives of
> Essex.
> > And MANY of the papery academics I see drifting around Amherst.  I go to
> Wal-
> > Mart from time to time and look with ENVY at the lady behind the cash
> register
> > who seems to require much LESS of life than I do and thus has a greater
> chance
> > of happiness.  I dunno, I guess I just find some of the sentiment ABOUT
> Levine
> > and his poetry of the working class a little cloying.
> >
> > K.
> >
> > Quoting Thom424 at aol.com:
> >
> > > Here's that Levine review of WHAT WORK IS. It's from CRAZY RIVER (Ohio).
> > > No. 3.
> > >
> > > I apologize for its length.
> > >
> > > ******************************
> > >
> > > Who Shall Speak for Them?
> > >
> > > Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 77 pp.
> > >
> > > The story of blue-collar America has not appeared in our literature
> often
> > > enough, nor made its way into mainstream anthologies, though it is
> central to
> > > our
> > > American life. Now that part of that way of life has passed, who shall
> tell
> > > its stories? Who shall speak for those people like my father and tell
> the sad
> > >
> > > stories of communities such as Homestead and the dozens of other working
> > > class
> > > communities scattered throughout the industrial East and Midwest? A few
> prose
> > >
> > > writers have told the story: Robert Ward in Red Baker, his novel about
> an
> > > unemployed Baltimore steelworker; Ben Hamper in Rivethead, a nonfiction
> > > account of
> > > life on the GM assembly line; and to some degree Michael Moore has told
> the
> > > story in his controversial film, Roger and Me.
> > >
> > > But the story has not been told often enough nor well enough by our
> poets,
> > > though James Wright did it well when he wrote about the industrial Ohio
> > > Valley,
> > > as does the too-little known Meridel LeSueur, whose portraits of rural
> and
> > > urban workers of the Midwest are as fine as any. Younger contemporaries
> such
> > > as
> > > Jim Daniels and Peter Oresick tell the story well, too. Philip Levine
> comes
> > > closest to our national poetic chronicler of working class America. He
> has
> > > done
> > > so remarkably well over the last thirty years, in such collections as
> Not
> > > This
> > > Pig (1968), They Feed, They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), The Names of the
> Lost
> > > (1976), Ashes: Poems Old and New (1979), One for the Rose (1981), and
> Sweet
> > > Will
> > > (1985). His Selected Poems  (1984) was overlooked by Pulitzer Prize and
> > > National Book Award panels, an unpardonable sin if there ever was one.
> > > Finally
> > > coming to their senses, members of the National Book Award panel awarded
> the
> > > 1991
> > > National Book Award to What Work Is, Levine's fifteenth collection of
> poems.
> > >
> > > Simultaneously published with What Work Is was New Selected Poems, a
> somewhat
> > >
> > > expanded edition of the 1984 Selected Poems.
> > >
> > > What Work Is is a journey through the underworld of American labor,
> beginning
> > >
> > > with Lewis Hines's haunting cover photograph, "Spinner, cotton mill,
> > > 1908-1909," in which a young girl--probably no older than twelve--stares
> > > through us,
> > > as she rests momentarily, from her adult labor and seems to balance
> herself
> > > precariously, one hand on the window sill and the other on the spinning
> mill
> > >
> > > frame. Through her eyes, we enter the bleak history of working class
> America
> > > as
> > > the book charts our course through the Charybdis and Scylla of the
> American
> > > industrial landscape. What Work Is is a meditation on the nature of work
> and
> > > the
> > > ways it consumes our lives. It is about jobs that are done with more
> hand and
> > >
> > > less head and heart, jobs for which we wait with
> > >
> > >           the sad refusal to give in to
> > >           rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
> > >           to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
> > >           a man is waiting who will say "No
> > >           we're not hiring today," for any
> > >           reason he wants.
> > >
> > > It is ironic that so many of us define ourselves by and through the work
> we
> > > do, while within that very work lurks the potential demon which will
> grind us
> > >
> > > down, wear us out, diminish us, if we are not careful.
> > >
> > > The twenty-five poems in the four sections of What Work Is are classic,
> > > mature Levine: mostly stanzaless, seamless free verse lines with a hint
> of
> > > prosody;
> > > words squeezed into verticality like Giacometti sculptures; moody, often
> > > lyrical stories told in the first person voices of generation
> descendants of
> > >
> > > turn-of-the-century eastern and southern European immigrants who
> supplied the
> > > sweat
> > > and brawn for the factories of the Midwest; sharp, sometimes laconic
> voices;
> > >
> > > language that is often flat and conversational; what the poems lack in
> music
> > >
> > > they make up for in the intensity of their honesty and truthfulness,
> which
> > > has
> > > a music of its own making. Cumulatively, these stories assume a
> > > documentary-like quality, with an affect much like reading the
> individual
> > > oral histories in
> > > Studs Terkel's powerful collection, Working.
> > >
> > > As we have come to expect, many of the poems share Detroit as their
> setting,
> > >
> > > another cursive twist of the Levine signature. Levine has always been a
> > > connoisseur of memory. Many of the poems, such as "Growth," a
> Whitmanesque
> > > paean to
> > > work in which a fourteen year old boy is awakened to working life in a
> soap
> > > factory
> > >
> > >           where I hammered and sawed, singing
> > >           my new life of working and earning,
> > >           outside in the fresh air of Detroit
> > >           in 1942, a year of growth
> > >
> > > draw us back to the 1940s and 50s of Levine's teens and early
> adolescence.
> > > Other poems, such as "Fear and Fame" and "Innocence," find ways of
> drawing
> > > hope
> > > and meaning from the numbing, destructive yet vitalizing rigors of work.
> > >
> > > The speakers in the poems shift back and forth between the
> autobiographical
> > > "I" and the persona voices of individual men and women workers;
> likewise, the
> > >
> > > settings shift from the Detroit of Levine's youth to the Fresno,
> California,
> > >
> > > region of his middle years. In "Angus Dei" Levine recalls "[his] little
> > > sister
> > > [creating] the Lamb of God" from "used-up dust mops / and coat hangers,"
> and
> > > in
> > > "Gin" Levine remembers "The first time [he] drank gin" and "thought it
> must
> > > be hair tonic." Perhaps the most stunning poems in the collection, ones
> I
> > > would
> > > rank among the best Levine poems to date, are "My Grave" and "Burned,"
> an
> > > eighteen-page, 600+ line poem whose central metaphor of fire and burning
> > > cauterize the collage-like memories of this autobiographical mid-life
> > > reverie.
> > >
> > > Many Levine poems, like "Every Day Blessing," are mini tour de forces.
> They
> > > begin in ordinary life, filled with the rich, sensual details and
> imagery of
> > >
> > > the common world. Someone is going somewhere, doing something or
> describing
> > > something, usually work or something that has happened at work, and it
> is not
> > > very
> > > important. The quotidian world is rendered in all its harshness and
> > > loveliness. And by the end of the poems, there is a recognition that
> > > something has been
> > > lost or discovered, and that the human spirit is in constant struggle
> with
> > > those forces which would diminish it. Here are the concluding lines of
> "Every
> > >
> > > Day Blessing":
> > >
> > >           Where he's going or where he is
> > >           he doesn't ask himself, he
> > >           doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off
> > >           at the familiar corner, crosses
> > >           the emptying parking lots
> > >           toward Chevy Gear & Axle #3.
> > >           In a few minutes he will hold
> > >           his time card above a clock,
> > >           and he can drop it in
> > >           and hear the moment crunching
> > >           down, or he can not, for
> > >           either way the day will last
> > >           forever. So he lets it fall.
> > >           If he feels the elusive calm
> > >           his father spoke of and searched
> > >           for all his short life, there's
> > >           no way of telling, for now he's
> > >           laughing among them, older men
> > >           and kids. He's saying, "Damn,
> > >           we've got it made." He's
> > >           lighting up or chewing with
> > >           others, thousands of miles
> > >           from their forgotten homes, each
> > >           and every one his father's son.
> > >
> > > No American writer writes about the working class with as much clarity,
> > > integrity, dignity and empathy as Philip Levine. When you read a book of
> > > Levine's
> > > poetry, you are fooled into thinking you are reading a book of poems
> about
> > > invented lives, but when you reach its end, you realize and understand
> that
> > > your
> > > father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt could be speaking
> these
> > > words, thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions. Such has
> been--and
> > >
> > > continues to be--the strength of Philip Levine's poetry.
> > >
> > > Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to discover the poetry of Philip
> Levine. I
> > >
> > > continue to depend on Levine to tell the story of working class
> Americans. In
> > >
> > > Levine's poetry, I find the story of my father's life, told with honesty
> and
> > >
> > > care and compassion. I want to send Levine's books to all the managers
> in
> > > America's factories and work places and tell them to put down their
> Total
> > > Quality
> > > Management manuals and listen to the voices speaking through Philip
> Levine's
> > >
> > > poems.   According to Levine, work is not the struggle to get a job done
> and
> > >
> > > turn a profit, but rather the struggle to remain human in the face of
> the
> > > grinding pressure to get a job done and turn a profit.   Until the
> Reagans
> > > and the
> > > Iacoccas and the Roger Smiths and the other managers of America
> understand
> > > this,
> > > we must stop using the word ??ototal??? as a way of characterizing
> > > management.
> > > We will not have ??oTQM??? until we understand:
> > >
> > >           How long it has been since you told [your bother]
> > >           you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
> > >           opened your eyes wide and said those words,
> > >           and maybe kissed his cheek?   You??Tve never
> > >           done something so simple, so obvious
> > >           not because you??Tre too young or too dumb,
> > >           not because you??Tre jealous or even mean
> > >           or incapable of crying in
> > >           the presence of another man, no,
> > >           just because you don??Tt know what work is.
> > >
> > > Reading Levine, I am reminded of the story Yeats tells in his Memoirs
> about
> > > meeting the Irish poet and dramatist John Millington Synge in a Paris
> hotel
> > > in
> > > 1896, where the twenty-five year old Synge was trying to write critical
> > > articles about French Literature and about Racine, specifically.   Yeats
> told
> > > Synge
> > > to give up criticism??"that Arthur Symons would always be a better
> critic of
> > >
> > > French literature??"and go to the Aran Islands, where Yeats himself had
> just
> > >
> > > returned, ??oand find expression for a life that is lacked.???   Wisely,
> > > Synge took
> > > Yeats??T advice.
> > >
> > > For more than thirty years, Philip Levine has been finding language and
> > > giving expression to a life and people who lack it.   Nowhere has this
> life
> > > been
> > > expressed so vividly, so powerfully, so honestly as in the poetry of
> Philip
> > > Levine, for as he says in ??oComing Close,??? ??oMake no mistake, this
> place
> > > has a
> > > language.???   Make no mistake: Philip Levine is one of our great
> national
> > > treasures.
> > >
> > >                                         **********************
> > > Thom Tammaro
> > > Moorhead, MN
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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 mandolin at mac.com  Sun Sep  5 13:02:45 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 13:02:45 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
In-Reply-To: <00b001c49357$a3ff9390$350b9942@Helen>
References: <20040905010958.8589.qmail@web52602.mail.yahoo.com>
	<00b001c49357$a3ff9390$350b9942@Helen>
Message-ID: <681BFFAC-FF5D-11D8-AE71-000393C29586@mac.com>


On Sep 5, 2004, at 10:50 AM, Helen Ruggieri wrote:

> If you're an adjunct teaching six comp. sections at three different 
> colleges making $20,000 or so in a good year
> are you working class?? Is this an economic classification, a "job " 
> classification
> ?
> what?


It's both class and money, and the two have have only a passing 
acquaintance.

I'm probably not the only one on this list, but I'll bet there aren't 
many who, like me, have moved in and out of  "professional" work in 
their 30s and 40s.  I'm 51, and three years ago I washed dishes for a 
living after 4 years writing software. In the mid-90s I framed houses, 
roofed, waited tables, taught one year of middle school Spanish, was a 
mechanic on large commercial construction sites, did the CAD for the 
skin of the Durham County jail. In the 80s I taught freshman comp and 
creative writing and then did my first stint in trelecom softrware. 
After my 1974 BA from Kenyon I waited tables for a year and then worked 
two years as a tool-maker's apprentice.

I ate better framing (my favorite work) than I did teaching, but when I 
was framing the people I met casually thought I was stupid. If I had a 
beer I was a drunk. When I was teaching for $1250 a section those same 
kinds of people thought I was smart and were glad to have a drink with 
me (usually not a Bud). Now that I write software for the Navy they 
assume I'm good with numbers but not an interesting person.

There was a good piece on NPR today on this subject:

  http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3890457

>  ----- Original Message -----
>  From: Jeff Newberry
> To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views
> Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 9:09 PM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
>
> I suppose I was drawn to Levine's poetry because I could identify with 
> so much of it.? I grew up in a town that rotted in the shadow of a 
> paper mill, and when it closed, my hometown pretty much died.? Of my 
> friends, I was only one to make it out and escape the shadow of that 
> mill.
> ?
> But so what if I romanticize my past in my own work?? So what if 
> Levine romanticizes the working class?? I don't see a problem here.? 
> It's not, as David pointed out, that he really wants us to believe 
> that he still works at one of those car factories.? He finds 
> transcendence in that type of work using images drawn from his past 
> (and invented.? Read *The Bread of Time*.? Levine's pretty open about 
> the uses of fiction in his work).
> ?
> Now--are college professors working class?? Geez.? I brought up 
> working class on this list once and was almost chased out of the 
> country.? I teach a 5/5 load.? I chair a committee and advise a 
> college quiz team.? I teach 2 in the summer.? 90% of what I teach is 
> freshman comp, the very dregs of the English department.? However, I 
> enjoy what I do.? I really love teaching, so am I working class?? Does 
> loving what you do have anything to do with your class?? And hell no, 
> I'd never trade places with those people at Wal-mart.? I was a butcher 
> for a time in my early 20s.? No way in hell would I go back.? I also 
> used to unload produce trucks.? No way in hell would I go back.?

As I said above, it's instructive to do just that.

Michael



From hruggier at localnet.com  Sun Sep  5 14:30:36 2004
From: hruggier at localnet.com (Helen Ruggieri)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 14:30:36 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
References: <20040905010958.8589.qmail@web52602.mail.yahoo.com><00b001c49357$a3ff9390$350b9942@Helen>
	<681BFFAC-FF5D-11D8-AE71-000393C29586@mac.com>
Message-ID: <004501c49376$713a32c0$f1099942@Helen>


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Snider" <mandolin at mac.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 1:02 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
Meet your mother -
waitress, reporter, editor, substitute, High school English teacher, clerk
at W.T. Grants (an early Walmart), periodicals runner in a library, file
clerk, steno, secretary, technical buyer for welding and piping, adjunct,
instructor, assistant professor. . . .
h

Bruce Springsteen gives money to the Working Class Center at the U of
Youngstown.

>
> On Sep 5, 2004, at 10:50 AM, Helen Ruggieri wrote:
>
> > If you're an adjunct teaching six comp. sections at three different
> > colleges making $20,000 or so in a good year
> > are you working class? Is this an economic classification, a "job "
> > classification
> >
> > what?
>
>
> It's both class and money, and the two have have only a passing
> acquaintance.
>
> I'm probably not the only one on this list, but I'll bet there aren't
> many who, like me, have moved in and out of  "professional" work in
> their 30s and 40s.  I'm 51, and three years ago I washed dishes for a
> living after 4 years writing software. In the mid-90s I framed houses,
> roofed, waited tables, taught one year of middle school Spanish, was a
> mechanic on large commercial construction sites, did the CAD for the
> skin of the Durham County jail. In the 80s I taught freshman comp and
> creative writing and then did my first stint in trelecom softrware.
> After my 1974 BA from Kenyon I waited tables for a year and then worked
> two years as a tool-maker's apprentice.
>
> I ate better framing (my favorite work) than I did teaching, but when I
> was framing the people I met casually thought I was stupid. If I had a
> beer I was a drunk. When I was teaching for $1250 a section those same
> kinds of people thought I was smart and were glad to have a drink with
> me (usually not a Bud). Now that I write software for the Navy they
> assume I'm good with numbers but not an interesting person.
>
> There was a good piece on NPR today on this subject:
>
>   http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3890457
>
> >  ----- Original Message -----
> >  From: Jeff Newberry
> > To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views
> > Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 9:09 PM
> > Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
> >
> > I suppose I was drawn to Levine's poetry because I could identify with
> > so much of it. I grew up in a town that rotted in the shadow of a
> > paper mill, and when it closed, my hometown pretty much died. Of my
> > friends, I was only one to make it out and escape the shadow of that
> > mill.
> >
> > But so what if I romanticize my past in my own work? So what if
> > Levine romanticizes the working class? I don't see a problem here.
> > It's not, as David pointed out, that he really wants us to believe
> > that he still works at one of those car factories. He finds
> > transcendence in that type of work using images drawn from his past
> > (and invented. Read *The Bread of Time*. Levine's pretty open about
> > the uses of fiction in his work).
> >
> > Now--are college professors working class? Geez. I brought up
> > working class on this list once and was almost chased out of the
> > country. I teach a 5/5 load. I chair a committee and advise a
> > college quiz team. I teach 2 in the summer. 90% of what I teach is
> > freshman comp, the very dregs of the English department. However, I
> > enjoy what I do. I really love teaching, so am I working class? Does
> > loving what you do have anything to do with your class? And hell no,
> > I'd never trade places with those people at Wal-mart. I was a butcher
> > for a time in my early 20s. No way in hell would I go back. I also
> > used to unload produce trucks. No way in hell would I go back.
>
> As I said above, it's instructive to do just that.
>
> Michael
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>




From mandolin at mac.com  Sun Sep  5 14:49:43 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 14:49:43 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
In-Reply-To: <004501c49376$713a32c0$f1099942@Helen>
References: <20040905010958.8589.qmail@web52602.mail.yahoo.com>
	<00b001c49357$a3ff9390$350b9942@Helen>
	<681BFFAC-FF5D-11D8-AE71-000393C29586@mac.com>
	<004501c49376$713a32c0$f1099942@Helen>
Message-ID: <59EC2CE0-FF6C-11D8-AE71-000393C29586@mac.com>


On Sep 5, 2004, at 2:30 PM, Helen Ruggieri wrote:

> Meet your mother -
> waitress, reporter, editor, substitute, High school English teacher, 
> clerk
> at W.T. Grants (an early Walmart), periodicals runner in a library, 
> file
> clerk, steno, secretary, technical buyer for welding and piping, 
> adjunct,
> instructor, assistant professor. . . .
> h

I knew there was a reason you seem so relatively sensible.




From tad at opus40.org  Sun Sep  5 16:12:24 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 16:12:24 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
References: <8.56564e7e.2e6b5de3@aol.com><1094334142.413a36beef25d@mail-www3.oit.umass.edu><001d01c492cc$ce1c95a0$cfab3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<1094403466.413b458a40163@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <001a01c49384$b26e5d80$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

The experiences of our youth are powerful, and the most powerful among them
don't recede quickly. Levine continues to write what he has to write - these
are still the itches that need scratching.





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" <jkok at hfa.umass.edu>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 12:57 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review


Dear Anny and Chris,

There is so much richness now in all of this dialogue...

I guess as I read the responses of others,it clarifies my own thinking.  As
a,
forgive the cliche, single working mother (age fifty, kids 11 and
12 )working a
low-paying academic administrative job and depending on renting the
apartment
in my house and the continued faithful payments of a churlish ex-husband, it
may be the case that I get a little prickly around matters of class, having
been raised as quite the Irish princess (long ago) now living in a world
that
is utterly precarious.  So it could be that this sense of seperation between
the artist/subject and the "working class person"/object - may rub me a
little
thin.  Since I am both.  Your point, therefore about the time difference in
the
worlds that he is writing about, is well taken.  Then there was more of a
marked difference between groups of people and their sensibilities and
experiences than now, when it seems, MOST of us feel ourselves to be
heartily
enmeshed in the working class.  My daily struggle is to find beauty and
inspiration and simply MY OWN THOUGHTS in the midst of many, MANY dull
chores
ranging from keeping track of language students to driving to sports
practices,
Stop & Shop, Daves Pet and Soda world, etc. etc.

I have never read a poem of Phil Levine's where I felt embarassed by his
rendition of any kind of situation.  But I do feel that in general there is
a
delicacy involved in terms of, well, appropriating material on an
indefinitie
basis when one is in a more cloistered, luxurious situation.  The dilemma of
Bruce Springsteen, now that he is utterly rich and successful.  He no longer
lives in that Jersey world - how can he honor it and respect the struggles
of
those people when they are no longer his struggles.  He seems to do it
well -
and with consciousness of his own situation  as now being outside.

And finally, I watch the temptation (and I do not necessarily accuse PL of
this
since, in truth, I have not followed all of his career) of poets making
a "career" out of one thing.  Being a Vietnam vet or having an incestuous
father relationship or having grown up poor - there is so much to write in
all
of these landscapes but of course, the price of not moving on when it is
time -
or the temptation to write them to death out of not being able to match the
intensity of those experiences in other areas...for me it's always something
to
watch.  It ups the ante for having to keep the present alive.

But finally, the fact of the love and deep usefulness of Levine's work
speaks
for itself, I would think.

Best to you, Kerry
Quoting Anny Ballardini <anny.ballardini at tin.it>:

> Hi Jane,
>
> your mail is so full of inputs that I feel compelled to answer something.
>
> A couple of days ago, it was a hot sunny day and it slowed me down when I
> got outside, hit by the heat, and the colors, and life. I ran to the small
> supermarket after a meeting and ended up being the last customer. The lady
> at the cash register was a girl, as soon as she gave me my change she
opened
> the register and started counting the money. That is where I thought of
all
> her problems, if anything was missing, her anxiousness in wanting to get
out
> of there, the repetitiveness of her job. And of how lucky I was, dumb and
> staring at the beauty of the day, which I was noticing for the first time
at
> 7 p.m.
>
> With Philip Levine you will have to go back almost a century. Conditions
> were hard, and yes, I believe in some of his poetry.
>
> Now things are different. I remember one kid who didn't study but became
an
> electrician or a plumber, he ended up with a wonderful cottage, a great
car,
> while I am still here with my dusty books, aloof, envied by many, and with
> little but thoughts. On the other hand, I would have been terribly lost
> behind a cash register, I don't like to drink, and parties have become
> boring for me.
>
> So yes, I am with you, and I like it where I am, take care,
>
> Anny Ballardini
> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
>
>
> From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" <jkok at hfa.umass.edu>
> Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 11:42 PM
>
>
> > Forgive me for what may seem like an irreverent question, but when
> exactly,
> > during this thirty year period of writing about the working class, did
> Phil
> > Levine, um, start to teach in the university system. My impression, and
I
> am
> > thoroughly willing to be wrong, is that he has been fairly OUT of the
> working
> > class for along time...  That his last factory job was, maybe, in the
> distant
> > past.
> >
> > I guess I have this sense, amidst we enlightened artists looking
> > sympathetically into the world of the factory workers, etc. is there is,
> yes,
> > MUCH empathy, tons of sympathy, and an utter blind spot to the presence
of
> > SATISFACTIONS and depth in those lives, amidst all the damn struggles.
> Dear
> > God, I feel sorry for the doctors of Westchester!!  The housewives of
> Essex.
> > And MANY of the papery academics I see drifting around Amherst.  I go to
> Wal-
> > Mart from time to time and look with ENVY at the lady behind the cash
> register
> > who seems to require much LESS of life than I do and thus has a greater
> chance
> > of happiness.  I dunno, I guess I just find some of the sentiment ABOUT
> Levine
> > and his poetry of the working class a little cloying.
> >
> > K.
> >
> > Quoting Thom424 at aol.com:
> >
> > > Here's that Levine review of WHAT WORK IS. It's from CRAZY RIVER
(Ohio).
> > > No. 3.
> > >
> > > I apologize for its length.
> > >
> > > ******************************
> > >
> > > Who Shall Speak for Them?
> > >
> > > Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 77 pp.
> > >
> > > The story of blue-collar America has not appeared in our literature
> often
> > > enough, nor made its way into mainstream anthologies, though it is
> central to
> > > our
> > > American life. Now that part of that way of life has passed, who shall
> tell
> > > its stories? Who shall speak for those people like my father and tell
> the sad
> > >
> > > stories of communities such as Homestead and the dozens of other
working
> > > class
> > > communities scattered throughout the industrial East and Midwest? A
few
> prose
> > >
> > > writers have told the story: Robert Ward in Red Baker, his novel about
> an
> > > unemployed Baltimore steelworker; Ben Hamper in Rivethead, a
nonfiction
> > > account of
> > > life on the GM assembly line; and to some degree Michael Moore has
told
> the
> > > story in his controversial film, Roger and Me.
> > >
> > > But the story has not been told often enough nor well enough by our
> poets,
> > > though James Wright did it well when he wrote about the industrial
Ohio
> > > Valley,
> > > as does the too-little known Meridel LeSueur, whose portraits of rural
> and
> > > urban workers of the Midwest are as fine as any. Younger
contemporaries
> such
> > > as
> > > Jim Daniels and Peter Oresick tell the story well, too. Philip Levine
> comes
> > > closest to our national poetic chronicler of working class America. He
> has
> > > done
> > > so remarkably well over the last thirty years, in such collections as
> Not
> > > This
> > > Pig (1968), They Feed, They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), The Names of the
> Lost
> > > (1976), Ashes: Poems Old and New (1979), One for the Rose (1981), and
> Sweet
> > > Will
> > > (1985). His Selected Poems  (1984) was overlooked by Pulitzer Prize
and
> > > National Book Award panels, an unpardonable sin if there ever was one.
> > > Finally
> > > coming to their senses, members of the National Book Award panel
awarded
> the
> > > 1991
> > > National Book Award to What Work Is, Levine's fifteenth collection of
> poems.
> > >
> > > Simultaneously published with What Work Is was New Selected Poems, a
> somewhat
> > >
> > > expanded edition of the 1984 Selected Poems.
> > >
> > > What Work Is is a journey through the underworld of American labor,
> beginning
> > >
> > > with Lewis Hines's haunting cover photograph, "Spinner, cotton mill,
> > > 1908-1909," in which a young girl--probably no older than
twelve--stares
> > > through us,
> > > as she rests momentarily, from her adult labor and seems to balance
> herself
> > > precariously, one hand on the window sill and the other on the
spinning
> mill
> > >
> > > frame. Through her eyes, we enter the bleak history of working class
> America
> > > as
> > > the book charts our course through the Charybdis and Scylla of the
> American
> > > industrial landscape. What Work Is is a meditation on the nature of
work
> and
> > > the
> > > ways it consumes our lives. It is about jobs that are done with more
> hand and
> > >
> > > less head and heart, jobs for which we wait with
> > >
> > >           the sad refusal to give in to
> > >           rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
> > >           to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
> > >           a man is waiting who will say "No
> > >           we're not hiring today," for any
> > >           reason he wants.
> > >
> > > It is ironic that so many of us define ourselves by and through the
work
> we
> > > do, while within that very work lurks the potential demon which will
> grind us
> > >
> > > down, wear us out, diminish us, if we are not careful.
> > >
> > > The twenty-five poems in the four sections of What Work Is are
classic,
> > > mature Levine: mostly stanzaless, seamless free verse lines with a
hint
> of
> > > prosody;
> > > words squeezed into verticality like Giacometti sculptures; moody,
often
> > > lyrical stories told in the first person voices of generation
> descendants of
> > >
> > > turn-of-the-century eastern and southern European immigrants who
> supplied the
> > > sweat
> > > and brawn for the factories of the Midwest; sharp, sometimes laconic
> voices;
> > >
> > > language that is often flat and conversational; what the poems lack in
> music
> > >
> > > they make up for in the intensity of their honesty and truthfulness,
> which
> > > has
> > > a music of its own making. Cumulatively, these stories assume a
> > > documentary-like quality, with an affect much like reading the
> individual
> > > oral histories in
> > > Studs Terkel's powerful collection, Working.
> > >
> > > As we have come to expect, many of the poems share Detroit as their
> setting,
> > >
> > > another cursive twist of the Levine signature. Levine has always been
a
> > > connoisseur of memory. Many of the poems, such as "Growth," a
> Whitmanesque
> > > paean to
> > > work in which a fourteen year old boy is awakened to working life in a
> soap
> > > factory
> > >
> > >           where I hammered and sawed, singing
> > >           my new life of working and earning,
> > >           outside in the fresh air of Detroit
> > >           in 1942, a year of growth
> > >
> > > draw us back to the 1940s and 50s of Levine's teens and early
> adolescence.
> > > Other poems, such as "Fear and Fame" and "Innocence," find ways of
> drawing
> > > hope
> > > and meaning from the numbing, destructive yet vitalizing rigors of
work.
> > >
> > > The speakers in the poems shift back and forth between the
> autobiographical
> > > "I" and the persona voices of individual men and women workers;
> likewise, the
> > >
> > > settings shift from the Detroit of Levine's youth to the Fresno,
> California,
> > >
> > > region of his middle years. In "Angus Dei" Levine recalls "[his]
little
> > > sister
> > > [creating] the Lamb of God" from "used-up dust mops / and coat
hangers,"
> and
> > > in
> > > "Gin" Levine remembers "The first time [he] drank gin" and "thought it
> must
> > > be hair tonic." Perhaps the most stunning poems in the collection,
ones
> I
> > > would
> > > rank among the best Levine poems to date, are "My Grave" and "Burned,"
> an
> > > eighteen-page, 600+ line poem whose central metaphor of fire and
burning
> > > cauterize the collage-like memories of this autobiographical mid-life
> > > reverie.
> > >
> > > Many Levine poems, like "Every Day Blessing," are mini tour de forces.
> They
> > > begin in ordinary life, filled with the rich, sensual details and
> imagery of
> > >
> > > the common world. Someone is going somewhere, doing something or
> describing
> > > something, usually work or something that has happened at work, and it
> is not
> > > very
> > > important. The quotidian world is rendered in all its harshness and
> > > loveliness. And by the end of the poems, there is a recognition that
> > > something has been
> > > lost or discovered, and that the human spirit is in constant struggle
> with
> > > those forces which would diminish it. Here are the concluding lines of
> "Every
> > >
> > > Day Blessing":
> > >
> > >           Where he's going or where he is
> > >           he doesn't ask himself, he
> > >           doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off
> > >           at the familiar corner, crosses
> > >           the emptying parking lots
> > >           toward Chevy Gear & Axle #3.
> > >           In a few minutes he will hold
> > >           his time card above a clock,
> > >           and he can drop it in
> > >           and hear the moment crunching
> > >           down, or he can not, for
> > >           either way the day will last
> > >           forever. So he lets it fall.
> > >           If he feels the elusive calm
> > >           his father spoke of and searched
> > >           for all his short life, there's
> > >           no way of telling, for now he's
> > >           laughing among them, older men
> > >           and kids. He's saying, "Damn,
> > >           we've got it made." He's
> > >           lighting up or chewing with
> > >           others, thousands of miles
> > >           from their forgotten homes, each
> > >           and every one his father's son.
> > >
> > > No American writer writes about the working class with as much
clarity,
> > > integrity, dignity and empathy as Philip Levine. When you read a book
of
> > > Levine's
> > > poetry, you are fooled into thinking you are reading a book of poems
> about
> > > invented lives, but when you reach its end, you realize and understand
> that
> > > your
> > > father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt could be speaking
> these
> > > words, thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions. Such has
> been--and
> > >
> > > continues to be--the strength of Philip Levine's poetry.
> > >
> > > Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to discover the poetry of Philip
> Levine. I
> > >
> > > continue to depend on Levine to tell the story of working class
> Americans. In
> > >
> > > Levine's poetry, I find the story of my father's life, told with
honesty
> and
> > >
> > > care and compassion. I want to send Levine's books to all the managers
> in
> > > America's factories and work places and tell them to put down their
> Total
> > > Quality
> > > Management manuals and listen to the voices speaking through Philip
> Levine's
> > >
> > > poems.   According to Levine, work is not the struggle to get a job
done
> and
> > >
> > > turn a profit, but rather the struggle to remain human in the face of
> the
> > > grinding pressure to get a job done and turn a profit.   Until the
> Reagans
> > > and the
> > > Iacoccas and the Roger Smiths and the other managers of America
> understand
> > > this,
> > > we must stop using the word ??ototal??? as a way of characterizing
> > > management.
> > > We will not have ??oTQM??? until we understand:
> > >
> > >           How long it has been since you told [your bother]
> > >           you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
> > >           opened your eyes wide and said those words,
> > >           and maybe kissed his cheek?   You??Tve never
> > >           done something so simple, so obvious
> > >           not because you??Tre too young or too dumb,
> > >           not because you??Tre jealous or even mean
> > >           or incapable of crying in
> > >           the presence of another man, no,
> > >           just because you don??Tt know what work is.
> > >
> > > Reading Levine, I am reminded of the story Yeats tells in his Memoirs
> about
> > > meeting the Irish poet and dramatist John Millington Synge in a Paris
> hotel
> > > in
> > > 1896, where the twenty-five year old Synge was trying to write
critical
> > > articles about French Literature and about Racine, specifically.
Yeats
> told
> > > Synge
> > > to give up criticism??"that Arthur Symons would always be a better
> critic of
> > >
> > > French literature??"and go to the Aran Islands, where Yeats himself
had
> just
> > >
> > > returned, ??oand find expression for a life that is lacked.???
Wisely,
> > > Synge took
> > > Yeats??T advice.
> > >
> > > For more than thirty years, Philip Levine has been finding language
and
> > > giving expression to a life and people who lack it.   Nowhere has this
> life
> > > been
> > > expressed so vividly, so powerfully, so honestly as in the poetry of
> Philip
> > > Levine, for as he says in ??oComing Close,??? ??oMake no mistake, this
> place
> > > has a
> > > language.???   Make no mistake: Philip Levine is one of our great
> national
> > > treasures.
> > >
> > >                                         **********************
> > > Thom Tammaro
> > > Moorhead, MN
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
>



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From tad at opus40.org  Sun Sep  5 16:15:58 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 16:15:58 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
References: <20040905010958.8589.qmail@web52602.mail.yahoo.com><00b001c49357$a3ff9390$350b9942@Helen>
	<681BFFAC-FF5D-11D8-AE71-000393C29586@mac.com>
Message-ID: <003c01c49385$32931550$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Michael - very perceptive on how we're perceived. I think you've got it just
right. And as awful as out lives on the fringes of academia may be, I think
many of us have the perception - probably correct - that we can't write too
much out that experience that will speak to anyone outside of the
experience. We can't make metaphor out of it.

Tad

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Snider" <mandolin at mac.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 1:02 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review



On Sep 5, 2004, at 10:50 AM, Helen Ruggieri wrote:

> If you're an adjunct teaching six comp. sections at three different
> colleges making $20,000 or so in a good year
> are you working class? Is this an economic classification, a "job "
> classification
>
> what?


It's both class and money, and the two have have only a passing
acquaintance.

I'm probably not the only one on this list, but I'll bet there aren't
many who, like me, have moved in and out of  "professional" work in
their 30s and 40s.  I'm 51, and three years ago I washed dishes for a
living after 4 years writing software. In the mid-90s I framed houses,
roofed, waited tables, taught one year of middle school Spanish, was a
mechanic on large commercial construction sites, did the CAD for the
skin of the Durham County jail. In the 80s I taught freshman comp and
creative writing and then did my first stint in trelecom softrware.
After my 1974 BA from Kenyon I waited tables for a year and then worked
two years as a tool-maker's apprentice.

I ate better framing (my favorite work) than I did teaching, but when I
was framing the people I met casually thought I was stupid. If I had a
beer I was a drunk. When I was teaching for $1250 a section those same
kinds of people thought I was smart and were glad to have a drink with
me (usually not a Bud). Now that I write software for the Navy they
assume I'm good with numbers but not an interesting person.

There was a good piece on NPR today on this subject:

  http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3890457

>  ----- Original Message -----
>  From: Jeff Newberry
> To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views
> Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 9:09 PM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
>
> I suppose I was drawn to Levine's poetry because I could identify with
> so much of it. I grew up in a town that rotted in the shadow of a
> paper mill, and when it closed, my hometown pretty much died. Of my
> friends, I was only one to make it out and escape the shadow of that
> mill.
>
> But so what if I romanticize my past in my own work? So what if
> Levine romanticizes the working class? I don't see a problem here.
> It's not, as David pointed out, that he really wants us to believe
> that he still works at one of those car factories. He finds
> transcendence in that type of work using images drawn from his past
> (and invented. Read *The Bread of Time*. Levine's pretty open about
> the uses of fiction in his work).
>
> Now--are college professors working class? Geez. I brought up
> working class on this list once and was almost chased out of the
> country. I teach a 5/5 load. I chair a committee and advise a
> college quiz team. I teach 2 in the summer. 90% of what I teach is
> freshman comp, the very dregs of the English department. However, I
> enjoy what I do. I really love teaching, so am I working class? Does
> loving what you do have anything to do with your class? And hell no,
> I'd never trade places with those people at Wal-mart. I was a butcher
> for a time in my early 20s. No way in hell would I go back. I also
> used to unload produce trucks. No way in hell would I go back.

As I said above, it's instructive to do just that.

Michael

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From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Sun Sep  5 17:30:30 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 16:30:30 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Levine
Message-ID: <s13b3f3b.005@mail.highland.edu>

Subbing up to the List. Hello to all.

Chris S. (hi there, hope the leg is better):

I wonder if Auden's observation that "liking" one's occupation has
nothing to do with class is at all apposite to Moore's observation that
one may not like poetry and still be a poet. Same with a poem, Spicer
seems to show: A poem can perfectly well not like itself and still be a
poem... A very mysterious poem. Poetry as apophasis. Flagellate poetry.

Kent


From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sun Sep  5 17:47:37 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 23:47:37 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
References: <8.56564e7e.2e6b5de3@aol.com><1094334142.413a36beef25d@mail-www3.oit.umass.edu><001d01c492cc$ce1c95a0$cfab3452@yourpk9x5fuc06><1094403466.413b458a40163@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
	<001a01c49384$b26e5d80$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <008801c49391$f66e47e0$05a93252@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Yes, I also totally agree with this, and with Kent Johnson, and with Snider,
and with Helen,
do I have a personality?

Anny

From: "The Old Mole" <tad at opus40.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 10:12 PM


> The experiences of our youth are powerful, and the most powerful among
them
> don't recede quickly. Levine continues to write what he has to write -
these
> are still the itches that need scratching.
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" <jkok at hfa.umass.edu>
> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 12:57 PM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
>
>
> Dear Anny and Chris,
>
> There is so much richness now in all of this dialogue...
>
> I guess as I read the responses of others,it clarifies my own thinking.
As
> a,
> forgive the cliche, single working mother (age fifty, kids 11 and
> 12 )working a
> low-paying academic administrative job and depending on renting the
> apartment
> in my house and the continued faithful payments of a churlish ex-husband,
it
> may be the case that I get a little prickly around matters of class,
having
> been raised as quite the Irish princess (long ago) now living in a world
> that
> is utterly precarious.  So it could be that this sense of seperation
between
> the artist/subject and the "working class person"/object - may rub me a
> little
> thin.  Since I am both.  Your point, therefore about the time difference
in
> the
> worlds that he is writing about, is well taken.  Then there was more of a
> marked difference between groups of people and their sensibilities and
> experiences than now, when it seems, MOST of us feel ourselves to be
> heartily
> enmeshed in the working class.  My daily struggle is to find beauty and
> inspiration and simply MY OWN THOUGHTS in the midst of many, MANY dull
> chores
> ranging from keeping track of language students to driving to sports
> practices,
> Stop & Shop, Daves Pet and Soda world, etc. etc.
>
> I have never read a poem of Phil Levine's where I felt embarassed by his
> rendition of any kind of situation.  But I do feel that in general there
is
> a
> delicacy involved in terms of, well, appropriating material on an
> indefinitie
> basis when one is in a more cloistered, luxurious situation.  The dilemma
of
> Bruce Springsteen, now that he is utterly rich and successful.  He no
longer
> lives in that Jersey world - how can he honor it and respect the struggles
> of
> those people when they are no longer his struggles.  He seems to do it
> well -
> and with consciousness of his own situation  as now being outside.
>
> And finally, I watch the temptation (and I do not necessarily accuse PL of
> this
> since, in truth, I have not followed all of his career) of poets making
> a "career" out of one thing.  Being a Vietnam vet or having an incestuous
> father relationship or having grown up poor - there is so much to write in
> all
> of these landscapes but of course, the price of not moving on when it is
> time -
> or the temptation to write them to death out of not being able to match
the
> intensity of those experiences in other areas...for me it's always
something
> to
> watch.  It ups the ante for having to keep the present alive.
>
> But finally, the fact of the love and deep usefulness of Levine's work
> speaks
> for itself, I would think.
>
> Best to you, Kerry
> Quoting Anny Ballardini <anny.ballardini at tin.it>:
>
> > Hi Jane,
> >
> > your mail is so full of inputs that I feel compelled to answer
something.
> >
> > A couple of days ago, it was a hot sunny day and it slowed me down when
I
> > got outside, hit by the heat, and the colors, and life. I ran to the
small
> > supermarket after a meeting and ended up being the last customer. The
lady
> > at the cash register was a girl, as soon as she gave me my change she
> opened
> > the register and started counting the money. That is where I thought of
> all
> > her problems, if anything was missing, her anxiousness in wanting to get
> out
> > of there, the repetitiveness of her job. And of how lucky I was, dumb
and
> > staring at the beauty of the day, which I was noticing for the first
time
> at
> > 7 p.m.
> >
> > With Philip Levine you will have to go back almost a century. Conditions
> > were hard, and yes, I believe in some of his poetry.
> >
> > Now things are different. I remember one kid who didn't study but became
> an
> > electrician or a plumber, he ended up with a wonderful cottage, a great
> car,
> > while I am still here with my dusty books, aloof, envied by many, and
with
> > little but thoughts. On the other hand, I would have been terribly lost
> > behind a cash register, I don't like to drink, and parties have become
> > boring for me.
> >
> > So yes, I am with you, and I like it where I am, take care,
> >
> > Anny Ballardini
> > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
> >
> >
> > From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" <jkok at hfa.umass.edu>
> > Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 11:42 PM
> >
> >
> > > Forgive me for what may seem like an irreverent question, but when
> > exactly,
> > > during this thirty year period of writing about the working class, did
> > Phil
> > > Levine, um, start to teach in the university system. My impression,
and
> I
> > am
> > > thoroughly willing to be wrong, is that he has been fairly OUT of the
> > working
> > > class for along time...  That his last factory job was, maybe, in the
> > distant
> > > past.
> > >
> > > I guess I have this sense, amidst we enlightened artists looking
> > > sympathetically into the world of the factory workers, etc. is there
is,
> > yes,
> > > MUCH empathy, tons of sympathy, and an utter blind spot to the
presence
> of
> > > SATISFACTIONS and depth in those lives, amidst all the damn struggles.
> > Dear
> > > God, I feel sorry for the doctors of Westchester!!  The housewives of
> > Essex.
> > > And MANY of the papery academics I see drifting around Amherst.  I go
to
> > Wal-
> > > Mart from time to time and look with ENVY at the lady behind the cash
> > register
> > > who seems to require much LESS of life than I do and thus has a
greater
> > chance
> > > of happiness.  I dunno, I guess I just find some of the sentiment
ABOUT
> > Levine
> > > and his poetry of the working class a little cloying.
> > >
> > > K.
> > >
> > > Quoting Thom424 at aol.com:
> > >
> > > > Here's that Levine review of WHAT WORK IS. It's from CRAZY RIVER
> (Ohio).
> > > > No. 3.
> > > >
> > > > I apologize for its length.
> > > >
> > > > ******************************
> > > >
> > > > Who Shall Speak for Them?
> > > >
> > > > Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 77 pp.
> > > >
> > > > The story of blue-collar America has not appeared in our literature
> > often
> > > > enough, nor made its way into mainstream anthologies, though it is
> > central to
> > > > our
> > > > American life. Now that part of that way of life has passed, who
shall
> > tell
> > > > its stories? Who shall speak for those people like my father and
tell
> > the sad
> > > >
> > > > stories of communities such as Homestead and the dozens of other
> working
> > > > class
> > > > communities scattered throughout the industrial East and Midwest? A
> few
> > prose
> > > >
> > > > writers have told the story: Robert Ward in Red Baker, his novel
about
> > an
> > > > unemployed Baltimore steelworker; Ben Hamper in Rivethead, a
> nonfiction
> > > > account of
> > > > life on the GM assembly line; and to some degree Michael Moore has
> told
> > the
> > > > story in his controversial film, Roger and Me.
> > > >
> > > > But the story has not been told often enough nor well enough by our
> > poets,
> > > > though James Wright did it well when he wrote about the industrial
> Ohio
> > > > Valley,
> > > > as does the too-little known Meridel LeSueur, whose portraits of
rural
> > and
> > > > urban workers of the Midwest are as fine as any. Younger
> contemporaries
> > such
> > > > as
> > > > Jim Daniels and Peter Oresick tell the story well, too. Philip
Levine
> > comes
> > > > closest to our national poetic chronicler of working class America.
He
> > has
> > > > done
> > > > so remarkably well over the last thirty years, in such collections
as
> > Not
> > > > This
> > > > Pig (1968), They Feed, They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), The Names of
the
> > Lost
> > > > (1976), Ashes: Poems Old and New (1979), One for the Rose (1981),
and
> > Sweet
> > > > Will
> > > > (1985). His Selected Poems  (1984) was overlooked by Pulitzer Prize
> and
> > > > National Book Award panels, an unpardonable sin if there ever was
one.
> > > > Finally
> > > > coming to their senses, members of the National Book Award panel
> awarded
> > the
> > > > 1991
> > > > National Book Award to What Work Is, Levine's fifteenth collection
of
> > poems.
> > > >
> > > > Simultaneously published with What Work Is was New Selected Poems, a
> > somewhat
> > > >
> > > > expanded edition of the 1984 Selected Poems.
> > > >
> > > > What Work Is is a journey through the underworld of American labor,
> > beginning
> > > >
> > > > with Lewis Hines's haunting cover photograph, "Spinner, cotton mill,
> > > > 1908-1909," in which a young girl--probably no older than
> twelve--stares
> > > > through us,
> > > > as she rests momentarily, from her adult labor and seems to balance
> > herself
> > > > precariously, one hand on the window sill and the other on the
> spinning
> > mill
> > > >
> > > > frame. Through her eyes, we enter the bleak history of working class
> > America
> > > > as
> > > > the book charts our course through the Charybdis and Scylla of the
> > American
> > > > industrial landscape. What Work Is is a meditation on the nature of
> work
> > and
> > > > the
> > > > ways it consumes our lives. It is about jobs that are done with more
> > hand and
> > > >
> > > > less head and heart, jobs for which we wait with
> > > >
> > > >           the sad refusal to give in to
> > > >           rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
> > > >           to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
> > > >           a man is waiting who will say "No
> > > >           we're not hiring today," for any
> > > >           reason he wants.
> > > >
> > > > It is ironic that so many of us define ourselves by and through the
> work
> > we
> > > > do, while within that very work lurks the potential demon which will
> > grind us
> > > >
> > > > down, wear us out, diminish us, if we are not careful.
> > > >
> > > > The twenty-five poems in the four sections of What Work Is are
> classic,
> > > > mature Levine: mostly stanzaless, seamless free verse lines with a
> hint
> > of
> > > > prosody;
> > > > words squeezed into verticality like Giacometti sculptures; moody,
> often
> > > > lyrical stories told in the first person voices of generation
> > descendants of
> > > >
> > > > turn-of-the-century eastern and southern European immigrants who
> > supplied the
> > > > sweat
> > > > and brawn for the factories of the Midwest; sharp, sometimes laconic
> > voices;
> > > >
> > > > language that is often flat and conversational; what the poems lack
in
> > music
> > > >
> > > > they make up for in the intensity of their honesty and truthfulness,
> > which
> > > > has
> > > > a music of its own making. Cumulatively, these stories assume a
> > > > documentary-like quality, with an affect much like reading the
> > individual
> > > > oral histories in
> > > > Studs Terkel's powerful collection, Working.
> > > >
> > > > As we have come to expect, many of the poems share Detroit as their
> > setting,
> > > >
> > > > another cursive twist of the Levine signature. Levine has always
been
> a
> > > > connoisseur of memory. Many of the poems, such as "Growth," a
> > Whitmanesque
> > > > paean to
> > > > work in which a fourteen year old boy is awakened to working life in
a
> > soap
> > > > factory
> > > >
> > > >           where I hammered and sawed, singing
> > > >           my new life of working and earning,
> > > >           outside in the fresh air of Detroit
> > > >           in 1942, a year of growth
> > > >
> > > > draw us back to the 1940s and 50s of Levine's teens and early
> > adolescence.
> > > > Other poems, such as "Fear and Fame" and "Innocence," find ways of
> > drawing
> > > > hope
> > > > and meaning from the numbing, destructive yet vitalizing rigors of
> work.
> > > >
> > > > The speakers in the poems shift back and forth between the
> > autobiographical
> > > > "I" and the persona voices of individual men and women workers;
> > likewise, the
> > > >
> > > > settings shift from the Detroit of Levine's youth to the Fresno,
> > California,
> > > >
> > > > region of his middle years. In "Angus Dei" Levine recalls "[his]
> little
> > > > sister
> > > > [creating] the Lamb of God" from "used-up dust mops / and coat
> hangers,"
> > and
> > > > in
> > > > "Gin" Levine remembers "The first time [he] drank gin" and "thought
it
> > must
> > > > be hair tonic." Perhaps the most stunning poems in the collection,
> ones
> > I
> > > > would
> > > > rank among the best Levine poems to date, are "My Grave" and
"Burned,"
> > an
> > > > eighteen-page, 600+ line poem whose central metaphor of fire and
> burning
> > > > cauterize the collage-like memories of this autobiographical
mid-life
> > > > reverie.
> > > >
> > > > Many Levine poems, like "Every Day Blessing," are mini tour de
forces.
> > They
> > > > begin in ordinary life, filled with the rich, sensual details and
> > imagery of
> > > >
> > > > the common world. Someone is going somewhere, doing something or
> > describing
> > > > something, usually work or something that has happened at work, and
it
> > is not
> > > > very
> > > > important. The quotidian world is rendered in all its harshness and
> > > > loveliness. And by the end of the poems, there is a recognition that
> > > > something has been
> > > > lost or discovered, and that the human spirit is in constant
struggle
> > with
> > > > those forces which would diminish it. Here are the concluding lines
of
> > "Every
> > > >
> > > > Day Blessing":
> > > >
> > > >           Where he's going or where he is
> > > >           he doesn't ask himself, he
> > > >           doesn't know and doesn't know it matters. He gets off
> > > >           at the familiar corner, crosses
> > > >           the emptying parking lots
> > > >           toward Chevy Gear & Axle #3.
> > > >           In a few minutes he will hold
> > > >           his time card above a clock,
> > > >           and he can drop it in
> > > >           and hear the moment crunching
> > > >           down, or he can not, for
> > > >           either way the day will last
> > > >           forever. So he lets it fall.
> > > >           If he feels the elusive calm
> > > >           his father spoke of and searched
> > > >           for all his short life, there's
> > > >           no way of telling, for now he's
> > > >           laughing among them, older men
> > > >           and kids. He's saying, "Damn,
> > > >           we've got it made." He's
> > > >           lighting up or chewing with
> > > >           others, thousands of miles
> > > >           from their forgotten homes, each
> > > >           and every one his father's son.
> > > >
> > > > No American writer writes about the working class with as much
> clarity,
> > > > integrity, dignity and empathy as Philip Levine. When you read a
book
> of
> > > > Levine's
> > > > poetry, you are fooled into thinking you are reading a book of poems
> > about
> > > > invented lives, but when you reach its end, you realize and
understand
> > that
> > > > your
> > > > father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt could be speaking
> > these
> > > > words, thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions. Such has
> > been--and
> > > >
> > > > continues to be--the strength of Philip Levine's poetry.
> > > >
> > > > Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to discover the poetry of Philip
> > Levine. I
> > > >
> > > > continue to depend on Levine to tell the story of working class
> > Americans. In
> > > >
> > > > Levine's poetry, I find the story of my father's life, told with
> honesty
> > and
> > > >
> > > > care and compassion. I want to send Levine's books to all the
managers
> > in
> > > > America's factories and work places and tell them to put down their
> > Total
> > > > Quality
> > > > Management manuals and listen to the voices speaking through Philip
> > Levine's
> > > >
> > > > poems.   According to Levine, work is not the struggle to get a job
> done
> > and
> > > >
> > > > turn a profit, but rather the struggle to remain human in the face
of
> > the
> > > > grinding pressure to get a job done and turn a profit.   Until the
> > Reagans
> > > > and the
> > > > Iacoccas and the Roger Smiths and the other managers of America
> > understand
> > > > this,
> > > > we must stop using the word ??ototal??? as a way of characterizing
> > > > management.
> > > > We will not have ??oTQM??? until we understand:
> > > >
> > > >           How long it has been since you told [your bother]
> > > >           you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
> > > >           opened your eyes wide and said those words,
> > > >           and maybe kissed his cheek?   You??Tve never
> > > >           done something so simple, so obvious
> > > >           not because you??Tre too young or too dumb,
> > > >           not because you??Tre jealous or even mean
> > > >           or incapable of crying in
> > > >           the presence of another man, no,
> > > >           just because you don??Tt know what work is.
> > > >
> > > > Reading Levine, I am reminded of the story Yeats tells in his
Memoirs
> > about
> > > > meeting the Irish poet and dramatist John Millington Synge in a
Paris
> > hotel
> > > > in
> > > > 1896, where the twenty-five year old Synge was trying to write
> critical
> > > > articles about French Literature and about Racine, specifically.
> Yeats
> > told
> > > > Synge
> > > > to give up criticism??"that Arthur Symons would always be a better
> > critic of
> > > >
> > > > French literature??"and go to the Aran Islands, where Yeats himself
> had
> > just
> > > >
> > > > returned, ??oand find expression for a life that is lacked.???
> Wisely,
> > > > Synge took
> > > > Yeats??T advice.
> > > >
> > > > For more than thirty years, Philip Levine has been finding language
> and
> > > > giving expression to a life and people who lack it.   Nowhere has
this
> > life
> > > > been
> > > > expressed so vividly, so powerfully, so honestly as in the poetry of
> > Philip
> > > > Levine, for as he says in ??oComing Close,??? ??oMake no mistake,
this
> > place
> > > > has a
> > > > language.???   Make no mistake: Philip Levine is one of our great
> > national
> > > > treasures.
> > > >
> > > >                                         **********************
> > > > Thom Tammaro
> > > > Moorhead, MN
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > 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 JforJames at aol.com  Sun Sep  5 17:57:46 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 17:57:46 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] 'nother Levine 
Message-ID: <1cc.2a288147.2e6ce5da@aol.com>


They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
                      Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones need to sharpen and the muscles to stretch,
They Lion grow.
                      Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, come home!" From pig balls,
>From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
>From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
                      From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the first, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
>From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
                      From my five arms and all my hands,
>From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
>From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
>From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
>From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.


from THEY FEED THEY LION and THE NAMES OF THE LOST
released 1999
Copyright (c) 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971,1972, 1976
by Philip Levine
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From JforJames at aol.com  Sun Sep  5 18:22:06 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 18:22:06 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] More Levine/sentiment
Message-ID: <1e1.2a067734.2e6ceb8e@aol.com>


> My pet peeves would definitely include critics who don't see the
> >>difference
> >>between sentiment and sentimentality.
> >
> 
I think one must flirt with sentimentality to get
to sentiment. Too many poets don't go to that edge,
or even a bit beyond. I also think a poem must
mean in order to move. Much of po-mo poetry 
works by sleights and feints, and eschews
any kind of narrative grounding. Sentiment, 
to move, needs the human-interest element. 

Levine is one of my main poets, so I'm biased.
I think he has mined the same vein for many
years. But that's obviously a choice he's made.
It's not like Philip Levine doesn't know he's still
singing about the working class. It's not like
he's pretending to be something he's not. He
still works the late shift crafting songs and telling
tales. He's chosen his great subject.

Springsteen is an exemplar from the world of rock. 
He is a singer for those with whom his sympathy
keeps faith. Here is Springsteen's indictment...
       And the poets down here
       Don't write nothing at all
       They just stand back and let it all be
A poem should mean and not just be.
Finnegan
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From halvard at gmail.com  Sun Sep  5 18:26:33 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 18:26:33 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Levine
In-Reply-To: <s13b3f3b.005@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s13b3f3b.005@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <f160a12104090515261e51c064@mail.gmail.com>

Guess you've already found what you need. Welcome
aboard, Kent.

Hal


On Sun, 05 Sep 2004 16:30:30 -0500, Kent Johnson
<kent.johnson at highland.edu> wrote:
> Subbing up to the List. Hello to all.
> 
> Chris S. (hi there, hope the leg is better):
> 
> I wonder if Auden's observation that "liking" one's occupation has
> nothing to do with class is at all apposite to Moore's observation that
> one may not like poetry and still be a poet. Same with a poem, Spicer
> seems to show: A poem can perfectly well not like itself and still be a
> poem... A very mysterious poem. Poetry as apophasis. Flagellate poetry.
> 
> Kent
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



-- 
Hal      "Those who cast the ballots decide nothing.
            Those who count the ballots decide everything."
                                    --Joseph Stalin
             

Halvard Johnson
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard


From maxpaul at sfsu.edu  Sun Sep  5 18:55:38 2004
From: maxpaul at sfsu.edu (maxpaul at sfsu.edu)
Date: Sun,  5 Sep 2004 15:55:38 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: New American Writing #22
Message-ID: <1094424938.413b996ac8442@webmail.sfsu.edu>



----- Forwarded message from maxpaul at sfsu.edu -----
    Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 15:51:36 -0700
    From: maxpaul at sfsu.edu
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS at LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU>
 Subject: New American Writing #22
      To: POETICS at LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU

Just published:

Issue #22 of NAW containing work by Gustaf Sobin, Wang Ping, Toby Olson, Eleni
Sikelianos, Eileen Myles, Laura Mullen, Mark McMorris, Nathaniel Tarn, James
Tate, John Olson, Todd Swift, Noelle Kocot, Rusty Morrison, Joseph Lease, Molly
Bendall, Lisa Samuels, Spencer Selby, James Brook, Brian Henry, Terence Winch,
G.C. Waldrep, Dale Smith, Peter Orner, and many others.

The Political Poetry of Benjamin Peret.  Translations of contemporary Asian
poets by Wang Ping, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, Alex Lemon,
Gary Gach, Mong Lan, and an essay on "The Modernization of Vietnamese
Poetry" by Hoang Hung, Allen Ginsberg's Vietnamese translator.

$10 from NAW, 369 Molino, Mill Valley CA 94941
Subscriptions available/ 3 issues for $27
If you want to use a credit card, order from

http://newamericanwriting.com

----- End forwarded message -----




From JforJames at aol.com  Sun Sep  5 18:59:21 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 18:59:21 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
Message-ID: <1ca.2a352b05.2e6cf449@aol.com>


Personal Effects

   1
For once not arguing, 
we divide among ourselves
the things she left; her mother's mother's
swan brooch, her pilled and odorless
brown coat, sturdy Timex, 
the night shirt she mended
with clashing thread. 

   2
The morning before, I sat
by my mother's bed
to ask her what she would like 
the paper to say about her
life. It was like bring read a story
backwards, the reader becoming
the child afraid to fall asleep. 

   3
With the shift nurse helping
and some baby oil, and trembling
the way he did the day he slipped it on, 
my father bends over
the quieted body I thought I saw breathe, 
and slides off her wedding ring.

--
"Personal Effects" by Frannie Lindsay, 
from Where She Always Was ? Utah University Press, 2004
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From upwardcat at sbcglobal.net  Sun Sep  5 19:04:37 2004
From: upwardcat at sbcglobal.net (Wendy Battin)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 19:04:37 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine Review
In-Reply-To: <00b001c49357$a3ff9390$350b9942@Helen>
References: <20040905010958.8589.qmail@web52602.mail.yahoo.com>
	<00b001c49357$a3ff9390$350b9942@Helen>
Message-ID: <F5E06C12-FF8F-11D8-A416-000A9573C758@sbcglobal.net>

On Sep 5, 2004, at 10:50 AM, Helen Ruggieri wrote:
> If you're an adjunct teaching six comp. sections at three different 
> colleges making $20,000 or so in a good year are you working class??

I've done that, and worse, but it's never occurred to me to think of 
myself as working class.  My family was/is working class, urban 
construction work and assembly line (and in my mother's and sister's 
cases, office clerk) much like Levine's.  People don't go to college 
there, were lucky if they finished high school.  I'd have thought it an 
insult to claim I was in the same boat they were, with my fancy 
degrees, no matter how underpaid I was.

That's not to say that what's happened to the academy isn't appalling, 
or to pretend that poverty is any more "voluntary" for people who've 
had the privilege of an education.  (It's not voluntary for people 
trying to keep family farms going, either; that might be a closer 
analogy to the situation of economically-marginal artists and 
intellectuals.  We value our work more than the market does, so we 
persist.)

Wendy

Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

He need not search his pockets for words.
Russian



From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sun Sep  5 19:36:22 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 18:36:22 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <1ca.2a352b05.2e6cf449@aol.com>
Message-ID: <BD610D26.AF53%grahamd@ripon.edu>

For me this poem as a whole isn't Rod McKuen sentimental by any means,
though I am not sure about that final stanza.  I think the closing gesture
of the father, and particularly the spotlit word "trembling," might perhaps
cross the line.  Especially so given the tonal flatness of the first two
stanzas.  I can imagine a poet like Gerald Stern writing the whole poem at a
kind of fever-pitch, and the last gesture wouldn't seem quite so
over-the-top, possibly.


-------------------------------------



on 9/5/04 5:59 PM, JforJames at aol.com at JforJames at aol.com wrote:


Personal Effects

  1
For once not arguing,
we divide among ourselves
the things she left; her mother's mother's
swan brooch, her pilled and odorless
brown coat, sturdy Timex,
the night shirt she mended
with clashing thread.

  2
The morning before, I sat
by my mother's bed
to ask her what she would like
the paper to say about her
life. It was like bring read a story
backwards, the reader becoming
the child afraid to fall asleep.

  3
With the shift nurse helping
and some baby oil, and trembling
the way he did the day he slipped it on,
my father bends over
the quieted body I thought I saw breathe,
and slides off her wedding ring.

--
"Personal Effects" by Frannie Lindsay,
from Where She Always Was ? Utah University Press, 2004

_______________________________________________

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================


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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sun Sep  5 19:38:45 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 18:38:45 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment vs. sentimentality
Message-ID: <BD610DB5.AF54%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Another example, if anyone's still interested in the topic.  A recent piece
from our new poet laureate:

At the Cancer Clinic

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

Ted Kooser.  *Delights & Shadows*.  Copper Canyon Press.



====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From upwardcat at sbcglobal.net  Sun Sep  5 20:06:40 2004
From: upwardcat at sbcglobal.net (Wendy Battin)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 20:06:40 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment vs. sentimentality
In-Reply-To: <BD610DB5.AF54%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <BD610DB5.AF54%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <A0983856-FF98-11D8-A416-000A9573C758@sbcglobal.net>

OK, for the sake of argument, I'd say this is sentimental:
> Each bends to the weight of an arm
> and steps with the straight, tough bearing
> of courage.

I have reservations about the "funny knit cap," too, but the rest of 
the poem seems more respectful of what's there and more moving than 
those false steps.  (I'm on the verge of equating sentiment with 
laziness and sentimentality with sloppiness, and I'm not sure that's 
wrong.)

Wendy

On Sep 5, 2004, at 7:38 PM, David Graham wrote:

> Another example, if anyone's still interested in the topic.  A recent 
> piece
> from our new poet laureate:
>
> At the Cancer Clinic
>
> She is being helped toward the open door
> that leads to the examining rooms
> by two young women I take to be her sisters.
> Each bends to the weight of an arm
> and steps with the straight, tough bearing
> of courage. At what must seem to be
> a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
> smiling and calling encouragement.
> How patient she is in the crisp white sails
> of her clothes. The sick woman
> peers from under her funny knit cap
> to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
> and take its turn under her weight.
> There is no restlessness or impatience
> or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
> fills the clean mold of this moment
> and all the shuffling magazines grow still.
>
> Ted Kooser.  *Delights & Shadows*.  Copper Canyon Press.
>

Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html


Attention is living; inattention is dying.
The attentive never stop; the inattentive are dead already.
-Dhammapada 21



From JforJames at aol.com  Sun Sep  5 20:41:36 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 20:41:36 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
Message-ID: <1c9.1e306668.2e6d0c40@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/5/2004 7:34:34 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes:

>  I think the closing gesture of the father, and particularly the spotlit 
> word "trembling," might perhaps cross the line. 

What redeems that loaded word ("trembling") for me 
is the fact the poet has framed the moment as 
a "reverse marrying."  So the artifice, which is always
more obvious than the emotion, undercuts somewhat. 
Also, the flatness of the first two sections lulls the 
reader into walking, unexpectant, into the charged 
language of the last.   
Finnegan
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From JforJames at aol.com  Sun Sep  5 20:54:37 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 20:54:37 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment vs. sentimentality
Message-ID: <154.3e79c239.2e6d0f4d@aol.com>

R. G. Collingwood
"A genuine poet, in his moments of genuine poetry,
never mentions by name the emotions he is expressing."


(In the The Principles of Art, Collingwood makes a case
for the fact that the artist is actually expressing
the emotion through art in order to understand what
it is he/she is experiencing.) 
Finnegan
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From tad at opus40.org  Sun Sep  5 20:57:21 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 20:57:21 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
References: <BD610D26.AF53%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <005a01c493ac$790bc910$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Q: sentiment or sentimentality?I pretty much felt the same way, David.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Graham 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views 
  Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 7:36 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?


  For me this poem as a whole isn't Rod McKuen sentimental by any means, though I am not sure about that final stanza.  I think the closing gesture of the father, and particularly the spotlit word "trembling," might perhaps cross the line.  Especially so given the tonal flatness of the first two stanzas.  I can imagine a poet like Gerald Stern writing the whole poem at a kind of fever-pitch, and the last gesture wouldn't seem quite so over-the-top, possibly. 


  -------------------------------------



  on 9/5/04 5:59 PM, JforJames at aol.com at JforJames at aol.com wrote:



    Personal Effects

      1
    For once not arguing, 
    we divide among ourselves
    the things she left; her mother's mother's
    swan brooch, her pilled and odorless
    brown coat, sturdy Timex, 
    the night shirt she mended
    with clashing thread. 

      2
    The morning before, I sat
    by my mother's bed
    to ask her what she would like 
    the paper to say about her
    life. It was like bring read a story
    backwards, the reader becoming
    the child afraid to fall asleep. 

      3
    With the shift nurse helping
    and some baby oil, and trembling
    the way he did the day he slipped it on, 
    my father bends over
    the quieted body I thought I saw breathe, 
    and slides off her wedding ring.

    --
    "Personal Effects" by Frannie Lindsay, 
    from Where She Always Was ? Utah University Press, 2004

    _______________________________________________


  ====================================================
  David Graham
  grahamd at ripon.edu
  Home Page:
  http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
  Poetry Library:
  http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
  ====================================================




------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep  6 02:47:42 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 08:47:42 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
References: <BD610D26.AF53%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<005a01c493ac$790bc910$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <005301c493dd$693b83a0$05ac3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Q: sentiment or sentimentality?I am with James. That _trembling_ was strong enough to act as the catalyzing point of the entire poem, beautiful for the complexity of what the author wants to show of her personality. 
And with Wendy on the plainness of the second poem brought as a comparison to Lindsay's one.

Anny Ballardini

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: The Old Mole 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views 
  Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 2:57 AM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?


  I pretty much felt the same way, David.
    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: David Graham 
    To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views 
    Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 7:36 PM
    Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?


    For me this poem as a whole isn't Rod McKuen sentimental by any means, though I am not sure about that final stanza.  I think the closing gesture of the father, and particularly the spotlit word "trembling," might perhaps cross the line.  Especially so given the tonal flatness of the first two stanzas.  I can imagine a poet like Gerald Stern writing the whole poem at a kind of fever-pitch, and the last gesture wouldn't seem quite so over-the-top, possibly. 


    -------------------------------------



    on 9/5/04 5:59 PM, JforJames at aol.com at JforJames at aol.com wrote:



      Personal Effects

        1
      For once not arguing, 
      we divide among ourselves
      the things she left; her mother's mother's
      swan brooch, her pilled and odorless
      brown coat, sturdy Timex, 
      the night shirt she mended
      with clashing thread. 

        2
      The morning before, I sat
      by my mother's bed
      to ask her what she would like 
      the paper to say about her
      life. It was like bring read a story
      backwards, the reader becoming
      the child afraid to fall asleep. 

        3
      With the shift nurse helping
      and some baby oil, and trembling
      the way he did the day he slipped it on, 
      my father bends over
      the quieted body I thought I saw breathe, 
      and slides off her wedding ring.

      --
      "Personal Effects" by Frannie Lindsay, 
      from Where She Always Was ? Utah University Press, 2004

      _______________________________________________


    ====================================================
    David Graham
    grahamd at ripon.edu
    Home Page:
    http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
    Poetry Library:
    http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
    ====================================================




----------------------------------------------------------------------------


    _______________________________________________
    New-Poetry mailing list
    New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
    http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep  6 03:21:14 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 09:21:14 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] the Poets' Corner
Message-ID: <007401c493e2$185da9e0$05ac3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Dear All,

 

with the end of summer and the beginning of an intense fall, here is the latest update of the Poet's Corner featuring the following Poets:

 

Philip Fried

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=119

 

Giovanna Mulas

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=121

 

John Tranter

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=122

 

Jennifer L. Lesh

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=123

 

Fan Ogilvie

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=124

 

Eileen Tabios

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=125

 

Susanne Toth

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=126

 

Alan Sondheim

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=127

 

Rae Armantrout

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=128

 

 

 

________________________________

Further additions:

 

A new poem by Jon Corelis:

List

http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=708

 

My translation of Jon Corelis' Parable into Italian:

Parabola

http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=671

 

By Chris Murray:

Close to Porcelain

http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=736

 

rain 4

http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=737

 

Logos Qs & Yr(s)

http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=738

 

Prayer: Demeter to Persephone (for Mike Snider)

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=82

 

Slip Now

http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=740

 

 

________________________________

Reviews:

 

For Freddy Longo's new book: Poeti a Cuba, I put down a couple of thoughts:

http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=691

 

 

_________________________________

 

The main index of all featured poets can be found at:

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content

 

I am touched by the quantity and quality of contributions, I would like to add that Giovanna Mulas, very young since she was born in 1969, was short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and sent two books for the Corner, a long essay, and two short stories. Her generosity goes beyond limits.

 

I am pleased I finally got in contact with Fan Ogilvie, whose poems I first read on Fulcrum 2, her exotic name and surreal - clean style have stayed with me for long. The same with Rae Armantrout, whose work I evaluate as honest, precise, religious, if this adjective still has any quality. 

 

It was an honor to meet Philip Fried and Alan Sondheim, the commitment of whom I respect. John Tranter, the Australian par excellence, well known for his incredible magazine: Jacket, and heaps of books, my thanks for taking your time to send me some poems.

 

And Jennifer L. Lesh, who is back to writing after years, her poems are beautiful & fresh, her mirrored projection. As it is for Eileen Tabios, la Chatelaine of the web. As per Susanne Tooth, I got in contact with her through Jos? Koser, who met her in Caracas.

 

A special acknowledgement to Chris Murray for her continuous support and new wonderful work, as to Jon Corelis who has much contributed with poems and translations (Ovid, Sulpicia, Bertran de Born, Horace, Callimachus, and Nikephoros Vrettakos).

 

Joanna Boulter, who celebrated in these days the third birthday of her and her husband's Roger Collett publishing house, Arrowhead Press, reminded me that this is about the time the Poets' Corner was first opened, a full long year - well to be precise - one year and about one month ago. An enormous bottle of sparkling drinks for us all who are part of it, with a special cheers to Vanni, the webmaster who is able to solve everything, and Ornella, his patient assistant, as well as to Cristina Petruzzino who made this possible.

 

My best wishes,

 

Anny Ballardini

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome

The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky

 

 
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep  6 10:02:27 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 16:02:27 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poets' Corner last note
Message-ID: <025501c4941a$2502af50$e22bb750@yourpk9x5fuc06>

I knew I was going to forget someone or something, and those are my translations of Katia Kapovich's two beautiful poems:

A paper plane to nowhere
http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=155

and Golden Fleece
http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=154

I also noticed that Mario Lucini mentions Kapovich's work on Poiein:
http://www.loso.it/poiein/autori/ballardiniKapovich.htm

My best,

Anny Ballardini

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky

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From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 11:21:34 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 11:21:34 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] "catastrophic success"--Ass. Press--In tune with the
	times.
In-Reply-To: <005301c493dd$693b83a0$05ac3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
References: <BD610D26.AF53%grahamd@ripon.edu>	<005a01c493ac$790bc910$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
	<005301c493dd$693b83a0$05ac3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <413C807E.8050500@ix.netcom.com>

The Script From Arnold Schwarzenegger's Republican National Convention 
Movie:
Swift Boat Veterans Denounce Schwarzenegger's Claims That He Killed 61 
Police Officers And 78 Firefighters In Terminator IV: The Next Pile Of 
Genetically Altered Aryan Horseshit:
Cheney Says That George Bush Would Not Wait For A Permission Slip To 
Protect The American People---Not Even A Permission Slip From The 
American People, Hinting At Another Coup:
George Bush Removes Own Rectum And Lower Intestine Cleansing His Viscera 
With Jack Daniels And Prune Juice In Search Of The Answer To His Own 
Koan 'Catastrophic Success'

Translated By Yaso Adiodi For The Assassinated Press
http://www.theassassinatedpress.com/schwarz2.htm


U.S. Lowers Net Worth of Osama Bin Laden:
Saudi Terrorist Declared Bankruptcy Twice; Turned Down For Loan To Open 
Beirut Popeyes:
"Money Had To Come From Elsewhere," Sept. 11th Panel Declares:
CIA And Bush Administration Fabricated Wealth Of Fugitive Terror Financier:
Cheney Says "And The American People Don't Have The Balls To Do Anything 
About It."

By KATAMARAN LEGER SHREDDER
http://www.theassassinatedpress.com/shred.htm

Four Terrorists Join GOP Platform:
A Present For Poppy; Bush Jr.'s White House Arranges Pardons For Some Of 
Bush Sr.'s Favorite Terrorists:
"It must be the Old Butcher's birthday," Scott McLellan Tells Press:
Administration Denies U.S. Taxpayer Bank Role in Cuban Exiles' Pardon:
Panama Frees 4 Convicted in Plot To Kill Civilians, Bombing of Airliner

By GLENN KEESTER
http://www.theassassinatedpress.com/keester3.htm


From hruggier at localnet.com  Mon Sep  6 11:30:03 2004
From: hruggier at localnet.com (Helen Ruggieri)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 11:30:03 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
References: <BD610D26.AF53%grahamd@ripon.edu><005a01c493ac$790bc910$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
	<005301c493dd$693b83a0$05ac3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <00f801c49426$62c32200$49dcf63f@Helen>

Q: sentiment or sentimentality?Whatever the thermometer says about your level of sentiment - I think this discussion is valuable  - 
do more poems!  



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Anny Ballardini 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views 
  Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 2:47 AM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?


  I am with James. That _trembling_ was strong enough to act as the catalyzing point of the entire poem, beautiful for the complexity of what the author wants to show of her personality. 
  And with Wendy on the plainness of the second poem brought as a comparison to Lindsay's one.

  Anny Ballardini

  http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
  The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
  Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky


    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: The Old Mole 
    To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views 
    Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 2:57 AM
    Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?


    I pretty much felt the same way, David.
      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: David Graham 
      To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views 
      Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 7:36 PM
      Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?


      For me this poem as a whole isn't Rod McKuen sentimental by any means, though I am not sure about that final stanza.  I think the closing gesture of the father, and particularly the spotlit word "trembling," might perhaps cross the line.  Especially so given the tonal flatness of the first two stanzas.  I can imagine a poet like Gerald Stern writing the whole poem at a kind of fever-pitch, and the last gesture wouldn't seem quite so over-the-top, possibly. 


      -------------------------------------



      on 9/5/04 5:59 PM, JforJames at aol.com at JforJames at aol.com wrote:



        Personal Effects

          1
        For once not arguing, 
        we divide among ourselves
        the things she left; her mother's mother's
        swan brooch, her pilled and odorless
        brown coat, sturdy Timex, 
        the night shirt she mended
        with clashing thread. 

          2
        The morning before, I sat
        by my mother's bed
        to ask her what she would like 
        the paper to say about her
        life. It was like bring read a story
        backwards, the reader becoming
        the child afraid to fall asleep. 

          3
        With the shift nurse helping
        and some baby oil, and trembling
        the way he did the day he slipped it on, 
        my father bends over
        the quieted body I thought I saw breathe, 
        and slides off her wedding ring.

        --
        "Personal Effects" by Frannie Lindsay, 
        from Where She Always Was ? Utah University Press, 2004

        _______________________________________________


      ====================================================
      David Graham
      grahamd at ripon.edu
      Home Page:
      http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
      Poetry Library:
      http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
      ====================================================




--------------------------------------------------------------------------


      _______________________________________________
      New-Poetry mailing list
      New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
      http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



----------------------------------------------------------------------------


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    New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
    http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From Faustina1 at aol.com  Mon Sep  6 13:39:16 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 13:39:16 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
Message-ID: <4BD5F728.7CCF95F2.023799CC@aol.com>

Have to admit that I am very much pro sentiment in poems, but for some reason do not warm to that one.  I keep thinking things like, well, how did the speaker know the man trembled when he put the ring on her finger?  He or she wasn't born yet.  It seemed a little contrived.  I kind of like the similar poem on Poetry Daily today, "In the Museum of Your Last Day" by Patrick Phillips.  Janet


From antrobin at clipper.net  Mon Sep  6 14:07:25 2004
From: antrobin at clipper.net (Anthony Robinson)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 11:07:25 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <4BD5F728.7CCF95F2.023799CC@aol.com>
Message-ID: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>

I kinda like it too. 

Tony
(also pro-sentiment, but anti-Levine)

-----Original Message-----
From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
[mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of
Faustina1 at aol.com
Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 10:39 AM
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?

Have to admit that I am very much pro sentiment in poems, but for some
reason do not warm to that one.  I keep thinking things like, well, how
did the speaker know the man trembled when he put the ring on her
finger?  He or she wasn't born yet.  It seemed a little contrived.  I
kind of like the similar poem on Poetry Daily today, "In the Museum of
Your Last Day" by Patrick Phillips.  Janet
_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 15:59:23 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 15:59:23 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
Message-ID: <413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>

Doesn't sentiment and its collective/commercial incorporation, 
sentimentality, imply a shared set of delusions; a conditioning that has 
attached a debased cultural conformity that is hostile to work that is 
uncompromising, individual & a- or non-conformal? Doesn't sentiment 
imply a buffer between the topic by the very manner in which it is 
communicated? It's hostility and violence is everywhere dismissed 
because sentiment's contexts project a feeling of being disarmed and 
passive as well as implying an ethic while not requiring any risk or 
action on the part of the reader/viewer---Hollywood films, poems, 
Hallmark cards, popular music et al. But isn't any such willful 
wrenching from the actual at its core an act of violence against nature? 
A safe, act of voyeuristism. Empire makes sentiment possible where the 
oppressed minorities feeding the privileged capitol take all the risks 
aesthetically and politically attempted to make a break. Of course, now 
transnational capital can subvert and absorb any threat. In fact now, 
the aesthetic uprising are usual viewed as commercial opportunity by 
both the artists and the companies and, though the companies are not 
operating out of sentiment as companies, the individuals who make up 
major companies' business segment often are no less sentimental yet 
perhaps more cutthroat than their customers.

It's ironic that so many cultural purveyors of sentiment and 
sentimentalty in candid moments are very cynical about what they do. 
There is no doubt that sentiment and sentimentality rule the arts, 
popular and otherwise today, especially among people who most directly 
benefit from the material empire that determines sentimnets standards 
and defends its ubiquity. And then there are hose who are so inured, 
they don't know what I'm talking about.

Although the world's people are victimized by the West's sentiments, 
collectively its sentimental projections backed up by power, the 
destruction persists.  CP


Anthony Robinson wrote:

>I kinda like it too. 
>
>Tony
>(also pro-sentiment, but anti-Levine)
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>[mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of
>Faustina1 at aol.com
>Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 10:39 AM
>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
>
>Have to admit that I am very much pro sentiment in poems, but for some
>reason do not warm to that one.  I keep thinking things like, well, how
>did the speaker know the man trembled when he put the ring on her
>finger?  He or she wasn't born yet.  It seemed a little contrived.  I
>kind of like the similar poem on Poetry Daily today, "In the Museum of
>Your Last Day" by Patrick Phillips.  Janet
>_______________________________________________
>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 alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 16:07:42 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 16:07:42 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <413CC38E.5020000@ix.netcom.com>

Once, again ignore previous email. Rough cut and didn't intend to send. CP

R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:

> Doesn't sentiment and its collective/commercial incorporation, 
> sentimentality, imply a shared set of delusions; a conditioning that 
> has attached a debased cultural conformity that is hostile to work 
> that is uncompromising, individual & a- or non-conformal? Doesn't 
> sentiment imply a buffer between the topic by the very manner in which 
> it is communicated? It's hostility and violence is everywhere 
> dismissed because sentiment's contexts project a feeling of being 
> disarmed and passive as well as implying an ethic while not requiring 
> any risk or action on the part of the reader/viewer---Hollywood films, 
> poems, Hallmark cards, popular music et al. But isn't any such willful 
> wrenching from the actual at its core an act of violence against 
> nature? A safe, act of voyeuristism. Empire makes sentiment possible 
> where the oppressed minorities feeding the privileged capitol take all 
> the risks aesthetically and politically attempted to make a break. Of 
> course, now transnational capital can subvert and absorb any threat. 
> In fact now, the aesthetic uprising are usual viewed as commercial 
> opportunity by both the artists and the companies and, though the 
> companies are not operating out of sentiment as companies, the 
> individuals who make up major companies' business segment often are no 
> less sentimental yet perhaps more cutthroat than their customers.
>
> It's ironic that so many cultural purveyors of sentiment and 
> sentimentalty in candid moments are very cynical about what they do. 
> There is no doubt that sentiment and sentimentality rule the arts, 
> popular and otherwise today, especially among people who most directly 
> benefit from the material empire that determines sentimnets standards 
> and defends its ubiquity. And then there are hose who are so inured, 
> they don't know what I'm talking about.
>
> Although the world's people are victimized by the West's sentiments, 
> collectively its sentimental projections backed up by power, the 
> destruction persists.  CP
>
>
> Anthony Robinson wrote:
>
>> I kinda like it too.
>> Tony
>> (also pro-sentiment, but anti-Levine)
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> [mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of
>> Faustina1 at aol.com
>> Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 10:39 AM
>> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
>> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
>>
>> Have to admit that I am very much pro sentiment in poems, but for some
>> reason do not warm to that one.  I keep thinking things like, well, how
>> did the speaker know the man trembled when he put the ring on her
>> finger?  He or she wasn't born yet.  It seemed a little contrived.  I
>> kind of like the similar poem on Poetry Daily today, "In the Museum of
>> Your Last Day" by Patrick Phillips.  Janet
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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 alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 17:41:28 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 17:41:28 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>

Doesn't sentiment and its collective/commercial incorporation, 
sentimentality, imply a shared set of delusions or little examined 
enthusiams; a conditioning that has attached a debasing cultural 
conformity which is hostile in its ignorance to work that is 
uncompromising, individual &/or a- or non-conformal? Doesn't sentiment 
imply a buffer between its creator and consumer and the ding therein 
described so that the thing becomes secondary to the thrill of 
communication or shared experience? It's hostility and violence are 
everywhere dismissed because sentiment's contexts project a feeling of 
being disarmed, disarming, gentle and passive which carries the phantom 
of a positive quasi-religious ethic without performing any genuinely 
ethical act---Hollywood films, poems, advertising, Hallmark cards, 
popular music et al.

But isn't any such willful ignoring of the object for the clannishness 
of a culturally shared comfort, at its core, an act of violence against 
nature? Contra naturam. Sentiment is a very shy and repressed voyeurism. CP


>


From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 18:28:29 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 18:28:29 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>

The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader 
or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when 
manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically 
mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic 
patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying. 
In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by 
defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more 
than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art. 
Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and 
negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven 
discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.

However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between 
sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become utterly 
blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set 
of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual 
conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within 
which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and 
independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a 
spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static 
mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers 
utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given' 
domain. CP


>


From tad at opus40.org  Mon Sep  6 18:33:39 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 18:33:39 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Ignorance calling
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily><413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <001a01c49461$959eb000$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Doing a short article on Marilyn Nelson, and one of the honors in her bio is
the 1998 Poets' Prize for The Fields of Praise. Any honor given to The
Fields of Praise would have been richly deserved, and I'm sure this one was,
but...what is it? What is the Poets' Prize? Who gives it?

Tad




From bardo at optonline.net  Mon Sep  6 19:06:18 2004
From: bardo at optonline.net (Daniel Zimmerman)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 19:06:18 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com> <413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>

Carlo,

I've always felt suspicious about--even averse to--any approach in poerty to
mawkishness rather than feeling produced by penetrating description or
depiction.
Poetry seems to me a science of individual instances of feelings/perceptions
, as opposed to psychology, for example, which taxonomizes and seeks to
articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.
Physics--ever since experiment replaced the testimony of witnesses about
unique, often unrepeatable events--also seems concerned pretty much
exclusively with general principles. Could you elaborate a little on the
fourth dimension correlate? I'd have thought that physicists use the fourth
dimension to describe rather than to ape (or manipulate or coerce), but
perhaps you see some crossover there (in poetics, for example).

~ Dan Zimmerman

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:28 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?


> The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader
> or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
> manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
> mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
> patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying.
> In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
> defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more
> than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
> Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and
> negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
> discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
>
> However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between
> sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become utterly
> blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set
> of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
> conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within
> which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
> independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
> spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static
> mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers
> utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
> domain. CP
>
>
> >
> _______________________________________________
> 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 Sep  6 19:12:58 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 19:12:58 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Ignorance calling
Message-ID: <e5.5af8c2.2e6e48fa@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/6/2004 6:34:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, tad at opus40.org 
writes:

> Doing a short article on Marilyn Nelson, and one of the honors in her bio 
> is
> the 1998 Poets' Prize for The Fields of Praise. Any honor given to The
> Fields of Praise would have been richly deserved, and I'm sure this one was,
> but...what is it? What is the Poets' Prize? Who gives it?
> 
> Tad

Tad, don't know. I know that Marilyn Nelson has come
back to Connectiuct, purchased a property with a house,
and founded a writer's retreat for African American writers 
called "Soul Mountain." 
Finnegan
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From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 19:16:01 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 19:16:01 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>	<413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <413CEFB1.3090406@ix.netcom.com>

Of course, the weakness in the first paragraph below is the trope that 
equates aesthetic manipulation with the kind of willful manipulation 
that borders on lying to direct an outcome. I would insist that 
sentiment in poetry intends both, but that in no way excuses the trope.

The trope is, of course,  Plato's; "We must *kill* the *poets* first" 
etc.  CP

I want to thank Marcus Bales for coming to the defense of Wittgenstein a 
while back.

R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:

> The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the 
> reader or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because 
> when manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, 
> non-aesthetically mediated contacts between people expressing 
> sentiment the aesthetic patina falls away and such manipulation is 
> considered worse than lying. In writing poetry for example the 
> sentiment and its contexts are by defintion artifice and by definition 
> artifice is going to contain more than a dollop of manipulation to 
> conform to the conditions of art. Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment 
> should be viewed as a degrading and negative quality if sentiment in 
> actual non-artifice driven discourse/living is to retain its distinct 
> humanitas.
>
> However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between 
> sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become 
> utterly blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter 
> by a set of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place 
> in actual conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where 
> time within which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily 
> and independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, 
> a spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a 
> static mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and 
> considers utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 
> 'given' domain. CP
>
>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>


From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Mon Sep  6 19:28:45 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 18:28:45 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: Sentiment vs. sentimentality
Message-ID: <s13cac82.010@mail.highland.edu>

Carlo, we'd probably agree that the poem in question suffers from
sentimentality. 

But may I amiably suggest that your argument suffers, in turn, from an
apparent misapprehension that sentiment and sentimentality are pretty
much the same thing.

Probably good to get a semantic handle on the basic terms under
discussion before grimly moving into the popular physics...

Kent


From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Mon Sep  6 19:31:49 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 19:31:49 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Ignorance calling
Message-ID: <e2.68547f.2e6e4d65@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/6/2004 6:13:25 PM Central Daylight Time, 
JforJames at aol.com writes: 
> 
> In a message dated 9/6/2004 6:34:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, tad at opus40.org 
> writes:
> 
> >> Doing a short article on Marilyn Nelson, and one of the honors in her bio 
>> is
>> the 1998 Poets' Prize for The Fields of Praise. Any honor given to The
>> Fields of Praise would have been richly deserved, and I'm sure this one 
>> was,
>> but...what is it? What is the Poets' Prize? Who gives it?
>> 
>> Tad
> 
> Tad, don't know. I know that Marilyn Nelson has come
> back to Connectiuct, purchased a property with a house,
> and founded a writer's retreat for African American writers 
> called "Soul Mountain." 
> Finnegan
> 
I am currently the chair of the Poets' Prize, having succeeded Robert 
Phillips and David Mason who separately chaired in recent years.  The award was begun 
a dozen or so years ago by the late Frederick Morgan, Louis Simpson, and 
several others, and is given annually for a book by an American poet published in 
the previous year.  This year's prize, for a book published in 2002, was won 
by X. J. Kennedy for The Lords of Misrule.  The prize is announced in January, 
and the public award ceremony and reading take place at the Nicholas Roerich 
Museum in New York in May.  The winner is selected by a group of some twenty 
poets, who also put up the money for the award (usually $3000).  Members of the 
poets' committee are not eligible for the prize, and all nominations must come 
from members of the committee.  In recent years the winners have included 
Marilyn Nelson, Leon Stokesbury, Sydney Lea, Carolyn Kizer, Betty Adcock, Robert 
Mezey, and Wendell Berry.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep  6 19:33:07 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 19:33:07 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
Message-ID: <1ce.2a61f0f5.2e6e4db3@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/6/2004 6:28:49 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
alphavil at ix.netcom.com writes:

> The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader 
> or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when 
> manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically 
> mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic 
> patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying. 
> In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by 
> defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more 
> than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art. 
> Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and 
> negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven 
> discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
> 
> However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between 
> sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become utterly 
> blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set 
> of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual 
> conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within 
> which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and 
> independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a 
> spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static 
> mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers 
> utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given' 
> domain. CP
> 

Carlo, I agree that artifice is manipulation...and a poem is an 
act of artifice, no matter how genuine the intent.  I think where 
I would differ is that sentiment is a way of expressing experience. 
I don't think the poet necessarily wants 'to push the buttons' of 
the reader, as much as the poet may be saying: "I felt this, 
haven't you (reader)?"

It's very hard to pass thru life without being moved by death
or failure, love or adultery, etc. Is the poet to veer away from
these things, or to engage them, fully, without shunts or 
ellipses, come what may?

Afterthought: Some in science now believe time doesn't exist. 
Actually it's an old idea that recently gained some ground. 
Finnegan
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From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Mon Sep  6 19:45:13 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 18:45:13 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Q: Sentiment vs. sentimentality
Message-ID: <s13cb051.013@mail.highland.edu>

Carlo P. said:

"Of course, the weakness in the first paragraph below is the trope that

equates aesthetic manipulation with the kind of willful manipulation 
that borders on lying to direct an outcome. I would insist that 
sentiment in poetry intends both..."

Ah, so thought and reason prompted by feeling is nothing less than
"aesthetic manipulation," which is, in turn, nothing less than "lying to
direct an outcome"!

Wow... 

Hasta la vista, Modernism! 

Kent 




From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Mon Sep  6 19:46:26 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 18:46:26 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: Recite Humorous Poetry for $$$ !!
Message-ID: <s13cb08e.014@mail.highland.edu>

An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: "Eliot Weinberger" <unreal at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Recite Humorous Poetry for $$$ !!
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 19:39:17 -0400
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From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep  6 19:50:08 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 19:50:08 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] no time
Message-ID: <12b.4af2bc52.2e6e51b0@aol.com>

http://www.platonia.com/ideas.html
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From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 20:16:31 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 20:16:31 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>
	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>
Message-ID: <413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com>

Dan,

You have so much as said it out of psychology:

<which taxonomizes and seeks to
articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.>

where 'general' is expressed as a number, series of numbers or quantity or series of quantities etc.

A dimension is 'spatial' not temporal until the Einsteinian trope. If time becomes the fourth dimension, it is troped into spatiality and mathematically quite literally takes on spatial qualities that respond to the static mathematical appropriations available in three dimensions and is no longer time as we think, Bohr would say, visualize it.

If you work through Charles Olson you find that among his reading list to Ed Dorn, he recommends A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality, a book which in part tries to keep all the plates spinning as regards actuality and mathematico/physical formalism. As I've said before formalisms are reductive and as you say that formailsm can express itself as 'taxonomic.'

Many disciplines, psychology included tried to ape the successes of the sciences by adopting what were perceived as the virtues of science. The gateays were all mathematical based formailzation of actual, as Whitehead would say, nexi. The influence became evident in nearly every discipline. Sometimes its just an internal logical consistency which caused disastrous tropes to be put into action. Sometimes it was formal logic, statistics, something as crude as Taylor's Scientific Management or eugenics, but always it required a consistency bordering on mathematical fungibility. Marx, no stranger to scientific positivism said, "Logic is the money of the mind."

Now, the literature is loaded with these failures. Psychoanalysis has taken a particular beating as a scientific method. But as in all of western capitalist politics the real culprit has been exonerated---Science. Its insisted that science is immune from the considerations of the quasi-scientific disciplnes and that its 'successes' are prove positiv-ism. The instigatorr walks free.

When I started writing poetry 35 years ago which accused the sciences of being a menace because of their reliance on formalisms, what few people noticed laughed. At best they thought I was about just rehashing cold science/warm humanities crap.

But as the ecological movement and concerns for the environment began knocking around for an eschatology, I found I had already done a lot of the groundwork---Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel, Hume and others. My Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe touches on these topice, specifically the historical limits of formalisms with history represented by what we normally think of as time. 

Millennial Mathematics even more so as well, "Chlorpyrifos, the end of the world is within us." as does Eschatology of Reason: The Twin Towers. It turns out that specializing does cut out the big picture, and the big picture is now fucked. Mooks like Gross and Levitt and all the rest of the scientific community think science can turn the nose of spaceship earth back up. Fat chance.

Now, when able I'm doing for Game Theory what Decon. the Demiurge did for physics in a poem with the borrowed title, De Rerum Natura. Game Theory and its many sister disciplines is very interesting because Von Neumann, who looms large in D the D in 20th century physics, computers and defense policy(strategic bombing) and his fellows saw early on the problems of quantifying say large populations for the purpose of controlling or destroying them. The first computers were designed to calculate artillery shell trajectories. 

The Game theorists tried to force the vagaries and infinite variables of actuality and Process and Reality, into the formalistic world of the hard sciences while maintaing the integrity of a non-mathematical expression of infinite variables. This royal fuck up that has wider reaching implications by far than the failure of psychoanalysis also represents the most sophisticated apparatus of our official saviors.

Is it any wonder that Von Neumann wrote Self-Reproducing Automata? He knew we were goners so he created self-sufficient machines with Johnny Von Neumann programmed in as their creator, read deity, while they universe hopped gobbling a stray planet here or asteroid there for sustenance. Shit. Ain't that dreary. CP  





Daniel Zimmerman wrote:

>Carlo,
>
>I've always felt suspicious about--even averse to--any approach in poerty to
>mawkishness rather than feeling produced by penetrating description or
>depiction.
>Poetry seems to me a science of individual instances of feelings/perceptions
>, as opposed to psychology, for example, which taxonomizes and seeks to
>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.
>Physics--ever since experiment replaced the testimony of witnesses about
>unique, often unrepeatable events--also seems concerned pretty much
>exclusively with general principles. Could you elaborate a little on the
>fourth dimension correlate? I'd have thought that physicists use the fourth
>dimension to describe rather than to ape (or manipulate or coerce), but
>perhaps you see some crossover there (in poetics, for example).
>
>~ Dan Zimmerman
>
>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
><new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:28 PM
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
>
>
>  
>
>>The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader
>>or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
>>manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
>>mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
>>patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying.
>>In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
>>defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more
>>than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
>>Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and
>>negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
>>discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
>>
>>However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between
>>sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become utterly
>>blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set
>>of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
>>conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within
>>which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
>>independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
>>spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static
>>mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers
>>utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
>>domain. CP
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>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 alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 20:26:12 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 20:26:12 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: Sentiment vs. sentimentality
In-Reply-To: <s13cac82.010@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s13cac82.010@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <413D0024.7090902@ix.netcom.com>

Been through that many times and I'm happy with the conflation.

Elaborate your distinction, Kent. CP

Kent Johnson wrote:

>Carlo, we'd probably agree that the poem in question suffers from
>sentimentality. 
>
>But may I amiably suggest that your argument suffers, in turn, from an
>apparent misapprehension that sentiment and sentimentality are pretty
>much the same thing.
>
>Probably good to get a semantic handle on the basic terms under
>discussion before grimly moving into the popular physics...
>
>Kent
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>  
>


From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 20:27:17 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 20:27:17 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <1ce.2a61f0f5.2e6e4db3@aol.com>
References: <1ce.2a61f0f5.2e6e4db3@aol.com>
Message-ID: <413D0065.4090509@ix.netcom.com>

Answered in trope email. CP

JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 9/6/2004 6:28:49 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
> alphavil at ix.netcom.com writes:
>
>> The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader
>> or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
>> manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
>> mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
>> patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying.
>> In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
>> defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more
>> than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
>> Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and
>> negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
>> discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
>>
>> However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between
>> sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become utterly
>> blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set
>> of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
>> conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within
>> which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
>> independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
>> spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static
>> mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers
>> utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
>> domain. CP
>
>
>
> Carlo, I agree that artifice is manipulation...and a poem is an
> act of artifice, no matter how genuine the intent.  I think where
> I would differ is that sentiment is a way of expressing experience.
> I don't think the poet necessarily wants 'to push the buttons' of
> the reader, as much as the poet may be saying: "I felt this,
> haven't you (reader)?"
>
> It's very hard to pass thru life without being moved by death
> or failure, love or adultery, etc. Is the poet to veer away from
> these things, or to engage them, fully, without shunts or
> ellipses, come what may?
>
> Afterthought: Some in science now believe time doesn't exist.
> Actually it's an old idea that recently gained some ground.
> Finnegan
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>


From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 20:31:48 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 20:31:48 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Q: Sentiment vs. sentimentality
In-Reply-To: <s13cb051.013@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s13cb051.013@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <413D0174.4040100@ix.netcom.com>

Maybe in your hands. You don't know it in the way the modernists did and 
some still do. You're at the tail end of specialization where the broad 
uncritical cultural assumptions begin and are simply accepted. I just 
want to take a look. I know you don' tlike that. CP

"What thou lovest well remainest.
All the rest is dross."

Kent Johnson wrote:

>Carlo P. said:
>
>"Of course, the weakness in the first paragraph below is the trope that
>
>equates aesthetic manipulation with the kind of willful manipulation 
>that borders on lying to direct an outcome. I would insist that 
>sentiment in poetry intends both..."
>
>Ah, so thought and reason prompted by feeling is nothing less than
>"aesthetic manipulation," which is, in turn, nothing less than "lying to
>direct an outcome"!
>
>Wow... 
>
>Hasta la vista, Modernism! 
>
>Kent 
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>  
>


From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 20:34:34 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 20:34:34 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] no time
In-Reply-To: <12b.4af2bc52.2e6e51b0@aol.com>
References: <12b.4af2bc52.2e6e51b0@aol.com>
Message-ID: <413D021A.6090502@ix.netcom.com>

Saw that. Actually a Who song covers your dilemma. Somethin' about an 
old and new boss(sic)?

Note: Platonia

JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> http://www.platonia.com/ideas.html
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>


From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 20:37:12 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 20:37:12 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>	<413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>
	<413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com>

You gotta admit folks. Its something to write about while most of you 
rummage around in their daily experience for pseudo-interesting scrap 
9/10 of the way to sentimental blither like Levine. Can I have that? No. CP

R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:

> Dan,
>
> You have so much as said it out of psychology:
>
> <which taxonomizes and seeks to
> articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.>
>
> where 'general' is expressed as a number, series of numbers or 
> quantity or series of quantities etc.
>
> A dimension is 'spatial' not temporal until the Einsteinian trope. If 
> time becomes the fourth dimension, it is troped into spatiality and 
> mathematically quite literally takes on spatial qualities that respond 
> to the static mathematical appropriations available in three 
> dimensions and is no longer time as we think, Bohr would say, 
> visualize it.
>
> If you work through Charles Olson you find that among his reading list 
> to Ed Dorn, he recommends A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality, a book 
> which in part tries to keep all the plates spinning as regards 
> actuality and mathematico/physical formalism. As I've said before 
> formalisms are reductive and as you say that formailsm can express 
> itself as 'taxonomic.'
>
> Many disciplines, psychology included tried to ape the successes of 
> the sciences by adopting what were perceived as the virtues of 
> science. The gateays were all mathematical based formailzation of 
> actual, as Whitehead would say, nexi. The influence became evident in 
> nearly every discipline. Sometimes its just an internal logical 
> consistency which caused disastrous tropes to be put into action. 
> Sometimes it was formal logic, statistics, something as crude as 
> Taylor's Scientific Management or eugenics, but always it required a 
> consistency bordering on mathematical fungibility. Marx, no stranger 
> to scientific positivism said, "Logic is the money of the mind."
>
> Now, the literature is loaded with these failures. Psychoanalysis has 
> taken a particular beating as a scientific method. But as in all of 
> western capitalist politics the real culprit has been 
> exonerated---Science. Its insisted that science is immune from the 
> considerations of the quasi-scientific disciplnes and that its 
> 'successes' are prove positiv-ism. The instigatorr walks free.
>
> When I started writing poetry 35 years ago which accused the sciences 
> of being a menace because of their reliance on formalisms, what few 
> people noticed laughed. At best they thought I was about just 
> rehashing cold science/warm humanities crap.
>
> But as the ecological movement and concerns for the environment began 
> knocking around for an eschatology, I found I had already done a lot 
> of the groundwork---Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel, Hume and 
> others. My Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe touches on 
> these topice, specifically the historical limits of formalisms with 
> history represented by what we normally think of as time.
> Millennial Mathematics even more so as well, "Chlorpyrifos, the end of 
> the world is within us." as does Eschatology of Reason: The Twin 
> Towers. It turns out that specializing does cut out the big picture, 
> and the big picture is now fucked. Mooks like Gross and Levitt and all 
> the rest of the scientific community think science can turn the nose 
> of spaceship earth back up. Fat chance.
>
> Now, when able I'm doing for Game Theory what Decon. the Demiurge did 
> for physics in a poem with the borrowed title, De Rerum Natura. Game 
> Theory and its many sister disciplines is very interesting because Von 
> Neumann, who looms large in D the D in 20th century physics, computers 
> and defense policy(strategic bombing) and his fellows saw early on the 
> problems of quantifying say large populations for the purpose of 
> controlling or destroying them. The first computers were designed to 
> calculate artillery shell trajectories.
> The Game theorists tried to force the vagaries and infinite variables 
> of actuality and Process and Reality, into the formalistic world of 
> the hard sciences while maintaing the integrity of a non-mathematical 
> expression of infinite variables. This royal fuck up that has wider 
> reaching implications by far than the failure of psychoanalysis also 
> represents the most sophisticated apparatus of our official saviors.
>
> Is it any wonder that Von Neumann wrote Self-Reproducing Automata? He 
> knew we were goners so he created self-sufficient machines with Johnny 
> Von Neumann programmed in as their creator, read deity, while they 
> universe hopped gobbling a stray planet here or asteroid there for 
> sustenance. Shit. Ain't that dreary. CP 
>
>
>
>
> Daniel Zimmerman wrote:
>
>> Carlo,
>>
>> I've always felt suspicious about--even averse to--any approach in 
>> poerty to
>> mawkishness rather than feeling produced by penetrating description or
>> depiction.
>> Poetry seems to me a science of individual instances of 
>> feelings/perceptions
>> , as opposed to psychology, for example, which taxonomizes and seeks to
>> articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.
>> Physics--ever since experiment replaced the testimony of witnesses about
>> unique, often unrepeatable events--also seems concerned pretty much
>> exclusively with general principles. Could you elaborate a little on the
>> fourth dimension correlate? I'd have thought that physicists use the 
>> fourth
>> dimension to describe rather than to ape (or manipulate or coerce), but
>> perhaps you see some crossover there (in poetics, for example).
>>
>> ~ Dan Zimmerman
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
>> <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
>> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
>> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>> Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:28 PM
>> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
>>
>>
>>  
>>
>>> The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader
>>> or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
>>> manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
>>> mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
>>> patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying.
>>> In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
>>> defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more
>>> than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
>>> Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and
>>> negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
>>> discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
>>>
>>> However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between
>>> sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become 
>>> utterly
>>> blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set
>>> of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
>>> conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within
>>> which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
>>> independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
>>> spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static
>>> mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers
>>> utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
>>> domain. CP
>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> 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  Mon Sep  6 20:51:11 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 20:51:11 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] without falling under the control of either
Message-ID: <80.1549df0d.2e6e5fff@aol.com>

The greatest lyric poets, for instance Holderlin or Keats,
are men in whom the mythic power of insight breaks forth
again in its full intensity and objectifying power. But this
objectivity has discarded all material constraints. The spirit
lives in the word of language and in the mythical image
without falling under the control of either.
_The Power of Metaphor_, Ernst Cassirer. 
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From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep  6 20:58:09 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 20:58:09 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] "To A Frustrated Poet," by R.J. Ellmann 
Message-ID: <19b.297130df.2e6e61a1@aol.com>

I'm not sure the linebreaks are for real,
but it seems to speak to some sentiment expressed
on this list of late about the 'academic worker'
and her/his plight...


To A Frustrated Poet

This is to say
I know
You wish you were in the woods,
Living the poet life,
Not here at a formica topped table
In a meeting about perceived inequalities in the 
benefits and allowances offered to
employees of this college,
And I too wish you were in the woods,
Because it's no fun having a frustrated poet
In the Dept. of Human Resources, believe me.
In the poems of yours that I've read, you seem ever 
intelligent and decent and patient in a way
Not evident to us in this office,
And so, knowing how poets can make a feast out of trouble,
Raising flowers in a bed of drunkenness, divorce, despair,
I give you this check representing two weeks' wages
And ask you to clean out your desk today
And go home
And write a poem
With a real frog in it
And plums from the refrigerator,
So sweet and so cold.

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From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 21:00:17 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 21:00:17 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] without falling under the control of either
In-Reply-To: <80.1549df0d.2e6e5fff@aol.com>
References: <80.1549df0d.2e6e5fff@aol.com>
Message-ID: <413D0821.9050004@ix.netcom.com>

Nice for Ernst. Hard on Friedrich. CP

JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> The greatest lyric poets, for instance Holderlin or Keats,
> are men in whom the mythic power of insight breaks forth
> again in its full intensity and objectifying power. But this
> objectivity has discarded all material constraints. The spirit
> lives in the word of language and in the mythical image
> without falling under the control of either.
> _The Power of Metaphor_, Ernst Cassirer.
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>


From grahamd at ripon.edu  Mon Sep  6 21:33:33 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 20:33:33 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Speak of the devil
Message-ID: <BD627A1D.AF9A%grahamd@ripon.edu>

A poem from Philip Levine's new book, *Breath*, is featured at the moment on
Poetry Daily:

http://www.poems.com/today.htm

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 21:47:31 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 21:47:31 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Speak of the devil
In-Reply-To: <BD627A1D.AF9A%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <BD627A1D.AF9A%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <413D1333.6030307@ix.netcom.com>

Yippeee!!

David Graham wrote:

>A poem from Philip Levine's new book, *Breath*, is featured at the moment on
>Poetry Daily:
>
>http://www.poems.com/today.htm
>
>====================================================
>David Graham
>grahamd at ripon.edu
>Home Page:
>http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>Poetry Library:
>http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
>====================================================
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>  
>


From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 22:00:46 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 22:00:46 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Speak of the devil
In-Reply-To: <413D1333.6030307@ix.netcom.com>
References: <BD627A1D.AF9A%grahamd@ripon.edu> <413D1333.6030307@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <413D164E.9080301@ix.netcom.com>

Well. For a scrap from Phil's scrap book that was pretty long. But it 
all came out pretty much the way it was meant too and I'm happy for 
that. And relieved. I know Phil is. Thanks David. Cloacae P.
P.S. Home fries ar a fair bit more risky just before bedtime.

R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:

> Yippeee!!
>
> David Graham wrote:
>
>> A poem from Philip Levine's new book, *Breath*, is featured at the 
>> moment on
>> Poetry Daily:
>>
>> http://www.poems.com/today.htm
>>
>> ====================================================
>> David Graham
>> grahamd at ripon.edu
>> Home Page:
>> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>> Poetry Library:
>> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
>> ====================================================
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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 tad at opus40.org  Mon Sep  6 22:02:13 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 22:02:13 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Ignorance calling
References: <e2.68547f.2e6e4d65@cs.com>
Message-ID: <00be01c4947e$b357c380$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Sam - this sounds like a prize one could be proud to win.

Tad

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 7:31 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Ignorance calling


  In a message dated 9/6/2004 6:13:25 PM Central Daylight Time, JforJames at aol.com writes: 


    In a message dated 9/6/2004 6:34:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, tad at opus40.org writes:


      Doing a short article on Marilyn Nelson, and one of the honors in her bio is
      the 1998 Poets' Prize for The Fields of Praise. Any honor given to The
      Fields of Praise would have been richly deserved, and I'm sure this one was,
      but...what is it? What is the Poets' Prize? Who gives it?

      Tad


    Tad, don't know. I know that Marilyn Nelson has come
    back to Connectiuct, purchased a property with a house,
    and founded a writer's retreat for African American writers 
    called "Soul Mountain." 
    Finnegan


  I am currently the chair of the Poets' Prize, having succeeded Robert Phillips and David Mason who separately chaired in recent years.  The award was begun a dozen or so years ago by the late Frederick Morgan, Louis Simpson, and several others, and is given annually for a book by an American poet published in the previous year.  This year's prize, for a book published in 2002, was won by X. J. Kennedy for The Lords of Misrule.  The prize is announced in January, and the public award ceremony and reading take place at the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York in May.  The winner is selected by a group of some twenty poets, who also put up the money for the award (usually $3000).  Members of the poets' committee are not eligible for the prize, and all nominations must come from members of the committee.  In recent years the winners have included Marilyn Nelson, Leon Stokesbury, Sydney Lea, Carolyn Kizer, Betty Adcock, Robert Mezey, and Wendell Berry. 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Mon Sep  6 22:08:21 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 22:08:21 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: Sentiment vs. sentimentality
In-Reply-To: <s13cac82.010@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s13cac82.010@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <413D1815.6020606@ix.netcom.com>

Kint,

Where is your explanation of the distinction between sentiment and 
sentimentality? We got a brown out here in the woods that begins at 
10:30EST and without adequate refrigeration the plums have already 
shriveled like an frustrated doctor's squajamons. CP


Kent Johnson wrote:

>Carlo, we'd probably agree that the poem in question suffers from
>sentimentality. 
>
>But may I amiably suggest that your argument suffers, in turn, from an
>apparent misapprehension that sentiment and sentimentality are pretty
>much the same thing.
>
>Probably good to get a semantic handle on the basic terms under
>discussion before grimly moving into the popular physics...
>
>Kent
>_______________________________________________
>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 Sep  6 22:20:46 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 22:20:46 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Ignorance calling
Message-ID: <154.3e8dedf2.2e6e74fe@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/6/2004 9:02:35 PM Central Daylight Time, tad at opus40.org 
writes: 
> 
> Sam - this sounds like a prize one could be proud to win.
>   
>  Tad
>   
> 
I hope so.  It's always struck me that the fact that the poets put up the 
money themselves constituted a large part of the honor.
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From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Mon Sep  6 23:32:13 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe)
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 23:32:13 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com> <413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>
	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>
	<413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com> <413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>

Carlo,

As much as I shudder when required to think down some of the roads you have led 
us in terms of literary/cultural/political criticism, I applaud your spirit.  I 
do feel nicely jostled (in this lovely anonymous world of cyberspace where one 
can easily escape) and to see revealed some of my own literary 
unconsciousness,. most of which willl probably remain intact, but 
nonetheless...I don't mind witnessing a good fight. At some level, it calms me 
down... 

My point is, where would a person find a few of your poems?

I have to say, I am sick, to some degree, of telling stories in my own work.  I 
am sick of writing the stories from my mind.  OF trying to sum everything up.  
I am interested in, in the words of Edward Bartok-Baratta (a sometimes 
wonderful poet), keeping a little of dream nearby.  I am interested in writing 
more from my unconscious mind, more, from, really, my toes.  Finding more than 
the story can tell, perhaps.

As far as the evil machinations of the culture - I simply try to stay 
psychologically awake - for which i HAVE TAKEN SOME OF THE SAME GRIEF AS i AM 
SURE YOU ARE USED TO.  sorry about the caps lock.  I really truly do not have 
the strength to face wholesale evil - by now I understand that I become 
completely ineffective.  So it is a consciousness to the small things.  

Combined with a laziness, yes... so I will, indeed, make myself reread some of 
your uproarious diatribes and try and make some sense for myself...and possibly 
bring a different awareness to my work.

meanwhile, your poems??

Kerry O'Keefe
Quoting "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>:

> You gotta admit folks. Its something to write about while most of you 
> rummage around in their daily experience for pseudo-interesting scrap 
> 9/10 of the way to sentimental blither like Levine. Can I have that? No. CP
> 
> R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
> 
> > Dan,
> >
> > You have so much as said it out of psychology:
> >
> > <which taxonomizes and seeks to
> > articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.>
> >
> > where 'general' is expressed as a number, series of numbers or 
> > quantity or series of quantities etc.
> >
> > A dimension is 'spatial' not temporal until the Einsteinian trope. If 
> > time becomes the fourth dimension, it is troped into spatiality and 
> > mathematically quite literally takes on spatial qualities that respond 
> > to the static mathematical appropriations available in three 
> > dimensions and is no longer time as we think, Bohr would say, 
> > visualize it.
> >
> > If you work through Charles Olson you find that among his reading list 
> > to Ed Dorn, he recommends A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality, a book 
> > which in part tries to keep all the plates spinning as regards 
> > actuality and mathematico/physical formalism. As I've said before 
> > formalisms are reductive and as you say that formailsm can express 
> > itself as 'taxonomic.'
> >
> > Many disciplines, psychology included tried to ape the successes of 
> > the sciences by adopting what were perceived as the virtues of 
> > science. The gateays were all mathematical based formailzation of 
> > actual, as Whitehead would say, nexi. The influence became evident in 
> > nearly every discipline. Sometimes its just an internal logical 
> > consistency which caused disastrous tropes to be put into action. 
> > Sometimes it was formal logic, statistics, something as crude as 
> > Taylor's Scientific Management or eugenics, but always it required a 
> > consistency bordering on mathematical fungibility. Marx, no stranger 
> > to scientific positivism said, "Logic is the money of the mind."
> >
> > Now, the literature is loaded with these failures. Psychoanalysis has 
> > taken a particular beating as a scientific method. But as in all of 
> > western capitalist politics the real culprit has been 
> > exonerated---Science. Its insisted that science is immune from the 
> > considerations of the quasi-scientific disciplnes and that its 
> > 'successes' are prove positiv-ism. The instigatorr walks free.
> >
> > When I started writing poetry 35 years ago which accused the sciences 
> > of being a menace because of their reliance on formalisms, what few 
> > people noticed laughed. At best they thought I was about just 
> > rehashing cold science/warm humanities crap.
> >
> > But as the ecological movement and concerns for the environment began 
> > knocking around for an eschatology, I found I had already done a lot 
> > of the groundwork---Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel, Hume and 
> > others. My Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe touches on 
> > these topice, specifically the historical limits of formalisms with 
> > history represented by what we normally think of as time.
> > Millennial Mathematics even more so as well, "Chlorpyrifos, the end of 
> > the world is within us." as does Eschatology of Reason: The Twin 
> > Towers. It turns out that specializing does cut out the big picture, 
> > and the big picture is now fucked. Mooks like Gross and Levitt and all 
> > the rest of the scientific community think science can turn the nose 
> > of spaceship earth back up. Fat chance.
> >
> > Now, when able I'm doing for Game Theory what Decon. the Demiurge did 
> > for physics in a poem with the borrowed title, De Rerum Natura. Game 
> > Theory and its many sister disciplines is very interesting because Von 
> > Neumann, who looms large in D the D in 20th century physics, computers 
> > and defense policy(strategic bombing) and his fellows saw early on the 
> > problems of quantifying say large populations for the purpose of 
> > controlling or destroying them. The first computers were designed to 
> > calculate artillery shell trajectories.
> > The Game theorists tried to force the vagaries and infinite variables 
> > of actuality and Process and Reality, into the formalistic world of 
> > the hard sciences while maintaing the integrity of a non-mathematical 
> > expression of infinite variables. This royal fuck up that has wider 
> > reaching implications by far than the failure of psychoanalysis also 
> > represents the most sophisticated apparatus of our official saviors.
> >
> > Is it any wonder that Von Neumann wrote Self-Reproducing Automata? He 
> > knew we were goners so he created self-sufficient machines with Johnny 
> > Von Neumann programmed in as their creator, read deity, while they 
> > universe hopped gobbling a stray planet here or asteroid there for 
> > sustenance. Shit. Ain't that dreary. CP 
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Daniel Zimmerman wrote:
> >
> >> Carlo,
> >>
> >> I've always felt suspicious about--even averse to--any approach in 
> >> poerty to
> >> mawkishness rather than feeling produced by penetrating description or
> >> depiction.
> >> Poetry seems to me a science of individual instances of 
> >> feelings/perceptions
> >> , as opposed to psychology, for example, which taxonomizes and seeks to
> >> articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.
> >> Physics--ever since experiment replaced the testimony of witnesses about
> >> unique, often unrepeatable events--also seems concerned pretty much
> >> exclusively with general principles. Could you elaborate a little on the
> >> fourth dimension correlate? I'd have thought that physicists use the 
> >> fourth
> >> dimension to describe rather than to ape (or manipulate or coerce), but
> >> perhaps you see some crossover there (in poetics, for example).
> >>
> >> ~ Dan Zimmerman
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message ----- From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
> >> <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
> >> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
> >> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> >> Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:28 PM
> >> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
> >>
> >>
> >>  
> >>
> >>> The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader
> >>> or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
> >>> manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
> >>> mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
> >>> patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying.
> >>> In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
> >>> defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more
> >>> than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
> >>> Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and
> >>> negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
> >>> discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
> >>>
> >>> However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between
> >>> sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become 
> >>> utterly
> >>> blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set
> >>> of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
> >>> conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within
> >>> which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
> >>> independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
> >>> spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static
> >>> mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers
> >>> utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
> >>> domain. CP
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>   
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> 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 alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Tue Sep  7 00:37:00 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 00:37:00 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>	<413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com>
	<413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com>
	<1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com>

Thanks Kerry,

Many poems and articles can be found at:
http://www.flashpointmag.com/

Most people gravitate to:
Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe
http://www.flashpointmag.com/tribefp5.htm

which itself is being deconstructed as we speak.

If I seem a little agressive on these lists its because I've been 
attacked by a rather large number of characters herin.
Characters not character. Gabe Gudding was thrown off the Buffalo list 
because frankly they were too prissy and anal to handle Gabe at the 
time. But then he went back to them and begged to be let back on the 
list and promised to be a good boy for career and company. How has that 
compromise with langpo morons affected his poetry?

Sondheim once told me I didn't know him so my criticism was off the 
mark. I applied myself forthwith reading a great deal of his voluminous 
ouvre only to discover I had known him all along perhaps better than he 
had known himself. Sondheim is a milktoast once letting an anti-semite 
off the hook because he couldn't stand the fireworks and leaving myself 
and a friend to defend him.

Kent is the Karl Rove of the poetry lists. He is an inveterate liar who 
made a minor splash by perpetrating a fifth rate fraud in a 6th rate 
discipline years ago and flogging it to death. The only way to treat 
anything Kent says, unless he sees some advantage in knowing you, is as 
pure baiting bullshit., Don't take him seriously and have a good time at 
his expense. For a laugh ask to see his poetry.

Silliman is a snooze from the old langpos who will be best known for 
creating an utterly sleep inducing blog cluttered with his tired and 
predictable commentary. Once again, if he sees no advantage in it, he 
won't talk to you.

Richard Dillon is a twit of the first order who thinks he's a right 
winger, but when you pry he is just a ignoarnt blowhard vulnerable to 
the smallest fact or insight.  My introduction to Richard was a diatribe 
of his against the current leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung. When I 
pointed out Kim Il Sung was dead and Kim Jong Il was in power, he seemed 
embarrassed but not bright enough to learn anything.  When I referred to 
international economic embargoes he was once again lost.  He's so 
stupid, looking up to Bush is appropriate posture and might reflect 
relative IQ.

Jeff Newberry's a Dillon only dumber.

Paul Lake is a neo-formalist as stiff as his tiny little poems squeezed 
through the tiny orifice of neo-formalism. God only knows where he 
thinks that act is going.

Graham doesn't have a clue and is dead set on making sure it stays that 
way. Only then will he get the break so many around him have been 
afforded. Taking a new tact for him would be unthinkable. He's too 
invested in being all mawked up.

Congrats;
"Keep the dogs out of your dish." CP

Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe wrote:

>Carlo,
>
>As much as I shudder when required to think down some of the roads you have led 
>us in terms of literary/cultural/political criticism, I applaud your spirit.  I 
>do feel nicely jostled (in this lovely anonymous world of cyberspace where one 
>can easily escape) and to see revealed some of my own literary 
>unconsciousness,. most of which willl probably remain intact, but 
>nonetheless...I don't mind witnessing a good fight. At some level, it calms me 
>down... 
>
>My point is, where would a person find a few of your poems?
>
>I have to say, I am sick, to some degree, of telling stories in my own work.  I 
>am sick of writing the stories from my mind.  OF trying to sum everything up.  
>I am interested in, in the words of Edward Bartok-Baratta (a sometimes 
>wonderful poet), keeping a little of dream nearby.  I am interested in writing 
>more from my unconscious mind, more, from, really, my toes.  Finding more than 
>the story can tell, perhaps.
>
>As far as the evil machinations of the culture - I simply try to stay 
>psychologically awake - for which i HAVE TAKEN SOME OF THE SAME GRIEF AS i AM 
>SURE YOU ARE USED TO.  sorry about the caps lock.  I really truly do not have 
>the strength to face wholesale evil - by now I understand that I become 
>completely ineffective.  So it is a consciousness to the small things.  
>
>Combined with a laziness, yes... so I will, indeed, make myself reread some of 
>your uproarious diatribes and try and make some sense for myself...and possibly 
>bring a different awareness to my work.
>
>meanwhile, your poems??
>
>Kerry O'Keefe
>Quoting "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>:
>
>  
>
>>You gotta admit folks. Its something to write about while most of you 
>>rummage around in their daily experience for pseudo-interesting scrap 
>>9/10 of the way to sentimental blither like Levine. Can I have that? No. CP
>>
>>R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Dan,
>>>
>>>You have so much as said it out of psychology:
>>>
>>><which taxonomizes and seeks to
>>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.>
>>>
>>>where 'general' is expressed as a number, series of numbers or 
>>>quantity or series of quantities etc.
>>>
>>>A dimension is 'spatial' not temporal until the Einsteinian trope. If 
>>>time becomes the fourth dimension, it is troped into spatiality and 
>>>mathematically quite literally takes on spatial qualities that respond 
>>>to the static mathematical appropriations available in three 
>>>dimensions and is no longer time as we think, Bohr would say, 
>>>visualize it.
>>>
>>>If you work through Charles Olson you find that among his reading list 
>>>to Ed Dorn, he recommends A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality, a book 
>>>which in part tries to keep all the plates spinning as regards 
>>>actuality and mathematico/physical formalism. As I've said before 
>>>formalisms are reductive and as you say that formailsm can express 
>>>itself as 'taxonomic.'
>>>
>>>Many disciplines, psychology included tried to ape the successes of 
>>>the sciences by adopting what were perceived as the virtues of 
>>>science. The gateays were all mathematical based formailzation of 
>>>actual, as Whitehead would say, nexi. The influence became evident in 
>>>nearly every discipline. Sometimes its just an internal logical 
>>>consistency which caused disastrous tropes to be put into action. 
>>>Sometimes it was formal logic, statistics, something as crude as 
>>>Taylor's Scientific Management or eugenics, but always it required a 
>>>consistency bordering on mathematical fungibility. Marx, no stranger 
>>>to scientific positivism said, "Logic is the money of the mind."
>>>
>>>Now, the literature is loaded with these failures. Psychoanalysis has 
>>>taken a particular beating as a scientific method. But as in all of 
>>>western capitalist politics the real culprit has been 
>>>exonerated---Science. Its insisted that science is immune from the 
>>>considerations of the quasi-scientific disciplnes and that its 
>>>'successes' are prove positiv-ism. The instigatorr walks free.
>>>
>>>When I started writing poetry 35 years ago which accused the sciences 
>>>of being a menace because of their reliance on formalisms, what few 
>>>people noticed laughed. At best they thought I was about just 
>>>rehashing cold science/warm humanities crap.
>>>
>>>But as the ecological movement and concerns for the environment began 
>>>knocking around for an eschatology, I found I had already done a lot 
>>>of the groundwork---Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel, Hume and 
>>>others. My Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe touches on 
>>>these topice, specifically the historical limits of formalisms with 
>>>history represented by what we normally think of as time.
>>>Millennial Mathematics even more so as well, "Chlorpyrifos, the end of 
>>>the world is within us." as does Eschatology of Reason: The Twin 
>>>Towers. It turns out that specializing does cut out the big picture, 
>>>and the big picture is now fucked. Mooks like Gross and Levitt and all 
>>>the rest of the scientific community think science can turn the nose 
>>>of spaceship earth back up. Fat chance.
>>>
>>>Now, when able I'm doing for Game Theory what Decon. the Demiurge did 
>>>for physics in a poem with the borrowed title, De Rerum Natura. Game 
>>>Theory and its many sister disciplines is very interesting because Von 
>>>Neumann, who looms large in D the D in 20th century physics, computers 
>>>and defense policy(strategic bombing) and his fellows saw early on the 
>>>problems of quantifying say large populations for the purpose of 
>>>controlling or destroying them. The first computers were designed to 
>>>calculate artillery shell trajectories.
>>>The Game theorists tried to force the vagaries and infinite variables 
>>>of actuality and Process and Reality, into the formalistic world of 
>>>the hard sciences while maintaing the integrity of a non-mathematical 
>>>expression of infinite variables. This royal fuck up that has wider 
>>>reaching implications by far than the failure of psychoanalysis also 
>>>represents the most sophisticated apparatus of our official saviors.
>>>
>>>Is it any wonder that Von Neumann wrote Self-Reproducing Automata? He 
>>>knew we were goners so he created self-sufficient machines with Johnny 
>>>Von Neumann programmed in as their creator, read deity, while they 
>>>universe hopped gobbling a stray planet here or asteroid there for 
>>>sustenance. Shit. Ain't that dreary. CP 
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Daniel Zimmerman wrote:
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>Carlo,
>>>>
>>>>I've always felt suspicious about--even averse to--any approach in 
>>>>poerty to
>>>>mawkishness rather than feeling produced by penetrating description or
>>>>depiction.
>>>>Poetry seems to me a science of individual instances of 
>>>>feelings/perceptions
>>>>, as opposed to psychology, for example, which taxonomizes and seeks to
>>>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.
>>>>Physics--ever since experiment replaced the testimony of witnesses about
>>>>unique, often unrepeatable events--also seems concerned pretty much
>>>>exclusively with general principles. Could you elaborate a little on the
>>>>fourth dimension correlate? I'd have thought that physicists use the 
>>>>fourth
>>>>dimension to describe rather than to ape (or manipulate or coerce), but
>>>>perhaps you see some crossover there (in poetics, for example).
>>>>
>>>>~ Dan Zimmerman
>>>>
>>>>----- Original Message ----- From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
>>>><alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
>>>>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
>>>><new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>>>>Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:28 PM
>>>>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>>>The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader
>>>>>or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
>>>>>manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
>>>>>mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
>>>>>patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying.
>>>>>In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
>>>>>defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more
>>>>>than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
>>>>>Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and
>>>>>negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
>>>>>discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
>>>>>
>>>>>However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between
>>>>>sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become 
>>>>>utterly
>>>>>blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set
>>>>>of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
>>>>>conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within
>>>>>which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
>>>>>independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
>>>>>spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static
>>>>>mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers
>>>>>utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
>>>>>domain. CP
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>  
>>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>>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
>>
>>    
>>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>  
>


From ron.silliman at verizon.net  Tue Sep  7 08:23:20 2004
From: ron.silliman at verizon.net (Ron)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 08:23:20 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Silliman's Blog
Message-ID: <001d01c494d5$776ec6f0$6401a8c0@Dell>

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

RECENT TOPICS:

In search of Robert Hogg

Philadelphia Progressive Poetry Calendar

Bill Knott's Short Poems --
short poems . not!

The Opening of Field --
Robert Duncan's major themes

The H.D. Book
& Robert Duncan's poetry

Greetings from San Antonio

Collaborations of unfathomable familiarity -
Francie Shaw & Bob Perelman's Playing Bodies

David Perry's New Years -
Kicking it up a notch or two

Elizabeth Willis' Meteoric Flowers -
Too much perfection, not enough risk

Joanne Kyger's God Never Dies -
When exactness is everything

Vacation reading list(s)

Rem Koolhaas,
Frank Gehry & 
post-avant architecture
in Seattle

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/




From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Tue Sep  7 09:46:27 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 08:46:27 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re Q: Sentiment vs. sentimentality
Message-ID: <s13d7583.043@mail.highland.edu>

Carlo P. said,

>>"Kint: Where is your explanation of the distinction between sentiment
and 
sentimentality? We got a brown out here in the woods that begins at 
10:30EST and without adequate refrigeration the plums have already 
shriveled like an frustrated doctor's squajamons."


You could begin with a dictionary.

As for the plums shriveling, look on the bright side: Prunes are good
for the constipation.




From alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Tue Sep  7 10:28:18 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 10:28:18 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re Q: Sentiment vs. sentimentality
In-Reply-To: <s13d7583.043@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s13d7583.043@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <413DC582.4050708@ix.netcom.com>

I agree. Kent could be begin with a dictionary. But then again that 
would fuck up the pace of his little canard and his usual bullshit with 
nothing behind it. CP

Kent Johnson wrote:

>Carlo P. said,
>
>  
>
>>>"Kint: Where is your explanation of the distinction between sentiment
>>>      
>>>
>and 
>sentimentality? We got a brown out here in the woods that begins at 
>10:30EST and without adequate refrigeration the plums have already 
>shriveled like an frustrated doctor's squajamons."
>
>
>You could begin with a dictionary.
>
>As for the plums shriveling, look on the bright side: Prunes are good
>for the constipation.
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>  
>


From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Tue Sep  7 10:34:00 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 10:34:00 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com> <413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>
	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>
	<413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com> <413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com>
	<1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
	<413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409071030090.28264@shell2.oit.umass.edu>

Indeed!  Well I am awake and invigorated.

I have maintained such an impressive obscurity, that I am always certain
those who know me can ONLY be doing it because they like me...

Today is the first day of school at work, and also for Gracie and Gus
(6th & 7th gr., respectively.)  By the
end of this day, which started at 4:30 a.m.with first one then another
anxious
kid clomping down to use the bathroom, I will be mildly hallucinatory.  It
will be then that I will take the pleasure of chasing down some of yr
poems.

Cheers, Kerry


On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:

> Thanks Kerry,
>
> Many poems and articles can be found at:
> http://www.flashpointmag.com/
>
> Most people gravitate to:
> Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe
> http://www.flashpointmag.com/tribefp5.htm
>
> which itself is being deconstructed as we speak.
>
> If I seem a little agressive on these lists its because I've been
> attacked by a rather large number of characters herin.
> Characters not character. Gabe Gudding was thrown off the Buffalo list
> because frankly they were too prissy and anal to handle Gabe at the
> time. But then he went back to them and begged to be let back on the
> list and promised to be a good boy for career and company. How has that
> compromise with langpo morons affected his poetry?
>
> Sondheim once told me I didn't know him so my criticism was off the
> mark. I applied myself forthwith reading a great deal of his voluminous
> ouvre only to discover I had known him all along perhaps better than he
> had known himself. Sondheim is a milktoast once letting an anti-semite
> off the hook because he couldn't stand the fireworks and leaving myself
> and a friend to defend him.
>
> Kent is the Karl Rove of the poetry lists. He is an inveterate liar who
> made a minor splash by perpetrating a fifth rate fraud in a 6th rate
> discipline years ago and flogging it to death. The only way to treat
> anything Kent says, unless he sees some advantage in knowing you, is as
> pure baiting bullshit., Don't take him seriously and have a good time at
> his expense. For a laugh ask to see his poetry.
>
> Silliman is a snooze from the old langpos who will be best known for
> creating an utterly sleep inducing blog cluttered with his tired and
> predictable commentary. Once again, if he sees no advantage in it, he
> won't talk to you.
>
> Richard Dillon is a twit of the first order who thinks he's a right
> winger, but when you pry he is just a ignoarnt blowhard vulnerable to
> the smallest fact or insight.  My introduction to Richard was a diatribe
> of his against the current leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung. When I
> pointed out Kim Il Sung was dead and Kim Jong Il was in power, he seemed
> embarrassed but not bright enough to learn anything.  When I referred to
> international economic embargoes he was once again lost.  He's so
> stupid, looking up to Bush is appropriate posture and might reflect
> relative IQ.
>
> Jeff Newberry's a Dillon only dumber.
>
> Paul Lake is a neo-formalist as stiff as his tiny little poems squeezed
> through the tiny orifice of neo-formalism. God only knows where he
> thinks that act is going.
>
> Graham doesn't have a clue and is dead set on making sure it stays that
> way. Only then will he get the break so many around him have been
> afforded. Taking a new tact for him would be unthinkable. He's too
> invested in being all mawked up.
>
> Congrats;
> "Keep the dogs out of your dish." CP
>
> Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe wrote:
>
> >Carlo,
> >
> >As much as I shudder when required to think down some of the roads you have led
> >us in terms of literary/cultural/political criticism, I applaud your spirit.  I
> >do feel nicely jostled (in this lovely anonymous world of cyberspace where one
> >can easily escape) and to see revealed some of my own literary
> >unconsciousness,. most of which willl probably remain intact, but
> >nonetheless...I don't mind witnessing a good fight. At some level, it calms me
> >down...
> >
> >My point is, where would a person find a few of your poems?
> >
> >I have to say, I am sick, to some degree, of telling stories in my own work.  I
> >am sick of writing the stories from my mind.  OF trying to sum everything up.
> >I am interested in, in the words of Edward Bartok-Baratta (a sometimes
> >wonderful poet), keeping a little of dream nearby.  I am interested in writing
> >more from my unconscious mind, more, from, really, my toes.  Finding more than
> >the story can tell, perhaps.
> >
> >As far as the evil machinations of the culture - I simply try to stay
> >psychologically awake - for which i HAVE TAKEN SOME OF THE SAME GRIEF AS i AM
> >SURE YOU ARE USED TO.  sorry about the caps lock.  I really truly do not have
> >the strength to face wholesale evil - by now I understand that I become
> >completely ineffective.  So it is a consciousness to the small things.
> >
> >Combined with a laziness, yes... so I will, indeed, make myself reread some of
> >your uproarious diatribes and try and make some sense for myself...and possibly
> >bring a different awareness to my work.
> >
> >meanwhile, your poems??
> >
> >Kerry O'Keefe
> >Quoting "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>:
> >
> >
> >
> >>You gotta admit folks. Its something to write about while most of you
> >>rummage around in their daily experience for pseudo-interesting scrap
> >>9/10 of the way to sentimental blither like Levine. Can I have that? No. CP
> >>
> >>R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>Dan,
> >>>
> >>>You have so much as said it out of psychology:
> >>>
> >>><which taxonomizes and seeks to
> >>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.>
> >>>
> >>>where 'general' is expressed as a number, series of numbers or
> >>>quantity or series of quantities etc.
> >>>
> >>>A dimension is 'spatial' not temporal until the Einsteinian trope. If
> >>>time becomes the fourth dimension, it is troped into spatiality and
> >>>mathematically quite literally takes on spatial qualities that respond
> >>>to the static mathematical appropriations available in three
> >>>dimensions and is no longer time as we think, Bohr would say,
> >>>visualize it.
> >>>
> >>>If you work through Charles Olson you find that among his reading list
> >>>to Ed Dorn, he recommends A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality, a book
> >>>which in part tries to keep all the plates spinning as regards
> >>>actuality and mathematico/physical formalism. As I've said before
> >>>formalisms are reductive and as you say that formailsm can express
> >>>itself as 'taxonomic.'
> >>>
> >>>Many disciplines, psychology included tried to ape the successes of
> >>>the sciences by adopting what were perceived as the virtues of
> >>>science. The gateays were all mathematical based formailzation of
> >>>actual, as Whitehead would say, nexi. The influence became evident in
> >>>nearly every discipline. Sometimes its just an internal logical
> >>>consistency which caused disastrous tropes to be put into action.
> >>>Sometimes it was formal logic, statistics, something as crude as
> >>>Taylor's Scientific Management or eugenics, but always it required a
> >>>consistency bordering on mathematical fungibility. Marx, no stranger
> >>>to scientific positivism said, "Logic is the money of the mind."
> >>>
> >>>Now, the literature is loaded with these failures. Psychoanalysis has
> >>>taken a particular beating as a scientific method. But as in all of
> >>>western capitalist politics the real culprit has been
> >>>exonerated---Science. Its insisted that science is immune from the
> >>>considerations of the quasi-scientific disciplnes and that its
> >>>'successes' are prove positiv-ism. The instigatorr walks free.
> >>>
> >>>When I started writing poetry 35 years ago which accused the sciences
> >>>of being a menace because of their reliance on formalisms, what few
> >>>people noticed laughed. At best they thought I was about just
> >>>rehashing cold science/warm humanities crap.
> >>>
> >>>But as the ecological movement and concerns for the environment began
> >>>knocking around for an eschatology, I found I had already done a lot
> >>>of the groundwork---Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel, Hume and
> >>>others. My Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe touches on
> >>>these topice, specifically the historical limits of formalisms with
> >>>history represented by what we normally think of as time.
> >>>Millennial Mathematics even more so as well, "Chlorpyrifos, the end of
> >>>the world is within us." as does Eschatology of Reason: The Twin
> >>>Towers. It turns out that specializing does cut out the big picture,
> >>>and the big picture is now fucked. Mooks like Gross and Levitt and all
> >>>the rest of the scientific community think science can turn the nose
> >>>of spaceship earth back up. Fat chance.
> >>>
> >>>Now, when able I'm doing for Game Theory what Decon. the Demiurge did
> >>>for physics in a poem with the borrowed title, De Rerum Natura. Game
> >>>Theory and its many sister disciplines is very interesting because Von
> >>>Neumann, who looms large in D the D in 20th century physics, computers
> >>>and defense policy(strategic bombing) and his fellows saw early on the
> >>>problems of quantifying say large populations for the purpose of
> >>>controlling or destroying them. The first computers were designed to
> >>>calculate artillery shell trajectories.
> >>>The Game theorists tried to force the vagaries and infinite variables
> >>>of actuality and Process and Reality, into the formalistic world of
> >>>the hard sciences while maintaing the integrity of a non-mathematical
> >>>expression of infinite variables. This royal fuck up that has wider
> >>>reaching implications by far than the failure of psychoanalysis also
> >>>represents the most sophisticated apparatus of our official saviors.
> >>>
> >>>Is it any wonder that Von Neumann wrote Self-Reproducing Automata? He
> >>>knew we were goners so he created self-sufficient machines with Johnny
> >>>Von Neumann programmed in as their creator, read deity, while they
> >>>universe hopped gobbling a stray planet here or asteroid there for
> >>>sustenance. Shit. Ain't that dreary. CP
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>Daniel Zimmerman wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>Carlo,
> >>>>
> >>>>I've always felt suspicious about--even averse to--any approach in
> >>>>poerty to
> >>>>mawkishness rather than feeling produced by penetrating description or
> >>>>depiction.
> >>>>Poetry seems to me a science of individual instances of
> >>>>feelings/perceptions
> >>>>, as opposed to psychology, for example, which taxonomizes and seeks to
> >>>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.
> >>>>Physics--ever since experiment replaced the testimony of witnesses about
> >>>>unique, often unrepeatable events--also seems concerned pretty much
> >>>>exclusively with general principles. Could you elaborate a little on the
> >>>>fourth dimension correlate? I'd have thought that physicists use the
> >>>>fourth
> >>>>dimension to describe rather than to ape (or manipulate or coerce), but
> >>>>perhaps you see some crossover there (in poetics, for example).
> >>>>
> >>>>~ Dan Zimmerman
> >>>>
> >>>>----- Original Message ----- From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli"
> >>>><alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
> >>>>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
> >>>><new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> >>>>Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:28 PM
> >>>>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>>The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader
> >>>>>or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
> >>>>>manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
> >>>>>mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
> >>>>>patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying.
> >>>>>In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
> >>>>>defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more
> >>>>>than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
> >>>>>Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and
> >>>>>negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
> >>>>>discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between
> >>>>>sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become
> >>>>>utterly
> >>>>>blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set
> >>>>>of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
> >>>>>conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within
> >>>>>which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
> >>>>>independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
> >>>>>spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static
> >>>>>mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers
> >>>>>utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
> >>>>>domain. CP
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>_______________________________________________
> >>>>>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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >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 alphavil at ix.netcom.com  Tue Sep  7 10:59:59 2004
From: alphavil at ix.netcom.com (R.Gancie/C.Parcelli)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 10:59:59 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409071030090.28264@shell2.oit.umass.edu>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>	<413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com>
	<413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com>	<1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>	<413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com>
	<Pine.GSO.4.55.0409071030090.28264@shell2.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <413DCCEF.1030406@ix.netcom.com>

<I will be mildly hallucinatory.>
I strongly recommend staying in this condition. CP



Kerry O'Keefe wrote:

>Indeed!  Well I am awake and invigorated.
>
>I have maintained such an impressive obscurity, that I am always certain
>those who know me can ONLY be doing it because they like me...
>
>Today is the first day of school at work, and also for Gracie and Gus
>(6th & 7th gr., respectively.)  By the
>end of this day, which started at 4:30 a.m.with first one then another
>anxious
>kid clomping down to use the bathroom, I will be mildly hallucinatory.  It
>will be then that I will take the pleasure of chasing down some of yr
>poems.
>
>Cheers, Kerry
>
>
>On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Thanks Kerry,
>>
>>Many poems and articles can be found at:
>>http://www.flashpointmag.com/
>>
>>Most people gravitate to:
>>Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe
>>http://www.flashpointmag.com/tribefp5.htm
>>
>>which itself is being deconstructed as we speak.
>>
>>If I seem a little agressive on these lists its because I've been
>>attacked by a rather large number of characters herin.
>>Characters not character. Gabe Gudding was thrown off the Buffalo list
>>because frankly they were too prissy and anal to handle Gabe at the
>>time. But then he went back to them and begged to be let back on the
>>list and promised to be a good boy for career and company. How has that
>>compromise with langpo morons affected his poetry?
>>
>>Sondheim once told me I didn't know him so my criticism was off the
>>mark. I applied myself forthwith reading a great deal of his voluminous
>>ouvre only to discover I had known him all along perhaps better than he
>>had known himself. Sondheim is a milktoast once letting an anti-semite
>>off the hook because he couldn't stand the fireworks and leaving myself
>>and a friend to defend him.
>>
>>Kent is the Karl Rove of the poetry lists. He is an inveterate liar who
>>made a minor splash by perpetrating a fifth rate fraud in a 6th rate
>>discipline years ago and flogging it to death. The only way to treat
>>anything Kent says, unless he sees some advantage in knowing you, is as
>>pure baiting bullshit., Don't take him seriously and have a good time at
>>his expense. For a laugh ask to see his poetry.
>>
>>Silliman is a snooze from the old langpos who will be best known for
>>creating an utterly sleep inducing blog cluttered with his tired and
>>predictable commentary. Once again, if he sees no advantage in it, he
>>won't talk to you.
>>
>>Richard Dillon is a twit of the first order who thinks he's a right
>>winger, but when you pry he is just a ignoarnt blowhard vulnerable to
>>the smallest fact or insight.  My introduction to Richard was a diatribe
>>of his against the current leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung. When I
>>pointed out Kim Il Sung was dead and Kim Jong Il was in power, he seemed
>>embarrassed but not bright enough to learn anything.  When I referred to
>>international economic embargoes he was once again lost.  He's so
>>stupid, looking up to Bush is appropriate posture and might reflect
>>relative IQ.
>>
>>Jeff Newberry's a Dillon only dumber.
>>
>>Paul Lake is a neo-formalist as stiff as his tiny little poems squeezed
>>through the tiny orifice of neo-formalism. God only knows where he
>>thinks that act is going.
>>
>>Graham doesn't have a clue and is dead set on making sure it stays that
>>way. Only then will he get the break so many around him have been
>>afforded. Taking a new tact for him would be unthinkable. He's too
>>invested in being all mawked up.
>>
>>Congrats;
>>"Keep the dogs out of your dish." CP
>>
>>Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Carlo,
>>>
>>>As much as I shudder when required to think down some of the roads you have led
>>>us in terms of literary/cultural/political criticism, I applaud your spirit.  I
>>>do feel nicely jostled (in this lovely anonymous world of cyberspace where one
>>>can easily escape) and to see revealed some of my own literary
>>>unconsciousness,. most of which willl probably remain intact, but
>>>nonetheless...I don't mind witnessing a good fight. At some level, it calms me
>>>down...
>>>
>>>My point is, where would a person find a few of your poems?
>>>
>>>I have to say, I am sick, to some degree, of telling stories in my own work.  I
>>>am sick of writing the stories from my mind.  OF trying to sum everything up.
>>>I am interested in, in the words of Edward Bartok-Baratta (a sometimes
>>>wonderful poet), keeping a little of dream nearby.  I am interested in writing
>>>more from my unconscious mind, more, from, really, my toes.  Finding more than
>>>the story can tell, perhaps.
>>>
>>>As far as the evil machinations of the culture - I simply try to stay
>>>psychologically awake - for which i HAVE TAKEN SOME OF THE SAME GRIEF AS i AM
>>>SURE YOU ARE USED TO.  sorry about the caps lock.  I really truly do not have
>>>the strength to face wholesale evil - by now I understand that I become
>>>completely ineffective.  So it is a consciousness to the small things.
>>>
>>>Combined with a laziness, yes... so I will, indeed, make myself reread some of
>>>your uproarious diatribes and try and make some sense for myself...and possibly
>>>bring a different awareness to my work.
>>>
>>>meanwhile, your poems??
>>>
>>>Kerry O'Keefe
>>>Quoting "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>You gotta admit folks. Its something to write about while most of you
>>>>rummage around in their daily experience for pseudo-interesting scrap
>>>>9/10 of the way to sentimental blither like Levine. Can I have that? No. CP
>>>>
>>>>R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>>>Dan,
>>>>>
>>>>>You have so much as said it out of psychology:
>>>>>
>>>>><which taxonomizes and seeks to
>>>>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.>
>>>>>
>>>>>where 'general' is expressed as a number, series of numbers or
>>>>>quantity or series of quantities etc.
>>>>>
>>>>>A dimension is 'spatial' not temporal until the Einsteinian trope. If
>>>>>time becomes the fourth dimension, it is troped into spatiality and
>>>>>mathematically quite literally takes on spatial qualities that respond
>>>>>to the static mathematical appropriations available in three
>>>>>dimensions and is no longer time as we think, Bohr would say,
>>>>>visualize it.
>>>>>
>>>>>If you work through Charles Olson you find that among his reading list
>>>>>to Ed Dorn, he recommends A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality, a book
>>>>>which in part tries to keep all the plates spinning as regards
>>>>>actuality and mathematico/physical formalism. As I've said before
>>>>>formalisms are reductive and as you say that formailsm can express
>>>>>itself as 'taxonomic.'
>>>>>
>>>>>Many disciplines, psychology included tried to ape the successes of
>>>>>the sciences by adopting what were perceived as the virtues of
>>>>>science. The gateays were all mathematical based formailzation of
>>>>>actual, as Whitehead would say, nexi. The influence became evident in
>>>>>nearly every discipline. Sometimes its just an internal logical
>>>>>consistency which caused disastrous tropes to be put into action.
>>>>>Sometimes it was formal logic, statistics, something as crude as
>>>>>Taylor's Scientific Management or eugenics, but always it required a
>>>>>consistency bordering on mathematical fungibility. Marx, no stranger
>>>>>to scientific positivism said, "Logic is the money of the mind."
>>>>>
>>>>>Now, the literature is loaded with these failures. Psychoanalysis has
>>>>>taken a particular beating as a scientific method. But as in all of
>>>>>western capitalist politics the real culprit has been
>>>>>exonerated---Science. Its insisted that science is immune from the
>>>>>considerations of the quasi-scientific disciplnes and that its
>>>>>'successes' are prove positiv-ism. The instigatorr walks free.
>>>>>
>>>>>When I started writing poetry 35 years ago which accused the sciences
>>>>>of being a menace because of their reliance on formalisms, what few
>>>>>people noticed laughed. At best they thought I was about just
>>>>>rehashing cold science/warm humanities crap.
>>>>>
>>>>>But as the ecological movement and concerns for the environment began
>>>>>knocking around for an eschatology, I found I had already done a lot
>>>>>of the groundwork---Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel, Hume and
>>>>>others. My Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe touches on
>>>>>these topice, specifically the historical limits of formalisms with
>>>>>history represented by what we normally think of as time.
>>>>>Millennial Mathematics even more so as well, "Chlorpyrifos, the end of
>>>>>the world is within us." as does Eschatology of Reason: The Twin
>>>>>Towers. It turns out that specializing does cut out the big picture,
>>>>>and the big picture is now fucked. Mooks like Gross and Levitt and all
>>>>>the rest of the scientific community think science can turn the nose
>>>>>of spaceship earth back up. Fat chance.
>>>>>
>>>>>Now, when able I'm doing for Game Theory what Decon. the Demiurge did
>>>>>for physics in a poem with the borrowed title, De Rerum Natura. Game
>>>>>Theory and its many sister disciplines is very interesting because Von
>>>>>Neumann, who looms large in D the D in 20th century physics, computers
>>>>>and defense policy(strategic bombing) and his fellows saw early on the
>>>>>problems of quantifying say large populations for the purpose of
>>>>>controlling or destroying them. The first computers were designed to
>>>>>calculate artillery shell trajectories.
>>>>>The Game theorists tried to force the vagaries and infinite variables
>>>>>of actuality and Process and Reality, into the formalistic world of
>>>>>the hard sciences while maintaing the integrity of a non-mathematical
>>>>>expression of infinite variables. This royal fuck up that has wider
>>>>>reaching implications by far than the failure of psychoanalysis also
>>>>>represents the most sophisticated apparatus of our official saviors.
>>>>>
>>>>>Is it any wonder that Von Neumann wrote Self-Reproducing Automata? He
>>>>>knew we were goners so he created self-sufficient machines with Johnny
>>>>>Von Neumann programmed in as their creator, read deity, while they
>>>>>universe hopped gobbling a stray planet here or asteroid there for
>>>>>sustenance. Shit. Ain't that dreary. CP
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>Daniel Zimmerman wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>          
>>>>>
>>>>>>Carlo,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I've always felt suspicious about--even averse to--any approach in
>>>>>>poerty to
>>>>>>mawkishness rather than feeling produced by penetrating description or
>>>>>>depiction.
>>>>>>Poetry seems to me a science of individual instances of
>>>>>>feelings/perceptions
>>>>>>, as opposed to psychology, for example, which taxonomizes and seeks to
>>>>>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.
>>>>>>Physics--ever since experiment replaced the testimony of witnesses about
>>>>>>unique, often unrepeatable events--also seems concerned pretty much
>>>>>>exclusively with general principles. Could you elaborate a little on the
>>>>>>fourth dimension correlate? I'd have thought that physicists use the
>>>>>>fourth
>>>>>>dimension to describe rather than to ape (or manipulate or coerce), but
>>>>>>perhaps you see some crossover there (in poetics, for example).
>>>>>>
>>>>>>~ Dan Zimmerman
>>>>>>
>>>>>>----- Original Message ----- From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli"
>>>>>><alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
>>>>>>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
>>>>>><new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>>>>>>Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:28 PM
>>>>>>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>            
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader
>>>>>>>or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
>>>>>>>manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
>>>>>>>mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
>>>>>>>patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying.
>>>>>>>In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
>>>>>>>defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more
>>>>>>>than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
>>>>>>>Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and
>>>>>>>negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
>>>>>>>discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between
>>>>>>>sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become
>>>>>>>utterly
>>>>>>>blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set
>>>>>>>of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
>>>>>>>conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within
>>>>>>>which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
>>>>>>>independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
>>>>>>>spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static
>>>>>>>mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers
>>>>>>>utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
>>>>>>>domain. CP
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>>>>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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>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 GrahamD at ripon.edu  Tue Sep  7 11:59:05 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 10:59:05 -0500 
Subject: [New-Poetry] Dove dance
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A353@mail.ripon.edu>

Interview with Rita Dove on how dance has inspired her recent poetry:

http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?45442B7C000C05050A75

I've just recently noticed that the Academy of American Poets is running
such feature articles on their site, under the "Prose on Poetry" heading.

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================



From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Tue Sep  7 12:35:18 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 12:35:18 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Dove dance
Message-ID: <46.57c15558.2e6f3d46@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/7/2004 10:59:29 AM Central Daylight Time, 
GrahamD at ripon.edu writes: 
> 
> Interview with Rita Dove on how dance has inspired her recent poetry:
> 
> http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?45442B7C000C05050A75
> 
> I've just recently noticed that the Academy of American Poets is running
> such feature articles on their site, under the "Prose on Poetry" heading.

We are using a poem about ballroom dancing called "American Smooth" in 
Contemporary American Poetry: A Pocket Anthology.
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From elemenope at icubed.com  Tue Sep  7 01:32:43 2004
From: elemenope at icubed.com (ELEMENOPE Productions)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 13:32:43 +0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] this is all what I can say // Q: Sentiment vs.
	sentimentality
In-Reply-To: <200409071430.i87EUaYD029086@wiz.cath.vt.edu>
References: <200409071430.i87EUaYD029086@wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Message-ID: <a05100301bd62efea1120@[204.215.201.60]>

When I attempted to share excerpts from my book, "Whores I Have 
Japed," it was ignored.  When I put out my book of money making 
coupleted quips, by the same name, it wasn't even used for its 
Franklinesque daytrading insights.  (It was derided by famous 
downtown persons who wrote about fingering for change in payphone 
flip-drawers.)  When I attempted, recently, out of the goodness of my 
heart - or what remains of it - to steer Professor Gudding and 
Should-Know-Better Sondheim away from the Satanic, I was 
cold-shouldered.  When I explained over many years the grave dangers 
of NeoChomsky Nurse Ratchetism to the hipster ethos, I was stamped 
with a happy face on my wrist and told to keep moving - - on the Buff 
list, in particular.

But when I rode as a Lone Star Ranger with Dubya against the 
IzzyGhouls - - that was too much!  Sharpened pencil points of 
scowling KerryItes assailed me, who threatened, flipping the point, 
permanent erasure and no more invites to the delux pew at St. Marx 
Church.

R. of ELEMENOPE

>
>>Richard Dillon is a twit of the first order who thinks he's a right
>>winger, but when you pry he is just a ignoarnt blowhard vulnerable to
>>the smallest fact or insight.  My introduction to Richard was a diatribe
>>of his against the current leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung. When I
>>pointed out Kim Il Sung was dead and Kim Jong Il was in power, he seemed
>>embarrassed but not bright enough to learn anything.  When I referred to
>>international economic embargoes he was once again lost.  He's so
>>stupid, looking up to Bush is appropriate posture and might reflect
>relative IQ.


Gancie/Parcelli
-- 


From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Tue Sep  7 17:03:08 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 17:03:08 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Pound on Poetry cover
Message-ID: <1a8.2852ffcd.2e6f7c0c@cs.com>

On the back cover of the September Poetry appears "In a Station of the 
Metro," apparently as it appeared in the April, 1913, issue of the magazine:

The apparition       of these face       in the crowd  :
Petals     on a wet, black     bough  .

I had never seen the poem printed with this punctuation and spacing.
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From halvard at gmail.com  Tue Sep  7 17:07:23 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 17:07:23 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Pound on Poetry cover
In-Reply-To: <1a8.2852ffcd.2e6f7c0c@cs.com>
References: <1a8.2852ffcd.2e6f7c0c@cs.com>
Message-ID: <f160a12104090714076bcdc335@mail.gmail.com>

On the back cover of the September Poetry appears "In a Station of the
Metro," apparently as it appeared in the April, 1913, issue of the
magazine:

The apparition       of these face       in the crowd  :
Petals     on a wet, black     bough  .

I had never seen the poem printed with this punctuation and spacing. 

=====

Not to mention spelling and/or grammar.

Hal        "America loves a successful sociopath."
                   --Gary Indiana, *Three Month Fever*
             
Halvard Johnson
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard


From wjbat at conncoll.edu  Tue Sep  7 17:14:03 2004
From: wjbat at conncoll.edu (Wendy Battin)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 17:14:03 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] emotion & sentiment
In-Reply-To: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
Message-ID: <D8790E89-0112-11D9-B282-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>

> Have to admit that I am very much pro sentiment in poems

Janet, Tony, Finnegan, and others who've defended the word, or what it 
denotes:
Do you make any distinction between feeling, emotion, and sentiment?  
My understanding of "sentiment" is that it's an opinion or attitude 
based on emotion, not at all equivalent to emotion itself.  You don't 
have to resort to physics and the abolition of time to explain its 
static character.  It's a linguistic artifact, and the process is 
called _nominalization_: turning a verb into a noun, an action or event 
into an abstracted steady state.  (Annie Finch actually treats it in 
the same way, Tad, when she identifies sentiment as a shift to a 
communal feeling, though I'm less inclined to see that as a Good Thing 
than she is.)  Is this what you're approving?

Wendy


Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

Fire has no brother.
Nigerian 



From Faustina1 at aol.com  Tue Sep  7 17:29:56 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 17:29:56 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] emotion & sentiment
Message-ID: <65.3310e857.2e6f8254@aol.com>

I think of sentiment as being the evocation or expression of feeling through 
words, though of course the word can mean either the feeling or attitude 
itself as well.  (I never quote the dictionary, so I won't, but...)  I guess what I 
approve is that poetry may evoke feelings, can be beautiful.  (There, I have 
said the B word...)  Or it can be terrifying, painful, or whatever.  I don't 
think that poetry which expresses emotion is necessarily self-indulgent or 
trite...  and I was interested in the discussion because as has been said, if you 
take risks in the expression of emotion, you are likely to risk triteness, and 
of course those who dislike emotion in poetry are quick to apply the label.  
And of course sometimes it fits.  But I remember reading Marjorie Perloff 
saying something to the effect that since Connie Chung (I think) had talked on TV 
about the desire to have a baby , this subject was poetically bankrupt--and I 
disagree with that perspective.  I think you could still write a good poem 
about wanting to have a child.  You don't always have to do something that has 
never been done, but just to do it differently.  Janet


From tad at opus40.org  Tue Sep  7 17:45:04 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 17:45:04 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Pound on Poetry cover
References: <1a8.2852ffcd.2e6f7c0c@cs.com>
Message-ID: <00e301c49523$f16b46b0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

   Not sure I like it this way...
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 5:03 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] Pound on Poetry cover


  On the back cover of the September Poetry appears "In a Station of the Metro," apparently as it appeared in the April, 1913, issue of the magazine:

  The apparition       of these face       in the crowd  :
  Petals     on a wet, black     bough  .

  I had never seen the poem printed with this punctuation and spacing. 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Tue Sep  7 17:55:59 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 17:55:59 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] emotion & sentiment
Message-ID: <e5.721386.2e6f886f@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/7/2004 4:30:29 PM Central Daylight Time, 
Faustina1 at aol.com writes: 
> But I remember reading Marjorie Perloff 
> saying something to the effect that since Connie Chung (I think) had talked 
> on TV 
> about the desire to have a baby , this subject was poetically bankrupt--and 
> I 
> disagree with that perspective. 

Gosh, didn't Lucille Ball do that 50 years ago?
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Tue Sep  7 17:57:30 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 17:57:30 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Pound on Poetry cover
Message-ID: <1cb.2a6c7592.2e6f88ca@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/7/2004 4:45:35 PM Central Daylight Time, tad at opus40.org 
writes: 
> 
> 
>    Not sure I like it this way...
>  
> >> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com 
>> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 5:03 PM
>>  Subject: [New-Poetry] Pound on Poetry cover
>>  
>> 
>> On the back cover of the September Poetry appears "In a Station of the 
>> Metro," apparently as it appeared in the April, 1913, issue of the magazine:
>> 
>> The apparition       of these faces       in the crowd  :
>> Petals     on a wet, black     bough  .
>> 
>> I had never seen the poem printed with this punctuation and spacing. 
>> 
>> 
> 
Interestingly, it seems to prefigure Williams's "variable foot" and the 
triadic structure of some of his later poems.
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Tue Sep  7 18:06:16 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 18:06:16 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Pound on Poetry cover
Message-ID: <8c.145932bc.2e6f8ad8@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/7/2004 4:57:51 PM Central Daylight Time, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com 
writes: 
> 
> In a message dated 9/7/2004 4:45:35 PM Central Daylight Time, tad at opus40.org 
> writes: 
> >> 
>> 
>>    Not sure I like it this way...
>> 
>> >>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>>> From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com 
>>> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 5:03 PM
>>> Subject: [New-Poetry] Pound on Poetry cover
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On the back cover of the September Poetry appears "In a Station of the 
>>> Metro," apparently as it appeared in the April, 1913, issue of the magazine:
>>> 
>>> The apparition       of these faces       in the crowd  :
>>> Petals     on a wet, black     bough  .
>>> 
>>> I had never seen the poem printed with this punctuation and spacing. 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 
> Interestingly, it seems to prefigure Williams's "variable foot" and the 
> triadic structure of some of his later poems.
> 
One other thing: I've always thought that a colon would have been more 
appropriate than the semicolon that's in the usually printed versions.
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Tue Sep  7 09:04:55 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 09:04:55 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Found Poem: September
Message-ID: <413D79B7.10665.5573AC@localhost>

Found Poem: September

In the US, September is 
National Coupon Month,
Southern Gospel Music Month, 
National Piano Month, 
National Potato Month, 
National Sewing Month, 
and also 
Be Kind to Writers and Editors Month.

C'mon,
you can do it:
it's only one month.





From DICK at pkmfgvm4.vnet.ibm.com  Tue Sep  7 18:16:06 2004
From: DICK at pkmfgvm4.vnet.ibm.com (DICK at pkmfgvm4.vnet.ibm.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 04 18:16:06 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Subject poetically bankrupt
Message-ID: <200409072216.i87MGRl0053304@d01relay04.pok.ibm.com>

***** Reply to your note of: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 18:00:21 -0400 **************
>>saying something to the effect that since Connie Chung (I think) had talked on TV
>>about the desire to have a baby , this subject was poetically bankrupt--and I

All such universal statements are invalid.

Richard


From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Tue Sep  7 18:18:41 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:18:41 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Emotion and sentiment
Message-ID: <s13ded95.090@mail.highland.edu>

Wendy Battin said,

>>"Do you make any distinction between feeling, emotion, and sentiment?
 
My understanding of "sentiment" is that it's an opinion or attitude 
based on emotion, not at all equivalent to emotion itself.  You don't 
have to resort to physics and the abolition of time to explain its 
static character.  It's a linguistic artifact, and the process is 
called _nominalization_: turning a verb into a noun, an action or event

into an abstracted steady state.  (Annie Finch actually treats it in 
the same way, Tad, when she identifies sentiment as a shift to a 
communal feeling, though I'm less inclined to see that as a Good Thing

than she is.)  Is this what you're approving?"

I would say that is nicely put in the main, Wendy, though I'm not sure
I exactly follow your point in a couple spots. Sentiment, as widely
understood in relation to poetry (unless I've been leading my Intro to
Poetry students completely astray!), would be thought, attitude, or
judgment actively refracted through feeling/emotion/intuition.
Obviously, such refraction accounts for nearly all great poetry, to some
degree or other: Can we conceive of Homer, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound,
Zukofsky, O'Hara, CD Wright, even such "clinical eyes" as Moore or
Oppen, and on and on, without "sentiment"? It's the dance of the
intellect, as it were, a *ground of epistemological engagement*, really,
and very different from the *passive consequence* of Sentimentality--
which no one here would much favor, I assume, except as ironic device.

Kent

 



From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Tue Sep  7 18:34:05 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:34:05 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] my blurb
Message-ID: <s13df127.093@mail.highland.edu>

"Kent is the Karl Rove of the poetry lists. He is an inveterate liar who

made a minor splash by perpetrating a fifth rate fraud in a 6th rate 
discipline years ago and flogging it to death. The only way to treat 
anything Kent says, unless he sees some advantage in knowing you, is as

pure baiting bullshit., Don't take him seriously and have a good time
at 
his expense. For a laugh ask to see his poetry."

My, this is even better camp than the most vitriolic passage from
Michael Atkinson's Believer article on Yasusada! (Which will be
included, actually, among the blurbs to the second Yasusada book,
forthcoming this fall). One usually has to pay for comments this
spectacular. I get one for free from a secretly obsessive reader after
being on the List for a little more than 24 hours!

:~ )



From antrobin at clipper.net  Tue Sep  7 18:49:37 2004
From: antrobin at clipper.net (Anthony Robinson)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 15:49:37 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] emotion & sentiment
In-Reply-To: <65.3310e857.2e6f8254@aol.com>
Message-ID: <04e601c4952c$fea9ff70$4c331c40@Emily>

What Janet said.

tony

-----Original Message-----
From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
[mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of
Faustina1 at aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 2:30 PM
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] emotion & sentiment

I think of sentiment as being the evocation or expression of feeling
through 
words, though of course the word can mean either the feeling or attitude

itself as well.  (I never quote the dictionary, so I won't, but...)  I
guess what I 
approve is that poetry may evoke feelings, can be beautiful.  (There, I
have 
said the B word...)  Or it can be terrifying, painful, or whatever.  I
don't 
think that poetry which expresses emotion is necessarily self-indulgent
or 
trite...  and I was interested in the discussion because as has been
said, if you 
take risks in the expression of emotion, you are likely to risk
triteness, and 
of course those who dislike emotion in poetry are quick to apply the
label.  
And of course sometimes it fits.  But I remember reading Marjorie
Perloff 
saying something to the effect that since Connie Chung (I think) had
talked on TV 
about the desire to have a baby , this subject was poetically
bankrupt--and I 
disagree with that perspective.  I think you could still write a good
poem 
about wanting to have a child.  You don't always have to do something
that has 
never been done, but just to do it differently.  Janet
_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Tue Sep  7 21:30:52 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 21:30:52 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
In-Reply-To: <413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com> <413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>
	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>
	<413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com> <413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com>
	<1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
	<413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <1094607052.413e60cc2baa0@mail-www3.oit.umass.edu>

Carlo.

You are a maniac.

We read on, howling and gluttonous.

Damn!

Kerry
Quoting "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>:

> Thanks Kerry,
> 
> Many poems and articles can be found at:
> http://www.flashpointmag.com/
> 
> Most people gravitate to:
> Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe
> http://www.flashpointmag.com/tribefp5.htm
> 
> which itself is being deconstructed as we speak.
> 
> If I seem a little agressive on these lists its because I've been 
> attacked by a rather large number of characters herin.
> Characters not character. Gabe Gudding was thrown off the Buffalo list 
> because frankly they were too prissy and anal to handle Gabe at the 
> time. But then he went back to them and begged to be let back on the 
> list and promised to be a good boy for career and company. How has that 
> compromise with langpo morons affected his poetry?
> 
> Sondheim once told me I didn't know him so my criticism was off the 
> mark. I applied myself forthwith reading a great deal of his voluminous 
> ouvre only to discover I had known him all along perhaps better than he 
> had known himself. Sondheim is a milktoast once letting an anti-semite 
> off the hook because he couldn't stand the fireworks and leaving myself 
> and a friend to defend him.
> 
> Kent is the Karl Rove of the poetry lists. He is an inveterate liar who 
> made a minor splash by perpetrating a fifth rate fraud in a 6th rate 
> discipline years ago and flogging it to death. The only way to treat 
> anything Kent says, unless he sees some advantage in knowing you, is as 
> pure baiting bullshit., Don't take him seriously and have a good time at 
> his expense. For a laugh ask to see his poetry.
> 
> Silliman is a snooze from the old langpos who will be best known for 
> creating an utterly sleep inducing blog cluttered with his tired and 
> predictable commentary. Once again, if he sees no advantage in it, he 
> won't talk to you.
> 
> Richard Dillon is a twit of the first order who thinks he's a right 
> winger, but when you pry he is just a ignoarnt blowhard vulnerable to 
> the smallest fact or insight.  My introduction to Richard was a diatribe 
> of his against the current leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung. When I 
> pointed out Kim Il Sung was dead and Kim Jong Il was in power, he seemed 
> embarrassed but not bright enough to learn anything.  When I referred to 
> international economic embargoes he was once again lost.  He's so 
> stupid, looking up to Bush is appropriate posture and might reflect 
> relative IQ.
> 
> Jeff Newberry's a Dillon only dumber.
> 
> Paul Lake is a neo-formalist as stiff as his tiny little poems squeezed 
> through the tiny orifice of neo-formalism. God only knows where he 
> thinks that act is going.
> 
> Graham doesn't have a clue and is dead set on making sure it stays that 
> way. Only then will he get the break so many around him have been 
> afforded. Taking a new tact for him would be unthinkable. He's too 
> invested in being all mawked up.
> 
> Congrats;
> "Keep the dogs out of your dish." CP
> 
> Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe wrote:
> 
> >Carlo,
> >
> >As much as I shudder when required to think down some of the roads you have
> led 
> >us in terms of literary/cultural/political criticism, I applaud your spirit.
>  I 
> >do feel nicely jostled (in this lovely anonymous world of cyberspace where
> one 
> >can easily escape) and to see revealed some of my own literary 
> >unconsciousness,. most of which willl probably remain intact, but 
> >nonetheless...I don't mind witnessing a good fight. At some level, it calms
> me 
> >down... 
> >
> >My point is, where would a person find a few of your poems?
> >
> >I have to say, I am sick, to some degree, of telling stories in my own work.
>  I 
> >am sick of writing the stories from my mind.  OF trying to sum everything
> up.  
> >I am interested in, in the words of Edward Bartok-Baratta (a sometimes 
> >wonderful poet), keeping a little of dream nearby.  I am interested in
> writing 
> >more from my unconscious mind, more, from, really, my toes.  Finding more
> than 
> >the story can tell, perhaps.
> >
> >As far as the evil machinations of the culture - I simply try to stay 
> >psychologically awake - for which i HAVE TAKEN SOME OF THE SAME GRIEF AS i
> AM 
> >SURE YOU ARE USED TO.  sorry about the caps lock.  I really truly do not
> have 
> >the strength to face wholesale evil - by now I understand that I become 
> >completely ineffective.  So it is a consciousness to the small things.  
> >
> >Combined with a laziness, yes... so I will, indeed, make myself reread some
> of 
> >your uproarious diatribes and try and make some sense for myself...and
> possibly 
> >bring a different awareness to my work.
> >
> >meanwhile, your poems??
> >
> >Kerry O'Keefe
> >Quoting "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>:
> >
> >  
> >
> >>You gotta admit folks. Its something to write about while most of you 
> >>rummage around in their daily experience for pseudo-interesting scrap 
> >>9/10 of the way to sentimental blither like Levine. Can I have that? No.
> CP
> >>
> >>R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
> >>
> >>    
> >>
> >>>Dan,
> >>>
> >>>You have so much as said it out of psychology:
> >>>
> >>><which taxonomizes and seeks to
> >>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.>
> >>>
> >>>where 'general' is expressed as a number, series of numbers or 
> >>>quantity or series of quantities etc.
> >>>
> >>>A dimension is 'spatial' not temporal until the Einsteinian trope. If 
> >>>time becomes the fourth dimension, it is troped into spatiality and 
> >>>mathematically quite literally takes on spatial qualities that respond 
> >>>to the static mathematical appropriations available in three 
> >>>dimensions and is no longer time as we think, Bohr would say, 
> >>>visualize it.
> >>>
> >>>If you work through Charles Olson you find that among his reading list 
> >>>to Ed Dorn, he recommends A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality, a book 
> >>>which in part tries to keep all the plates spinning as regards 
> >>>actuality and mathematico/physical formalism. As I've said before 
> >>>formalisms are reductive and as you say that formailsm can express 
> >>>itself as 'taxonomic.'
> >>>
> >>>Many disciplines, psychology included tried to ape the successes of 
> >>>the sciences by adopting what were perceived as the virtues of 
> >>>science. The gateays were all mathematical based formailzation of 
> >>>actual, as Whitehead would say, nexi. The influence became evident in 
> >>>nearly every discipline. Sometimes its just an internal logical 
> >>>consistency which caused disastrous tropes to be put into action. 
> >>>Sometimes it was formal logic, statistics, something as crude as 
> >>>Taylor's Scientific Management or eugenics, but always it required a 
> >>>consistency bordering on mathematical fungibility. Marx, no stranger 
> >>>to scientific positivism said, "Logic is the money of the mind."
> >>>
> >>>Now, the literature is loaded with these failures. Psychoanalysis has 
> >>>taken a particular beating as a scientific method. But as in all of 
> >>>western capitalist politics the real culprit has been 
> >>>exonerated---Science. Its insisted that science is immune from the 
> >>>considerations of the quasi-scientific disciplnes and that its 
> >>>'successes' are prove positiv-ism. The instigatorr walks free.
> >>>
> >>>When I started writing poetry 35 years ago which accused the sciences 
> >>>of being a menace because of their reliance on formalisms, what few 
> >>>people noticed laughed. At best they thought I was about just 
> >>>rehashing cold science/warm humanities crap.
> >>>
> >>>But as the ecological movement and concerns for the environment began 
> >>>knocking around for an eschatology, I found I had already done a lot 
> >>>of the groundwork---Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel, Hume and 
> >>>others. My Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe touches on 
> >>>these topice, specifically the historical limits of formalisms with 
> >>>history represented by what we normally think of as time.
> >>>Millennial Mathematics even more so as well, "Chlorpyrifos, the end of 
> >>>the world is within us." as does Eschatology of Reason: The Twin 
> >>>Towers. It turns out that specializing does cut out the big picture, 
> >>>and the big picture is now fucked. Mooks like Gross and Levitt and all 
> >>>the rest of the scientific community think science can turn the nose 
> >>>of spaceship earth back up. Fat chance.
> >>>
> >>>Now, when able I'm doing for Game Theory what Decon. the Demiurge did 
> >>>for physics in a poem with the borrowed title, De Rerum Natura. Game 
> >>>Theory and its many sister disciplines is very interesting because Von 
> >>>Neumann, who looms large in D the D in 20th century physics, computers 
> >>>and defense policy(strategic bombing) and his fellows saw early on the 
> >>>problems of quantifying say large populations for the purpose of 
> >>>controlling or destroying them. The first computers were designed to 
> >>>calculate artillery shell trajectories.
> >>>The Game theorists tried to force the vagaries and infinite variables 
> >>>of actuality and Process and Reality, into the formalistic world of 
> >>>the hard sciences while maintaing the integrity of a non-mathematical 
> >>>expression of infinite variables. This royal fuck up that has wider 
> >>>reaching implications by far than the failure of psychoanalysis also 
> >>>represents the most sophisticated apparatus of our official saviors.
> >>>
> >>>Is it any wonder that Von Neumann wrote Self-Reproducing Automata? He 
> >>>knew we were goners so he created self-sufficient machines with Johnny 
> >>>Von Neumann programmed in as their creator, read deity, while they 
> >>>universe hopped gobbling a stray planet here or asteroid there for 
> >>>sustenance. Shit. Ain't that dreary. CP 
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>Daniel Zimmerman wrote:
> >>>
> >>>      
> >>>
> >>>>Carlo,
> >>>>
> >>>>I've always felt suspicious about--even averse to--any approach in 
> >>>>poerty to
> >>>>mawkishness rather than feeling produced by penetrating description or
> >>>>depiction.
> >>>>Poetry seems to me a science of individual instances of 
> >>>>feelings/perceptions
> >>>>, as opposed to psychology, for example, which taxonomizes and seeks to
> >>>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.
> >>>>Physics--ever since experiment replaced the testimony of witnesses about
> >>>>unique, often unrepeatable events--also seems concerned pretty much
> >>>>exclusively with general principles. Could you elaborate a little on the
> >>>>fourth dimension correlate? I'd have thought that physicists use the 
> >>>>fourth
> >>>>dimension to describe rather than to ape (or manipulate or coerce), but
> >>>>perhaps you see some crossover there (in poetics, for example).
> >>>>
> >>>>~ Dan Zimmerman
> >>>>
> >>>>----- Original Message ----- From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
> >>>><alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
> >>>>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
> >>>><new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> >>>>Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:28 PM
> >>>>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> 
> >>>>
> >>>>        
> >>>>
> >>>>>The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the reader
> >>>>>or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
> >>>>>manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
> >>>>>mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
> >>>>>patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than lying.
> >>>>>In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
> >>>>>defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain more
> >>>>>than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
> >>>>>Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading and
> >>>>>negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
> >>>>>discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction between
> >>>>>sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become 
> >>>>>utterly
> >>>>>blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a set
> >>>>>of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
> >>>>>conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time within
> >>>>>which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
> >>>>>independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
> >>>>>spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a static
> >>>>>mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and considers
> >>>>>utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
> >>>>>domain. CP
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>  
> >>>>>_______________________________________________
> >>>>>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
> >>
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >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 ripon.edu  Tue Sep  7 21:56:06 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 20:56:06 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Milosz query
Message-ID: <BD63D0E6.B004%grahamd@ripon.edu>

*The New Republic* online has a tribute to Milosz by Seamus Heaney.

I love Milosz's phrase the "immense call of the Particular"-- in the
following snippet:

--------------
The old man, the sage of Grizzly Peak Boulevard in Berkeley, veteran of the
Cold War, hero of Solidarity, friend of the pope, was at once the child "who
receives First Communion in Wilno and afterwards drinks cocoa served by
zealous Catholic ladies" and the poet who constantly heard "the immense call
of the Particular, despite the earthly law that sentences memory to
extinction." 
----------------

Full article here:

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040913&s=heaney091304

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Tue Sep  7 22:38:15 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 22:38:15 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Emotion and sentiment
Message-ID: <e8.769ca9.2e6fca97@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/7/2004 5:19:47 PM Central Daylight Time, 
Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes: 
> 
> Wendy Battin said,
> 
> >>"Do you make any distinction between feeling, emotion, and sentiment?

It seems mostly a linguistic distinction, with the first two being almost 
synonymous in the way that most Germanic/Latinate pairs are--with similar 
denotations but with slightly different connotations, like "smart" and "intelligent." 
 But "sentiment" has, for me, a public sense that goes with manners and 
customs, an emotion that is expressed publicly in an "acceptable" manner: "That's a 
nice sentiment."  "His letter contained a touching sentiment."  Sentiments 
change with manners, and we now see many Victorian sentiments, to cite the 
obvious example, as overly sentimental (as Oscar Wilde said about the death of 
Little Nell). I don't think we'd use "emotion" or "feeling," which denote private 
reactions, as synonyms in these sentences, and the connotations of these two 
terms are different; no one would say "feeling mess" in the same breath as 
"emotional disorder."  Like of a lot of the Germanic words, "feelings" has a much 
more sensual quality.  Thus, I think, comes the usual sense of "sentimental," 
meaning that it's a shared response to widely shared experiences--babies, 
deaths, popular songs, the public expressions of love, etc.  For poets, 
"sentimental" has taken on a largely negative connotation--stock responses to stock 
situations which are cliched and, as someone noted, manipulative of easy tears 
from the reader.  Recognizing it for what it is is easy enough, but, still, the 
most manipulative tear-jerker can sometimes get a gut response and a wet hanky 
from me, even though I may laugh at the obviousness of its corniness in 
retrospect.  Shoot, how can we help ourselves when Paul Henreid lights those two 
cigarettes and gives one to Bette Davis and she says, "Oh, Jerry, why should we 
ask for the moon when we have the stars?"

Man-with-Heart-of-Pure-Mush
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From antrobin at clipper.net  Tue Sep  7 23:03:21 2004
From: antrobin at clipper.net (Anthony Robinson)
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 20:03:21 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Emotion and sentiment
In-Reply-To: <e8.769ca9.2e6fca97@cs.com>
Message-ID: <04ee01c49550$6df5bcc0$4c331c40@Emily>

Sam Gwynn wrote about sentiment & sentimentality:
 
>"For poets, "sentimental" has taken on a largely negative
connotation--stock responses to stock situations which are cliched and,
as someone noted, manipulative of >easy tears from the reader."
 
Yes.  The problem, I think, is that many "post-modern" types equate
"sentiment" with "sentimentality" and what follows is poetry stripped of
feeling or emotion.  Of course, Eliot's famous notion of
"impersonality" is a culprit as well.
 
For me, poetry, no matter how "experimental" or "post-avant" or
whatever, HAS to have some sort of emotional interest.  The easy irony
that characterizes much of the verse (used as Sidney might have) of the
past 20 or so years wears thin by the time one has entered his or her
thirties,  I'd say.  
 
When I say that I'm a fan of sentiment, I'm simply saying that I'm not
afraid to feel, and I'm a fan of poetry that deals with emotion and
emotional responses to emotional situations.  That said, lots and lots
of poetry is "sentimental" in the pejorative sense.  It's easy to
confuse the two.  
 
I try to find poetry that doesn't ironize itself out of feeling.  Poetry
that is aware of irony (in the traditional sense and in the mostly
emptied-of-content sense of the post-Seinfeld era, i.e. "irony" as a
self-conscious dismissal of meaning, shared values, etc.) and theory,
and blah blah blah, but also seeks to connect with the reader on a
non-ironic emotional level.  Saying "I love you," to use the most
obvious example, doesn't always have to be accompanied by a wink. (Or an
asterisk, or invisible quotes.)
 
Some fool once said that it is impossible to like both Ashbery and
Larkin.  I like them both, precisely because at their best, each writes
poetry that, while, full of sentiment, is not sentimental.  Nor is it
glib or jokey.  (Okay..remember, I said at their best. Both can be glib
and jokey, too..)
 
 
Tony 
 
 
 
 
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Tue Sep  7 23:12:18 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 22:12:18 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Emotion and sentiment
In-Reply-To: <e8.769ca9.2e6fca97@cs.com>
Message-ID: <BD63E2C2.B018%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Sam's comments below seem very much on-target to me, except that I'm not
sure it's so easy to recognize what's sentimental in a poem.  I mean, here
we have been disagreeing pretty strenuously, many of us, about particular
poets and poems.  Yes, I'm sure there is some extreme (Rod McKuen, the worst
of Angelou) that we'd probably all agree on; but where things get difficult
and interesting are all the in-betweens.

I once heard William Matthews make a wonderful remark at a reading.  Someone
had posed a question involving literary theory, and he began his reply by
saying "I'm interested in language at the precinct level. . . ."

Me too.  So here is another actual poem to chew on, if anyone cares to.  The
poet's well known and honored, and thought enough of this piece to name a
book after it, so it seems a fair example to bring forward.

My feeling is that the poem clearly flirts with the sentimental ("takes
emotional risks" in workshop-ese), and certainly foregrounds romantic
diction that will set off alarms in some readers ("yearning," "cherishing,"
"speechless")  In its final epiphany I'd say it really does edge pretty
close to glib heartstring-tugging.  But I'm not sure it tumbles into the
abyss. . . .


What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably
fell down there. 
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have
piled up 

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we
spoke of. 
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours
through 

the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I
can't turn it off. 
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the
bag breaking, 

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying
along those 
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist
and sleeve, 

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that
yearning. 

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.
We want 
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and
then more of it. 

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the
window glass, 
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing
so deep 

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm
speechless: 
I am living, I remember you.


--Marie Howe, *What the Living Do*.  W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.



on 9/7/04 9:38 PM, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com at Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:

In a message dated 9/7/2004 5:19:47 PM Central Daylight Time,
Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes:

Wendy Battin said,

>>"Do you make any distinction between feeling, emotion, and sentiment?


It seems mostly a linguistic distinction, with the first two being almost
synonymous in the way that most Germanic/Latinate pairs are--with similar
denotations but with slightly different connotations, like "smart" and
"intelligent."  But "sentiment" has, for me, a public sense that goes with
manners and customs, an emotion that is expressed publicly in an
"acceptable" manner: "That's a nice sentiment."  "His letter contained a
touching sentiment."  Sentiments change with manners, and we now see many
Victorian sentiments, to cite the obvious example, as overly sentimental (as
Oscar Wilde said about the death of Little Nell). I don't think we'd use
"emotion" or "feeling," which denote private reactions, as synonyms in these
sentences, and the connotations of these two terms are different; no one
would say "feeling mess" in the same breath as "emotional disorder."  Like
of a lot of the Germanic words, "feelings" has a much more sensual quality.
Thus, I think, comes the usual sense of "sentimental," meaning that it's a
shared response to widely shared experiences--babies, deaths, popular songs,
the public expressions of love, etc.  For poets, "sentimental" has taken on
a largely negative connotation--stock responses to stock situations which
are cliched and, as someone noted, manipulative of easy tears from the
reader.  Recognizing it for what it is is easy enough, but, still, the most
manipulative tear-jerker can sometimes get a gut response and a wet hanky
from me, even though I may laugh at the obviousness of its corniness in
retrospect.  Shoot, how can we help ourselves when Paul Henreid lights those
two cigarettes and gives one to Bette Davis and she says, "Oh, Jerry, why
should we ask for the moon when we have the stars?"

Man-with-Heart-of-Pure-Mush
_______________________________________________


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================


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From elemenope at icubed.com  Tue Sep  7 12:55:19 2004
From: elemenope at icubed.com (ELEMENOPE Productions)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 00:55:19 +0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Received following post back channel: "Fwd: What."
Message-ID: <a05100302bd6397a9207f@[204.215.200.211]>

G&P retort, but hetheyshe didn't post it to the public list.  Just a 
polite oversight, of course.

R - - -

Who cares SungDung from DungSung; they're just grey cookie cutter 
Commie tyrants with miss-aisled imaginations and a flair for goose 
stepping myriads on MayDay.

"CP" oh, that's the Communist Party?  Right.  Clever.  You might 
consider applying for a grant from the Tides Foundation. 
http://kerry-04.org/about/teresa.php


>Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 19:57:27 -0400
>From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
>X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
>To: ELEMENOPE Productions <elemenope at icubed.com>
>Subject: What.
>X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.40
>
>What can anyone say? You're just a fuckin' loser. But you don't seem 
>to mind?  Right? And Kim Il Sung and I just want you to know we 
>don't mind either. CP


-- 


From tad at opus40.org  Wed Sep  8 08:14:21 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 08:14:21 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Emotion and sentiment
References: <e8.769ca9.2e6fca97@cs.com>
Message-ID: <009c01c4959d$61367720$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Just watched "Now, Voyager" again, and felt the familiar lump in my throat
again. Growing up with Howard Koch, who wrote "it doesn't take much to see
that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in
this crazy world," as a friend and mentor, I gained a lot of respect for
sentiment. I'm not sure that as poets, we're working in a form that's
equipped to do it well, in comparison to movies or pop songs like "It Never
Entered My Mind." We do other things better, which makes them no more nor
less true or valuable. I brought up Finch's essay on Sentimentism, I
suppose, just to say that these things change. There was a time when poets
did sentiment better, and when it was esteemed as more of a virtue in
poetry. Actually, Wendy, I share your suspicion of it, and I don't think we
can or should try to go back to writing like Sara Teasdale. But what we
approach with suspicion, we nonetheless may approach.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 10:38 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Emotion and sentiment


In a message dated 9/7/2004 5:19:47 PM Central Daylight Time,
Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes:


Wendy Battin said,

>>"Do you make any distinction between feeling, emotion, and sentiment?


It seems mostly a linguistic distinction, with the first two being almost
synonymous in the way that most Germanic/Latinate pairs are--with similar
denotations but with slightly different connotations, like "smart" and
"intelligent."  But "sentiment" has, for me, a public sense that goes with
manners and customs, an emotion that is expressed publicly in an
"acceptable" manner: "That's a nice sentiment."  "His letter contained a
touching sentiment."  Sentiments change with manners, and we now see many
Victorian sentiments, to cite the obvious example, as overly sentimental (as
Oscar Wilde said about the death of Little Nell). I don't think we'd use
"emotion" or "feeling," which denote private reactions, as synonyms in these
sentences, and the connotations of these two terms are different; no one
would say "feeling mess" in the same breath as "emotional disorder."  Like
of a lot of the Germanic words, "feelings" has a much more sensual quality.
Thus, I think, comes the usual sense of "sentimental," meaning that it's a
shared response to widely shared experiences--babies, deaths, popular songs,
the public expressions of love, etc.  For poets, "sentimental" has taken on
a largely negative connotation--stock responses to stock situations which
are cliched and, as someone noted, manipulative of easy tears from the
reader.  Recognizing it for what it is is easy enough, but, still, the most
manipulative tear-jerker can sometimes get a gut response and a wet hanky
from me, even though I may laugh at the obviousness of its corniness in
retrospect.  Shoot, how can we help ourselves when Paul Henreid lights those
two cigarettes and gives one to Bette Davis and she says, "Oh, Jerry, why
should we ask for the moon when we have the stars?"

Man-with-Heart-of-Pure-Mush



_______________________________________________
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  Wed Sep  8 08:44:15 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 08:44:15 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Robt Dana name Iowa Laureate
Message-ID: <1e5.2a09c0aa.2e70589f@aol.com>

http://www.press-citizen.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040908/NEWS01/409080
315/1079
 
"What has kept me in the poetry-writing business is that it is an art form 
that I feel I understand after all these years. ... Some of its attraction is 
the attraction that jazz has to jazz musicians. And maybe the attraction of all 
art is that you never know what you make is going to be very good at all. You 
don't make too many masterpieces in your lifetime, so if you make one or two 
or three that is probably amazing." 
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From Faustina1 at aol.com  Wed Sep  8 10:08:00 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 10:08:00 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Emotion and sentiment: the Howe poem
Message-ID: <787DD40E.68C747E0.023799CC@aol.com>

I don't know what I think of that poem!  It is certainly an interesting example, and I usually like Howe's breathless, clipped metaphysics.  But...but... I think I expected more from the end.  It is a poem that promises a lot.  I am not sure it delivers.  Janet


From clitophon at yahoo.com  Wed Sep  8 10:16:49 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 07:16:49 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] under the cod
In-Reply-To: <787DD40E.68C747E0.023799CC@aol.com>
Message-ID: <20040908141649.60963.qmail@web40413.mail.yahoo.com>

Hi, can you provide a link to this website now
accepting subs of promes and pics?  
www.theengine.net
Please note that the site is banned in public places
and that anyone surfing into it - either by pattern,
design or just chance - will be reported to an
alligatorian minion in a black silk cape and punched
over Venetian mask (sinister or what!!!!) under the
rule '011'.  (also sinisterly inverting the codified
'room 101' of Orwellian legendre and Godonlyknows what
punishments await that person for looking at the
visage of the Medusa?)  (any ideas?)
best wishes,
Paulus Von Murphicus
(I adopted the Von to get my ham acting onto the West
end stage but fell over mid-summer playing football
thus terminating a lately, flowering 'Troilus and
Cressida'.)
www.postpressed.com.au


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush


From crystallyn at gmail.com  Wed Sep  8 10:31:46 2004
From: crystallyn at gmail.com (Crystal King)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 10:31:46 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Pound on Poetry cover
In-Reply-To: <8c.145932bc.2e6f8ad8@cs.com>
References: <8c.145932bc.2e6f8ad8@cs.com>
Message-ID: <d03e49bc04090807313a3e44e9@mail.gmail.com>

I was a bit startled when I saw it this way as well. The spaces before
the colon and the period were the most interesting to me. A curious
pause before the ending.

I rather liked it. The new (or should I say old?) rhythm is unexpected.

This is probably one of my altogether favorite poems. 

Crystal

~~~~~~~~~
www.plumrubyreview.com


From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Wed Sep  8 11:23:09 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 08:23:09 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
Message-ID: <20040908152309.70690.qmail@web52609.mail.yahoo.com>

The Donald Justice poem below is an oldie but a
goodie, as the poetry dj might say.  I like the poem,
a lot actually. I posted it because of the recent
discussion about sentiment and sentimentality.  In the
third stanza, the reference to a boy trying on his
father's tie (in secret, no less) might strike some as
overly sentimental.  For me, it doesn't.  But, like
Jim and David, I am a fan of Philip Levine, so I'm not
against sentiment or sentimentality--though I'm not
sure that I fully understand the semantic difference
between the two.

The poem was on Poetry Daily today, by the way, along
with a couple of others, including one that references
Tifton, Georgia, where I now reside and teach.  

I want to say again how much I'm enjoying this thread.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

_______________

Jeff Newberry

=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
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From Faustina1 at aol.com  Wed Sep  8 12:06:38 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 12:06:38 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
Message-ID: <27F54969.0BF8019F.023799CC@aol.com>

I like this poem also--I find, though, that I am now contaminated by the notion of sentimentality, am reading poems more or less looking for it.  Janet


From cstroffo at earthlink.net  Wed Sep  8 13:26:21 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 09:26:21 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
Message-ID: <200409081607.i88G7e3d159366@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>

Do you know if anybody wrote an "answer song" to this?
Like "women at 40" or
"men at 40 who don't have kids and still rent apartments"?

Chris

----------
>From: Jeff Newberry <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
>To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
>Date: Wed, Sep 8, 2004, 7:23 AM
>

> The Donald Justice poem below is an oldie but a
> goodie, as the poetry dj might say.  I like the poem,
> a lot actually. I posted it because of the recent
> discussion about sentiment and sentimentality.  In the
> third stanza, the reference to a boy trying on his
> father's tie (in secret, no less) might strike some as
> overly sentimental.  For me, it doesn't.  But, like
> Jim and David, I am a fan of Philip Levine, so I'm not
> against sentiment or sentimentality--though I'm not
> sure that I fully understand the semantic difference
> between the two.
>
> The poem was on Poetry Daily today, by the way, along
> with a couple of others, including one that references
> Tifton, Georgia, where I now reside and teach.
>
> I want to say again how much I'm enjoying this thread.
>
> Men at Forty
>
> Men at forty
> Learn to close softly
> The doors to rooms they will not be
> Coming back to.
>
> At rest on a stair landing,
> They feel it moving
> Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
> Though the swell is gentle.
>
> And deep in mirrors
> They rediscover
> The face of the boy as he practices tying
> His father's tie there in secret,
>
> And the face of that father,
> Still warm with the mystery of lather.
> They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
> Something is filling them, something
>
> That is like the twilight sound
> Of the crickets, immense,
> Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
> Behind their mortgaged houses.
>
> _______________
>
> Jeff Newberry
>
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
>
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
>
>
>   
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


From halvard at gmail.com  Wed Sep  8 12:20:40 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 12:20:40 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
In-Reply-To: <200409081607.i88G7e3d159366@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>
References: <200409081607.i88G7e3d159366@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>
Message-ID: <f160a12104090809205b6717bd@mail.gmail.com>

Haven't seen the poem for a while, Chris, but Anne
Sexton's "Menstruation at 40" might fill the bill.

Hal        "America loves a successful sociopath."
                   --Gary Indiana, *Three Month Fever*
             
Halvard Johnson
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard

On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 09:26:21 -0800, Chris Stroffolino
<cstroffo at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Do you know if anybody wrote an "answer song" to this?
> Like "women at 40" or
> "men at 40 who don't have kids and still rent apartments"?
> 
> Chris


From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Wed Sep  8 14:06:56 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 13:06:56 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
In-Reply-To: <200409081607.i88G7e3d159366@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>
References: <200409081607.i88G7e3d159366@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040908130630.02abc078@mail.ilstu.edu>

Let's make one, Chris. This begs an answer song.

At 12:26 PM 9/8/2004, Chris Stroffolino wrote:
>Do you know if anybody wrote an "answer song" to this?
>Like "women at 40" or
>"men at 40 who don't have kids and still rent apartments"?
>
>Chris



From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Wed Sep  8 14:10:25 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 14:10:25 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
In-Reply-To: <6.0.3.0.2.20040908130630.02abc078@mail.ilstu.edu>
References: <200409081607.i88G7e3d159366@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>
	<6.0.3.0.2.20040908130630.02abc078@mail.ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409081410070.2956@shell1.oit.umass.edu>

women at fifty getting ready for their first tattoo?




From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Wed Sep  8 14:41:07 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 13:41:07 -0500 
Subject: [New-Poetry] Men at 40
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A360@mail.ripon.edu>

Whenever I teach intro poetry writing, I always do imitation & parody
exercises.  "Men at 40" works like a charm as a prompt.  I've gotten "Women
at Twenty," "Boys Without Girlfriends," "Divorce at 40," etc.

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	Gabriel Gudding
> Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views
> Sent: 	Wednesday, September 8, 2004 1:06 PM
> To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views; NewPoetry: Contemporary
> Poetry News & Views
> Subject: 	Re: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
> 
> Let's make one, Chris. This begs an answer song.
> 
> At 12:26 PM 9/8/2004, Chris Stroffolino wrote:
> >Do you know if anybody wrote an "answer song" to this?
> >Like "women at 40" or
> >"men at 40 who don't have kids and still rent apartments"?
> >
> >Chris
> 


From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Wed Sep  8 14:43:36 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 11:43:36 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
In-Reply-To: <200409081607.i88G7e3d159366@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>
Message-ID: <20040908184336.14215.qmail@web52603.mail.yahoo.com>

It seems as though I've read one.  I don't remember
it, but it's right on the edge of mind. 

Sam Gwynn might know; seems as though I remember
reading it in his Pocket anthology.  Sam?

Jeff Newberry


--- Chris Stroffolino  <cstroffo at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Do you know if anybody wrote an "answer song" to
> this?
> Like "women at 40" or
> "men at 40 who don't have kids and still rent
> apartments"?
> 
> Chris
> 
> ----------
> >From: Jeff Newberry <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
> >To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> >Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality
> (Donald Justice)
> >Date: Wed, Sep 8, 2004, 7:23 AM
> >
> 
> > The Donald Justice poem below is an oldie but a
> > goodie, as the poetry dj might say.  I like the
> poem,
> > a lot actually. I posted it because of the recent
> > discussion about sentiment and sentimentality.  In
> the
> > third stanza, the reference to a boy trying on his
> > father's tie (in secret, no less) might strike
> some as
> > overly sentimental.  For me, it doesn't.  But,
> like
> > Jim and David, I am a fan of Philip Levine, so I'm
> not
> > against sentiment or sentimentality--though I'm
> not
> > sure that I fully understand the semantic
> difference
> > between the two.
> >
> > The poem was on Poetry Daily today, by the way,
> along
> > with a couple of others, including one that
> references
> > Tifton, Georgia, where I now reside and teach.
> >
> > I want to say again how much I'm enjoying this
> thread.
> >
> > Men at Forty
> >
> > Men at forty
> > Learn to close softly
> > The doors to rooms they will not be
> > Coming back to.
> >
> > At rest on a stair landing,
> > They feel it moving
> > Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
> > Though the swell is gentle.
> >
> > And deep in mirrors
> > They rediscover
> > The face of the boy as he practices tying
> > His father's tie there in secret,
> >
> > And the face of that father,
> > Still warm with the mystery of lather.
> > They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
> > Something is filling them, something
> >
> > That is like the twilight sound
> > Of the crickets, immense,
> > Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
> > Behind their mortgaged houses.
> >
> > _______________
> >
> > Jeff Newberry
> >
> > =====
> > Jeff Newberry
> >
> > "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> > especially when your only friend
> > talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> > and you do just the same as him."
> > --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> >
> >
> >   
> > __________________________________
> > Do you Yahoo!?
> > New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
> > http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Wed Sep  8 14:45:12 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 14:45:12 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Men at 40
In-Reply-To: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A360@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <413F1AF8.24390.1A4276D@localhost>

How about women at 20 yards?
M

Art and Reality
James Simmons

     From twenty yards I saw my old love
     Locking up her car.
     She smiled and waved, as lovely still
     As girls of twenty are.

     That cloud of auburn hair that bursts
     Like sunrise round her head,
     The smile that made me smile
     At ordinary things she said.

     But twenty years have gone and flesh
     Is perishable stuff;
     Can art and exercise and diet
     Ever be enough

     To save the tiny facial muscles
     And keep taut the skin,
     And have the waist, in middle-age,
     Still curving firmly in?

     Beauty invites me to approach,
     And lies make truth seem hard
     As my old love assumes her age,
     A year for every yard.


On 8 Sep 2004 at 13:41, Graham, David wrote:

> Whenever I teach intro poetry writing, I always do imitation & parody
> exercises.  "Men at 40" works like a charm as a prompt.  I've gotten
> "Women at Twenty," "Boys Without Girlfriends," "Divorce at 40," etc.
> 
> ============================================
> David Graham
> Department of English, Ripon College
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>      Home Page:  
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>      My Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> 
> Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
> ============================================
> 
> 
> > ----------
> > From: 	Gabriel Gudding
> > Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views
> > Sent: 	Wednesday, September 8, 2004 1:06 PM
> > To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views; NewPoetry:
> > Contemporary Poetry News & Views Subject: 	Re: [New-Poetry]
> > Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
> > 
> > Let's make one, Chris. This begs an answer song.
> > 
> > At 12:26 PM 9/8/2004, Chris Stroffolino wrote:
> > >Do you know if anybody wrote an "answer song" to this?
> > >Like "women at 40" or
> > >"men at 40 who don't have kids and still rent apartments"?
> > >
> > >Chris
> > 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 





From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Wed Sep  8 14:56:17 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 11:56:17 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Men Who are Dorky
Message-ID: <20040908185617.37306.qmail@web52602.mail.yahoo.com>

With apologies to Donald Justice and to those who can
actually write parody, I present:

Men Who are Dorky

Men who are dorky
Learn to fall down slowly
After walking into the doors
Of rooms they were leaving.

At the bottom of a stairwell,
The feel their sprained ankles
Twisted beneath them like bad guys?
Limbs in Steven Seagal movies.

And deep in mirrors
They see acne scars
On the face of the boy who practices
Dancing with Mom before senior prom.

And the face of his father,
Still disappointed after all these years.
The boy too sometimes wishes he?d played football
Rather than Dungeons and Dragons and chess,

Those games like the sounds 
of chirping Nintendos and Velcro-strap shoes
Filling his home on Saturday evenings
As he washes his mother?s hair.


It's problematic, I know.  Particularly the end, but
what the hell?  What do I tell my students?  Do not
apologize for your work (unless it's really, really,
really bad).



=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 


From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Wed Sep  8 15:08:13 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 15:08:13 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
Message-ID: <e6.5863d0b4.2e70b29d@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/8/2004 1:43:58 PM Central Daylight Time, 
jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com writes: 
> 
> It seems as though I've read one.  I don't remember
> it, but it's right on the edge of mind. 
> 
> Sam Gwynn might know; seems as though I remember
> reading it in his Pocket anthology.  Sam?
> 
> Jeff Newberry
> 
Doesn't ring a bell.
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From wjbat at conncoll.edu  Wed Sep  8 15:57:46 2004
From: wjbat at conncoll.edu (Wendy Battin)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 15:57:46 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Men at 40
In-Reply-To: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A360@mail.ripon.edu>
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A360@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <5ABC6B7C-01D1-11D9-A0AA-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>

On Sep 8, 2004, at 2:41 PM, Graham, David wrote:
> Whenever I teach intro poetry writing, I always do imitation & parody
> exercises.  "Men at 40" works like a charm as a prompt.  I've gotten 
> "Women
> at Twenty," "Boys Without Girlfriends," "Divorce at 40," etc.

It does beg for parody.  I've resisted so far.  Forty seems like a 
frivolous occasion for melancholy at this point, but my take on that is 
just as dated and culture-bound as his.

On the Howe poem: it doesn't strike me as sentimental, but it's not one 
of my favorites from her work.  The details are too generic and 
predictable, and there's nothing in the language or perception to 
engage me past what I already know.  I'd be curious to hear a defense, 
though.

For the record, I'm all in favor of emotion, passion, vision in poetry. 
  I don't believe there are any subjects too sentimental to touch, if 
you have the skill, though some are damned hard to redeem.  Those are 
most tempting, & worth many failures.

Wendy


Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

When a thief kisses you, count your teeth.
Yiddish



From hruggier at localnet.com  Wed Sep  8 16:15:25 2004
From: hruggier at localnet.com (Helen Ruggieri)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 16:15:25 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU 
Message-ID: <004201c495e0$94bb91f0$380b9942@Helen>

This is an old explanation I picked up somewhere and because I'm always saying the same thing over and over again to 18 year olds - I have honed it to the bone. 
Dog pun. 

Sentimental:  one says, my dog died; you reply, I'm sorry to hear that.  You're not sorry at all - you're making the expected polite response. 

Sentiment:  I tell you about my dog Bruno, part husky who pulled me everywhere.  In the morning he would stand my my side of the bed and when I opened my eyes there he'd be, watching, waiting, glad to finally have me with him. 
One night as he was pulling me for my walk he slipped on black ice and went down on his butt.  I laughed.  He came
back and nipped me.  He didn't like it if you laughed at him. He also like to grab one of your mittens and run with it.  He didn't care how cold it was.  

and so on, more dog tales

He died last night

Now I have to walk alone.

If I've done my job - you really feel a little bit sorry about Bruno dying.   
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From sheilafblack at hotmail.com  Wed Sep  8 16:31:41 2004
From: sheilafblack at hotmail.com (sheila black)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 20:31:41 +0000
Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
Message-ID: <BAY19-F34sGJaCFJcqF00036389@hotmail.com>

I'm with Wendy.  You go, girlfriend!  Also, on another subject, has anyone 
read anything interesting about ekphrasis lately?  I am teaching a course 
that touches on it and looking for (more) ideas.  Exercises--imitation and 
parody included--would be especially welcome.  Re Donald Justice, what about 
women at forty who still listen to the Ramones...Thanks. Sheila

_________________________________________________________________
Get ready for school! Find articles, homework help and more in the Back to 
School Guide! http://special.msn.com/network/04backtoschool.armx



From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Wed Sep  8 17:38:00 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 14:38:00 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
References: <004201c495e0$94bb91f0$380b9942@Helen>
Message-ID: <413F7BB7.254E342A@earthlink.net>



> Helen Ruggieri wrote:
> 
> This is an old explanation I picked up somewhere and because I'm
> always saying the same thing over and over again to 18 year olds - I
> have honed it to the bone.
> Dog pun.
> 
> Sentimental:  one says, my dog died; you reply, I'm sorry to hear
> that.  You're not sorry at all - you're making the expected polite
> response.
> 
> Sentiment:  I tell you about my dog Bruno, part husky who pulled me
> everywhere.  In the morning he would stand my my side of the bed and
> when I opened my eyes there he'd be, watching, waiting, glad to
> finally have me with him.
> One night as he was pulling me for my walk he slipped on black ice and
> went down on his butt.  I laughed.  He came
> back and nipped me.  He didn't like it if you laughed at him. He also
> like to grab one of your mittens and run with it.  He didn't care how
> cold it was.
> 
> and so on, more dog tales
> 
> He died last night
> 
> Now I have to walk alone.
> 
> If I've done my job - you really feel a little bit sorry about Bruno
> dying.

O.K., how about this Matthews poem re dead dog, sentimental or sentiment
or just a good way to write about the subject?

Loyal

They gave him an overdose
of anesthetic, and its fog
shut down his heart in seconds.
I tried to hold him, but he was
somewhere else. For so much love
one of the principals is missing,
it's no wonder we confuse love
with longing. Oh I was thick
with both. I wanted my dog
to live forever and while I was
working on impossibilities
I wanted to live forever, too.
I wanted company and to be alone.
I wanted to know how they trash
a stiff ninety-five-pound dog
and I paid them to do it
and not tell me. What else?
I wanted a letter of apology
delivered by decrepit hand,
by someone shattered for each time
I'd had to eat pure pain. I wanted
to weep, not "like a baby,"
in gulps and breath-stretching
howls, but steadily, like an adult,
according to the fiction
that there is work to be done,
and almost inconsolably.

 
--William Matthews.  *Selected Poems and Translations 1969-1991*,
Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

p.s. - I think it just escapes being sentimental. - Jim


From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Wed Sep  8 17:48:08 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 23:48:08 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU 
References: <004201c495e0$94bb91f0$380b9942@Helen>
Message-ID: <003601c495ed$87bf3760$192ab750@yourpk9x5fuc06>

My idea of sentimental is a little bit more complex. Something sticky, too sweet, to which other adjectives are usually added, like interested, without a personality, playing with feelings to fill up for the lack of actual feelings.

Usually someone with a sentimental attitude easily wins over someone with sentiments, because s/he has a sneaky way of approaching things. At least at the beginning, then usually and hopefully things are made clear.

I consider your first example, as you say, a _polite response_ (response is the right term). 

Anny Ballardini

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky


  From: Helen Ruggieri 
  Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 10:15 PM


  This is an old explanation I picked up somewhere and because I'm always saying the same thing over and over again to 18 year olds - I have honed it to the bone. 
  Dog pun. 

  Sentimental:  one says, my dog died; you reply, I'm sorry to hear that.  You're not sorry at all - you're making the expected polite response. 

  Sentiment:  I tell you about my dog Bruno, part husky who pulled me everywhere.  In the morning he would stand my my side of the bed and when I opened my eyes there he'd be, watching, waiting, glad to finally have me with him. 
  One night as he was pulling me for my walk he slipped on black ice and went down on his butt.  I laughed.  He came
  back and nipped me.  He didn't like it if you laughed at him. He also like to grab one of your mittens and run with it.  He didn't care how cold it was.  

  and so on, more dog tales

  He died last night

  Now I have to walk alone.

  If I've done my job - you really feel a little bit sorry about Bruno dying.   


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From tad at opus40.org  Wed Sep  8 19:02:14 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 19:02:14 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU 
References: <004201c495e0$94bb91f0$380b9942@Helen>
	<003601c495ed$87bf3760$192ab750@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <00aa01c495f7$e3d4eea0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Sentimental is also anything that doesn't get through to you personally. As with my ex-sort-of-wife, who hated sentimentality (she said) more than anything in the world, but couldn't get enough of George Jones singing "A Good Year for the Roses" or "He Stopped Loving Her Today."

Well, I can't either, but I don't delude myself that they're not sentimental.


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Anny Ballardini 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views 
  Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 5:48 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU 


  My idea of sentimental is a little bit more complex. Something sticky, too sweet, to which other adjectives are usually added, like interested, without a personality, playing with feelings to fill up for the lack of actual feelings.

  Usually someone with a sentimental attitude easily wins over someone with sentiments, because s/he has a sneaky way of approaching things. At least at the beginning, then usually and hopefully things are made clear.

  I consider your first example, as you say, a _polite response_ (response is the right term). 

  Anny Ballardini

  http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
  The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
  Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky


    From: Helen Ruggieri 
    Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 10:15 PM


    This is an old explanation I picked up somewhere and because I'm always saying the same thing over and over again to 18 year olds - I have honed it to the bone. 
    Dog pun. 

    Sentimental:  one says, my dog died; you reply, I'm sorry to hear that.  You're not sorry at all - you're making the expected polite response. 

    Sentiment:  I tell you about my dog Bruno, part husky who pulled me everywhere.  In the morning he would stand my my side of the bed and when I opened my eyes there he'd be, watching, waiting, glad to finally have me with him. 
    One night as he was pulling me for my walk he slipped on black ice and went down on his butt.  I laughed.  He came
    back and nipped me.  He didn't like it if you laughed at him. He also like to grab one of your mittens and run with it.  He didn't care how cold it was.  

    and so on, more dog tales

    He died last night

    Now I have to walk alone.

    If I've done my job - you really feel a little bit sorry about Bruno dying.   


----------------------------------------------------------------------------


    _______________________________________________
    New-Poetry mailing list
    New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
    http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Wed Sep  8 20:11:23 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 19:11:23 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Men at 40
In-Reply-To: <5ABC6B7C-01D1-11D9-A0AA-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>
Message-ID: <BD6509DB.B076%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Very interesting thread.  I've heard nothing yet that disturbs my initial
notion that we're not very close to agreeing on what sentimentality is, at
least on the poem-by-poem level.

For what it's worth, by mentioning my imitation/parody exercise I wasn't
holding Justice's "Men at Forty" up for ridicule at all.  It's become an
anthology staple, and anyone may be forgiven for tiring of it, but I think
it's a marvelous poem.  I don't find it sentimental at all.

Melancholy, sure, but that's just one of the eternal lyric moods:  nothing
particularly sappy about its perceptions.

As for its attitude being dated & culture-bound, I guess just about any poem
is, if you're looking for that.  Lyrics that endure tend to have something
else going on in them, too--news that stays news and all that--which for me
this poem definitely does. I remember loving it when I was 20, and now,
looking back on age 40 from some distance, I still find it remarkably fresh.


------------------------
on 9/8/04 2:57 PM, Wendy Battin at wjbat at conncoll.edu wrote:

> On Sep 8, 2004, at 2:41 PM, Graham, David wrote:
>> Whenever I teach intro poetry writing, I always do imitation & parody
>> exercises.  "Men at 40" works like a charm as a prompt.  I've gotten
>> "Women
>> at Twenty," "Boys Without Girlfriends," "Divorce at 40," etc.
> 
> It does beg for parody.  I've resisted so far.  Forty seems like a
> frivolous occasion for melancholy at this point, but my take on that is
> just as dated and culture-bound as his.
> 
> On the Howe poem: it doesn't strike me as sentimental, but it's not one
> of my favorites from her work.  The details are too generic and
> predictable, and there's nothing in the language or perception to
> engage me past what I already know.  I'd be curious to hear a defense,
> though.
> 
> For the record, I'm all in favor of emotion, passion, vision in poetry.
> I don't believe there are any subjects too sentimental to touch, if
> you have the skill, though some are damned hard to redeem.  Those are
> most tempting, & worth many failures.
> 
> Wendy
> 
> 

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From wjbat at conncoll.edu  Wed Sep  8 20:24:36 2004
From: wjbat at conncoll.edu (Wendy Battin)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 20:24:36 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Men at 40
In-Reply-To: <BD6509DB.B076%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <BD6509DB.B076%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <A18D8928-01F6-11D9-A0AA-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>

Do you think the Howe poem is sentimental, David?  Is that why you 
posted it?  Disturb your initial notion, for all our sakes.

And I wasn't holding up Justice's "Men at Forty" for ridicule, either.  
I do suspect it's a guy thing, however.

Wendy

On Sep 8, 2004, at 8:11 PM, David Graham wrote:

> Very interesting thread.  I've heard nothing yet that disturbs my 
> initial
> notion that we're not very close to agreeing on what sentimentality 
> is, at
> least on the poem-by-poem level.
>
> For what it's worth, by mentioning my imitation/parody exercise I 
> wasn't
> holding Justice's "Men at Forty" up for ridicule at all.  It's become 
> an
> anthology staple, and anyone may be forgiven for tiring of it, but I 
> think
> it's a marvelous poem.  I don't find it sentimental at all.
>
> Melancholy, sure, but that's just one of the eternal lyric moods:  
> nothing
> particularly sappy about its perceptions.
>
> As for its attitude being dated & culture-bound, I guess just about 
> any poem
> is, if you're looking for that.  Lyrics that endure tend to have 
> something
> else going on in them, too--news that stays news and all that--which 
> for me
> this poem definitely does. I remember loving it when I was 20, and now,
> looking back on age 40 from some distance, I still find it remarkably 
> fresh.
>
>
> ------------------------
> on 9/8/04 2:57 PM, Wendy Battin at wjbat at conncoll.edu wrote:
>
>> On Sep 8, 2004, at 2:41 PM, Graham, David wrote:
>>> Whenever I teach intro poetry writing, I always do imitation & parody
>>> exercises.  "Men at 40" works like a charm as a prompt.  I've gotten
>>> "Women
>>> at Twenty," "Boys Without Girlfriends," "Divorce at 40," etc.
>>
>> It does beg for parody.  I've resisted so far.  Forty seems like a
>> frivolous occasion for melancholy at this point, but my take on that 
>> is
>> just as dated and culture-bound as his.
>>
>> On the Howe poem: it doesn't strike me as sentimental, but it's not 
>> one
>> of my favorites from her work.  The details are too generic and
>> predictable, and there's nothing in the language or perception to
>> engage me past what I already know.  I'd be curious to hear a defense,
>> though.
>>
>> For the record, I'm all in favor of emotion, passion, vision in 
>> poetry.
>> I don't believe there are any subjects too sentimental to touch, if
>> you have the skill, though some are damned hard to redeem.  Those are
>> most tempting, & worth many failures.
>>
>> Wendy
>>
>>
>
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>
Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

A wicked book cannot repent.



From JforJames at aol.com  Wed Sep  8 20:35:18 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 20:35:18 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Men at 40
Message-ID: <cf.16302700.2e70ff46@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/8/2004 8:09:15 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes:

> For what it's worth, by mentioning my imitation/parody exercise I wasn't
> holding Justice's "Men at Forty" up for ridicule at all.  It's become an
> anthology staple, and anyone may be forgiven for tiring of it, but I think
> it's a marvelous poem. 

Parody, which is imitation, is a form of flattery. 
Who bothers to parody something that's not working.
The Justice poem captures that turning point from youth
to middle-age quite well. Many poems have done worse
with a very human concern.
Finnegan
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From JforJames at aol.com  Wed Sep  8 20:37:21 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 20:37:21 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU 
Message-ID: <11.3311b50a.2e70ffc1@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/8/2004 5:41:17 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
jvcervantes at earthlink.net writes:

> how about this Matthews poem re dead dog, sentimental or sentiment
> or just a good way to write about the subject

The dog days are past, but here's another...I published
this book during the brief existence of Plinth Books.
I'm not a dog guy, I'm afraid, but I think he make his
case: 
Finnegan

After Putting My Dog Down

Her blonde Labrador's fur
blends with the shaft
of sunlight I let in
after finally 
opening that door
to the room at the vet's
I wailed in.
I leave her as if
she were waiting for me
any Saturday morning--
head on paws,
tail curled 
in a wagging abeyance,
patient, as she always was,
so help me, I thought
I could learn that
virtue from her,
always ready
for my call to come,
"Come Cider, let's
go for a walk to the brook."

--Wally Swist
The New Life, Plinth Books, 1998

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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Wed Sep  8 20:43:29 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 19:43:29 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Men at 40
In-Reply-To: <A18D8928-01F6-11D9-A0AA-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>
Message-ID: <BD651161.B07F%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Wendy--I posted the Howe poem because I am of two minds about it.  When i
first encountered it I had been going through a parallel family experience,
and (I suspect this is probably true for most of us at various times) I am
sure that fact colored my reading.  The poem just bowled me over, seemed
bold and honest and true, in part because it takes the "risk" of relatively
flat, straightforward language.

With time I began to think that perhaps its rhetoric had its hand on my
sleeve a bit too much, as Donald Hall once put it.  But my initial
reaction's still lurking there, too.

So I was wondering what others might say about a poem that, for me,
illustrates some of the difficulty of sorting out such reactions.

In case others are interested, here's the Howe poem again.  Very long-lined
couplets, by the way, in case the emailer futzes up the typography.



What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably
fell down there. 
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have
piled up 

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we
spoke of. 
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours
through 

the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I
can't turn it off. 
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the
bag breaking, 

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying
along those 
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist
and sleeve, 

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that
yearning. 

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.
We want 
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and
then more of it. 

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the
window glass, 
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing
so deep 

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm
speechless: 
I am living, I remember you.


--Marie Howe, *What the Living Do*.  W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.




on 9/8/04 7:24 PM, Wendy Battin at wjbat at conncoll.edu wrote:

> Do you think the Howe poem is sentimental, David?  Is that why you
> posted it?  Disturb your initial notion, for all our sakes.
> 
> And I wasn't holding up Justice's "Men at Forty" for ridicule, either.
> I do suspect it's a guy thing, however.
> 
> Wendy
> 


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Wed Sep  8 20:53:48 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 20:53:48 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
In-Reply-To: <11.3311b50a.2e70ffc1@aol.com>
References: <11.3311b50a.2e70ffc1@aol.com>
Message-ID: <1094691228.413fa99c8b145@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>

I definitely prefer the Matthews' poem.  The narrator is more complex and 
appealing for his mild grandiosity in wanting everyone to live forever.  At 
least a little human shadow here.  Kind of a relief.

Kerry


Quoting JforJames at aol.com:

> In a message dated 9/8/2004 5:41:17 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
> jvcervantes at earthlink.net writes:
> 
> > how about this Matthews poem re dead dog, sentimental or sentiment
> > or just a good way to write about the subject
> 
> The dog days are past, but here's another...I published
> this book during the brief existence of Plinth Books.
> I'm not a dog guy, I'm afraid, but I think he make his
> case: 
> Finnegan
> 
> After Putting My Dog Down
> 
> Her blonde Labrador's fur
> blends with the shaft
> of sunlight I let in
> after finally 
> opening that door
> to the room at the vet's
> I wailed in.
> I leave her as if
> she were waiting for me
> any Saturday morning--
> head on paws,
> tail curled 
> in a wagging abeyance,
> patient, as she always was,
> so help me, I thought
> I could learn that
> virtue from her,
> always ready
> for my call to come,
> "Come Cider, let's
> go for a walk to the brook."
> 
> --Wally Swist
> The New Life, Plinth Books, 1998
> 
> 





From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Wed Sep  8 20:59:24 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 19:59:24 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?
Message-ID: <s13f64ab.001@mail.highland.edu>

>In case others are interested, here's the Howe poem again.  

And all this time I thought the reference was to a poem by SUSAN Howe.
And I'm scratching my head and wondering how a poem by Susan Howe could
be considered sentimental...

Come to think of it, is "sentimentality" a potential problem relevant
only (or at least mainly) to those writing in more conventional,
narrative modes? 

Kent


From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Wed Sep  8 21:15:19 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 18:15:19 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
References: <11.3311b50a.2e70ffc1@aol.com>
Message-ID: <413FAEA6.D30A07ED@earthlink.net>



JforJames at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In a message dated 9/8/2004 5:41:17 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> jvcervantes at earthlink.net writes:
> 
> > how about this Matthews poem re dead dog, sentimental or sentiment
> > or just a good way to write about the subject
> 
> The dog days are past, but here's another...I published
> this book during the brief existence of Plinth Books.
> I'm not a dog guy, I'm afraid, but I think he make his
> case:
> Finnegan
> 
> After Putting My Dog Down
> 
> Her blonde Labrador's fur
> blends with the shaft
> of sunlight I let in
> after finally
> opening that door
> to the room at the vet's
> I wailed in.
> I leave her as if
> she were waiting for me
> any Saturday morning--
> head on paws,
> tail curled
> in a wagging abeyance,
> patient, as she always was,
> so help me, I thought
> I could learn that
> virtue from her,
> always ready
> for my call to come,
> "Come Cider, let's
> go for a walk to the brook."
> 
> --Wally Swist
> The New Life, Plinth Books, 1998

And another . . . aren't these a good test of the sentimental vs. the
sentiment (rhetorical ?) But this one turns on its owner, so to speak. - Jim

Do You Love Me?

She's twelve and she's asking the dog,
who does, but who speaks
in tongues, whose feints and gyrations
are themselves parts of speech.

They're on the back porch
and I don't really mean to be taking this in
but once I've heard I can't stop listening.
and again she asks, and the good dog

sits and wiggles, leaps and licks.
Imagine never asking. Imagine why:
so sure you wouldn't dare, or couldn't care
less. I wonder if the dog's guileless brown eyes

can lie, if the perfect canine lack of abstractions
might not be a bit like the picture books
she "read" as a child, before her parents' lips
shaped the daily miracle of speech

and kisses, and the words were not lead
and weighed only air, and did not mean
so meanly. "Do you love me?" she says
and says, until the dog, sensing perhaps

its own awful speechlessness, tries to bolt,
but she holds it by the collar and will not
let go, until, having come closer,
I hear the rest of it. I hear it all.

She's got the dog's furry jowls in her hands,
she's speaking precisely
into its laid back, quivering ears:
"Say it," she hisses, "Say it to me."

 --Robert Wrigley. *Poetry*. October/November 2002. [Reprinted in Lives of
the Animals. Penguin, 2003.]


From antrobin at clipper.net  Wed Sep  8 21:17:46 2004
From: antrobin at clipper.net (Anthony Robinson)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 18:17:46 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?
In-Reply-To: <s13f64ab.001@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <057d01c4960a$d8c38c70$4c331c40@Emily>

Come to think of it, is "sentimentality" a potential problem relevant
only (or at least mainly) to those writing in more conventional,
narrative modes? 

Kent

* *

I don't think so, Kent.  

Perhaps we call it something else if it's "experimental."

For example, "beautiful" language, when occurring in "experimental"
poetry is often derided as "precious" or some such.

But that's probably not the same thing as "sentimental."  

T.



From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Wed Sep  8 22:52:37 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 22:52:37 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Men at 40
Message-ID: <96.145357e2.2e711f75@cs.com>

Thanks for alerting me to this poem's presence on the internet today, for I 
was scheduled to teach Justice, including "Men at Forty," to my poetry writing 
class.  There are four women and three men in the class, and all of the 
comments on the poem came from the women, who were very enthusiastic about it.  One 
of the women said, "Gee, I wonder how this would be different from a woman's 
point of view," at which point I said, "Damn, this just came up on a lit-serv I 
subscribe to!"  And so I challenged her, and others, to write another version 
of the poem.
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Wed Sep  8 22:54:32 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 22:54:32 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Men at 40
Message-ID: <85.1566bd34.2e711fe8@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/8/2004 7:41:51 PM Central Daylight Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes: 
> 
> With time I began to think that perhaps its rhetoric had its hand on my
> sleeve a bit too much, as Donald Hall once put it.  But my initial
> reaction's still lurking there, too.
> 
I think "sentimental" might be well understood by looking at Hall's Befeft.
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Wed Sep  8 22:56:24 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 22:56:24 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?
Message-ID: <157.3eba844b.2e712058@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/8/2004 8:00:07 PM Central Daylight Time, 
Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes: 
> 
> Come to think of it, is "sentimentality" a potential problem relevant
> only (or at least mainly) to those writing in more conventional,
> narrative modes? 
> 
> Kent
> _____________
A good question. Wordsworth's "Michael," which I consider some kind of great 
narrative poem, is terribly sentimental but ultimately succeeds for me: "And 
never lifted up a single stone."
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Wed Sep  8 23:09:23 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:09:23 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hall Mark
In-Reply-To: <85.1566bd34.2e711fe8@cs.com>
Message-ID: <BD653393.B09B%grahamd@ripon.edu>

on 9/8/04 9:54 PM, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com at Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:

In a message dated 9/8/2004 7:41:51 PM Central Daylight Time,
grahamd at ripon.edu writes:

With time I began to think that perhaps its rhetoric had its hand on my
sleeve a bit too much, as Donald Hall once put it.  But my initial
reaction's still lurking there, too.

I think "sentimental" might be well understood by looking at Hall's Befeft.
_______________________________________________

Sam, you perhaps mean Hall's *Without*?  Ah, me:  it is sad what's happened
to that man--a truly wonderful critic at his best, and certainly a poet who
once had a lot more grit.

But most of all, I'm getting all sentimental myself to think of poor Sam,
teaching a poetry workshop with only seven students!  You poor thing!  Here,
take some of my 20 students. . . .

(We also did Justice today in my class.)

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================


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From shkodrov at yahoo.com  Wed Sep  8 23:32:56 2004
From: shkodrov at yahoo.com (Rossitza Shkodrova)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 20:32:56 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?
In-Reply-To: <s13f64ab.001@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <20040909033256.88118.qmail@web13901.mail.yahoo.com>

Kent,

Your question strikes me as a cause-effect
kind-of-problem... Which comes first - the
sentimentality or the narrative? Or... What is more
important - the tool of expression or what gets
expressed? 

Now I'm thinking... is sentimentality simply a matter
of perception (emotional/philosophical context) or is
there a more formal way to look at it?


Rosie


P.S.
Oh, I'm sorry; I forgot my introduction...

I wouldn?t be writing this at all, if I wasn?t in a
highly "sentimental" mood myself right now (even
though I?ve been accused before in a "dramatic
pessimism" as well).  So, since I don?t even know what
might be a proper form of doing this... I'll stop
here... Just one more thing - you will also have to
suffer my ESL problems in the rare occasions I'll show
up around...


--- Kent Johnson <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu> wrote:

> >In case others are interested, here's the Howe poem
> again.  
> 
> And all this time I thought the reference was to a
> poem by SUSAN Howe.
> And I'm scratching my head and wondering how a poem
> by Susan Howe could
> be considered sentimental...
> 
> Come to think of it, is "sentimentality" a potential
> problem relevant
> only (or at least mainly) to those writing in more
> conventional,
> narrative modes? 
> 
> Kent
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



From wjbat at conncoll.edu  Wed Sep  8 23:34:20 2004
From: wjbat at conncoll.edu (Wendy Battin)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 23:34:20 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?
In-Reply-To: <157.3eba844b.2e712058@cs.com>
References: <157.3eba844b.2e712058@cs.com>
Message-ID: <227737C3-0211-11D9-A0AA-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>


On Sep 8, 2004, at 10:56 PM, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:
> In a message dated 9/8/2004 8:00:07 PM Central Daylight Time, 
> Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes:
>  Come to think of it, is "sentimentality" a potential problem relevant
>  only (or at least mainly) to those writing in more conventional,
>  narrative modes?
>  Kent
>  _____________
>  A good question. Wordsworth's "Michael," which I consider some kind 
> of great narrative poem, is terribly sentimental but ultimately 
> succeeds for me: "And never lifted up a single stone."

I confess that "Michael" reduced me to hysterics when I tried reading 
it aloud to my freshman roommate when I was 18, and I've never been 
able to read it straight since.  David's right, of course, that poems 
take us where they find us, and it's a miracle that so many of them 
find us at all.

To Kent's question: you can guard against the most obvious kinds 
sentimentality by avoiding emotion or by bracketing it with irony.  But 
that's not enough.  What we hate about sentimentality is its 
hollowness, its falsity, its self-concern.   I don't think jettisoning 
convention is any safeguard against dishonesty.  Staying awake, 
perhaps.  Whatever keeps you awake.

Wendy


Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

Nobody gathers firewood to roast a thin goat.
Kenyan



From cstroffo at earthlink.net  Thu Sep  9 01:14:01 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 21:14:01 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: "40---Love"!
Message-ID: <200409090355.i893tJH9199672@pimout1-ext.prodigy.net>


Oh god gabe---you triggered flashback. in richard ellman o'clair norton 
anthology 1972 there was a poem by liverpudlian roger mcgough called

40-Love

anybody remember that?

----------
>From: Gabriel Gudding <gmguddi at ilstu.edu>
>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>,
"NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Sentiment/Sentimentality (Donald Justice)
>Date: Wed, Sep 8, 2004, 10:06 AM
>

> Let's make one, Chris. This begs an answer song.
>
> At 12:26 PM 9/8/2004, Chris Stroffolino wrote:
>>Do you know if anybody wrote an "answer song" to this?
>>Like "women at 40" or
>>"men at 40 who don't have kids and still rent apartments"?
>>
>>Chris
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


From jsafdie at comcast.net  Thu Sep  9 00:32:21 2004
From: jsafdie at comcast.net (Joe Safdie)
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 21:32:21 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?
References: <20040909033256.88118.qmail@web13901.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <03d701c49625$ffcfa090$f7131118@D6T95L21>

Rosie! How come you're on this list???

I just joined it myself not long ago . . . and have been "lurking" for a 
couple of weeks, although tempted to join in any minute now . . . but you 
beat me to it!

How are you holding up?

J.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rossitza Shkodrova" <shkodrov at yahoo.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 8:32 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?


> Kent,
>
> Your question strikes me as a cause-effect
> kind-of-problem... Which comes first - the
> sentimentality or the narrative? Or... What is more
> important - the tool of expression or what gets
> expressed?
>
> Now I'm thinking... is sentimentality simply a matter
> of perception (emotional/philosophical context) or is
> there a more formal way to look at it?
>
>
> Rosie
>
>
> P.S.
> Oh, I'm sorry; I forgot my introduction...
>
> I wouldn't be writing this at all, if I wasn't in a
> highly "sentimental" mood myself right now (even
> though I've been accused before in a "dramatic
> pessimism" as well).  So, since I don't even know what
> might be a proper form of doing this... I'll stop
> here... Just one more thing - you will also have to
> suffer my ESL problems in the rare occasions I'll show
> up around...
>
>
> --- Kent Johnson <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu> wrote:
>
>> >In case others are interested, here's the Howe poem
>> again.
>>
>> And all this time I thought the reference was to a
>> poem by SUSAN Howe.
>> And I'm scratching my head and wondering how a poem
>> by Susan Howe could
>> be considered sentimental...
>>
>> Come to think of it, is "sentimentality" a potential
>> problem relevant
>> only (or at least mainly) to those writing in more
>> conventional,
>> narrative modes?
>>
>> Kent
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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 Sep  9 01:26:36 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 01:26:36 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hall Mark
Message-ID: <1e5.2a1e363d.2e71438c@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/8/2004 10:08:06 PM Central Daylight Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes: 
> 
> >> 
>> >>> 
>>> With time I began to think that perhaps its rhetoric had its hand on my
>>> sleeve a bit too much, as Donald Hall once put it.  But my initial
>>> reaction's still lurking there, too.
>>> 
>> 
>> I think "sentimental" might be well understood by looking at Hall's Befeft. 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> 
> Sam, you perhaps mean Hall's *Without*?  Ah, me:  it is sad what's happened 
> to that man--a truly wonderful critic at his best, and certainly a poet who 
> once had a lot more grit.
> 
> But most of all, I'm getting all sentimental myself to think of poor Sam, 
> teaching a poetry workshop with only seven students!  You poor thing!  Here, 
> take some of my 20 students. . . .
> 
> (We also did Justice today in my class.)

Sorry.  Without it is.
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep  9 01:27:41 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 01:27:41 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?
Message-ID: <7b.33546973.2e7143cd@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/8/2004 10:34:38 PM Central Daylight Time, 
wjbat at conncoll.edu writes: 
> I confess that "Michael" reduced me to hysterics when I tried reading 
> it aloud to my freshman roommate when I was 18, and I've never been 
> able to read it straight since.  David's right, of course, that poems 
> take us where they find us, and it's a miracle that so many of them 
> find us at all.

Hey, read it to your freshman roommate again!
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Thu Sep  9 07:50:46 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 07:50:46 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
In-Reply-To: <413F7BB7.254E342A@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <41400B56.12495.25320D@localhost>

> > Helen Ruggieri wrote:
> > Sentimental:  one says, my dog died; you reply, I'm sorry to hear
> > that.  You're not sorry at all - you're making the expected polite
> > response.
> > Sentiment:  I tell you about my dog Bruno, part husky who pulled me
> > everywhere.  In the morning he would stand my my side of the bed and
> > when I opened my eyes there he'd be, watching, waiting, glad to
> > finally have me with him. One night as he was pulling me for my walk
> > he slipped on black ice and went down on his butt.  I laughed.  He
> > came back and nipped me.  He didn't like it if you laughed at him.
> > He also like to grab one of your mittens and run with it.  He didn't
> > care how cold it was.
> > He died last night
> > Now I have to walk alone.
> > If I've done my job - you really feel a little bit sorry about Bruno
> > dying.

On 8 Sep 2004 at 14:38, James Cervantes wrote:
> O.K., how about this Matthews poem re dead dog, sentimental or
> sentiment or just a good way to write about the subject?
> 
> Loyal
> 
> They gave him an overdose
> of anesthetic, and its fog
> shut down his heart in seconds.
> I tried to hold him, but he was
> somewhere else. For so much love
> one of the principals is missing,
> it's no wonder we confuse love
> with longing. Oh I was thick
> with both. I wanted my dog
> to live forever and while I was
> working on impossibilities
> I wanted to live forever, too.
> I wanted company and to be alone.
> I wanted to know how they trash
> a stiff ninety-five-pound dog
> and I paid them to do it
> and not tell me. What else?
> I wanted a letter of apology
> delivered by decrepit hand,
> by someone shattered for each time
> I'd had to eat pure pain. I wanted
> to weep, not "like a baby,"
> in gulps and breath-stretching
> howls, but steadily, like an adult,
> according to the fiction
> that there is work to be done,
> and almost inconsolably.

How about this one from John Updike?

Dog's Death
John Updike

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!"
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.
Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.







From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep  9 08:53:33 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 08:53:33 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?
Message-ID: <1ac.291964db.2e71ac4d@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/8/2004 11:34:39 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
wjbat at conncoll.edu writes:

> Come to think of it, is "sentimentality" a potential problem relevant
> > only (or at least mainly) to those writing in more conventional,
> > narrative modes?
> > Kent
> 
> To Kent's question: you can guard against the most obvious kinds 
> sentimentality by avoiding emotion or by bracketing it with irony.  But 
> that's not enough.  What we hate about sentimentality is its 
> hollowness, its falsity, its self-concern.   I don't think jettisoning 
> convention is any safeguard against dishonesty.  Staying awake, 
> perhaps.  Whatever keeps you awake.
> 

Kent, Wendy,...
I think some kind of 'narrative grounding' is necessary 
for sentiment to come across. You have to engender
an empathetic response in the reader. A disembodied 
lyric voice or a detached speaker behind
the poem is not likely to engage one fully enough
to create an emotional response in the reader 
to the poem.

This may be obvious but emotion/feeling is not
something inside the poem. It's in the psyche of the
writer and it is a psychological response to some
real situation. The emotion gets "translated" or
"conveyed" for the reader by rendering in language
that life situation once more, with enough narrative 
elements, to engage the reader's empathetic response:

-
Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

--Jack Gilbert
(The Great Fires, Knopf, 1994)


Here's poem that might be a good example
of giving enough narrative detail for the reader
to latch onto. The straight-ahead, terse telling 
undercuts the possibility of the poem lapsing
into sentimentality. (I like the quick turn to 
the present tense at the end...adds a little
immediacy at the right moment, I think.)

I prefer my sentiment without a dollop of
irony on top.
Finnegan
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From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Thu Sep  9 08:59:13 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Thu,  9 Sep 2004 13:59:13 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality & narrative?
In-Reply-To: <7b.33546973.2e7143cd@cs.com>
References: <7b.33546973.2e7143cd@cs.com>
Message-ID: <1094734753.414053a1245ab@webmail.ukonline.net>


Very interesting discussion. Some more opinions for the melting-pot:

This whole anti-sentimentality thing is just an understandable reaction to 
some extremes of nineteenth-century culture. We'll get over it eventually, 
and then we'll never bother to use the word again. 

When people call something sentimental, it seems to involve assuming that you 
can judge the quality of someone's feelings on the basis of how they're 
manifested. But most people are incredibly bad at doing this, especially when 
the object of their scorn comes from some very different sector of the 
population (which it nearly always does). 

But the heyday of literary obsession with "sentimentality" was really fifty 
years ago, with Leavis and Lawrence. In a modern poetic the focus of our 
worries, so it appears to me, is not sentimentality - that is transparent - 
but individual feeling. 

  

----------------------------------------------
This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net


From Faustina1 at aol.com  Thu Sep  9 09:03:49 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 09:03:49 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: "40---Love"!
Message-ID: <668B08F6.0745B1DF.023799CC@aol.com>

I remember McGough's 40-love! It was split across the page--ended something like

the net          was still
between          them

I thought it was neat.  He had other reader-implicating game poems in there.  Janet


From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep  9 09:22:10 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 06:22:10 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment(ality)
Message-ID: <20040909132210.36404.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>

I'm trying to put my finger on a poem that's escaping
me.  It's about a speaker who's come home from college
(I think) because his little brother or sister (or
perhaps father) has died.  I remember a line about
"old men treating me like a grown up" or something
along those lines.

Anybody know what I'm talking about?



=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


From grahamd at ripon.edu  Thu Sep  9 09:33:13 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 08:33:13 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment(ality)
In-Reply-To: <20040909132210.36404.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <BD65C5C9.B0C7%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Perhaps Heaney?

Mid-term Break 
                   
     --Seamus Heaney


I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.



on 9/9/04 8:22 AM, Jeff Newberry at jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com wrote:

> I'm trying to put my finger on a poem that's escaping
> me.  It's about a speaker who's come home from college
> (I think) because his little brother or sister (or
> perhaps father) has died.  I remember a line about
> "old men treating me like a grown up" or something
> along those lines.
> 
> Anybody know what I'm talking about?
> 
> 
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From wwmorgan at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep  9 09:36:13 2004
From: wwmorgan at ilstu.edu (Bill Morgan)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 08:36:13 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment(ality)
In-Reply-To: <20040909132210.36404.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040909132210.36404.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.2.0.2.20040909082535.01d0ab00@mail.ilstu.edu>

At 08:22 AM 9/9/2004, you wrote:
>I'm trying to put my finger on a poem that's escaping
>me.  It's about a speaker who's come home from college
>(I think) because his little brother or sister (or
>perhaps father) has died.  I remember a line about
>"old men treating me like a grown up" or something
>along those lines.
>
>Anybody know what I'm talking about?
>
>
>
>=====
>Jeff Newberry
>
>"Sometimes it's not so easy,
>especially when your only friend
>talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
>and you do just the same as him."
>--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"



         I think you're remembering Seamus Heaney's "Mid-term Break."  I 
heard him read it and comment on it this summer.  He indicated that it was 
in fact autobiographical and that it was (he said with a twinkle) a "good 
cash cow," since it had been anthologized many times.

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room.  Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks.  Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.



>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
>http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry





From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep  9 09:46:28 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 06:46:28 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment(ality)
In-Reply-To: <BD65C5C9.B0C7%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <20040909134628.20245.qmail@web52604.mail.yahoo.com>

That's it!

Thanks, David.

Now--back to my original inspiration for posting this
poem.  What's the take on this one, folks? 
Sentimental?  Sentimentality? 

The reason I ask is that for many, many years, I've
written about the death of my father (who died with I
was 15).  However, I've never written about my
grandfather (who died that year as well).  My father
died of cancer; my grandfather shot himself.  I've
always avoided my grandfather as a subject because I
didn't know how to write about it without seeming
sentimental in the worst way, without appealing to
pathos and pity and winding up with a
boo-hoo-why-do-people-do-this? type poem.  But a
number of my poems and stories and essays about my
father are very sentimental.  My poem "Exegesis"
(available at www.storySouth.com) has been charged
with overt sentimentality by some readers.

I wonder why I feel comfortable writing about my
father and not my grandfather?

Do any of you have subjects that you avoid?

Jeff Newberry


--- David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu> wrote:

> Perhaps Heaney?
> 
> Mid-term Break 
>                    
>      --Seamus Heaney
> 
> 
> I sat all morning in the college sick bay
> Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
> At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
> 
> In the porch I met my father crying--
> He had always taken funerals in his stride--
> And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
> 
> The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
> When I came in, and I was embarrassed
> By old men standing up to shake my hand
> 
> And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
> Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
> Away at school, as my mother held my hand
> 
> In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
> At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
> With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the
> nurses.
> 
> Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
> And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
> For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
> 
> Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
> He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
> No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
> 
> A four foot box, a foot for every year.
> 
> 
> 
> on 9/9/04 8:22 AM, Jeff Newberry at
> jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to put my finger on a poem that's
> escaping
> > me.  It's about a speaker who's come home from
> college
> > (I think) because his little brother or sister (or
> > perhaps father) has died.  I remember a line about
> > "old men treating me like a grown up" or something
> > along those lines.
> > 
> > Anybody know what I'm talking about?
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > =====
> > Jeff Newberry
> > 
> > "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> > especially when your only friend
> > talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> > and you do just the same as him."
> > --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > __________________________________
> > Do you Yahoo!?
> > Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other
> providers!
> > http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> > _______________________________________________
> > New-Poetry mailing list
> > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 
> 
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
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From Faustina1 at aol.com  Thu Sep  9 09:52:34 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 09:52:34 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentiment(ality)
Message-ID: <72ED6EAB.7DF12AB9.023799CC@aol.com>

I always thought that a very painful poem to read--sentiment, then, not sentimentality.  It seems to earn its feeling, to use workshop cliche.  

This very interesting discussion reminds me of the first plagiarism case I ever found--in 1963, when I was a T.A.  There was an essay in one of our sourcebooks about a child whose father had died.  It was very emotionally affecting, I thought then, though now all I remember is someone scraping frost off a window to look in at something.  Anyway, one of my students plagiarized this essay but substituted his cat for Daddy.  It was hilarious.  My office mate and I howled.  And, in fact, I am a cat person...   Janet  


From hruggier at localnet.com  Thu Sep  9 10:32:59 2004
From: hruggier at localnet.com (Helen Ruggieri)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 10:32:59 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
References: <004201c495e0$94bb91f0$380b9942@Helen>
	<413F7BB7.254E342A@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <001601c49679$e88adb80$e00a9942@Helen>

I don't think it's sentimental -
I felt the sentiment
but I'm a sucker for dead dog poems -
although there's one by Jimmy Stewart
that raises my hackles.

h
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Cervantes" <jvcervantes at earthlink.net>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 5:38 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU


>
>
> > Helen Ruggieri wrote:
> >
> > This is an old explanation I picked up somewhere and because I'm
> > always saying the same thing over and over again to 18 year olds - I
> > have honed it to the bone.
> > Dog pun.
> >
> > Sentimental:  one says, my dog died; you reply, I'm sorry to hear
> > that.  You're not sorry at all - you're making the expected polite
> > response.
> >
> > Sentiment:  I tell you about my dog Bruno, part husky who pulled me
> > everywhere.  In the morning he would stand my my side of the bed and
> > when I opened my eyes there he'd be, watching, waiting, glad to
> > finally have me with him.
> > One night as he was pulling me for my walk he slipped on black ice and
> > went down on his butt.  I laughed.  He came
> > back and nipped me.  He didn't like it if you laughed at him. He also
> > like to grab one of your mittens and run with it.  He didn't care how
> > cold it was.
> >
> > and so on, more dog tales
> >
> > He died last night
> >
> > Now I have to walk alone.
> >
> > If I've done my job - you really feel a little bit sorry about Bruno
> > dying.
>
> O.K., how about this Matthews poem re dead dog, sentimental or sentiment
> or just a good way to write about the subject?
>
> Loyal
>
> They gave him an overdose
> of anesthetic, and its fog
> shut down his heart in seconds.
> I tried to hold him, but he was
> somewhere else. For so much love
> one of the principals is missing,
> it's no wonder we confuse love
> with longing. Oh I was thick
> with both. I wanted my dog
> to live forever and while I was
> working on impossibilities
> I wanted to live forever, too.
> I wanted company and to be alone.
> I wanted to know how they trash
> a stiff ninety-five-pound dog
> and I paid them to do it
> and not tell me. What else?
> I wanted a letter of apology
> delivered by decrepit hand,
> by someone shattered for each time
> I'd had to eat pure pain. I wanted
> to weep, not "like a baby,"
> in gulps and breath-stretching
> howls, but steadily, like an adult,
> according to the fiction
> that there is work to be done,
> and almost inconsolably.
>
>
> --William Matthews.  *Selected Poems and Translations 1969-1991*,
> Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
>
> p.s. - I think it just escapes being sentimental. - Jim
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>




From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Thu Sep  9 10:45:07 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 09:45:07 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimental poem for D. Bromige
Message-ID: <s140262a.053@mail.highland.edu>

Here is a sentimental poem for the very non-narrative poet David
Bromige. It's part of the forthcoming _Epigramititis: 108 Living
American Poets_, with Afterword "Approbatio" by Ed Dorn to me, ca.
1999.
*

David Bromige

I sat with him in Samuel Pepy's rooms
at Cambridge. He was the guest of honor at 
the 2004 CCCP. There were antiques all around
us and portraits on the walls of men from the18th 
century. We talked pleasantries, while the leaded 
glass refracted a hard ray of light into his thin, pale 
head. The river flowed under the rooms; the punts 
with their straw-hated boys slid on the river under 
the rooms. There were purple and yellow flowers 
along the banks of the river, and small yellow birds, 
too. Isn't the river sliding under the rooms lovely, 
said his wife, handing me a glass of wine, with all 
the flowers and the birds? Yes, I said, it certainly is,
and I felt as if history were moving like a river beneath
me, or through me. Would you please push me to the 
loo, my love, said David, beside the clock, in his chariot 
chair. Because I have to take the kind of piss that would 
scare the shit out of a Saskatchewan moose.



From tad at opus40.org  Thu Sep  9 10:47:36 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 10:47:36 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
References: <004201c495e0$94bb91f0$380b9942@Helen><413F7BB7.254E342A@earthlink.net>
	<001601c49679$e88adb80$e00a9942@Helen>
Message-ID: <009501c4967b$f3ff5fc0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Maybe sentimentality is a tool like any other, and some people use it better
than others.


OLD SHEP


When I was a lad, and old Shep was a pup
Over hills and meadows we`d stray
Just a little boy and his dog, we were both full of fun
We grew up together that way

I remember the time at the old swimmin? hole
When I would have drowned beyond doubt
But old Shep was right there, to the rescue he came
He jumped in and helped pul me out

As the years fast did roll old Shep he grew lame
His eyes were fast growing dim
And one day the doctor looked at me and said
"I can do no more for him, Jim"

With hands that were trembling I picked up my gun
And aimed it at Shep`s faithful head
I just couldn`t do it, I wanted to run
I wish they would shoot me instead

He came to my side and he looked up at me
And laid his old head on my knee
I had struck the best friend that a man ever had
I cried so I scarcely could see

Old Shep he has gone where the good doggies go
And no more with old Shep will I roam
But if dogs have a heaven there`s one thing I know
Old Shep has a wonderful home

  --Red Foley


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Helen Ruggieri" <hruggier at localnet.com>
To: <jvcervantes at earthlink.net>; "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &
Views" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 10:32 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU


> I don't think it's sentimental -
> I felt the sentiment
> but I'm a sucker for dead dog poems -
> although there's one by Jimmy Stewart
> that raises my hackles.
>
> h
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "James Cervantes" <jvcervantes at earthlink.net>
> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 5:38 PM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
>
>
> >
> >
> > > Helen Ruggieri wrote:
> > >
> > > This is an old explanation I picked up somewhere and because I'm
> > > always saying the same thing over and over again to 18 year olds - I
> > > have honed it to the bone.
> > > Dog pun.
> > >
> > > Sentimental:  one says, my dog died; you reply, I'm sorry to hear
> > > that.  You're not sorry at all - you're making the expected polite
> > > response.
> > >
> > > Sentiment:  I tell you about my dog Bruno, part husky who pulled me
> > > everywhere.  In the morning he would stand my my side of the bed and
> > > when I opened my eyes there he'd be, watching, waiting, glad to
> > > finally have me with him.
> > > One night as he was pulling me for my walk he slipped on black ice and
> > > went down on his butt.  I laughed.  He came
> > > back and nipped me.  He didn't like it if you laughed at him. He also
> > > like to grab one of your mittens and run with it.  He didn't care how
> > > cold it was.
> > >
> > > and so on, more dog tales
> > >
> > > He died last night
> > >
> > > Now I have to walk alone.
> > >
> > > If I've done my job - you really feel a little bit sorry about Bruno
> > > dying.
> >
> > O.K., how about this Matthews poem re dead dog, sentimental or sentiment
> > or just a good way to write about the subject?
> >
> > Loyal
> >
> > They gave him an overdose
> > of anesthetic, and its fog
> > shut down his heart in seconds.
> > I tried to hold him, but he was
> > somewhere else. For so much love
> > one of the principals is missing,
> > it's no wonder we confuse love
> > with longing. Oh I was thick
> > with both. I wanted my dog
> > to live forever and while I was
> > working on impossibilities
> > I wanted to live forever, too.
> > I wanted company and to be alone.
> > I wanted to know how they trash
> > a stiff ninety-five-pound dog
> > and I paid them to do it
> > and not tell me. What else?
> > I wanted a letter of apology
> > delivered by decrepit hand,
> > by someone shattered for each time
> > I'd had to eat pure pain. I wanted
> > to weep, not "like a baby,"
> > in gulps and breath-stretching
> > howls, but steadily, like an adult,
> > according to the fiction
> > that there is work to be done,
> > and almost inconsolably.
> >
> >
> > --William Matthews.  *Selected Poems and Translations 1969-1991*,
> > Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
> >
> > p.s. - I think it just escapes being sentimental. - Jim
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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 jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep  9 11:13:02 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 08:13:02 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
In-Reply-To: <009501c4967b$f3ff5fc0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <20040909151302.84686.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>

Oh my God.

Every time I hear this song, I can't help bursting out
into tears. Of course, I am a dog person and have
never spent more than 5 years of my life sans a
canine.  

Damn you, Elvis.  Damn you, Red Foley!  Damn you, Tad!
 My office door is open and I'm bawling!!!

Jeff Newberry


--- The Old Mole <tad at opus40.org> wrote:

> Maybe sentimentality is a tool like any other, and
> some people use it better
> than others.
> 
> 
> OLD SHEP
> 
> 
> When I was a lad, and old Shep was a pup
> Over hills and meadows we`d stray
> Just a little boy and his dog, we were both full of
> fun
> We grew up together that way
> 
> I remember the time at the old swimmin? hole
> When I would have drowned beyond doubt
> But old Shep was right there, to the rescue he came
> He jumped in and helped pul me out
> 
> As the years fast did roll old Shep he grew lame
> His eyes were fast growing dim
> And one day the doctor looked at me and said
> "I can do no more for him, Jim"
> 
> With hands that were trembling I picked up my gun
> And aimed it at Shep`s faithful head
> I just couldn`t do it, I wanted to run
> I wish they would shoot me instead
> 
> He came to my side and he looked up at me
> And laid his old head on my knee
> I had struck the best friend that a man ever had
> I cried so I scarcely could see
> 
> Old Shep he has gone where the good doggies go
> And no more with old Shep will I roam
> But if dogs have a heaven there`s one thing I know
> Old Shep has a wonderful home
> 
>   --Red Foley
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


From tad at opus40.org  Thu Sep  9 11:47:39 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 11:47:39 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
References: <20040909151302.84686.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <00b001c49684$5899cb20$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Jeff - it really is that good. It's as good in its way as "Michael" or "We
Are Seven," but that skill had moved out of the provenance of literary
poetry.

Tad


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 11:13 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU


Oh my God.

Every time I hear this song, I can't help bursting out
into tears. Of course, I am a dog person and have
never spent more than 5 years of my life sans a
canine.

Damn you, Elvis.  Damn you, Red Foley!  Damn you, Tad!
 My office door is open and I'm bawling!!!

Jeff Newberry


--- The Old Mole <tad at opus40.org> wrote:

> Maybe sentimentality is a tool like any other, and
> some people use it better
> than others.
>
>
> OLD SHEP
>
>
> When I was a lad, and old Shep was a pup
> Over hills and meadows we`d stray
> Just a little boy and his dog, we were both full of
> fun
> We grew up together that way
>
> I remember the time at the old swimmin? hole
> When I would have drowned beyond doubt
> But old Shep was right there, to the rescue he came
> He jumped in and helped pul me out
>
> As the years fast did roll old Shep he grew lame
> His eyes were fast growing dim
> And one day the doctor looked at me and said
> "I can do no more for him, Jim"
>
> With hands that were trembling I picked up my gun
> And aimed it at Shep`s faithful head
> I just couldn`t do it, I wanted to run
> I wish they would shoot me instead
>
> He came to my side and he looked up at me
> And laid his old head on my knee
> I had struck the best friend that a man ever had
> I cried so I scarcely could see
>
> Old Shep he has gone where the good doggies go
> And no more with old Shep will I roam
> But if dogs have a heaven there`s one thing I know
> Old Shep has a wonderful home
>
>   --Red Foley
>


=====
Jeff Newberry

"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"



__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry




From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep  9 12:33:03 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 18:33:03 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
References: <20040909151302.84686.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>
	<00b001c49684$5899cb20$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <011c01c4968a$adc33040$fbae3252@yourpk9x5fuc06>

I also liked this one:

morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world

Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dewfall, on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day

and Steve Wonder's Superstition, the Doors, Let it be,
...
From: "The Old Mole" <tad at opus40.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 5:47 PM


> Jeff - it really is that good. It's as good in its way as "Michael" or "We
> Are Seven," but that skill had moved out of the provenance of literary
> poetry.
>
> Tad
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 11:13 AM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
>
>
> Oh my God.
>
> Every time I hear this song, I can't help bursting out
> into tears. Of course, I am a dog person and have
> never spent more than 5 years of my life sans a
> canine.
>
> Damn you, Elvis.  Damn you, Red Foley!  Damn you, Tad!
>  My office door is open and I'm bawling!!!
>
> Jeff Newberry
>
>
> --- The Old Mole <tad at opus40.org> wrote:
>
> > Maybe sentimentality is a tool like any other, and
> > some people use it better
> > than others.
> >
> >
> > OLD SHEP
> >
> >
> > When I was a lad, and old Shep was a pup
> > Over hills and meadows we`d stray
> > Just a little boy and his dog, we were both full of
> > fun
> > We grew up together that way
> >
> > I remember the time at the old swimmin? hole
> > When I would have drowned beyond doubt
> > But old Shep was right there, to the rescue he came
> > He jumped in and helped pul me out
> >
> > As the years fast did roll old Shep he grew lame
> > His eyes were fast growing dim
> > And one day the doctor looked at me and said
> > "I can do no more for him, Jim"
> >
> > With hands that were trembling I picked up my gun
> > And aimed it at Shep`s faithful head
> > I just couldn`t do it, I wanted to run
> > I wish they would shoot me instead
> >
> > He came to my side and he looked up at me
> > And laid his old head on my knee
> > I had struck the best friend that a man ever had
> > I cried so I scarcely could see
> >
> > Old Shep he has gone where the good doggies go
> > And no more with old Shep will I roam
> > But if dogs have a heaven there`s one thing I know
> > Old Shep has a wonderful home
> >
> >   --Red Foley
> >
>
>
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
>
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> _______________________________________________
> 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 cstroffo at earthlink.net  Thu Sep  9 14:47:49 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 10:47:49 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimental poem for D. Bromige
Message-ID: <200409091729.i89HRjHB243436@pimout1-ext.prodigy.net>

David is great!

----------
>From: "Kent Johnson" <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu>
>To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimental poem for D. Bromige
>Date: Thu, Sep 9, 2004, 6:45 AM
>

> Here is a sentimental poem for the very non-narrative poet David
> Bromige. It's part of the forthcoming _Epigramititis: 108 Living
> American Poets_, with Afterword "Approbatio" by Ed Dorn to me, ca.
> 1999.
> *
>
> David Bromige
>
> I sat with him in Samuel Pepy's rooms
> at Cambridge. He was the guest of honor at
> the 2004 CCCP. There were antiques all around
> us and portraits on the walls of men from the18th
> century. We talked pleasantries, while the leaded
> glass refracted a hard ray of light into his thin, pale
> head. The river flowed under the rooms; the punts
> with their straw-hated boys slid on the river under
> the rooms. There were purple and yellow flowers
> along the banks of the river, and small yellow birds,
> too. Isn't the river sliding under the rooms lovely,
> said his wife, handing me a glass of wine, with all
> the flowers and the birds? Yes, I said, it certainly is,
> and I felt as if history were moving like a river beneath
> me, or through me. Would you please push me to the
> loo, my love, said David, beside the clock, in his chariot
> chair. Because I have to take the kind of piss that would
> scare the shit out of a Saskatchewan moose.
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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  Thu Sep  9 14:52:48 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 10:52:48 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
Message-ID: <200409091734.i89HY5H9172586@pimout1-ext.prodigy.net>

stevie wonder's "as" with all those "until" phrases at the end
works pretty well too...

certainly better than the cole porter "always"
(which the poetry society of america had on the subways for awhile---)

Of course, I'm teaching Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" in my freshman comp
classes (students born in 1986!) as an example of a text that survives
extremely well under the burden of a "close reading" method....

C

----------
>From: "Anny Ballardini" <anny.ballardini at tin.it>
>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
>Date: Thu, Sep 9, 2004, 8:33 AM
>

> I also liked this one:
>
> morning has broken, like the first morning
> Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
> Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
> Praise for them springing fresh from the world
>
> Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven
> Like the first dewfall, on the first grass
> Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
> Sprung in completeness where his feet pass
>
> Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
> Born of the one light, eden saw play
> Praise with elation, praise every morning
> God's recreation of the new day
>
> and Steve Wonder's Superstition, the Doors, Let it be,
> ...
> From: "The Old Mole" <tad at opus40.org>
> Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 5:47 PM
>
>
>> Jeff - it really is that good. It's as good in its way as "Michael" or "We
>> Are Seven," but that skill had moved out of the provenance of literary
>> poetry.
>>
>> Tad
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
>> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
>> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>> Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 11:13 AM
>> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
>>
>>
>> Oh my God.
>>
>> Every time I hear this song, I can't help bursting out
>> into tears. Of course, I am a dog person and have
>> never spent more than 5 years of my life sans a
>> canine.
>>
>> Damn you, Elvis.  Damn you, Red Foley!  Damn you, Tad!
>>  My office door is open and I'm bawling!!!
>>
>> Jeff Newberry
>>
>>
>> --- The Old Mole <tad at opus40.org> wrote:
>>
>> > Maybe sentimentality is a tool like any other, and
>> > some people use it better
>> > than others.
>> >
>> >
>> > OLD SHEP
>> >
>> >
>> > When I was a lad, and old Shep was a pup
>> > Over hills and meadows we`d stray
>> > Just a little boy and his dog, we were both full of
>> > fun
>> > We grew up together that way
>> >
>> > I remember the time at the old swimmin? hole
>> > When I would have drowned beyond doubt
>> > But old Shep was right there, to the rescue he came
>> > He jumped in and helped pul me out
>> >
>> > As the years fast did roll old Shep he grew lame
>> > His eyes were fast growing dim
>> > And one day the doctor looked at me and said
>> > "I can do no more for him, Jim"
>> >
>> > With hands that were trembling I picked up my gun
>> > And aimed it at Shep`s faithful head
>> > I just couldn`t do it, I wanted to run
>> > I wish they would shoot me instead
>> >
>> > He came to my side and he looked up at me
>> > And laid his old head on my knee
>> > I had struck the best friend that a man ever had
>> > I cried so I scarcely could see
>> >
>> > Old Shep he has gone where the good doggies go
>> > And no more with old Shep will I roam
>> > But if dogs have a heaven there`s one thing I know
>> > Old Shep has a wonderful home
>> >
>> >   --Red Foley
>> >
>>
>>
>> =====
>> Jeff Newberry
>>
>> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
>> especially when your only friend
>> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
>> and you do just the same as him."
>> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
>>
>>
>>
>> __________________________________
>> Do you Yahoo!?
>> Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
>> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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 jsafdie at comcast.net  Thu Sep  9 13:44:35 2004
From: jsafdie at comcast.net (Joe Safdie)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 10:44:35 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality and Perception
References: <20040909033256.88118.qmail@web13901.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <00c101c49694$ac2f6550$f7131118@D6T95L21>

Sorry for my somewhat inelegant pratfall onto the list last night; I've been 
quiet for a few weeks just to understand the nature of the discussions here. 
So now I'd like to introduce myself to those who don't know me and say hello 
to those who do. Some reviewer in the *NYT Book Review* last Sunday called 
the current state of poetry "balkanized," with favorites of one practitioner 
not even known to those of another (e.g., Susan and Marie Howe), and a list 
like this one would seem to be one way to remedy that situation.

Anyway, as regards sentiment -- I've been re-reading the best book on Dante 
that I've ever read, called *The Figure of Beatrice* by Charles Williams 
(1961); I recommend it highly. In an early chapter, Williams says "The 
golden haze of virtue that hangs over Florence is not in itself untrue; all 
that matters is whether a true Romanticism examines it or a 
pseudo-Romanticism is blinded by it."

This is how I see the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. The 
latter is pseudo-Romanticism, and as Carlo said last week, is actually a bar 
to perception, "a buffer between its creator and consumer . . . so that the 
thing becomes secondary to the thrill of communication or shared 
experience." To me, Carlo's central point (and of course he can correct me) 
was this: "the distinction between sentiment in actual life and its artistic 
expression have become utterly blurred. The former is driven by actual 
conditions, the latter by a set of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses 
that take place in actual conditions."

I agree completely. But that shouldn't obscure the fact that there *is* a 
real romanticism. Williams clarifies the distinction a few pages later, 
talking about what some have seen as Dante's overly idealized early poems 
about Beatrice: "The vision of perfection does not at all exclude the sight 
of imperfection; the two can exist together; they can even, in a sense, 
co-inhere. To suppose anything else would be a false romanticism of the 
worst kind. Proper Romanticism neither denies nor conceals; neither fears 
nor flies. It desires only accuracy; 'look, look; attend.'"

Sentiment can be seen as what used to be called "sensibillity" -- a 
feeling/thinking response to the world, as any intelligent person or poet 
might have. Sentimentality is mawkishly emotional and blurs that accuracy of 
perception. The fact that Dante was also a political poet is relevant here; 
poets have to deal with the whole spectrum, and not just be linguistic 
feeling-mongers for those who have forgotten how. I have a piece on Ed Dorn 
as a love poet in the latest *Jacket* (the one with Kent's article) that 
goes into these ideas a little more.

Glad to be here; hope these interesting discussions can continue.

Joe Safdie








From Faustina1 at aol.com  Thu Sep  9 13:59:04 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 13:59:04 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality
Message-ID: <0831AD52.703DE1D4.023799CC@aol.com>

Just wanted to say how much I am enjoying all this!  Even all the dead dogs.  Janet


From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Thu Sep  9 14:22:57 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 14:22:57 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality and Perception
In-Reply-To: <00c101c49694$ac2f6550$f7131118@D6T95L21>
References: <20040909033256.88118.qmail@web13901.mail.yahoo.com>
	<00c101c49694$ac2f6550$f7131118@D6T95L21>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409091419250.20049@shell1.oit.umass.edu>

Joe, thank you for a fine self-introduction and careful response to all
these deliberations on the subject of sentiment and sentimentality.  I
look forward to reading more of your thoughts.

In the meantime,  I am noticing the Ed Dorn's name is coming up quite a
bit these days you, Carlo, Kent, I think).  I lost track of him back when
I was in my teens, reading
that incredible compilation of American Beat poetry that we all own - the
one with the red flaggish stuff on the cover (my copy is currently
decomposing on a shelf.)  The one with Corso's "Marriage" in it?  But I
felt
that Dorn had somehow faded from sight.  it seems he has not.  Any
descriptions of what he's up to, his place right now in the picture?

Kerry O'Keefe



On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Joe Safdie wrote:

> Sorry for my somewhat inelegant pratfall onto the list last night; I've been
> quiet for a few weeks just to understand the nature of the discussions here.
> So now I'd like to introduce myself to those who don't know me and say hello
> to those who do. Some reviewer in the *NYT Book Review* last Sunday called
> the current state of poetry "balkanized," with favorites of one practitioner
> not even known to those of another (e.g., Susan and Marie Howe), and a list
> like this one would seem to be one way to remedy that situation.
>
> Anyway, as regards sentiment -- I've been re-reading the best book on Dante
> that I've ever read, called *The Figure of Beatrice* by Charles Williams
> (1961); I recommend it highly. In an early chapter, Williams says "The
> golden haze of virtue that hangs over Florence is not in itself untrue; all
> that matters is whether a true Romanticism examines it or a
> pseudo-Romanticism is blinded by it."
>
> This is how I see the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. The
> latter is pseudo-Romanticism, and as Carlo said last week, is actually a bar
> to perception, "a buffer between its creator and consumer . . . so that the
> thing becomes secondary to the thrill of communication or shared
> experience." To me, Carlo's central point (and of course he can correct me)
> was this: "the distinction between sentiment in actual life and its artistic
> expression have become utterly blurred. The former is driven by actual
> conditions, the latter by a set of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses
> that take place in actual conditions."
>
> I agree completely. But that shouldn't obscure the fact that there *is* a
> real romanticism. Williams clarifies the distinction a few pages later,
> talking about what some have seen as Dante's overly idealized early poems
> about Beatrice: "The vision of perfection does not at all exclude the sight
> of imperfection; the two can exist together; they can even, in a sense,
> co-inhere. To suppose anything else would be a false romanticism of the
> worst kind. Proper Romanticism neither denies nor conceals; neither fears
> nor flies. It desires only accuracy; 'look, look; attend.'"
>
> Sentiment can be seen as what used to be called "sensibillity" -- a
> feeling/thinking response to the world, as any intelligent person or poet
> might have. Sentimentality is mawkishly emotional and blurs that accuracy of
> perception. The fact that Dante was also a political poet is relevant here;
> poets have to deal with the whole spectrum, and not just be linguistic
> feeling-mongers for those who have forgotten how. I have a piece on Ed Dorn
> as a love poet in the latest *Jacket* (the one with Kent's article) that
> goes into these ideas a little more.
>
> Glad to be here; hope these interesting discussions can continue.
>
> Joe Safdie
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From jsafdie at comcast.net  Thu Sep  9 14:41:08 2004
From: jsafdie at comcast.net (Joe Safdie)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 11:41:08 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality and Perception
References: <20040909033256.88118.qmail@web13901.mail.yahoo.com><00c101c49694$ac2f6550$f7131118@D6T95L21>
	<Pine.GSO.4.55.0409091419250.20049@shell1.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <011d01c4969c$92780420$f7131118@D6T95L21>

Not faded from my sight, Kerry, or from many others', but he isn't 
physically here any longer, having succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 
December of 1999.

The latest *Chicago Review* is entitled "Edward Dorn: American Heretic" and 
has lots of his recent work, plus tributes and some fascinating early 
letters to and from Amiri Baraka, then Leroi Jones; there's also a fine 
collection of articles about him in the online magazine *Cento* -- it's at 
http://centomag.org

Always good to see *The New American Poetry* mentioned . . . that and the 
*Anthology of New York Poets* a few years later were the two books that got 
me started . . .

Best,

Joe

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kerry O'Keefe" <jkok at hfa.umass.edu>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 11:22 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Sentimentality and Perception


> Joe, thank you for a fine self-introduction and careful response to all
> these deliberations on the subject of sentiment and sentimentality.  I
> look forward to reading more of your thoughts.
>
> In the meantime,  I am noticing the Ed Dorn's name is coming up quite a
> bit these days you, Carlo, Kent, I think).  I lost track of him back when
> I was in my teens, reading
> that incredible compilation of American Beat poetry that we all own - the
> one with the red flaggish stuff on the cover (my copy is currently
> decomposing on a shelf.)  The one with Corso's "Marriage" in it?  But I
> felt
> that Dorn had somehow faded from sight.  it seems he has not.  Any
> descriptions of what he's up to, his place right now in the picture?
>
> Kerry O'Keefe
>
>
>
> On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Joe Safdie wrote:
>
>> Sorry for my somewhat inelegant pratfall onto the list last night; I've 
>> been
>> quiet for a few weeks just to understand the nature of the discussions 
>> here.
>> So now I'd like to introduce myself to those who don't know me and say 
>> hello
>> to those who do. Some reviewer in the *NYT Book Review* last Sunday 
>> called
>> the current state of poetry "balkanized," with favorites of one 
>> practitioner
>> not even known to those of another (e.g., Susan and Marie Howe), and a 
>> list
>> like this one would seem to be one way to remedy that situation.
>>
>> Anyway, as regards sentiment -- I've been re-reading the best book on 
>> Dante
>> that I've ever read, called *The Figure of Beatrice* by Charles Williams
>> (1961); I recommend it highly. In an early chapter, Williams says "The
>> golden haze of virtue that hangs over Florence is not in itself untrue; 
>> all
>> that matters is whether a true Romanticism examines it or a
>> pseudo-Romanticism is blinded by it."
>>
>> This is how I see the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. 
>> The
>> latter is pseudo-Romanticism, and as Carlo said last week, is actually a 
>> bar
>> to perception, "a buffer between its creator and consumer . . . so that 
>> the
>> thing becomes secondary to the thrill of communication or shared
>> experience." To me, Carlo's central point (and of course he can correct 
>> me)
>> was this: "the distinction between sentiment in actual life and its 
>> artistic
>> expression have become utterly blurred. The former is driven by actual
>> conditions, the latter by a set of aesthetics that attempt to ape 
>> responses
>> that take place in actual conditions."
>>
>> I agree completely. But that shouldn't obscure the fact that there *is* a
>> real romanticism. Williams clarifies the distinction a few pages later,
>> talking about what some have seen as Dante's overly idealized early poems
>> about Beatrice: "The vision of perfection does not at all exclude the 
>> sight
>> of imperfection; the two can exist together; they can even, in a sense,
>> co-inhere. To suppose anything else would be a false romanticism of the
>> worst kind. Proper Romanticism neither denies nor conceals; neither fears
>> nor flies. It desires only accuracy; 'look, look; attend.'"
>>
>> Sentiment can be seen as what used to be called "sensibillity" -- a
>> feeling/thinking response to the world, as any intelligent person or poet
>> might have. Sentimentality is mawkishly emotional and blurs that accuracy 
>> of
>> perception. The fact that Dante was also a political poet is relevant 
>> here;
>> poets have to deal with the whole spectrum, and not just be linguistic
>> feeling-mongers for those who have forgotten how. I have a piece on Ed 
>> Dorn
>> as a love poet in the latest *Jacket* (the one with Kent's article) that
>> goes into these ideas a little more.
>>
>> Glad to be here; hope these interesting discussions can continue.
>>
>> Joe Safdie
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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 Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Thu Sep  9 14:45:26 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 13:45:26 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
Message-ID: <s1405e9d.074@mail.highland.edu>

By the way, it's my understanding that Carlo Pacelli has been removed
from the list. I assume it has something to do with his recent harangues
contra me and others (which I know at least a couple of us on the
receiving end found more amusing than anything). 

I, for one, would like to see Carlo allowed to come back. And then just
take it from there... He sometimes has interesting things to say. We all
lose it now and then: some at home, some at the keyboard, some at the
golf course (some of us at all three!). 

Kent


From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Thu Sep  9 14:54:59 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 14:54:59 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
In-Reply-To: <s1405e9d.074@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s1405e9d.074@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409091453290.20049@shell1.oit.umass.edu>


here, here!





On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Kent Johnson wrote:

> By the way, it's my understanding that Carlo Pacelli has been removed
> from the list. I assume it has something to do with his recent harangues
> contra me and others (which I know at least a couple of us on the
> receiving end found more amusing than anything).
>
> I, for one, would like to see Carlo allowed to come back. And then just
> take it from there... He sometimes has interesting things to say. We all
> lose it now and then: some at home, some at the keyboard, some at the
> golf course (some of us at all three!).
>
> Kent
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep  9 15:04:50 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 14:04:50 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
In-Reply-To: <s1405e9d.074@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s1405e9d.074@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040909140137.0291f738@mail.ilstu.edu>

I agree with Kent. If Richard Dillon (Elemenope) can be allowed on this 
list, certainly Carlo Parcelli shd be here as well. They represent the 
lunatic fringe at both ends of the aesthetico-politico spectrum. We need to 
have them here to make the rest of us look reasonable.

Gabe



From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep  9 15:28:09 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 15:28:09 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
Message-ID: <105.504ca94b.2e7208c9@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/9/2004 10:48:14 AM Central Daylight Time, tad at opus40.org 
writes: 
> 
> Jeff - it really is that good. It's as good in its way as "Michael" or "We
> Are Seven," but that skill had moved out of the provenance of literary
> poetry.
> 
> Tad
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views"
> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 11:13 AM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
> 
> 
> Oh my God.
> 
> Every time I hear this song, I can't help bursting out
> into tears. Of course, I am a dog person and have
> never spent more than 5 years of my life sans a
> canine.
> 

> Damn you, Elvis.  Damn you, Red Foley!  Damn you, Tad!
> My office door is open and I'm bawling!!!
> 
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> 
> --- The Old Mole <tad at opus40.org> wrote:
> 
> >Maybe sentimentality is a tool like any other, and
> >some people use it better
> >than others.
> >
> >
> >OLD SHEP
> >
> >
> >When I was a lad, and old Shep was a pup
> >Over hills and meadows we`d stray
> >Just a little boy and his dog, we were both full of
> >fun
> >We grew up together that way
> >
> >I remember the time at the old swimmin? hole
> >When I would have drowned beyond doubt
> >But old Shep was right there, to the rescue he came
> >He jumped in and helped pul me out
> >
> >As the years fast did roll old Shep he grew lame
> >His eyes were fast growing dim
> >And one day the doctor looked at me and said
> >"I can do no more for him, Jim"
> >
> >With hands that were trembling I picked up my gun
> >And aimed it at Shep`s faithful head
> >I just couldn`t do it, I wanted to run
> >I wish they would shoot me instead
> >
> >He came to my side and he looked up at me
> >And laid his old head on my knee
> >I had struck the best friend that a man ever had
> >I cried so I scarcely could see
> >
> >Old Shep he has gone where the good doggies go
> >And no more with old Shep will I roam
> >But if dogs have a heaven there`s one thing I know
> >Old Shep has a wonderful home
> >
> >   --Red Foley
> >
> 
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> _______________________________________________
> 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

OK, Jeff.  I'm going out to rent Old Yeller now.
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep  9 15:41:52 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 15:41:52 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] SENTIMENTAL OVER YOU
Message-ID: <145.333c55d4.2e720c00@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/9/2004 12:34:22 PM Central Daylight Time, 
cstroffo at earthlink.net writes: 
> 
> stevie wonder's "as" with all those "until" phrases at the end
> works pretty well too...
> 
> certainly better than the cole porter "always"
> (which the poetry society of america had on the subways for awhile---)
> 
> Of course, I'm teaching Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" in my freshman comp
> classes (students born in 1986!) as an example of a text that survives
> extremely well under the burden of a "close reading" method....
> 
> C

I must protest.  "Always" was written by Irving Berlin, and if you want the 
anti-sentimental Berlin, just read the lyrics to "Let's Have Another Cup of 
Coffee."  Besides, "Always" was written for his second wife (he had been widowed 
for a number of years).

<img> 

Berlin Irving - Let's Have Another Cup O' Coffee Lyrics 

Why worry when skies are gray
Why should we complain
Let's laugh at the cloudy day
Let's sing in the rain
Songwriters say the storm quickly passes
That's their philosophy
They see the world through rose-colored glasses
Why shouldn't we?

Just around the corner
There's a rainbow in the sky
So let's have another cup o' coffee
And let's have another piece o' pie!

Trouble's just a bubble
And the clouds will soon roll by
So let's have another cup o' coffee
And let's have another piece o' pie

Let a smile be your umbrella
For it's just an April show'r
Even John D. Rockefeller 
Is looking for the silver lining

Mister Herbert Hoover 
Says that now's the time to buy
So let's have another cup o' coffee
And let's have another piece o' pie!


[alternate lines:]
Things that really matter 
Are the things that gold can't buy
 
As for Porter:




Song: ALWAYS TRUE TO YOU IN MY FASHION Lyrics


BILL:
Why can't you behave?
Why can't you behave?
LOIS:
Tell me how can you be jealous
When you know, baby, I'm your slave?
I'm just mad for you,
And I'll always be, 
But naturally

If a custom-tailored vet
Asks me out for something wet,
When the vet begins to pet, I cry "Hooray!"
But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion,
Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.
BILL:
There's a lush from Baltimore,
Who is rich but such a bore,
LOIS:
When the bore fall on the floor, I let him lay.
But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion,
Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.
BILL:
What about that Mister Thorne
Calls you up from night 'til morn?
LOIS:
Mister Thorne once cornered corn and that ain't hay.
Aha!
But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion,
Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.
BILL:
So you're out with Mister Fritz
You were dining at the Ritz,
LOIS:
Mister Fritz is full of Schlitz and Schlitz must pay.
But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion,
Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.
I could never curl my lip
At a dazzlin' diamond clip,
BILL:
S'pose the clip meant "let 'er rip,"
LOIS:
I'd not say "Nay!"
BILL:
But you're always true to me, darlin', in your fashion!
LOIS:
Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.
BILL:
Mister Harris, plutocrat,
Wants to give your cheek a pat,
LOIS:
If the Harris pat
Means a Paris hat,
B?b?, Oo-la-la!
Mais je suis toujour fid?le, darlin', in my fashion,
Oui, je suis toujour fid?le, darlin', in my way.
Mister Gable,
BILL:
You mean Clark?
LOIS:
Wants me on his boat to park,
If the gable boat
Means a sable coat,
BILL:
I know,
Anchors aweigh!
LOIS:
But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion,
Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.


And one of the great love songs:


Of sentimental verse,
Nothing in my purse,
And chuckles
When the preacher said
For better or for worse,
How lovely it was.

Thanks for the memory
Of Schubert's Serenade,
Little things of jade
And traffic jams
And anagrams
And bills we never paid,
How lovely it was.

We who could laugh over big things
Were parted by only a slight thing.
I wonder if we did the right thing,
Oh, well, that's life, I guess,
I love your dress.

Thanks for the memory
Of faults that you forgave,
Of rainbows on a wave,
And stockings in the basin
When a fellow needs a shave,
Thank you so much.

Thanks for the memory
Of tinkling temple bells,
Alma mater yells
And Cuban rum

And towels from
The very best hotels,
Oh how lovely it was.

Thanks for the memory
Of cushions on the floor,
Hash with Dinty Moore,
That pair of gay pajamas
That you bought
And never wore.

We said goodbye with a highball,
Then I got as high as a steeple,
But we were intelligent people,
No tears, no fuss,
Hooray for us.

Strictly entire nous,
Darling, how are you?
And how are all
Those little dreams
That never did come true?

Awfully glad I met you,
Cheerio and toodle-oo
Thank you,
Thank you so much.

Ralph Rainger - Leo Robin

There's a line about "buttered toast and prunes" that I miss from this 
version.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep  9 16:25:48 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:25:48 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
Message-ID: <e1.b3acba.2e72164c@aol.com>

I don't drop people lightly from the list...I hate
playing list police. But Carlo crossed
the line...a line he knows very well. It's very simple: 
you can't call people names on this list. And you 
especially can't assail those who have said 
nothing to provoke you personally. 

And Dillon has been shut down in the past,
Gabe. As I recall, it was because of what he
said to/about you. And because I have to be the one 
who cleans up the mess, I'm not laughing about
the 'lunatic fringe' crack.

Just like most members of this list, I can't say
I read every last word in every post. If anyone 
would like to reconstruct a case that connects 
Carlo's attacks to some provocation on this list, 
please backchannel me. 

Finally, it's not a lifetime banishment. Kent, 
in the first year of this list I had to change
yoru posting status, but perhaps you don't
recall. 

I have one thing to say to those who can't
keep within the bounds of civil discussion: 
Get a blog; they're free
Finnegan
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From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep  9 16:46:25 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 13:46:25 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
In-Reply-To: <e1.b3acba.2e72164c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <20040909204625.1302.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>

Hear, hear!

Jeff Newberry


--- JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> I don't drop people lightly from the list...I hate
> playing list police. But Carlo crossed
> the line...a line he knows very well. It's very
> simple: 
> you can't call people names on this list. And you 
> especially can't assail those who have said 
> nothing to provoke you personally. 
> 
> And Dillon has been shut down in the past,
> Gabe. As I recall, it was because of what he
> said to/about you. And because I have to be the one 
> who cleans up the mess, I'm not laughing about
> the 'lunatic fringe' crack.
> 
> Just like most members of this list, I can't say
> I read every last word in every post. If anyone 
> would like to reconstruct a case that connects 
> Carlo's attacks to some provocation on this list, 
> please backchannel me. 
> 
> Finally, it's not a lifetime banishment. Kent, 
> in the first year of this list I had to change
> yoru posting status, but perhaps you don't
> recall. 
> 
> I have one thing to say to those who can't
> keep within the bounds of civil discussion: 
> Get a blog; they're free
> Finnegan
> > _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 


From cstroffo at earthlink.net  Thu Sep  9 18:26:40 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 14:26:40 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
Message-ID: <200409092107.i89L7LHB068774@pimout1-ext.prodigy.net>

If there's a vote, I'm for letting CP back on

Continuous Peasant

----------
>From: Gabriel Gudding <gmguddi at ilstu.edu>
>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>,
new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
>Date: Thu, Sep 9, 2004, 11:04 AM
>

> I agree with Kent. If Richard Dillon (Elemenope) can be allowed on this
> list, certainly Carlo Parcelli shd be here as well. They represent the
> lunatic fringe at both ends of the aesthetico-politico spectrum. We need to
> have them here to make the rest of us look reasonable.
>
> Gabe
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Thu Sep  9 17:47:12 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (Michael Peverett)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 22:47:12 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] Review of Peter Riley's Excavations
Message-ID: <002001c496b6$97d305e0$67c428c3@FY.LOCAL>

My review of Excavations by Peter Riley is now online at Stride magazine
(http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk)

Michael Peverett



From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep  9 18:16:47 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 18:16:47 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
Message-ID: <1cf.2a9bda23.2e72304f@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/9/2004 3:47:06 PM Central Daylight Time, 
jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com writes: 
> 
> Hear, hear!
> 
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> 
> --- JforJames at aol.com wrote:
> 
> >I don't drop people lightly from the list...I hate
> >playing list police. But Carlo crossed
> >the line...a line he knows very well. It's very
> >simple: 
> >you can't call people names on this list. And you 
> >especially can't assail those who have said 
> >nothing to provoke you personally. 
> >
> >And Dillon has been shut down in the past,
> >Gabe. As I recall, it was because of what he
> >said to/about you. And because I have to be the one 
> >who cleans up the mess, I'm not laughing about
> >the 'lunatic fringe' crack.
> >
> >Just like most members of this list, I can't say
> >I read every last word in every post. If anyone 
> >would like to reconstruct a case that connects 
> >Carlo's attacks to some provocation on this list, 
> >please backchannel me. 
> >
> >Finally, it's not a lifetime banishment. Kent, 
> >in the first year of this list I had to change
> >yoru posting status, but perhaps you don't
> >recall. 
> >
> >I have one thing to say to those who can't
> >keep within the bounds of civil discussion: 
> >Get a blog; they're free
> >Finnegan
> >>_______________________________________________
> >New-Poetry mailing list
> >New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> >http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> >
> 
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> 
> 
>     
>         
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
More hear, hear!  That stuff was way over the top.
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From tad at opus40.org  Thu Sep  9 18:33:57 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 18:33:57 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
References: <e1.b3acba.2e72164c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <005001c496bd$1a4855b0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

A note of thanks to Jim for starting this list and maintaining it. It's not an easy job...I know. And I think he's done a great job.

Tad

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 4:25 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.


  I don't drop people lightly from the list...I hate
  playing list police. But Carlo crossed
  the line...a line he knows very well. It's very simple: 
  you can't call people names on this list. And you 
  especially can't assail those who have said 
  nothing to provoke you personally. 

  And Dillon has been shut down in the past,
  Gabe. As I recall, it was because of what he
  said to/about you. And because I have to be the one 
  who cleans up the mess, I'm not laughing about
  the 'lunatic fringe' crack.

  Just like most members of this list, I can't say
  I read every last word in every post. If anyone 
  would like to reconstruct a case that connects 
  Carlo's attacks to some provocation on this list, 
  please backchannel me. 

  Finally, it's not a lifetime banishment. Kent, 
  in the first year of this list I had to change
  yoru posting status, but perhaps you don't
  recall. 

  I have one thing to say to those who can't
  keep within the bounds of civil discussion: 
  Get a blog; they're free
  Finnegan



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Fri Sep 10 02:32:09 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 08:32:09 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Update from the Library of Congress
References: <e1.b3acba.2e72164c@aol.com>
	<005001c496bd$1a4855b0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <008f01c496ff$e62d6ca0$5bad3252@yourpk9x5fuc06>

>From: "Laura Gottesman" <lgot at loc.gov>

The Library of Congress is pleased to announce the final release of the
Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress, available on
the American Memory Web site at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/

The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the
papers of the nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who
escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an
outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher.

The online collection, from the Library of Congress' Manuscript
Division, now contains approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images)
relating to Douglass' life as an escaped slave, abolitionist, editor,
orator, and public servant. The papers span the years 1841 to 1964, with
the bulk of the material from 1862 to 1895. The collection consists of
correspondence, speeches and articles by Douglass and his
contemporaries, a draft of his autobiography, financial and legal
papers, scrapbooks, and miscellaneous items. These papers reveal
Douglass' interest in diverse subjects such as politics, emancipation,
racial prejudice, women's suffrage, and prison reform. Included is
correspondence with many prominent civil rights reformers of his day,
including Susan B. Anthony, William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, Horace
Greeley, and Russell Lant, and political leaders such as Grover
Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. Scrapbooks document Douglass' role as
minister to Haiti and the controversy surrounding his interracial second
marriage.  The online release of the Frederick Douglass Papers is made
possible through the generous support of the Citigroup Foundation.

American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating
to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more
than 8 million digital items from more than 120 historical collections.

Please submit any questions you may have using the web form available
at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-memory2.html.

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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Fri Sep 10 02:36:37 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 08:36:37 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Newberry Library - fellowships
Message-ID: <009d01c49700$86622670$5bad3252@yourpk9x5fuc06>

>From: Erin Lucido <lucidoe at newberry.org>

Newberry Library Fellowships in the Humanities, 2005-06

The Newberry Library, an independent research library in Chicago, Illinois, 
invites applications for its 2005-06 Fellowships in the Humanities. 
Newberry Library fellowships support research in residence at the Library. 
All proposed research must be appropriate to the collections of the 
Newberry Library. Our fellowship program rests on the belief that all 
projects funded by the Newberry benefit from engagement both with the 
materials in the Newberry's collections and with the lively community of 
researchers that gathers around those collections.  Long-term residential 
fellowships are available to postdoctoral scholars for periods of six to 
eleven months. Applicants for postdoctoral awards must hold the Ph.D. at 
the time of application. The stipend for these fellowships is up to 
$40,000.  Short-term residential fellowships are intended for postdoctoral 
scholars or Ph.D. candidates from outside of the Chicago area who have a 
specific need for Newberry collections. Scholars whose principal residence 
or place of employment is within the Chicago area are not eligible. The 
tenure of short-term fellowships varies from one week to two months.  The 
amount of the award is generally $1200 per month. Applications for 
long-term fellowships are due January 10, 2005; applications for most 
short-term fellowships are due March 1, 2005.  For more information or to 
download application materials, visit our Web site at 
<http://www.newberry.org/nl/research/L3rfellowships.html>http://www.newberry.org/nl/research/L3rfellowships.html
If you would like materials sent to you by mail, write to Committee on 
Awards, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL  60610-3380.  If you have 
questions about the fellowships program, contact research at newberry.org or 
(312) 255-3666.

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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Fri Sep 10 02:39:59 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 08:39:59 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hinds & Matterson Editors
Message-ID: <00a801c49700$fecda260$5bad3252@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Editions Rodopi BV is pleased to announce the following new publication(s)
in American Studies:

Rebound. The American Poetry Book.
Edited by Michael Hinds and Stephen Matterson.
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2004. VIII, 208 pp. (Textxet 44)
ISBN: 90-420-1712-0 Paper ? 43,-

This pioneering collection of new essays challenges established modes of
reading American lyric poetry, by orientating interpretation so that it
incorporates an awareness of the book context in which individual poems are
embedded.  These essays critically explore individual books by Walt Whitman,
Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos
Williams, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, Lyn
Hejinian and Jorie Graham, and consider the book as a restrictive, "binding"
concept for Emily Dickinson and some contemporary American poets. Rebound
both provides innovative readings of supposedly familiar poets and books,
and also generates critical strategies for renewed engagement with American
poetry traditions. As a "speaking whole" Rebound addresses a rich variety of
topics: intentionality as hermeneutic;  the architecture and artefacture of
the book; gender identity and the book; the positioning of the book in
postmodern poetics; the consequences of textual history for interpretation
and reception; and the American poetry book as metonym for nation.
Contributors: Domhnall Mitchell, Eldrid Herrington, Charles Altieri, Stephen
Matterson, Stephen Wilson, Maria Irene Ramalho De Sousa  Santos, Ron Callan,
Michael Hinds, Gareth Reeves, Lucy Collins, Justin Quinn, Nerys Williams and
Nick Selby.  Charles Bernstein's "The Book as Architecture" is reprinted as
an Afterword.
----------
For more information please refer to our website at
http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=TEXTXET+44 or send an email to
info at rodopi.nl or subscriptions at rodopi.nl (for subscriptions only).
----------

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From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Fri Sep 10 08:19:22 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 05:19:22 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Fall, 2004 issue of The Salt River Review
Message-ID: <41419BCA.12C3C40E@earthlink.net>

The Fall, 2004 issue of The Salt River Review is now online, with poetry
by Paul C. Howell, Rebecca Byrkit, Cyril Wong, Ana Garza, Khadijah
Queen, Laura Jensen, Halvard Johnson, Barry Spacks & Greg Simon; fiction
by P. J. Taylor, F.John Sharp & John Michael Cummings; Editors'
commentary by James Cervantes & Greg Simon: "Donald Justice: Memory and
Rapture." 

The Salt River Review:  http://www.poetserv.org


From marcus at designerglass.com  Fri Sep 10 08:22:23 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 08:22:23 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Carlo Pacelli, etc.
In-Reply-To: <s1405e9d.074@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <4141643F.24219.436E5C@localhost>

On 9 Sep 2004 at 13:45, Kent Johnson wrote:
> By the way, it's my understanding that Carlo Pacelli has been removed
> from the list....<

Musing on the Boss Art

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old managers: how well they understood
Its harrowing power; how they took pride
In placing blame directly where it does not belong;
How, when those pursuing excellence are waiting
For the miraculous raise, there always must be
Perky-breasted new hires who survive by skating
On excuses at the edge of a not very good
Performance rating.
But even the most dreadful tongue-lashing must end
In a corner office, or the hall outside,
As the prairie-dogging cube-dwellers turn away,
And under-managers pretend they cannot see,
Relieved that this disaster did not spray
Its harsh, forsaken splash on them.  So they pretend
There's no important failure, and fluorescents drone
As they had on the white face disappeared into the down
Elevator, and the expensive suits, whose every frown
Is feared, disperse, each trailing a delicate scent of cologne.






From mbyrne at risd.edu  Fri Sep 10 08:19:20 2004
From: mbyrne at risd.edu (Mairead Byrne)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 08:19:20 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Update from the Library of Congress
Message-ID: <s14163a8.025@webacc1.risd.edu>

This is amazingly good news Anny, thank you so much. 
Mairead


>>> anny.ballardini at tin.it 09/10/04 02:25 AM >>>
>From: "Laura Gottesman" <lgot at loc.gov>

The Library of Congress is pleased to announce the final release of the
Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress, available on
the American Memory Web site at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/

The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the
papers of the nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who
escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an
outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher.

The online collection, from the Library of Congress' Manuscript
Division, now contains approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images)
relating to Douglass' life as an escaped slave, abolitionist, editor,
orator, and public servant. The papers span the years 1841 to 1964, with
the bulk of the material from 1862 to 1895. The collection consists of
correspondence, speeches and articles by Douglass and his
contemporaries, a draft of his autobiography, financial and legal
papers, scrapbooks, and miscellaneous items. These papers reveal
Douglass' interest in diverse subjects such as politics, emancipation,
racial prejudice, women's suffrage, and prison reform. Included is
correspondence with many prominent civil rights reformers of his day,
including Susan B. Anthony, William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, Horace
Greeley, and Russell Lant, and political leaders such as Grover
Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. Scrapbooks document Douglass' role as
minister to Haiti and the controversy surrounding his interracial second
marriage.  The online release of the Frederick Douglass Papers is made
possible through the generous support of the Citigroup Foundation.

American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating
to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more
than 8 million digital items from more than 120 historical collections.

Please submit any questions you may have using the web form available
at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-memory2.html.




From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Fri Sep 10 09:28:00 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 06:28:00 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Fwd: I agree
Message-ID: <20040910132800.57414.qmail@web52605.mail.yahoo.com>

For some reason, Carlo Parcelli contacted me, asking
me to post his mag's URL to NewPoetry.  I'm not one
for holding grudges, so here we go:

www.flashpointmag.com

For the record, I'm not sure what he agrees with me
about . . .

Jeff Newberry

--- "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
wrote:

> Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 22:00:14 -0400
> From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
> To: Jeff Newberry <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: I agree
> 
> I agree with you, Jeff. But would you please post
> the URL for my 
> magazine on New Poetry? Its
> 
> http://www.flashpointmag.com/
> 
> CP
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


From tad at opus40.org  Fri Sep 10 09:44:28 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 09:44:28 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Recording Kooser
Message-ID: <006801c4973c$4cfc94b0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

For Sam Gwynn, and anyone else who wanted to know about downloading the Ted Kooser interview. There's a program called StepVoice recorder - http://www.stepvoice.com/ - that ought to do it for you.

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From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Fri Sep 10 10:03:26 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 07:03:26 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Recording Kooser
In-Reply-To: <006801c4973c$4cfc94b0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <20040910140326.31598.qmail@web52604.mail.yahoo.com>

Does anybody remember that link to the Kooser
interview?  Yahoo dumped my trash--they're more
faithful than the city where I live.

By the way, I was reading some Kooser yesterday
afternoon in a book someone gave me called "A
Geography of Poets."  I don't recall the date, but
judging from the front cover pic of a bunch of
college-types dressed in black listening to who looks
like Mark Strand read, I deduce that it's got a
mid-1970s date.

I don't remember the title of the poem that struck me,
but the poem was about a place that told a story.  It
had lines like "The single road leading in says that
this place was lonely."  Another one read, "The
sandbox made with an old tractor tire says that a
child lived here."  

Don't know why I can't remember the title.  I liked
the poem.

Jeff Newberry


--- The Old Mole <tad at opus40.org> wrote:

> For Sam Gwynn, and anyone else who wanted to know
> about downloading the Ted Kooser interview. There's
> a program called StepVoice recorder -
> http://www.stepvoice.com/ - that ought to do it for
> you.
> 
> > _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 


From Thom424 at aol.com  Fri Sep 10 10:14:16 2004
From: Thom424 at aol.com (Thom424 at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 10:14:16 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Recording Kooser
Message-ID: <87.158dddc6.2e7310b8@aol.com>

jeff--

i'm pretty sure that anthology was one of the two editions of   *a geography 
of poets* edited by edward field.

kooser's poem is "abandoned farmhouse"


He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
On a pile of broken dishes by the house;
A tall man too, says the length of the bed
In an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
Says the Bible with a broken back
On the floor below a window, bright with sun;
But not a man for farming, say the fields
Cluttered on boulders and a leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
Papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
Covered with oilcloth, and they had a child
Says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
And canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar-hole,
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window-frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house
In the weed-choked yard.? Stones in the fields
Say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
In the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child?? Its toys were strewn in the yard
Like branches after a storm ? a rubber cow,
A rusty tractor and a broken plow,
A doll in overalls.? Something went wrong, they say.
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From tad at opus40.org  Fri Sep 10 11:22:58 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 11:22:58 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Recording Kooser
References: <20040910140326.31598.qmail@web52604.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <001901c4974a$1f556240$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

I like some of Kooser, but I don' t think I'll seek out the audio. When he
reads a poem, his voice immediately clicks over to that now-I'm
reading-a-poem voice that drives me nuts.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 10, 2004 10:03 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Recording Kooser


> Does anybody remember that link to the Kooser
> interview?  Yahoo dumped my trash--they're more
> faithful than the city where I live.
>
> By the way, I was reading some Kooser yesterday
> afternoon in a book someone gave me called "A
> Geography of Poets."  I don't recall the date, but
> judging from the front cover pic of a bunch of
> college-types dressed in black listening to who looks
> like Mark Strand read, I deduce that it's got a
> mid-1970s date.
>
> I don't remember the title of the poem that struck me,
> but the poem was about a place that told a story.  It
> had lines like "The single road leading in says that
> this place was lonely."  Another one read, "The
> sandbox made with an old tractor tire says that a
> child lived here."
>
> Don't know why I can't remember the title.  I liked
> the poem.
>
> Jeff Newberry
>
>
> --- The Old Mole <tad at opus40.org> wrote:
>
> > For Sam Gwynn, and anyone else who wanted to know
> > about downloading the Ted Kooser interview. There's
> > a program called StepVoice recorder -
> > http://www.stepvoice.com/ - that ought to do it for
> > you.
> >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > New-Poetry mailing list
> > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> >
>
>
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
>
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> 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 Sep 10 12:47:26 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 12:47:26 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Recording Kooser
Message-ID: <100.c777b8.2e73349e@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/10/2004 10:03:44 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com writes:
Does anybody remember that link to the Kooser
interview?  Yahoo dumped my trash--they're more
faithful than the city where I live
The new Laureate in a Q&A...

http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/08/20040816_b_main.asp
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From JforJames at aol.com  Fri Sep 10 12:48:32 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 12:48:32 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Recording Kooser
Message-ID: <90.4b7ba828.2e7334e0@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/10/2004 10:14:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
Thom424 at aol.com writes:
i'm pretty sure that anthology was one of the two editions of  *a geography 
of poets* edited by edward field.

kooser's poem is "abandoned farmhouse"
If memory serves, he read this one during the course
of the interview.
Finnegan
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sat Sep 11 07:15:59 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 13:15:59 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Li Po
Message-ID: <006201c497f0$b7a251b0$dbab3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

>From today's PoemHunter.com

Alone Looking at the Mountain 

All the birds have flown up and gone; 
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by. 
We never tire of looking at each other - 
Only the mountain and I. 

Li Po 

Anny Ballardini

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky

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From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Sat Sep 11 10:03:59 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 07:03:59 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Found Poem:  9/11/01
Message-ID: <20040911140359.39311.qmail@web52603.mail.yahoo.com>

Found Poem:  September 11, 2001

On this day in 2001, it was a clear, crisp, sunny
morning in New York City. 

Students were in their second week of school. People
were getting to work in cars, buses, and trains. 

Alessandra Fremura had planned on leaving for work at
8:00, but her babysitter was 20 minutes late. 

Virginia DiChiara couldn't get her golden retrievers
to come in from the backyard, so she decided to have
another cup of coffee. 

Kenneth Merlo was supposed to go in the office, but he
decided to spend the morning helping a friend hook up
her computer instead of going to his office. 

Michael Lomonaco stopped in the lobby of the World
Trade Center to order some reading glasses from the
one-hour eyeglass store. 

Michael Jacobs was running late when he reached the
Trade Center lobby. He rushed to make the elevator,
but the doors slid shut in his face. 

A musician named Michelle Wiley was at home in her
apartment. She sat down at her piano in her nightgown
and shower shoes, and stared out her window at the 

Twin Towers before beginning to play. 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 


From JforJames at aol.com  Sat Sep 11 12:07:07 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 12:07:07 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] New Contributing Correspondent
Message-ID: <1d0.2abc8723.2e747cab@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/11/2004 7:16:41 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
anny.ballardini at tin.it writes:

> Anny Ballardini
>   
> 

I would like to thank Anny Ballardini
for agreeing to be one of the NP-List's 
contributing correspondents. She'll be
periodically sending along notices, 
news items, URLs, poems, etc., whatever
she feels may be of interest. I thank 
the other contributing correspondents, 
as well, for their continued service to the 
list's life: Content to promote comment. 

Jim Finnegan
NewPoetry List
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From tad at opus40.org  Sat Sep 11 12:48:55 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 12:48:55 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] New Contributing Correspondent
References: <1d0.2abc8723.2e747cab@aol.com>
Message-ID: <001801c4981f$3c25e0e0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Anny's been filling that role de facto for awhile, and with great distinction.

Tad
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 12:07 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] New Contributing Correspondent


  In a message dated 9/11/2004 7:16:41 AM Eastern Standard Time, anny.ballardini at tin.it writes:


    Anny Ballardini
      



  I would like to thank Anny Ballardini
  for agreeing to be one of the NP-List's 
  contributing correspondents. She'll be
  periodically sending along notices, 
  news items, URLs, poems, etc., whatever
  she feels may be of interest. I thank 
  the other contributing correspondents, 
  as well, for their continued service to the 
  list's life: Content to promote comment. 

  Jim Finnegan
  NewPoetry List



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From JforJames at aol.com  Sat Sep 11 12:50:43 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 12:50:43 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] poems by others: Tom Raworth
Message-ID: <65.3376f3fa.2e7486e3@aol.com>

Inner Space

in an octagonal tower, five miles from the sea
he lives quietly with his books and doves
all walls are white, some days he wears
green spectacles, not reading

riffling the pages -- low sounds of birds and their flying

holding to the use of familiar objects
in the light that is not quite


--Tom Raworth
British Poetry Since 1945
edited by Edward Lucie-Smith
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From JforJames at aol.com  Sat Sep 11 13:08:44 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 13:08:44 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
Message-ID: <fe.e37da3.2e748b1c@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/11/2004 12:50:43 PM Eastern Standard Time, JforJames 
writes:

> holding to the use of familiar objects
> in the light that is not quite
> 
> 

I posted the Raworth poem because I liked
its understated but effectiive imagery.
But can anyone tell me off hand, is there
a name for the kind of locution he uses
in the last line which ends with that 'quite'?
Finnegan
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From halvard at gmail.com  Sat Sep 11 13:17:38 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 13:17:38 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
In-Reply-To: <fe.e37da3.2e748b1c@aol.com>
References: <fe.e37da3.2e748b1c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <f160a121040911101770931176@mail.gmail.com>

In a message dated 9/11/2004 12:50:43 PM Eastern Standard Time,
JforJames writes:


holding to the use of familiar objects
in the light that is not quite



I posted the Raworth poem because I liked
its understated but effectiive imagery.
But can anyone tell me off hand, is there
a name for the kind of locution he uses
in the last line which ends with that 'quite'?
Finnegan 

===

Rhyme?

-- 
Hal        "America loves a successful sociopath."
                   --Gary Indiana, *Three Month Fever*
             
Halvard Johnson
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard  <updated 9/8/04


From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Sat Sep 11 13:24:54 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 12:24:54 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
In-Reply-To: <fe.e37da3.2e748b1c@aol.com>
References: <fe.e37da3.2e748b1c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040911121855.02bc3e80@mail.ilstu.edu>

Finnegan, it cd be classified as 
a<http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/Classics/rhetoric.html#top#top>posiopesis, 
a kind of ellipse by which a speaker comes to an abrupt halt, sometimes in 
order to convey a sense of being overcome by an emotion (whether passion or 
fear or excitement or simply indecision or modesty). The effect for me in 
this case is to convey a kind of modesty in Raworth in the face of the 
extraordinary simplicity and beauty of the light -- his modest surrender to 
being able to find no words to show it.

Gabe

I posted the Raworth poem because I liked
>its understated but effectiive imagery.
>But can anyone tell me off hand, is there
>a name for the kind of locution he uses
>in the last line which ends with that 'quite'?
>Finnegan



From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Sat Sep 11 13:26:10 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 12:26:10 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
In-Reply-To: <6.0.3.0.2.20040911121855.02bc3e80@mail.ilstu.edu>
References: <fe.e37da3.2e748b1c@aol.com>
	<6.0.3.0.2.20040911121855.02bc3e80@mail.ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040911122537.02bc4508@mail.ilstu.edu>



The word my link broke apart is "aposiopesis" -- g



From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sat Sep 11 13:47:26 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 12:47:26 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Thanking Jim
In-Reply-To: <005001c496bd$1a4855b0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <BD68A45E.B1F9%grahamd@ripon.edu>

A slightly belated amen on this.  Many thanks to our most moderate moderator
for providing this virtual space for us all.

David Graham


on 9/9/04 5:33 PM, The Old Mole at tad at opus40.org wrote:

A note of thanks to Jim for starting this list and maintaining it. It's not
an easy job...I know. And I think he's done a great job.

Tad


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================


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From JforJames at aol.com  Sat Sep 11 13:52:30 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 13:52:30 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
Message-ID: <e8.d7deff.2e74955e@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/11/2004 1:26:31 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
gmguddi at ilstu.edu writes:

> The word my link broke apart is "aposiopesis" -- g
> 

Thanks, Gabe. Hal, was correct about the 'rhyme', of course.
But I was looking for something fancier...something 
I can impress myself with the next time I see it. The problem
with being an autodidact is that it makes of the mind
a one-room schoolhouse wherein the slow pupil plays
the disorganized teacher by lecturing before a mirror.
Finnegan
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From cstroffo at earthlink.net  Sat Sep 11 15:29:45 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 11:29:45 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
Message-ID: <200409111811.i8BIB03d069336@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>

and there is also the very british inflection of the word "quite"
which seems to be tonally part of the aposiopesis

----------
From: JforJames at aol.com
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
Date: Sat, Sep 11, 2004, 9:52 AM


In a message dated 9/11/2004 1:26:31 PM Eastern Standard Time,
gmguddi at ilstu.edu writes:

The word my link broke apart is "aposiopesis" -- g


Thanks, Gabe. Hal, was correct about the 'rhyme', of course.
But I was looking for something fancier...something
I can impress myself with the next time I see it. The problem
with being an autodidact is that it makes of the mind
a one-room schoolhouse wherein the slow pupil plays
the disorganized teacher by lecturing before a mirror.
Finnegan
_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


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From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Sat Sep 11 14:12:18 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 13:12:18 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Poems by others: Tom Raworth
Message-ID: <s142f9c4.000@mail.highland.edu>

The new Chicago Review is a special issue (book-sized) on Ed Dorn. One
of the most interesting things in it is a generous selection from ca.
60's correspondence between Dorn and Raworth, when the two were,
obviously, young poets and working to find their way. It's fascinating
to see what they were encouraging each other to read. It's also
fascinating how they actively exchanged different kinds of drugs in the
mails.

I strongly recommend this issue. My guess is that this CR (masterfully
edited by Eirik Steinhoff) will spark a new Dorn revival. (By the way,
Joe Safdie, who recently joined the list, actually worked with the Dorns
as a "student intern," if that's the term, on the famous/infamous
Rolling Stock during the 80's.) 

What *was* Dorn like, Joe??

Kent


From jsafdie at comcast.net  Sat Sep 11 15:05:25 2004
From: jsafdie at comcast.net (Joe Safdie)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 12:05:25 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Poems by others: Tom Raworth
References: <s142f9c4.000@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <00cb01c49832$4be96430$f7131118@D6T95L21>

Thanks for asking, Kent; anyone who's interested might start with my piece 
in the collection of articles on Dorn on http://centomag.org (it was also 
reprinted in the latest edition of Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen's *Skanky 
Possum*)

I also noted that early exchange of letters between Dorn and Rawroth in the 
Chicago Review -- at one point (1961) Dorn asks Raworth if he'd read 
Zukofsky's *A* yet "it is entirely possible you won't dig it. The cadences 
go to music structures--rather than the strict poetry means as we've known 
it since the Elizaethans. Be that as it may, the content is what interests 
me, very eclectic and sharp."

That was interesting to me for two reasons. One, Ed said in a funny letter 
to Olson about a month before this one that he'd never been able to 
understand Zukofsky (!), and two, I'd just been reading Zukofsky's letters 
to Pound. In 1930, he'd already finished the first seven sections of *A* and 
sent them to Pound, asking for his criticism  (Pound encouraged him, 
mostly).

Poetry correspondence through the ages -- again, that's the best of what 
lists can be, I think.

Also, about the Raworth poem that was quoted earlier, I guess it's possible 
that Gabe's right, and that Tom used that impossible-to-pronounce rhetorical 
strategy, but it also seems to me that he might also be saying that the 
light wasn't quite *light* . . . in other words, read it as if there were a 
comma (or just a pause) after "wasn't" . . .

Already too long a post, but in doing a bit of research this morning on the 
"variable foot" I came across WCW's Selected Essay -- you might get a real 
kick out of the first one, his original prologue to *Kora in Hell* . . .


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kent Johnson" <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu>
To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 11:12 AM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Poems by others: Tom Raworth


> The new Chicago Review is a special issue (book-sized) on Ed Dorn. One
> of the most interesting things in it is a generous selection from ca.
> 60's correspondence between Dorn and Raworth, when the two were,
> obviously, young poets and working to find their way. It's fascinating
> to see what they were encouraging each other to read. It's also
> fascinating how they actively exchanged different kinds of drugs in the
> mails.
>
> I strongly recommend this issue. My guess is that this CR (masterfully
> edited by Eirik Steinhoff) will spark a new Dorn revival. (By the way,
> Joe Safdie, who recently joined the list, actually worked with the Dorns
> as a "student intern," if that's the term, on the famous/infamous
> Rolling Stock during the 80's.)
>
> What *was* Dorn like, Joe??
>
> Kent



From JforJames at aol.com  Sat Sep 11 15:05:23 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 15:05:23 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Poems by others: Tom Raworth
Message-ID: <c4.15af9307.2e74a673@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/11/2004 2:12:46 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes:

> The new Chicago Review is a special issue (book-sized) on Ed Dorn

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/

thanks,...& here's where to order it.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Sat Sep 11 15:25:47 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 15:25:47 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Poems by others: Tom Raworth
Message-ID: <80.15bda0eb.2e74ab3b@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/11/2004 3:05:40 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
jsafdie at comcast.net writes:

> Also, about the Raworth poem that was quoted earlier, I guess it's possible 
> 
> that Gabe's right, and that Tom used that impossible-to-pronounce rhetorical 
> 
> strategy, but it also seems to me that he might also be saying that the 
> light wasn't quite *light* . . . in other words, read it as if there were a 
> comma (or just a pause) after "wasn't" . . .
> 
> 

This may be a stretch, too, but I hear an
echo and see a close anagram to the 
word "quiet." Which is in keeping with
the poem's effect...but of course that kind
of inflection creates a mental kink, 
to think of light as being either quiet 
or not quiet.
Finnegan
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From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Sat Sep 11 17:24:07 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 16:24:07 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Thanking Jim
In-Reply-To: <BD68A45E.B1F9%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <005001c496bd$1a4855b0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
	<BD68A45E.B1F9%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040911162138.02b19b20@mail.ilstu.edu>

Adding my dos centavos to David's and Tad's. Thanks, Jim, for yr service to 
this community. -gabe

At 12:47 PM 9/11/2004, David Graham wrote:
>A slightly belated amen on this.  Many thanks to our most moderate 
>moderator for providing this virtual space for us all.
>
>David Graham
>
>
>on 9/9/04 5:33 PM, The Old Mole at tad at opus40.org wrote:
>
>A note of thanks to Jim for starting this list and maintaining it. It's 
>not an easy job...I know. And I think he's done a great job.
>
>Tad
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From bardo at optonline.net  Sat Sep 11 19:00:57 2004
From: bardo at optonline.net (Daniel Zimmerman)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 19:00:57 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
References: <200409111811.i8BIB03d069336@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>
Message-ID: <008101c49853$329c2d20$6d94c044@MULDER>

Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom RaworthRight, Chris, so to my ear as you've suggested,
I might read it as:

holding to the use of familiar objects
in the light that is NOT quite [familiar]

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Chris Stroffolino 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views 
  Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 3:29 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth


  and there is also the very british inflection of the word "quite"
  which seems to be tonally part of the aposiopesis

  ----------
  From: JforJames at aol.com
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
  Date: Sat, Sep 11, 2004, 9:52 AM



    In a message dated 9/11/2004 1:26:31 PM Eastern Standard Time, gmguddi at ilstu.edu writes:


      The word my link broke apart is "aposiopesis" -- g



    Thanks, Gabe. Hal, was correct about the 'rhyme', of course.
    But I was looking for something fancier...something 
    I can impress myself with the next time I see it. The problem
    with being an autodidact is that it makes of the mind
    a one-room schoolhouse wherein the slow pupil plays
    the disorganized teacher by lecturing before a mirror.
    Finnegan
    _______________________________________________
    New-Poetry mailing list
    New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
    http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry





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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sat Sep 11 19:04:20 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 01:04:20 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] New Contributing Correspondent
References: <1d0.2abc8723.2e747cab@aol.com>
	<001801c4981f$3c25e0e0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <007901c49853$ac6d7aa0$acd93052@yourpk9x5fuc06>


Thank you James, and Tad,
Anny


From: The Old Mole 
  Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 6:48 PM


  Anny's been filling that role de facto for awhile, and with great distinction.

  Tad
    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: JforJames at aol.com 
    To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
    Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 12:07 PM
    Subject: [New-Poetry] New Contributing Correspondent


    In a message dated 9/11/2004 7:16:41 AM Eastern Standard Time, anny.ballardini at tin.it writes:


      Anny Ballardini
        



    I would like to thank Anny Ballardini
    for agreeing to be one of the NP-List's 
    contributing correspondents. She'll be
    periodically sending along notices, 
    news items, URLs, poems, etc., whatever
    she feels may be of interest. I thank 
    the other contributing correspondents, 
    as well, for their continued service to the 
    list's life: Content to promote comment. 

    Jim Finnegan
    NewPoetry List



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From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Sat Sep 11 19:52:29 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 18:52:29 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] New contributore to the list
Message-ID: <s1434984.069@mail.highland.edu>

That Anny Ballardini is one of the "contributors" to this list is great.
She is someone who is devoted to poetry, and she is also a fair and
generous observer of the flow of things, in face of pressures and
prejudices "of the crowd," as I've come to know from being on Poetryetc,
for example. 

Hurrah for Anny.

Kent


From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Sat Sep 11 20:28:26 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 19:28:26 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Here comes everybody
Message-ID: <s14351f5.075@mail.highland.edu>

There is an interview with me newly up at Here Comes Everybody, for
anyfew who might wish to look.

http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com 

Kent


From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sun Sep 12 05:40:31 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 11:40:31 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
References: <200409111811.i8BIB03d069336@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>
	<008101c49853$329c2d20$6d94c044@MULDER>
Message-ID: <005501c498ac$8bc7f1f0$072ab750@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom RaworthHere's how I read it:

holding to the use of familiar objects
in the light that is not quite [light]

The I of this poem is distant from human affairs, nonetheless the light his familiar objects receive is not quite the Light, whatever the author might mean by _light_.



From: Daniel Zimmerman 
  Cc: Daniel Zimmerman 
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth


  Right, Chris, so to my ear as you've suggested,
  I might read it as:

  holding to the use of familiar objects
  in the light that is NOT quite [familiar]

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Chris Stroffolino 
    To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views 
    Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 3:29 PM
    Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth


    and there is also the very british inflection of the word "quite"
    which seems to be tonally part of the aposiopesis

    ----------
    From: JforJames at aol.com
    To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
    Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
    Date: Sat, Sep 11, 2004, 9:52 AM



      In a message dated 9/11/2004 1:26:31 PM Eastern Standard Time, gmguddi at ilstu.edu writes:


        The word my link broke apart is "aposiopesis" -- g



      Thanks, Gabe. Hal, was correct about the 'rhyme', of course.
      But I was looking for something fancier...something 
      I can impress myself with the next time I see it. The problem
      with being an autodidact is that it makes of the mind
      a one-room schoolhouse wherein the slow pupil plays
      the disorganized teacher by lecturing before a mirror.
      Finnegan
      _______________________________________________
      New-Poetry mailing list
      New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
      http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry





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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sun Sep 12 06:16:40 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 12:16:40 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Here comes everybody
References: <s14351f5.075@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <008901c498b1$98965980$072ab750@yourpk9x5fuc06>


Thank you Kent for your Hurrah! Which brings to my mind also the opposite.
I'll try not to interfere more than I have always done, at least this is my
rational intention, then we will see, errare humanum est.

Interesting your interview, as usual. Especially what you say of poetry.
That dream of Mexico... From my initial Mexico I have gone down to Brazil,
and sparingly planning one whole year, but the period of time you suggest is
to be taken into consideration.

Cheers, Anny

From: "Kent Johnson" <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu>
To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 12, 2004 2:28 AM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Here comes everybody


> There is an interview with me newly up at Here Comes Everybody, for
> anyfew who might wish to look.
>
> http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com
>
> Kent
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From tad at opus40.org  Sun Sep 12 09:44:31 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 09:44:31 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
References: <200409111811.i8BIB03d069336@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net><008101c49853$329c2d20$6d94c044@MULDER>
	<005501c498ac$8bc7f1f0$072ab750@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <004501c498ce$a33b3d70$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom RaworthDo you suppose he means...


      lighght

         ?
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Anny Ballardini 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views 
  Sent: Sunday, September 12, 2004 5:40 AM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth


  Here's how I read it:

  holding to the use of familiar objects
  in the light that is not quite [light]

  The I of this poem is distant from human affairs, nonetheless the light his familiar objects receive is not quite the Light, whatever the author might mean by _light_.



  From: Daniel Zimmerman 
    Cc: Daniel Zimmerman 
    Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth


    Right, Chris, so to my ear as you've suggested,
    I might read it as:

    holding to the use of familiar objects
    in the light that is NOT quite [familiar]

      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: Chris Stroffolino 
      To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views 
      Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 3:29 PM
      Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth


      and there is also the very british inflection of the word "quite"
      which seems to be tonally part of the aposiopesis

      ----------
      From: JforJames at aol.com
      To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
      Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: poems by others: Tom Raworth
      Date: Sat, Sep 11, 2004, 9:52 AM



        In a message dated 9/11/2004 1:26:31 PM Eastern Standard Time, gmguddi at ilstu.edu writes:


          The word my link broke apart is "aposiopesis" -- g



        Thanks, Gabe. Hal, was correct about the 'rhyme', of course.
        But I was looking for something fancier...something 
        I can impress myself with the next time I see it. The problem
        with being an autodidact is that it makes of the mind
        a one-room schoolhouse wherein the slow pupil plays
        the disorganized teacher by lecturing before a mirror.
        Finnegan
        _______________________________________________
        New-Poetry mailing list
        New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
        http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry





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From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Sun Sep 12 18:26:40 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 17:26:40 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] rhode island notebook 6.17.03-6.20.03
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040912172429.02a1c528@mail.ilstu.edu>

rhode island notebook 6.17.03-6.20.03

             [anabasis]

2:16pm  June 17, 03, On
pavement at Toyota Quik Lube
mit just had oil change. Bright
sun ? mesocumuli hang on
horizon at edge of watery blue ceiling
Morrisey & Veterans Pkwy  2:19pm
Main & Veterans  2:20
I rise on 74 east  2:23pm & set odometer
pavement a flat porridge-colored
mash of grey & tan (thus beige)
cut like a line of Hopkins instress
beneath the robin?s egg frosting
of the inverted cupcake of the firmament
and past the jiggling green
I am bound for Nova Anglia.

I am a yacht thru the shallow vegetal seas
of Illinois, past Le Roy now
at 2:34, past a clot on the rt
of black & brown sunglistened
cows, ears out to cool themselves,
past silos & small Norman
grain bins (too silver
in the sun). Radio towers I
am doing 72.
                         The small corn
is three octaves darker
than that waving wheat-green fescue
of the ditches, Piatt County 24 miles.

Where are our old frigates full of faucets and shelves
how have they gone on this sea
of towns ? sea of towns and wind
             and corn? Many houses here
have sunk already,
even in this new land. I drive for Clio
to bring her back here
the summer.

The kind corn.
There is no Billy Valley of Death here
in Illy Nois
But a vegetable seaplain of life
and a wind that feels straight
of Tunis but w/out the dust
And fundamentally humid. Salt
Fork River 55m 3:12pm
Specks of gritty flowers near the
                                     bridges
Vermilion County 61m The Mandan
Around Fort Clark North Dakota
traded for a yellow paint called ?Vermillion?
The MANDAN NATION was exterminated
by small pox around 1839

Their Chief MAT?-TOPE
was painted by Carl Bodmer
in 1833. He had reputedly killed
several white men by the time
he stood for Bodmer?s portrait
which took 4 days to paint.
This Continent was ?settled? by
Europeans via a Campaign of
biological Warfare ? whose fruits
we now see in the vermillion ears
of the good Corn.
             Kickapoo State Park 69m
In the Middle Fork Vermilion River 72m
I saw greasy man-length green threads of water moss
smeared under the water shine
Salt Fork Vermilion River 74m

Reality can be felt deeply
in 2 ways:
rightly & wrongly. When rightly
our welling response is love
and curiosity. When wrongly,
our squirting reaction is
pride and fear. Awe I suppose
is the blend of both fear
& curiosity. Indiana border ?
80-odd miles.
             Wabash River Fountain
County 90 m 3:44pm
             Graham Creek how you sun 93m
             Dry Run Creek 98.3m
             Slightly rolling shallow
             be-treed hills here.

Swell my blown hair, O
             air-conditioned dash
Icky and Swale
             the icky Indiana
we do not likes it KKK
Stratocumuli dimmer, bigger
?the enormous aggregate that is
our war on all the lands
and seas of the globe?
             ?Ernie Pyle, apologist
             for the death makers
             ?Everything of this world
             had stopped, except war.?
                         ?Ernie Pyle
Sugar Creek 118 miles from Normal

We heard the Anchor Chain
rattle deeply in Rome
All of it, the sky, measled w/ clouds
that massive, upward, tundra of Air
the russian olive trees shaped
             like cumuli here
I see many old framed telephone poles
grey crisp wood bleached stiff
as cocks bent by the curves
the catenary weight of the
womany wires
What an idyll is my yacht
in Boone County as I dash
             in my idyll dash.

Did the Mortar shell make A
terrific quacking sound:
An instant duck come to life
and then gone in a quack
             packed with shrapnel?
I believe it was that which
burst my yacht
near Advance, Indiana at 135m

I see dill patching the rt ditch,
its dull yellow almost icky-
a digestive stomach-lining yellow
the cat tails then, huge & reedy
holding their small poops vertical.

Redwinged blackbirds sit at their desks
on top of them.
Are there no gentle
             men in America?
It?s my doubt these Indiana pickups
hold Any. No in this
                                     Jesus country.
Eagle Creek Reservoir  154m
                                     4:40pm
70east Indy 4:49 162m
Here in Indy
the cat tail spoor have burst.

I see the Indy City Center
yucky & icky under
hazy blue, blue itself its buildings
At 170m in Indy I see
                                     there
the Awful Ziggurat of Lilly
             Ziggurat of Morphia
Ziggurat of boring verse
Ruth E Lilly who bequeathed a million
to Poetry Magazine. Eli Lilly who made
a billion on Prozac, O Lily O Poppy,
O Morphia, god
in the land of the dead Indians
             70 east closed must take 74east
Heard this BS lie on NPR: ?US forces continue
to mix humanitarian aid w/
Military muscle.? ?at 5:10pm

70east 5:10pm CST
2 days Ago in New Harmony, Indiana
I heard ?Ellen Bryant Voigt? ?read?
her poetry, she
             ah she
pronouncingly repeated
the 20 yr old idiot Yeats? pronouncement
that poetry?s about passion, strange
she should be so prim her poetry
limp, the melodrama therein
sounded
like distant cats fucking.
Very distant.
Nameless Creek 203 m (these
distances now inaccurate b/c
of detour in Lilly Indy)

Anthony Creek. There
are the Goofy Hoosiers in
the distant sunlit field
mit shorts on, Stadium Empty,
huddling at some game
Montgomery Creek.
Here Are Hoosiers in tractors,
men & women west
of Big Blue River cutting
booby-thick median grass
and the grasses of the ditches
That odd butterfly
             seemed so happy
the light in the east lighting her

Optimistic little things
though I know sometimes melancholy
Generally a butterfly is
childlishly guileless, a wisp on a hinge
only slightly tougher than the wind
itself
Whitewater River there are no
large bugsplats yet
Move by me, blossoming dill!
5:56pm 237m rest stop
6:01 back on 70e sun
nested in a sick haze
behind me.

?The point was that we on the
shore knew we cd substitute
machines for lives.?
             Ernie Pyle
Ohio State Line 250m
     (Shelton Fireworks on
Indiana side ? stop there on
way back) ?
250m  ? tank gone.
Long constellation in median
of blue & white wildflowers
?superb?and always happy
to leave icky Indiana.
Let us build A creek over it
and wash Away its republicans

?We had eleven Negro boys aboard,
All in the stewards Department??
             Ernie Pyle, BRAVE MEN
?They were all quiet nice boys
and A credit to the ship.? ? Ernie Pyle
             ?They all had Music in their
souls. I had to laugh when the ward room
radio was playing a hot tune, I?d
notice them grinning to themselves &
dancing ever so slightly as they went
About their serving.? ? Ernie Pyle
             ?One of the boys was George Edward
Mallory of Orange, Virginia. He was
32
.? ? Ernie Pyle
You are A hag w/ a fat face,
             Ernie Pyle

6:28  CST  269m
Weighty sky
             orange-blue clouds roll
encompassing & burly
from the North   I must take off
sunglasses, I stop @ Brookville OH
& consume 2 fish sandwiches.

I see grass islands in
Stillwater State Scenic River

bugsplat, almost blue, near
Great Miami River   I believe
it had been a beetle
      Brandt Pike Huber Heights
Carriage Hll
   Mad River  293m

Talk to Colleagues, faculty About
Charlie?s line re someone pub-
oriented, po-mo lit & willing to take
over UNIT for Contemporary Lit.

Ulysses S. Grant was from,
I think, Point Pleasant
Ohio    I have no idea if
that town
is anywhere near Springfield
Ohio where I currently Am
7:28pm at Dim Apricot
evening an hr before an Ohio
       sunset
When I was a boy
I swung from horses? tails

A few kicked me, though not
    many: horses were nice
They did not poop
   when I swung behind there
    they did not poop on me
they merely let me swing
    and kicked me not
Fewer pickups in Ohio, not
As hot ? Massive junkyard of
farm equipment  330m
Ulysses S. Grant stood 5 feet 1 inch
I see Llamas there
             Ho Ho Yamas!

270-N  7:48  CST
             Acteon had seen the goddess bathing,
seen her boobies & hips
had seen the light blowing beneath
                                                 her arms
her hair like a booby army
her hips a platoon from her
                                     vulva
Northwest Columbus wall to wall
             grey clouds mollify
     orange dusk All our lights
Are on.  Where are the geese.
Has Achilles Ate them?  His
Whiskeys Are orbiting. He
cannot get to them.
      Achilles has ate the ducks.

Achilles has Ate the yamas.
     fewer US flags this
   trip  than any other trip.
Achilles has Ate the brandy,
             the quinine
          the geese he ate
The horses & mud he
ate.  360 m  71 N
A terrible footbridge over the
    HWY  at 362m is festooned w/
U.S. flags
The gelatinous sausage meat
     was made of a were-stag, a deer-man
formerly Acteon.  I see
a skulk of foxes in the rt ditch
             near Sunbury OHIO

Large field of white wildflower
constellated on rt, each white
clump approx.  3x4 feet, maybe
400 clumps strewn upon 5
Acres seen despite a settling
mist & impending dusk

Greasy flank of dark clouds
on right tree line   ? mile off.

Andrew Jackson, the Motherfucker,
killed the Choctaws & Cherokees
What A Great Idea!
And Afterward, for Jackson, the voices and the laughter
the glasses and orchestras strewn thru spring
             Mansfield OH  409m
                                     darkness

Fill on Ashland / Wooster OH
             Exit 186
                            426 m  9:04 CST
      37.6m (since fill) 9.845g
             44.45 mpg
I set these matters down not
to instruct others, but to
inform myself ? or so said
John Steinbeck.

?We find after years of struggle
that we do not take a trip ?
a trip takes us.? ? John
Steinbeck, Travels w/ Charlie

?Thus I discovered that I did not
know my own country.?  -- JS
I am then, in Ohio, A turtle yacht

When I stop in them gas station
             And see
the ignorant peoples
I wonder
Why they ignorant
Why they so dumb
             ?
It?s because I think
their dumb teachers are dumb
Where they should have had passion
             and Love
they had fear and pride
How they can be so proud
             and so simultaneous dumb
IS THIS CAR NOT MY
             ROSANANTE!!

76e  451m  9:41  CST
10:44pm Eastern time I burst
through A castle of paper
that has appeared on the
road.
ONWARD ROSANANTE!
Confetti blizzards behind me
Or was that a nunnery of paper?
Have I burst many nuns?
There is a slightly naughty
quality of fire to break lights
The Amber kindles gripped
by the asses of cars
As if each trailed 2 bundles
             of burning broom straw

But we do not speak of it on
    the road.  Our cars, our
yachts, our turtles, our steeds
these hermit homes ? look forward,
pioneers, O conestogas ? we go forward
    and have no traveling end.
We are Stern and bow
             have no  aft or end
They before me are not Americans
   for Americans have no Asses
       We Are All Assays
ONWARD ROSANANTE!!
    Meander Reservoir 511m
lit w/ A sheen of orange sodium
lights luminousing in low clouds
             beyond trees that are dark.

80 east 515m 11:41 eastern
Pennsylvania Welcomes me w/ a
             blue sign.
Shenango River: gray
    half-dollar flick of wings
                         My windshield missed
a moth. I have often wondered
if the slapping swirl of air from A
passing car will cripple a
Moth or hobble
             A butterfly.

Fine grain of mist past 10 miles
    wipers can?t quite take it off
they smear it into a thin condiment
     made of bug meat and cloud water

It clings there w/ an almost static charge
   to the clear silicate toast of
      my windscreen
138 m  ? tank gone.

Now A crackling rain 8 miles
     West of CLARION   1245am ESt
Shippenville  2 miles
The rises drops & turns of this
     stretch cause the dinosaur sized
Median trees to drop rise &
    sway, their leaves strain
and sift the lights of the
oncoming traffic, which are not
yellow. Or beige nor tan. But a
kind of off white, A sallow white,
    though some of the newer cars are
             blue

And in this weeping night
their reflections glister like
the prism blobs & corpuscles of light
one sees on the eyelashes
in a rain or if one has cried
and tried to see. Punxsatauwney,
North Fork Creek
There is a mist whose rate of
deposit on the windscreen falls
slightly below the first indexed
wiping speed, which causes a slight
annoyance in the driving
1:15 ? 1:19am Stop to Defecate  619m
Chesapeake Bay Watershed
Dense fog aluminum colored
             in the lights.
Descending the fog elevates
I drop to Curwensville Lake.
I ascend out of whatever
valley I was in, and on the rise
A happy rain giving a sound
of crinkling small candy wrappers.
ONWARD ROSANANTE!
I believe I am hydroplaning
Lightning flash (blue-white)
2:10am I am being
followed by someone who insists
on staying behind me ? and recall
that this Doppelg?nger always
             appears

On this lonely Alleghany stretch
No matter if I reduce my
speed to 40 or bolt away
at 80 it follows. Back
there 3 or so miles it
got right on me & I coasted
to 40 mph. I did not pass!
but decelerated as well.
             Dense fog & thorough thick rain.
Rain rain Rain rain Rain
             Lamar Lamar
                                     699m
2:37am  EST
Stop to Sleep at Lamar, PA
             Travel Ctr (TA)

Wake to heavy rain from an
             Aluminum sky 7:28am. Fill on
       6.377 gallons ? at 42.53 mpg
back on hwy 80east 7:45am
The Mighty Susquehanna here
    near Milton I squeak over
the tin brown water. Its
width here is similar to
the Wabash at New Harmony, IN.

I cross the Susquehanna again
at 768m. Sky lightening
but still low, mist stopping
dragging gray rags part way
up mountains on rt, tops
occluded, road drying Wedn
the 18th of June TODAY I see Clio!

81 N  785m  N to
Wilkes-Barre  Mist again
on 84.   Black twisted hanks
of tires, retreads delaminated,
lay at the rt shoulder
             like exhausted black muskellunge
Smaller fragments rest curved
             resembling fingernails
or charred forearms cragged w/ bones
stiffened w/ their radial steel wires
rest stop urination   846 m
             9:56 AM
The Sway and Swish of traffic
through eastern Pennsylvania

is balletic and calm
near Lords Valley Dingmans
Ferry. The dense thin trunked
oaks and birch rise in a great
green poof mattress on
close grassed hills either side
of tin-skied 84.  Metamorphic
and shaley Rocks knuckle out the grass
      easily here

At NY border high shale
cliff brow above trees
and bear square bold numerals
in whitewash: 91    1999
    2000

Near Port Jervis A petulant
red early 90s Chrysler
convertible, beige canvas top
down, flings itself past me.
A stiff cheap plastic
     American flag on its aerial.
The flag, raging like A
multicolored choked pigeon
bursts free of the Aerial
and falls grateful & exhausted
  to the road. I am
careful to run it
over.   Fog.   I am at
             dewpoint

and the road rises & pulls
me up & into it, only to pull me out
when lowered.
Wallkill River  900 m
Now here again under low
             tin roiling clouds
over the wide Hudson I travel
the Hamilton Fish bridge & steam
into a delta of cars backed
at the tollgates.  Blonde
makeupped sweetfaced toll lady
?Thank you Have a good day? A
smile, she takes my dollar bill

then a half mile of willows
on my left
Fishkill Creek near Poughkeepsie
& Peekskill the clouds Are
an Alloy of milk & glowing lead
A faded blue bumpersticker on A Ford:
UNITED IN PRAYER
URINATE IN EAST FISHKILL NY
930 m  11:15-19 am
942m EAST BRANCH CROTON RIVER
CONNECTICUT BORDER
946 m  11:33pm 55 speed limit

691e  985m  12:10
Must meet Clio & Mairead
at Martin Luther King Elementary
School
             Quinnipiac River
in silver mist
             91 North 994 m
             9 S heavy mist low
featureless sky dull of color
but bright
             Mattabesset River
                                     traffic
heavy Mist deluging spray
Are we driving through
             clam juice?

95 N  1030 m  12:50pm
Approaching Rhode Island
No mist, sky gone up its
ladder
New macadam the odd burnt butter
smell of tar
             1063 m R I border  1:19pm
Down a wet straight aisle in the
    mirroring macadam new clouds are
framed, scudding kinds, south
   to North.
Arrive Motel 6  Warwick  1:48 pm EST
   will Bathe now and then to Clio?s school
where soon she?s getting out,
             then to summer with me

             [katabasis]

4:29 AM EST  June 19 Southbound
Hwy 95 2.1 m fr. hotel
After Dunkin Donuts, o j
for Clio, Large creamed coffee, me,
4 old fashioneds (plain)
Sky faintly glow purple
Glory Glory Glory it
is morning
And what a Grand Girl
My daughter is
Connecticut A pink blue scene

Dark seagulls right to left
at New London. Across the
Massive high arching bridge
I see the sub base docks
the purple water smeared
             yellow
w/ the greasy shine
    of sodium lights
Delicate fog, coffee good
Fog & Empty road on 9
North to to Mattabesset River
Fog lifts at Middletown
Clio asleep at 10 to 6.
691 west 100.3m
Sodium lights at Watertown still &
                                     mist gray

6 AM Clio snoring
Descend hill to Quinnipiac River
Am near Milldale, Cheshire
Waterbury   Danbury
Cheshire   Prospect
Hello St Mary?s, the hospital
in yr foggy brick.
Southford, Southbury
Newtown brighter now
Sandyhook   wind
    sodium lights off
Brookfield Connecticut
morning traffic
Bethel
I am leaving Nova Anglia

84 W 145 m
New York State, North Salem
             Brewster  Fishkill
Poughkeepsie   Peekskill
Newburgh   Beacon
Wappinger Falls
The Hudson River whited
w/ a Milk Fog opposite hills
faint green ? green milk hills
Highland   New Paltz
West Point   Walden
Montgomery   Newburgh
enough w/ the Newburgh
Middletown   Port Jervis

Maybrook
             No fog, just haze
in the middle trees
Willows 8 foot swamp grass
      Akin to Wheat
Binghamton   Goshen
Greenville   Oh
             What a superb swamp
             rt. side cum duck grass
             elevation now 1254 ft. at top
             of massive hill
dead possum?small rt shoulder
Sussex   Port Jervis
Delaware River
Pennsylvania border
                         Matamoras

4 small birds in flight
Scree at base of cliffs
             cool day
Milford  ?ne b rd
Dingmans Ferry   Lords Valley
Porters Lake   Blooming Grove
Pecks Pond   Lake Wallenpaupack
Porter?s Lake   Blooming Grove
Taftan   Gray   Gray
Palmyra  Gray   Gray
Gray   Gray  Gray   Gray
Grentown   Gray
Newfoundland   Hamlin

Mt Cobb     sumac
             water greased cliffs
cold milk haze    cold milk sky
Dunmore Throop
                         Carbon Dale
Wilkes-Barre   Scranton
Avoca   Dupont   Pittston
Bear Creek   Nanticoke
Nuangola   First sun
             Strained thru gray
                         cloud milk
& chopping trees
cut cakes of cliffs

Conyngham   Nescopeck
urinic sun   dishwater sky
Mifflin township
Clio reading
             Madeline?s Rescue
in back  9:15am
Mainville   Mifflinville
pale yellow, pale blue, & hard pink
             wildflowers all over
ditches ? also egg white
Susquehanna River
Lime Ridge   Berwick
Bloomsburg   Buckhorn

Danville   Limestoneville
repaving 80 Westbound near
I-180 junction
Susquehanna River
Lewisburg   Williamsport
Few   US  Flags  now
Under A bridge where some itiod
had painted ?Trust Jesus?
someone else painted out the
?Jesus? and painted ?Yourself?
in its place.
Mile Run   Tractor-trailer
are Annoying how they
speed up down hills    or

to pass & then block
traffic slowing on an
   incline

Many dinky dirty yellow
                         flowers
FOG Densing near
                         Loganton
ghosting grey-beige soughs shoulder
through the trees
Lockhaven
Clio re panorama of the forests
near Lockhaven:  ?It looks
like broccoli!?

Porter Township   Lamar
?I?m learning to read!  Madeline
books are my favorite now.
They?re special. Aren?t they Daddy!?
Marion Township
Bellefonte
Dead body of Chihuahua sized
     chocolate colored piglet
      rt shoulder
      stiff w/ sunbloat
Milesburg
?Daddy we?re right near the
mountain.   It?s just like driving
on a nice river.?
SNOW SHOE  10:45 AM

?Dad, were you ever a cowboy??

?Dad, you can be one and block
cows.  And I can be your partner.?

Philipsburg   Kylertown

?I see a horse in the sky.  It?s made
out of clouds.?

Woodland   Shawville
Curwensville Lake
West branch of Susquehanna
     near Clearfield at Exit 120
Penfield
       Dubois    Brockway
Hazen   Brookville


Sigel   Punxsatawney
North Fork Creek
Union Township   Corsica
Clarion Township   496m
Strattanville
New Bethlehem   Clarion
             500 m
Monroe Township   Shippenville
Clarion River
                         Beaver Township
Knox
                         St. Petersburg   Emlenton
Foxburg           Alleghany River
Butler County   Clintonville

Barkeyville   Franklin   Oil City Area
Slipperyrock University    Butler
Dottles of rain   at Grove City
Windy flags   at Grove City
Grove City   Shady Lake   Mercer
Lackawanna
New Castle   Sharon-Hermitage
             Shenango River
Ohio Border 566m
Trumbull Co line
Hubbard

Youngstown    Girard
Canfield   Niles
Rain spats 1x2 cm 1:38pm
Meander Reservoir

King Lear sky  76w
Rain SPATS AGAIN  5x1cm  1:40pm
1:47pm I ask Clio to draw
our car. She says, ?I?m
on the case, Daddy.?  and
begins to draw.
Berlin Lake   Newton Falls
    Lake Milton.

FLAG ON A CONSTRUCTION CRANE: WILL
we ever be rid of this
FLAG PLAGUE?
Alliance, Ohio
Rootstown   Ravenna
epiphytic growth vines on tree
Kent State  610m fr. Providence
Akron dim sun the
             full sun semi-heavy
traffic
Canton   Barberton   Lodi

Massillon   Norton
Wadsworth   Ohio
Rittman   Medina
Seville   Lodi
Finlay   Ohio
71S    2:50pm
They fixed the evil problematic
     macadam on the
exit ramp
College of Wooster   Wooster
Massive HWY construction  N of
    Ashland
Congress   West Salem

The US flag has become
the pin of half wits
666m Stop at Days
INN  at Exit 186
Ashland OH exit

6:10 AM on HWY
Clio?s developed an eye
bother, maybe pink eye
Sun direct behind me
Clio asleep in back
Sunbury   Mt. Gilead

Delaware.  Sun low in the
left door   Ohio Wesleyan
Worthington   I-270 west
Columbus?s ring road heavy
traffic   Marysville
Dublin   Muirfield
Upper Arlington
             Hilliard Ohio
I-70 West 7:24 am
Dead Kitty w/ collar
      Calico, pretty, on its left side, rt shoulder
w/ its back to road
Plain City

London   Summerford

Land flattening now?
yet slightly rolling?land in
view of the road varying
between 20? ? 30? in heights.
Springfield
Ask Mairead if she
wrote to my parents again
Cedarville 801m Sun
bright & to the right ?
right rear
             Xenia   Urbana
Enon   Donnelsville

Mad River  813 m
Huber Heights   Brandt Pike
the Great Miami River, 821m,
looks beautiful, brown, &
intimate
In effect, the ubiquitous display
of the flag is akin to
Hussein?s ? or an dictator?s?
use of portraiture
Eaton  Greenville
    Rest stop   852m  8:45am EST
Indiana Border

The billboards. The hell
of billboards?And
so commence
the billboards
of the Hoosiers

Greens Fork River
Cambridge City
Connersville   Hagerstown

Fr. the backseat: 888m  9:15am:
?Daddy, What is the soul??

             [explanation]

?So, Angels are souls!  Cool!?

New Castle   Spiceland 890m
Big Blue River  892m

Montgomery Creek
Six Mile Creek
Why do they name the rivers?
             They don?t need to
Anthony Creek
Nameless Creek
Stop rest stop  905m
(rest stop mileage is 9 miles over
the mileage tablet in the cubbyhole
that I made up to measure all the reststops
between providence and normal)
Greenfield         Maxwell
Bright blue crisp sky  No clouds
Moon ? stage
Mount  Comfort

New Palestine.  And so we go
on, all of us, finding dentists
465 ring road around Indy
?detour for repairs on 70?
miss ogling Lilly Billyding

Bush sticker?1st & only one
  I?ve seen this trip.
?Lick Creek?
White River West Fork?
    Directly south of Indy
? tank gone   270m
45.378 mpg

I-74  949m  10:18 AM EST
10:20 AM  Pass Eagle
Creek Reservoir  -- its shining
green grass embankments
newly cut ? can see
the straight parallel marks of the mowers
on the dike grass
inexplicably (for it is steep)
pinstriping its flanks

Take Clio to Lake Evergreen
    to show her the dam.
She?s asking what a dam is.

?Is it like a hurricane??
she asks

Pittsboro
             Lizton
                         Lebanon

?It sounds like ?sons? are
the sun in the air.
But they?re not. They?re
             little kids.?

A mile of dill on the rt. ditch.

Jamestown       Advance
Crawfordsville     Wabash College
Sugar Creek     Linden
Waynetown      Wingate

?I wish you were famous & rich.?
?Why??
?Because you?re such a good daddy.
Daffy Duck used to be rich.
Because remember how he made
the dog laugh. On the news they
said ?Someone must make this sick
dog laugh & get one hundred million dollars.?
And soon he was down to his
last million. And he looked &
saw a sign that said, ?You lost,
Daffy!? And he looked and it
was right.?

Veedersburg     Attica
Covington          Graham Creek

Newport     Terre Haute
      Illinois border
Prison mile on the rt.
White towers at its corners ?
looks square or pentagonal, rarely
come through here in the daytime
Still no clouds
Danville            Potash Center
             Massive barnlike
structure filled w/ potash.
   Traintracks come to deposit
or retrieve the potash
    wind shifted to my stern.
18-23 mph Vermilion Rivre

Salt Fork Vermilion River
Stopped pee & play at idyllic
rest area west of Danville?
shady, has pond w/ aerating fountain, big trees,
clear slides etc. Clio played
w/ her new blue ball. When we
got out of vehicle, saw that
A sparrow had become lodged
in rt. side grillwork. Pulled its still
pliable body out, head
remained in & fell to
depths of engine compartment.
11:51 CST depart rest area
Clio bubbling ball in back
Am bearing 3 heads to Normal:
2 human heads and one sparrow

Fithian   Rankin
?Roses are Red
My Gun is Blue
I am Safe
How About You?
Gunssavelife.com?
?Nazi Burma Shave
Signs near Homer Illinois
The American concern for Safety
Cleanliness and the Freedom
to be Selfish, Greedy, & to Retain
the Right to bomb countries
toward democracy

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From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Sun Sep 12 19:36:18 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 18:36:18 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rhode Island Notebook
Message-ID: <s1449731.023@mail.highland.edu>

Wowzers, Gabriel, that's a lot of high octane gasoline, there. 

It is an absolute miracle that you haven't gotten yourself killed yet,
and killed others, writing while you speed along our highways as you do.
Clearly, you are Driving Under the Influence. Please be careful,
especially around school buses.

salud!

Kent


From JforJames at aol.com  Sun Sep 12 20:55:47 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 20:55:47 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] poems by others: Karl Shapiro's The Antimacassars....
Message-ID: <1e3.2a81152b.2e764a13@aol.com>

The Antimacassars of Wallace Stevens

When I think of the antimacassars of Wallace Stevens
I think of the colors of Hartford, Connecticut,
Sparse colors and thin light,
Hartford of red brick without cupolas,
Hartford of the lily-white years,
Capitol of the insurance companies,
Hartford of hardware and the Colt,
The bourgeois villa on the tree-lined street.
I think of the poet of Hartford, a beefy man,
I think of Hartford in a water-drop,
In a bird, in an unsung cloud,
Hartford the reality.
Such a city deserves the figure exquise of Wallace Stevens,
Such a city has earned its antimacassars.

--Karl Shapiro
(Chelsea #52, 1991)


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From JforJames at aol.com  Sun Sep 12 21:15:12 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 21:15:12 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] rhode island notebook 6.17.03-6.20.03
Message-ID: <cd.16882263.2e764ea0@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/12/2004 6:27:36 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
gmguddi at ilstu.edu writes:

> rhode island notebook 6.17.03-6.20.03
>  
>          

This looks like it could be 
some kind of Piston Cantos
in the making?  Drive he sd.
Finnegan
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From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Sun Sep 12 21:43:59 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 20:43:59 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Rhode Island Notebook
In-Reply-To: <s1449731.023@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s1449731.023@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040912204302.02a79440@mail.ilstu.edu>

Well, when Clio's in the car with me, Kent, I don't write, I speak into a 
recorder. Otherwise I prefer writing.

g

At 06:36 PM 9/12/2004, Kent Johnson wrote:
>Wowzers, Gabriel, that's a lot of high octane gasoline, there.
>
>It is an absolute miracle that you haven't gotten yourself killed yet,
>and killed others, writing while you speed along our highways as you do.
>Clearly, you are Driving Under the Influence. Please be careful,
>especially around school buses.
>
>salud!
>
>Kent
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



From ron.silliman at verizon.net  Mon Sep 13 07:36:14 2004
From: ron.silliman at verizon.net (Ron)
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 07:36:14 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Silliman's Blog
Message-ID: <000001c49985$e14c7180$6401a8c0@Dell>

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

RECENT TOPICS:

The Day Book as Ur-Blog:
Robert Duncan's plotless prose

Forthcoming readings & talks by Ron Silliman:
NYC, Philly, Lawrence, KS & SF
(& that's just the next three weeks)

"Pieces of the past arise out of the rubble."

Learning about trade presses the hard way

Meeting Robert Duncan

What exists & what is available
in Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book

In search of Robert Hogg

Philadelphia Progressive Poetry Calendar

Bill Knott's Short Poems --
short poems . not!

The Opening of Field --
Robert Duncan's major themes

The H.D. Book
& Robert Duncan's poetry

Greetings from San Antonio

Collaborations of unfathomable familiarity -
Francie Shaw & Bob Perelman's Playing Bodies

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/




From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Mon Sep 13 09:45:21 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 06:45:21 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Mark Jarman Feature
Message-ID: <20040913134521.12495.qmail@web52606.mail.yahoo.com>

Well-written feature on Mark Jarman at the link below:

http://www.nashscene.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?story=This_Week:News:Cover_Story


A poem from his latest book, *To the Green Man*:

To the Green Man  

for Philip Wilby

Lord of the returning leaves, of sleepers
Waking in their tunnels among roots,
Of heart and bush and fire-headed stag,
Of all things branching, stirring the blood like sap,
Pray for us in your small commemorations:
The facet of stained glass, the carved face
Lapped by decorations on the column side,
And the entry in the reference book that lists you
As forester, pub sign, keeper of golf courses.
King for a day, or week, then sacrificed,
Drunk on liquor made from honey, urged
To blossom at your leisure, and caressed?
The temptation is to think of you without envy.
In Fewston, Yorkshire, near the open moor.
You are set in a church window above the altar.
Wreathed and strangled, amber-glazed, you wear
A look of non-surprise, a victim's cunning,
Though your tongue hangs as dumb as any death.
Elsewhere, when you make your appearances,
Out of your mouth stems and oak leaves grow?
Like speech or silence? Your eyes are empty cups.
Pray, vestige-secret of the trees, for us,
Surprised and pleased to find you any place. 
 


Jeff Newberry

=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 


From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Mon Sep 13 10:43:48 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 09:43:48 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] rhode island notebook 6.17.03-6.20.03
In-Reply-To: <cd.16882263.2e764ea0@aol.com>
References: <cd.16882263.2e764ea0@aol.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040913093546.02bef0d8@mail.ilstu.edu>


>This looks like it could be
>some kind of Piston Cantos
>in the making?  Drive he sd.
>Finnegan

Piston Cantos? Bad lapse in judgment he sd. ;)
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From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep 13 12:53:03 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:53:03 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Oz Poet wins $6000 prize 
Message-ID: <8.572db0d4.2e772a6f@aol.com>

http://ballarat.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=news&subclass=local&category
=general%20news&story_id=335411&y=2004&m=9

He won with a poem called Indian Summer, which he started to write 10 years 
ago.

--
$6000 prize / 3650 days = $1.64 per day. That sounds
about right for the wages of a poet.
Finnegan
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep 13 16:00:58 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 22:00:58 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Oz Poet wins $6000 prize 
References: <8.572db0d4.2e772a6f@aol.com>
Message-ID: <012f01c499cc$636925f0$b7a93452@yourpk9x5fuc06>


I bet that in Italy they would charge you 20% advance (they call it) tax, then they have a very complicated system that goes by thresholds, translated into simple terms, if you live a little bit/some/much above misery, they add many more taxes, you might end up with a figure like 80 cents per day if you have an average job.

One of the lucky beings who live in Italy.
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 6:53 PM


  http://ballarat.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=news&subclass=local&category=general%20news&story_id=335411&y=2004&m=9

  He won with a poem called Indian Summer, which he started to write 10 years ago.

  --
  $6000 prize / 3650 days = $1.64 per day. That sounds
  about right for the wages of a poet.
  Finnegan


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
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From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep 13 19:14:55 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 19:14:55 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Outsight
Message-ID: <105.50b59d43.2e7783ef@aol.com>

Outsight


I could see the gaseous 
cobwebs of nebulae in the chandeliers 
of stars called galaxies.

I watched as fallen leaves 
and feathers spoke in tongues
with the winds, and thus made weather.

A phonebook full of names fell apart in my hands,
an alphabet of ants swarmed out, made a nest 
inside my cranium, and I knew them all.

The sockets of my eyes, gouged out, 
like open pit mines, played out
but filing with rainwater, like sky mirrors.

I could read the skidmarks
on the highway. I could untangle
at a glance a cat's cradle of utility wires.

If this isn't love, if this is not hope,
what is the vast organizing principle?
What binds us together other than grim gravity?

The less I was myself, the more I felt
the power of outsight taking over my psyche.
One must lose all ability to interpret,

unable to make sense of any one thing, to see all.
A pure gaze poured into me,
overwhelmed me, drowned mind and body,

One must sink in time and space
with mouth, ears and eyes wide open. 
Infected, inflected by angles and vectors, 

become an angel whose wings are doors 
taken off the hinges.  It was never inside.
Always it was out there, with and away, without.

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From MillB at aol.com  Mon Sep 13 22:26:07 2004
From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 22:26:07 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Unabashed Self-Promotion
Message-ID: <9a.1486440c.2e77b0bf@aol.com>

Hello fellow list members,
 
If you get or have a chance to see the latest edition of Nimrod, I have  
three poems in it.
 
Cheers,
 
 
Mill (aka Millicent Borges)
 

I'm all  in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start  with typewriters.

Frank Lloyd  Wright
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Tue Sep 14 00:42:53 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 23:42:53 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser interview
Message-ID: <BD6BE0FD.B2E5%grahamd@ripon.edu>

A tiny interview with Ted Kooser in the New York Times contains a priceless
exchange. Apropos of nothing, the interviewer had been quizzing him on his
familiarity with the work of Milosz and whether he'd been to Paris or
London:

Q:  As poet laureate, don't you think you should be better acquainted with
European poetry? 

A:  Think of all the European poetry I could have read if we hadn't spent
all this time on this interview.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html

I'm really enjoying watching journalists struggle to wrap their minds around
the notion of a poet laureate from Nebraska.   Why, Kooser even mentions
cows from time to time. . . .

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Tue Sep 14 01:12:31 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 01:12:31 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser interview
Message-ID: <df.121e1d1.2e77d7bf@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/13/2004 11:43:14 PM Central Daylight Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes: 
> 
> 
> A tiny interview with Ted Kooser in the New York Times contains a priceless
> exchange. Apropos of nothing, the interviewer had been quizzing him on his
> familiarity with the work of Milosz and whether he'd been to Paris or
> London:
> 
> Q:  As poet laureate, don't you think you should be better acquainted with
> European poetry? 
> 
> A:  Think of all the European poetry I could have read if we hadn't spent
> all this time on this interview.
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html
> 
> I'm really enjoying watching journalists struggle to wrap their minds around
> the notion of a poet laureate from Nebraska.   Why, Kooser even mentions
> cows from time to time. . . .
> 
 This is pretty funny.  I talked on the phone with Kooser the other day, and 
he was lamenting the thousands of poetry books he had and how he didn't have 
more room in his house for more of them--they're even overflowing into a 
storage shed.  I got the impression that he knows as much about contemporary 
American poetry as anyone I've talked to recently.  I was calling about a matter 
unrelated to his laureate appointment, and I hadn't met him before.  He was very 
gracious and still seemed amazed about the appointment.  I suspect some 
segments of the press want to pose him as a bumpkin simply because his appointment 
came under Bush and because he's from Nebraska.  Silly stuff.  Didn't Collins 
and Gluck also get appointed during Dubya's term (or maybe Collins's appt. was 
confirmed before the inauguration)?  Still, some prejudices die hard.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Tue Sep 14 16:55:53 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 16:55:53 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] The Poem of the Mind
Message-ID: <13e.133ee88.2e78b4d9@aol.com>

Here's an invitation to consider (or to post) poems
of the mind...

Station Hill Press
Project In-Progress
-----
http://www.stationhill.org/Finprogress.html
 
The Poem of the Mind
 
Proposal: An extensive anthology (approximately 800 pages) of poetry that 
explores the nature of "mind itself" in any of the ways that it has been 
"knowable" through poetry, along with commentary enough to focus the journey and 
invoke the contexts and supportive fields of thinking that underlie its 
development.  
 
To think of mind in poetry immediately suggests the work of Wallace Stevens 
(from which our title comes)...
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Tue Sep 14 21:08:01 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:08:01 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz
Message-ID: <BD6D0021.B35A%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Here's a poem I just ran across.  Not sure if I could have identified the
author.  Wonder if anyone can.


Autobiography


First was not,
Became a spot,
Then through and in
Felt heart begin,
And learning size
Nor needed eyes,
Yet colors grew
(Began with blue),
Nor ears yet felt
The silence melt,
Till wanting room
Broke through the womb,
>From one with Mother
Became Another,
Began to cry
Am I!  Am I!


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From MillB at aol.com  Tue Sep 14 21:38:25 2004
From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:38:25 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz
Message-ID: <36.626df568.2e78f711@aol.com>

Eddie Guest?
 
Mill
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From JforJames at aol.com  Tue Sep 14 21:46:17 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:46:17 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz
Message-ID: <8e.1526ecd9.2e78f8e9@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/14/2004 9:08:12 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes:

> Autobiography
> 
> 
> First was not,
> Became a spot,
> Then through and in
> Felt heart begin,
> And learning size
> Nor needed eyes,
> Yet colors grew
> (Began with blue),
> Nor ears yet felt
> The silence melt,
> Till wanting room
> Broke through the womb,
> >From one with Mother
> Became Another,
> Began to cry
> Am I!  Am I!
> 
> 

David, not a very good poem. I hope
it's something by a well-anthologized poet
from prior era. Or a bit of juvenilia.
The capped "Mother" and "Another"
place it before the contemporary, methinks,
anyway.
Finnegan
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From JforJames at aol.com  Tue Sep 14 21:47:49 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:47:49 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] observation
Message-ID: <142.33c44a07.2e78f945@aol.com>

"Description demands intense observation, so intense that the veil of 
everyday habit falls away and what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as 
so ordinary, is revealed as miraculous." --Czeslaw Milosz
(quoted in Leon Wieseltier's essay "Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004," NYBR, 
9/12/04)
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From barry.spacks at verizon.net  Wed Sep 15 08:12:29 2004
From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (barry.spacks at verizon.net)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 20:12:29 +0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Mail Delivery (failure new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu)
Message-ID: <200409151205.i8FC57YB001928@wiz.cath.vt.edu>

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From JforJames at aol.com  Wed Sep 15 08:31:24 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 08:31:24 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hunting Season Opens: Morse Prize deadline
Message-ID: <1ee.2acb06c1.2e79901c@aol.com>

Samuel French Morse Prize, Northeastern Univ. 
Deadline today: 9/15
    
http://www.casdn.neu.edu/~english/pubs/morse.htm
        
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From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Wed Sep 15 09:35:05 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:35:05 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] observation
In-Reply-To: <142.33c44a07.2e78f945@aol.com>
References: <142.33c44a07.2e78f945@aol.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409150927200.7052@shell1.oit.umass.edu>

How fine, Jim, to get this quote this morning.  Had that kind of
moment this a.m. as I was walking from the parking lot up to the office at
UMass, where suddenly, the traffic, the students passing on the sidewalks,
the smell of water, the mountains - in the distance beyond the ugly
concrete buildings - all
seemed, for lack of a better word, astonishing.  To simply be in the midst
of it - feel it moving - and
to understand that when one experiences life from the ground up, coming
into the morning as an animal would come out of it's lair - senses alert -
looking/feeling - how it is - when one does that and takes nothing for
granted but
tried to experience the source - then one has...everything, really.
Putting one's finger on the mystery.

The trick is finding language for it.

Kerry


From Faustina1 at aol.com  Wed Sep 15 09:50:16 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:50:16 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz
Message-ID: <526D6DCA.393AA4EC.023799CC@aol.com>

Robert Frost?


From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Wed Sep 15 10:28:29 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:28:29 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] poetry pop quiz
Message-ID: <s1480b56.005@mail.highland.edu>

A parody of John Clare by Gabe Gudding?


From marcus at designerglass.com  Wed Sep 15 10:44:20 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 10:44:20 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] poetry pop quiz
In-Reply-To: <s1480b56.005@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <41481D04.27078.C161CB@localhost>

On 15 Sep 2004 at 9:28, Kent Johnson wrote:
> A parody of John Clare by Gabe Gudding?

Gabe Gudding isn't that good a parodist.

Marcus





From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Wed Sep 15 10:53:14 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:53:14 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A36E@mail.ripon.edu>

Interesting guesses so far.  In case anyone's still interested in this
little game, I'll offer a couple clues before spilling the beans.  Jim
Finnegan has come closest so far to getting it.  

It's not Frost or someone from that generation.  But it was published in
1953.  Early work by someone later famous.

> ----------
> From: 	David Graham
> Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> Sent: 	Tuesday, September 14, 2004 8:08 PM
> To: 	new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> Subject: 	[New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz
> 
> Here's a poem I just ran across.  Not sure if I could have identified the
> author.  Wonder if anyone can.
> 
> 
> Autobiography
> 
> 
> First was not,
> Became a spot,
> Then through and in
> Felt heart begin,
> And learning size
> Nor needed eyes,
> Yet colors grew
> (Began with blue),
> Nor ears yet felt
> The silence melt,
> Till wanting room
> Broke through the womb,
> From one with Mother
> Became Another,
> Began to cry
> Am I!  Am I!
> 
> 
> 
> 
============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================




From jsafdie at comcast.net  Wed Sep 15 11:07:09 2004
From: jsafdie at comcast.net (Joe Safdie)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 08:07:09 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A36E@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <002501c49b35$ad1e1ba0$f7131118@D6T95L21>

I was going to say that it sounded like some things Roethke did a lot better 
later . . .


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Graham, David" <GrahamD at ripon.edu>
To: "'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views'" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 7:53 AM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint


> Interesting guesses so far.  In case anyone's still interested in this
> little game, I'll offer a couple clues before spilling the beans.  Jim
> Finnegan has come closest so far to getting it.
>
> It's not Frost or someone from that generation.  But it was published in
> 1953.  Early work by someone later famous.
>
>> ----------
>> From: David Graham
>> Reply To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 8:08 PM
>> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz
>>
>> Here's a poem I just ran across.  Not sure if I could have identified the
>> author.  Wonder if anyone can.
>>
>>
>> Autobiography
>>
>>
>> First was not,
>> Became a spot,
>> Then through and in
>> Felt heart begin,
>> And learning size
>> Nor needed eyes,
>> Yet colors grew
>> (Began with blue),
>> Nor ears yet felt
>> The silence melt,
>> Till wanting room
>> Broke through the womb,
>> From one with Mother
>> Became Another,
>> Began to cry
>> Am I!  Am I!
>>
>>
>>
>>
> ============================================
> David Graham
> Department of English, Ripon College
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>     Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>     My Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
>
> Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
> ============================================
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry 



From Faustina1 at aol.com  Wed Sep 15 11:17:39 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 11:17:39 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint
Message-ID: <21570AF9.4EB53F26.023799CC@aol.com>

The Coalition for Life?


From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Wed Sep 15 11:18:56 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 11:18:56 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint
Message-ID: <46.5891e0eb.2e79b760@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/15/2004 10:08:01 AM Central Daylight Time, 
jsafdie at comcast.net writes: 
> I was going to say that it sounded like some things Roethke did a lot 
> better 
> later . . .
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Graham, David" <GrahamD at ripon.edu>
> To: "'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views'" 
> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 7:53 AM
> Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint
> 
> 
> >Interesting guesses so far.  In case anyone's still interested in this
> >little game, I'll offer a couple clues before spilling the beans.  Jim
> >Finnegan has come closest so far to getting it.
> >
> >It's not Frost or someone from that generation.  But it was published in
> >1953.  Early work by someone later famous.
> >
> >>----------
> >>From: David Graham
> >>Reply To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> >>Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 8:08 PM
> >>To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> >>Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz
> >>
> >>Here's a poem I just ran across.  Not sure if I could have identified the
> >>author.  Wonder if anyone can.
> >>
> >>
> >>Autobiography
> >>
> >>
> >>First was not,
> >>Became a spot,
> >>Then through and in
> >>Felt heart begin,
> >>And learning size
> >>Nor needed eyes,
> >>Yet colors grew
> >>(Began with blue),
> >>Nor ears yet felt
> >>The silence melt,
> >>Till wanting room
> >>Broke through the womb,
> >>From one with Mother
> >>Became Another,
> >>Began to cry
> >>Am I!  Am I!
> >>

Is this early Levine?
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From barry.spacks at verizon.net  Wed Sep 15 11:41:33 2004
From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (Barry Spacks)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 08:41:33 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: my first no-line poem
In-Reply-To: <200409151205.i8FC5UYC001949@wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20040915083824.00b7ccd8@incoming.verizon.net>

At 08:05 AM 9/15/2004 -0400, you wrote:

>Today's Topics:
>
>    6. Mail Delivery (failure new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu)
>       (barry.spacks at verizon.net)
What was I *thinking*? (something about the Mind? --
the Poem at the End of same, concerning Emptiness?)

B.
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From tad at opus40.org  Wed Sep 15 11:41:47 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 11:41:47 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A36E@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <003f01c49b3a$832bc9f0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Snodgrass?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Graham, David" <GrahamD at ripon.edu>
To: "'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views'" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 10:53 AM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint


> Interesting guesses so far.  In case anyone's still interested in this
> little game, I'll offer a couple clues before spilling the beans.  Jim
> Finnegan has come closest so far to getting it.
>
> It's not Frost or someone from that generation.  But it was published in
> 1953.  Early work by someone later famous.
>
>> ----------
>> From: David Graham
>> Reply To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 8:08 PM
>> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz
>>
>> Here's a poem I just ran across.  Not sure if I could have identified the
>> author.  Wonder if anyone can.
>>
>>
>> Autobiography
>>
>>
>> First was not,
>> Became a spot,
>> Then through and in
>> Felt heart begin,
>> And learning size
>> Nor needed eyes,
>> Yet colors grew
>> (Began with blue),
>> Nor ears yet felt
>> The silence melt,
>> Till wanting room
>> Broke through the womb,
>> From one with Mother
>> Became Another,
>> Began to cry
>> Am I!  Am I!
>>
>>
>>
>>
> ============================================
> David Graham
> Department of English, Ripon College
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>     Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>     My Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
>
> Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
> ============================================
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



From Faustina1 at aol.com  Wed Sep 15 11:43:11 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 11:43:11 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint/query
Message-ID: <2A30851F.06146554.023799CC@aol.com>

Is this poet still living?


From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu  Wed Sep 15 04:49:58 2004
From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 03:49:58 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint
In-Reply-To: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A36E@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <BD6D6C66.6FE7%paul.lake@mail.atu.edu>

On 9/15/04 9:53 AM, "Graham, David" <GrahamD at ripon.edu> wrote:

> Interesting guesses so far.  In case anyone's still interested in this
> little game, I'll offer a couple clues before spilling the beans.  Jim
> Finnegan has come closest so far to getting it.
> 
> It's not Frost or someone from that generation.  But it was published in
> 1953.  Early work by someone later famous.
> 
>> ----------
>> From:     David Graham
>> Reply To:     NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
>> Sent:     Tuesday, September 14, 2004 8:08 PM
>> To:     new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> Subject:     [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz
>> 
>> Here's a poem I just ran across.  Not sure if I could have identified the
>> author.  Wonder if anyone can.
>> 
>> 
>> Autobiography
>> 
>> 
>> First was not,
>> Became a spot,
>> Then through and in
>> Felt heart begin,
>> And learning size
>> Nor needed eyes,
>> Yet colors grew
>> (Began with blue),
>> Nor ears yet felt
>> The silence melt,
>> Till wanting room
>> Broke through the womb,
>> From one with Mother
>> Became Another,
>> Began to cry
>> Am I!  Am I!
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> ============================================
> David Graham
> Department of English, Ripon College
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>    Home Page:  
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>    My Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> 
> Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
> ============================================
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> ---
> [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]
> 
> 
It sounds a little like early Roethke.

Paul Lake

---
[This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]



From wjbat at conncoll.edu  Wed Sep 15 12:05:38 2004
From: wjbat at conncoll.edu (Wendy Battin)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 12:05:38 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint/query
In-Reply-To: <2A30851F.06146554.023799CC@aol.com>
References: <2A30851F.06146554.023799CC@aol.com>
Message-ID: <158E6E96-0731-11D9-85CF-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>

On Sep 15, 2004, at 11:43 AM, Faustina1 at aol.com wrote:
> Is this poet still living?

Animal, vegetable, or mineral?
My first guess was Anne Sexton, but that's probably too obvious.

Wendy

Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

Yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.

--Shakespeare
(by Regan, of Lear)



From barry.spacks at verizon.net  Wed Sep 15 13:00:41 2004
From: barry.spacks at verizon.net (Barry Spacks)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 10:00:41 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Am I?
In-Reply-To: <200409151600.i8FG03YC003955@wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20040915095546.00b43a38@incoming.verizon.net>

At 12:00 PM 9/15/2004 -0400, somebody wrote:
> >
> > It's not Frost or someone from that generation.  But it was published in
> > 1953.  Early work by someone later famous.

May Swenson?

--Barry
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From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Wed Sep 15 13:05:48 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 12:05:48 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A371@mail.ripon.edu>

The poem is by Donald Justice.  I found it in his new and unfortunately
final collected edition, where it is dated 1953, and noted as coming from
something called  *Bad Dreams & Other Early Poems (1948-1962)*.  

I think I might have guessed May Swenson or Kay Ryan, myself; or possibly
even Robert Francis.  But it would be a weakish poem by any of them, as it
was from Justice.

I used to think that Justice never published a weak poem.  Now I see, via
the Collected, that he merely failed to re-publish them.  "Autobiography"
strikes me as a very skillful exercise poem, but ultimately a throw-away.
Justice evidently thought so, too, and never reprinted it in his several
selected editions.

Sad to think there will not be another book from him.  And he was never
especially prolific.  In the decade since his previous book, he only managed
to write ten more, it seems.  

The new book is thus a pretty expensive investment if you've already got all
the earlier books, but I hadn't, just his two selecteds plus the DJ Reader;
so I'm enjoying poking around in the recesses of *The Summer Anniversaries*
and so forth, seeing what's there beyond "Men at Forty" and all the other
familiar pieces.


> Autobiography
> 
> 
> First was not,
> Became a spot,
> Then through and in
> Felt heart begin,
> And learning size
> Nor needed eyes,
> Yet colors grew
> (Began with blue),
> Nor ears yet felt
> The silence melt,
> Till wanting room
> Broke through the womb,
> From one with Mother
> Became Another,
> Began to cry
> Am I!  Am I!
> 

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	Wendy Battin
> Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> Sent: 	Wednesday, September 15, 2004 11:05 AM
> To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> Subject: 	Re: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint/query
> 
> On Sep 15, 2004, at 11:43 AM, Faustina1 at aol.com wrote:
> > Is this poet still living?
> 
> Animal, vegetable, or mineral?
> My first guess was Anne Sexton, but that's probably too obvious.
> 
> Wendy
> 
> .cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 
> 


From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Wed Sep 15 13:20:51 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:20:51 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz
In-Reply-To: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A371@mail.ripon.edu>
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A371@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409151318230.7920@shell1.oit.umass.edu>

this poem fills me with horror.








From JforJames at aol.com  Wed Sep 15 13:26:07 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:26:07 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint
Message-ID: <dc.14b7d8eb.2e79d52f@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/15/2004 11:19:45 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
Rsgwynn1 at cs.com writes:

> 
> Is this early Levine? 
> 
> 

That's hitting below the belt.
Finnegan
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From Faustina1 at aol.com  Wed Sep 15 13:30:59 2004
From: Faustina1 at aol.com (Faustina1 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:30:59 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz
Message-ID: <56E77219.2B57E7C6.023799CC@aol.com>

Yeep.  Well, surely everyone is entitled to some bad poems.  Try Wallace Stevens' early work in "The Little June Books" he gave to his wife...


From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Wed Sep 15 13:39:28 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:39:28 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry pop quiz/hint
Message-ID: <1cf.2b325474.2e79d850@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/15/2004 12:27:00 PM Central Daylight Time, 
JforJames at aol.com writes: 
> In a message dated 9/15/2004 11:19:45 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
> Rsgwynn1 at cs.com writes:
> 
> >> 
>> Is this early Levine? 
>> 
>> 
> 
> That's hitting below the belt.
> Finnegan

Check out his early poem in New Poets of England and America.
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From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Wed Sep 15 14:27:33 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:27:33 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz
In-Reply-To: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A371@mail.ripon.edu>
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A371@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040915131758.02eb2000@mail.ilstu.edu>

I was gonna guess May Swenson. 



From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Wed Sep 15 14:52:55 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:52:55 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Mystery Poet Revealed/
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A372@mail.ripon.edu>

> ----------
> From: 	Kerry O'Keefe
> Sent: 	Wednesday, September 15, 2004 12:20 PM
> To: 	Graham, David
> Cc: 	'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views'
> Subject: 	Re: [New-Poetry] Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz
> 
> this poem fills me with horror.
	=================

	Sorry to cause pain, Kerry.  Wasn't my goal.

	I do know of at least one remedy, though.  Teach introductory poetry
workshops for a couple decades, and you'll come to welcome any poem with
this much skill and attention to sound.


> > Autobiography
> > 
> > 
> > First was not,
> > Became a spot,
> > Then through and in
> > Felt heart begin,
> > And learning size
> > Nor needed eyes,
> > Yet colors grew
> > (Began with blue),
> > Nor ears yet felt
> > The silence melt,
> > Till wanting room
> > Broke through the womb,
> > From one with Mother
> > Became Another,
> > Began to cry
> > Am I!  Am I!
> > 
> 
============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	Kerry O'Keefe
> Sent: 	Wednesday, September 15, 2004 12:20 PM
> To: 	Graham, David
> Cc: 	'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views'
> Subject: 	Re: [New-Poetry] Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz
> 
> this poem fills me with horror.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Wed Sep 15 18:52:48 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 00:52:48 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Narcissus' Works
Message-ID: <002101c49b76$b96de610$4ed93052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

I am finally announcing my Pic-pOmBlog, few pOms but some pics, 

Narcissus' Works is on at:
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com

What might be most interesting is a photo of Mary de Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound's daughter and wonderful host I met last night at Brunnenburg where she lives, on the occasion of the concert: 

Voices and Piano - Part on Ezra Pound and other voices

(Bertolt Brecht, Guillaume Apollinaire, Lech Walesa, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bonnie Barnett, Morton Feldman, Hanna Schygulla, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxiu- Mother Theresa, and Mao Tse-Tung

 with Nicolas Hodges, piano, composed by Peter Ablinger (also present). 

It was a cold, dark and rainy night, which brought to a very intimate evening.


Anny Ballardini

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky
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From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Thu Sep 16 04:58:52 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 09:58:52 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] Narcissus' Works
In-Reply-To: <002101c49b76$b96de610$4ed93052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
References: <002101c49b76$b96de610$4ed93052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <1095325132.414955cc6d014@webmail.ukonline.net>


Cool blog Anny

instantly added to my Favourites!






Quoting Anny Ballardini <anny.ballardini at tin.it>:

> I am finally announcing my Pic-pOmBlog, few pOms but some pics, 
> 
> Narcissus' Works is on at:
> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com
> 
> What might be most interesting is a photo of Mary de Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound's
> daughter and wonderful host I met last night at Brunnenburg where she lives,
> on the occasion of the concert: 
> 
> Voices and Piano - Part on Ezra Pound and other voices
> 
> (Bertolt Brecht, Guillaume Apollinaire, Lech Walesa, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
> Bonnie Barnett, Morton Feldman, Hanna Schygulla, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound,
> Agnes Gonxha Bojaxiu- Mother Theresa, and Mao Tse-Tung
> 
>  with Nicolas Hodges, piano, composed by Peter Ablinger (also present). 
> 
> It was a cold, dark and rainy night, which brought to a very intimate
> evening.
> 
> 
> Anny Ballardini
> 
> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
> The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather
> admirers.
> Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky
> 




----------------------------------------------
This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net


From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep 16 08:33:44 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 14:33:44 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Narcissus' Works
References: <002101c49b76$b96de610$4ed93052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<1095325132.414955cc6d014@webmail.ukonline.net>
Message-ID: <00c401c49be9$685bd2f0$b9d93052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Cheers and thank you Michael,
till soon,
Anny

From: <m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk>
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 10:58 AM


>
> Cool blog Anny
>
> instantly added to my Favourites!
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Quoting Anny Ballardini <anny.ballardini at tin.it>:
>
> > I am finally announcing my Pic-pOmBlog, few pOms but some pics,
> >
> > Narcissus' Works is on at:
> > http://annyballardini.blogspot.com
> >
> > What might be most interesting is a photo of Mary de Rachewiltz, Ezra
Pound's
> > daughter and wonderful host I met last night at Brunnenburg where she
lives,
> > on the occasion of the concert:
> >
> > Voices and Piano - Part on Ezra Pound and other voices
> >
> > (Bertolt Brecht, Guillaume Apollinaire, Lech Walesa, Pier Paolo
Pasolini,
> > Bonnie Barnett, Morton Feldman, Hanna Schygulla, Gertrude Stein, Ezra
Pound,
> > Agnes Gonxha Bojaxiu- Mother Theresa, and Mao Tse-Tung
> >
> >  with Nicolas Hodges, piano, composed by Peter Ablinger (also present).
> >
> > It was a cold, dark and rainy night, which brought to a very intimate
> > evening.
> >
> >
> > Anny Ballardini
> >
> > http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
> > The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather
> > admirers.
> > Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky
> >
>
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------
> This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep 16 10:16:41 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:16:41 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Tour - Call for Papers
Message-ID: <006501c49bf7$c9b58380$b9d93052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Tour is/was an incredible town when I visited it about 20 years ago, sur la Loire, where there are all the castles.


>From: "Ada Savin" <adasavin at noos.fr>
 >Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 10:28:45 +0200



              Collegium for African American Research (CAAR)
                             International Conference

                             Tours, 21-24 avril 2005

The Black World INNERSpace: INNERCity: INTERAction: INTERNation



                                         WORKSHOP
     The African-American Scene: An Inter-ethnic Perspective


This workshop intends to explore the complex relations between African 
Americans and other ethnic groups from a historical perspective as well as 
through various literary and visual representations. The stress will be 
laid on the inter-active, inter-dependent nature of Black identity / 
identities construction.
Papers can address such issues as Blacks and Indians (captivity and slave 
narratives / fugitive slaves in Indian tribes), Black-Jewish relations (the 
diaspora experience), the model character of the Black Civil Rights 
Movement for other ethnic movements or renaissances, ambivalent 
inter-actions in other zones of cultural contact like the American West - 
past and present - (Black cowboys / vaqueros), the inner city (Baldwin, 
Wright, Spike Lee's movies), the Canada-U.S. border and the Caribbean. 
Comparisons with the European inter-ethnic scene are also welcome.
Given the inter-disciplinary nature of the workshop, the organizers welcome 
papers that address these or other related topics from a historical, 
literary or visual perspective.



Ada Savin, University of Versailles, France 
<mailto:adasavin at noos.fr>adasavin at noos.fr
Heiner Bus, Bamberg University, Germany 
<mailto:heiner.bus at split.uni-bamberg.de>heiner.bus at split.uni-bamberg.de


Please send your abstract and brief CV to the organizers by November 15.



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From elemenope at icubed.com  Thu Sep 16 01:15:46 2004
From: elemenope at icubed.com (ELEMENOPE Productions)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 13:15:46 +0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
In-Reply-To: <200409161226.i8GCQNYD010947@wiz.cath.vt.edu>
References: <200409161226.i8GCQNYD010947@wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Message-ID: <a05100305bd6ecd5f7432@[204.215.200.207]>

Kerry O'Keefe, can you articulate why/how this poem affects you so 
dramatically?  It can't be so "weak" if your hairs stand on end upon 
reading it.

As for me, it's a pretty accurate account of Justice's experience 
during prenatal gestation. Is there another poem by someone anywhere 
that covers the same area?

I agree with this post:

>It sounds a little like early Roethke.
>
>Paul Lake

If it seems "weak" it is because of the derivative sound and last 
line, which really seems lifted from Roethke.  Regardless, Justice's 
ambition in this case was strong, accurate and useful as writer.  I 
wonder if Justice attempted any poems that imagined his last moment 
or even reports of NDE or OBE experiences?

Richard Dillon

ELEMENOPE Productions


>
>>
>>>  Autobiography
>>>
>>>
>>>  First was not,
>>>  Became a spot,
>>>  Then through and in
>>>  Felt heart begin,
>>>  And learning size
>>>  Nor needed eyes,
>>>  Yet colors grew
>>>  (Began with blue),
>>>  Nor ears yet felt
>>>  The silence melt,
>>>  Till wanting room
>>>  Broke through the womb,
>>>  From one with Mother
>>>  Became Another,
>>>  Began to cry
>>  > Am I!  Am I!
>  >

-- 


From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Thu Sep 16 14:47:56 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 14:47:56 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
In-Reply-To: <a05100305bd6ecd5f7432@[204.215.200.207]>
References: <200409161226.i8GCQNYD010947@wiz.cath.vt.edu>
	<a05100305bd6ecd5f7432@[204.215.200.207]>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409161441140.28655@shell2.oit.umass.edu>

Something about taking a huge, sprawling, unruly, messy, MYSTERIOUS
experience such as gestation and birth, combining it with the sensibility
of a full grown man, and cramming the whole thing into form at its most
tight-assed - it is a little repulsive to me insofar as he ends up
sounding false and, dear god, a little regressed...I have an image of a
full grown man sitting in a playpen

I tend to react strongly to things - one way or the other - but those last
lines ring badly, tritely

these is a perfectly exterior explanation of the experience - like a
little rubik's cube - certainly its own achievement - in an origami kind
of way - just not deeply useful to yours truly except for in the ways that
it fails.

Kerry






From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep 16 15:03:02 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:03:02 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
Message-ID: <8d.154edc38.2e7b3d66@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/16/2004 1:48:36 PM Central Daylight Time, 
jkok at hfa.umass.edu writes: 
> 
> Something about taking a huge, sprawling, unruly, messy, MYSTERIOUS
> experience such as gestation and birth, combining it with the sensibility
> of a full grown man, and cramming the whole thing into form at its most
> tight-assed - it is a little repulsive to me insofar as he ends up
> sounding false and, dear god, a little regressed...I have an image of a
> full grown man sitting in a playpen
> 
> I tend to react strongly to things - one way or the other - but those last
> lines ring badly, tritely
> 
> these is a perfectly exterior explanation of the experience - like a
> little rubik's cube - certainly its own achievement - in an origami kind
> of way - just not deeply useful to yours truly except for in the ways that
> it fails.
> 
> Kerry
> 
> 
It's a pretty bad poem by today's standards, but you've got to remember the 
50s formalist context and the rampant Freudianism of those days.  As Ms. 
O'Connor's character says, "They wasn't as advanced as we are."
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From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 16 15:14:26 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 12:14:26 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Ivan
Message-ID: <20040916191426.70491.qmail@web52602.mail.yahoo.com>

Hope that all are well during this storm.  

My mother lives on the panhandle of Florida, right on
that peninsula that juts out into the bay.  It's a
little town called Port St. Joe.  Unfortunately, it's
apparently a little like a war zone right now, from
what I hear.

Fortunately, my mom is staying with my wife and me, so
here in southeast Georgia, we dodged the bullet. 
We're having lots of heavy winds, however.

My little brother is in Pensacola, stranded at his
house with his roomates.  I think that they have a
case of ravioli (yum-yum Chef Boy Ardee) and a fridge
full of old food that needs to be eaten.  He can't
drive out because, well, right now, NOBODY can.   I
don't think that Escambia county police are letting
anyone in or out right now.  He told me on the phone
that they may not have power or water for 2-3 weeks,
though he may have been exagerating his his
desperation.  My in-laws live in Pensacola, as well. 
They lost a tree and some shingles.

Typically, I started thinking about poetry in the
middle of all this.  I can't remember any poems about
hurricanes.  Am I a solopsistic bastard for thinking
of poems in a time like this?  I hope not.  I think
that I remember a David Bottoms poem about hurricanes.

Anyway, I hope that all of you are well.

Take care.

Jeff

=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep 16 15:24:12 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:24:12 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Ivan
Message-ID: <d.32f873cb.2e7b425c@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/16/2004 2:14:50 PM Central Daylight Time, 
jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com writes: 
> 
> Typically, I started thinking about poetry in the
> middle of all this.  I can't remember any poems about
> hurricanes.  Am I a solopsistic bastard for thinking
> of poems in a time like this?  I hope not.  I think
> that I remember a David Bottoms poem about hurricanes.
> 
There's Alan Dugan's great "Surviving the Hurricane" and an early-American 
one by Phillip Freneau, "The Hurricane."  David Bottoms's poem--that is, the one 
I assume you're thinking about--is about an ice storm.  There are also some 
good descriptive lines in The Tempest.
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep 16 15:28:36 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:28:36 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Poem
Message-ID: <a3.63aa6252.2e7b4364@cs.com>

Surviving the Hurricane 
       by Alan Dugan

When the neighbor?s outhouse went by
and landed upside down on my property,
unoccupied, I laughed and yelled, ?It?s mine,?
but what?s so funny? the TV says
that many, many will get blown away
in the hurricane?s uproarious humors,
and now the horizontal rain comes through
my wall, the wallpaper heaves and cries
and runs down to the floor as pulp
as the windows go out with the wind,
poof!, and the wind picks off the roof
two shingles at a time in love-me-nots,
and there is no difference inside or out:
Leaning against the wall or the wind
is the same. This wet is that wet.
There is no protection anywhere except
I go stand in the upside-down outhouse
with the crapper stinking over my head,
once it has dripped dry of its storm-borne shit,
and be the dry mummy of it sarcophagus
under the whole hurricane of the universe.
That?s what?s so funny: Egypt.

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From halvard at gmail.com  Thu Sep 16 16:03:21 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:03:21 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] =?iso-8859-1?q?Poems_by_others=3A_Gerardo_Den=EDz?=
	=?iso-8859-1?q?=2C_=22From_the_Tower=22?=
In-Reply-To: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEMEBMINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEMEBMINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <f160a12104091613031ef52cc0@mail.gmail.com>

>From the Tower

In those lands where effect is antecedent of cause,
everything is like putting together a jig-saw puzzle:
a piece with half a mouth has something of wallpaper in the
background,
allowing you to begin completion; also thick lips spread
and there you go on to the body,
down to the rosey rose of Lancaster
held between two insulting toes.
Outside the wind whines, fog descends
or clears again. They're feeding the crows.
At all hours there are beheadings, meanwhile I cultivate
this habit, rather Italian, of writing in jail.

--Gerardo Den?z

tr. Judith Infante
in Marlboro Review,
No. 8, Summer/Fall, 1999

Hal

Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
         halvard at gmail.com
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard  <--updated 9/8/04



From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 16 16:06:46 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 13:06:46 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Poem
In-Reply-To: <a3.63aa6252.2e7b4364@cs.com>
Message-ID: <20040916200646.99111.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>

Thanks for this, Sam.

It's laugh-out-loud funny if you read it aloud in an
angry old codger's voice.

Jeff ;-)


--- Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:

> Surviving the Hurricane 
>        by Alan Dugan
> 
> When the neighbor???s outhouse went by
> and landed upside down on my property,
> unoccupied, I laughed and yelled, ???It???s mine,???
> but what???s so funny? the TV says
> that many, many will get blown away
> in the hurricane???s uproarious humors,
> and now the horizontal rain comes through
> my wall, the wallpaper heaves and cries
> and runs down to the floor as pulp
> as the windows go out with the wind,
> poof!, and the wind picks off the roof
> two shingles at a time in love-me-nots,
> and there is no difference inside or out:
> Leaning against the wall or the wind
> is the same. This wet is that wet.
> There is no protection anywhere except
> I go stand in the upside-down outhouse
> with the crapper stinking over my head,
> once it has dripped dry of its storm-borne shit,
> and be the dry mummy of it sarcophagus
> under the whole hurricane of the universe.
> That???s what???s so funny: Egypt.
> 
> > _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


From shkodrov at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 16 16:27:43 2004
From: shkodrov at yahoo.com (Rossitza Shkodrova)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 13:27:43 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409161441140.28655@shell2.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <20040916202743.97214.qmail@web13906.mail.yahoo.com>

And here... after the sentimentality discussion... and
reading the last postings about this poem... I came to
think about rationality... Is there a space to
over-rationalize things in poetry? Where is the
boundary between rational and sentimental? 

Reading Kerry?s posting, I wanted to say this:

First, there is nothing so Mysterious in the
experience of giving birth... (You will have to take
my word on this... I went through it twice, and can
assure you that MYSTERIOUS is not the word I would use
for it.) It might be messy, but none of the other
adjectives trigger any response in me... I don?t have
recollection about the time I went through this as I
was born, but this should be because I didn?t find it
mysterious or huge either...

I find this compression a good one. On one hand it
rationalizes the gestation process (demystifying it
somehow), concentrating and transferring the whole
tension in the last lines (where I do believe the
mystery/journey begins), which is quite nice, because
it really represents the culmination of the separation
process ? physically ? nothing mysterious
what-so-ever! And... because it is not mysterious (but
IS painful), its sounding doesn?t bother me that much.
This ?Am I? does sound a bit artificial on the
rational base of everything else, but I guess this
might be stretched to represent the rest of the life
for the new human being...

Anyway, I don?t particularly like the way this poem
sounds, but I find it might be quite useful in our
society, where everything tends to be mystified and
complicated... 
--

My question is one about balance I guess. I would hate
to read ?rational? poems all the time, but I?m sure I
can enjoy some from time to time, especially when they
are used as a tool to demystify reality...


Rosie

--- Kerry O'Keefe <jkok at hfa.umass.edu> wrote:

> Something about taking a huge, sprawling, unruly,
> messy, MYSTERIOUS
> experience such as gestation and birth, combining it
> with the sensibility
> of a full grown man, and cramming the whole thing
> into form at its most
> tight-assed - it is a little repulsive to me insofar
> as he ends up
> sounding false and, dear god, a little regressed...I
> have an image of a
> full grown man sitting in a playpen
> 
> I tend to react strongly to things - one way or the
> other - but those last
> lines ring badly, tritely
> 
> these is a perfectly exterior explanation of the
> experience - like a
> little rubik's cube - certainly its own achievement
> - in an origami kind
> of way - just not deeply useful to yours truly
> except for in the ways that
> it fails.
> 
> Kerry
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep 16 16:38:48 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:38:48 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Problems with Hurricanes -- by Victor 
 =?iso-8859-1?q?Hern=E1ndez?= Cruz
In-Reply-To: <20040916200646.99111.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <a3.63aa6252.2e7b4364@cs.com>
	<20040916200646.99111.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040916153758.01f89b20@mail.ilstu.edu>



Problems with Hurricanes

A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it's not the wind
or the noise or the water.
I'll tell you he said:
it's the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.

How would your family
feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.

Death by drowning has honor
If the wind picked you up
and slammed you
Against a mountain boulder
This would not carry shame
But
to suffer a mango smashing
Your skull
or a plantain hitting your
Temple at 70 miles per hour
is the ultimate disgrace.

The campesino takes off his hat ?
As a sign of respect
toward the fury of the wind
And says:
Don't worry about the noise
Don't worry about the water
Don't worry about the wind ?
If you are going out
beware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things.

 From Maraca New and Selected Poems 1965-2000, by Victor Hern?ndez Cruz
Copyright ? 2001 Victor Hern?ndez Cruz
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From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Thu Sep 16 16:55:32 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:55:32 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Poem
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A376@mail.ripon.edu>

Others:  many Caribbean poets, obviously.  Walcott's got one in *Fortunate
Traveler*, as I recall.  Brathwaite has at least one.  And isn't there a
section of Walcott's *Omeros* called "Hurricane Season"?

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
> 


From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep 16 16:56:20 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:56:20 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Problems with Hurricanes -- by Victor 
	=?iso-8859-1?Q?Hern=E1ndez?= Cruz
In-Reply-To: <6.0.3.0.2.20040916153758.01f89b20@mail.ilstu.edu>
References: <a3.63aa6252.2e7b4364@cs.com>
	<20040916200646.99111.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>
	<6.0.3.0.2.20040916153758.01f89b20@mail.ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040916155537.02f99328@mail.ilstu.edu>

That was meant to be left-justified, not centered.


Problems with Hurricanes

A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it's not the wind
or the noise or the water.
I'll tell you he said:
it's the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.

How would your family
feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.

Death by drowning has honor
If the wind picked you up
and slammed you
Against a mountain boulder
This would not carry shame
But
to suffer a mango smashing
Your skull
or a plantain hitting your
Temple at 70 miles per hour
is the ultimate disgrace.

The campesino takes off his hat ?
As a sign of respect
toward the fury of the wind
And says:
Don't worry about the noise
Don't worry about the water
Don't worry about the wind ?
If you are going out
beware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things.

 From Maraca New and Selected Poems 1965-2000, by Victor Hern?ndez Cruz
Copyright ? 2001 Victor Hern?ndez Cruz 




From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep 16 17:15:50 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 17:15:50 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Tupelo Press: Dorset Prize and Great Events
Message-ID: <12c.4c11c993.2e7b5c86@aol.com>

Poetry Matters
Dorset Prize Guidelines
 
Open to all poets writing in English
Judge: Carl Phillips
The prize:  A whopping $10,000!
Submissions accepted September 1 through December 1, 2004. 
 
http://www.tupelopress.org/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Hermine Meinhard
 
The Chicago Postmodern Poetry website features an in-depth and thought 
provoking interview with Tupelo Press author Hermine Meinhard.
 
http://www.chicagopostmodernpoetry.com/hermine.htm. 
 
--------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Ilya Kaminsky
 
The Seattle Post Intelligencer has a must read feature on the Tupelo Press 
author of Dancing in Odessa!
 
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/190135_book10.html 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Tupelo Events
This Week and Next
 
Sarah Hannah
 
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2004
12:30 PM
92nd Street Y Street Fair
92nd Street and Lexington Avenue
New York, New York 10128
212-413-8831
Contact Person: Elliott Rabin
http://www.92y.org/
Sarah Hannah will read from Longing Distance from 12:50 - 1:10 PM as 
part of the Street Fair.
 
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2004
6:30 PM (reading at 8:45 PM)
Makor Open House
Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y
35 West 67th Street
New York, New York
212-413-8830
Contact Person: Elliott Rabin
http://www.92y.org/
FREE
Sarah Hannah's students read their works from the 92nd Street Y/Makor 
Workshop.
 
Ilya Kaminsky
 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2004
7:30 PM
A Reading to Benefit Cranky.
Seattle Art Museum, Downtown
Nordstrom Lecture Hall
100 University Street
Seattle, Washington 98101-2902
http://www.failedpromise.org/news.html
FREE
Reading from Dancing in Odessa with Julianna Spallholtz as featured 
readers, along with other magazine contributors.
 
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2004
10:00 AM
Contemporary World Poetry Workshop
Richard Hugo House
1634 Eleventh Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98122
http://www.failedpromise.org/workshop.htm
$60; limited to 12 students.
Sponsored by Cranky, a literary journal.
 
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2004
7:00 PM
Pedestal Magazine Reading
Valencia Street Books
569 Valencia Street, between 16th and 17th
San Francisco, California
Reading from Dancing in Odessa with other Pedestal Magazine 
contributors.
 
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2004
8:00 PM
Poets For Peace Reading
Pegasus Bookstore
2349 Shattuck
Berkeley, California 94704
510-649-1320
Reading from Dancing in Odessa with Fred Marchant and Peter Streckfus.
 
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2004
8:00 PM
International Writing Program
Shambaugh House
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa 52242-2020
319-335-0128
hugh-ferrer at uiowa.edu
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp
FREE
Reading from Dancing in Odessa.
 
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2004
All Day
International Writing Program
Shambaugh House
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa 52242-2020
319-335-0128
hugh-ferrer at uiowa.edu
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp
Visiting with writing classes.
 
Natasha Saj?
 
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2004
3:00 PM
Poems from Bend
Great Salt Lake Book Festival
Salt Lake Public Library
210 East 400 Street
Salt Lake, Utah 84111
801-524-8200 
http://www.utahhumanities.org/bookfestival/bookfestival2004.php
FREE
Reading from Bend.
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Tupelo Press 
P.O. Box 539 
Dorset, VT 05251 
USA
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From mandolin at mac.com  Thu Sep 16 20:08:30 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:08:30 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Poem
In-Reply-To: <a3.63aa6252.2e7b4364@cs.com>
References: <a3.63aa6252.2e7b4364@cs.com>
Message-ID: <B49F0B35-083D-11D9-AA85-000393C29586@mac.com>


On Sep 16, 2004, at 3:28 PM, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:

> Surviving the Hurricane
>  ?????? by Alan Dugan
>

Sam's got one of his own,  "Cleante to Elmire," which is included in 
his No Word of Farewell. A fine piece of work.




From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep 16 20:17:43 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:17:43 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Poem
Message-ID: <13d.16df271.2e7b8727@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/16/2004 7:09:04 PM Central Daylight Time, 
mandolin at mac.com writes: 
> 
> X-INFO: INVALID TO LINE
> 
> On Sep 16, 2004, at 3:28 PM, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:
> 
> >Surviving the Hurricane
> >         by Alan Dugan
> >
> 
> Sam's got one of his own,  "Cleante to Elmire," which is included in 
> his No Word of Farewell. A fine piece of work.

Oh dear!  Honestly, not hiding my own hurricane lamp under a bushel basket, I 
totally forgot about this one, a poor thing but mine own!  Be glad to 
back-channel a copy to anyone who's interested.
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From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Thu Sep 16 20:20:00 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 17:20:00 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Problems with Hurricanes -- by Victor 
	=?iso-8859-1?Q?Hern=E1ndez?= Cruz
References: <a3.63aa6252.2e7b4364@cs.com>
	<20040916200646.99111.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>
	<6.0.3.0.2.20040916153758.01f89b20@mail.ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <414A2DB0.69DA8E52@earthlink.net>



Gabriel Gudding wrote:
> 
>                        Problems with Hurricanes
> 
>                      A campesino looked at the air
>                              And told me:
>                    With hurricanes it's not the wind
>                       or the noise or the water.
>                         I'll tell you he said:
>                       it's the mangoes, avocados
>                       Green plantains and bananas
>                   flying into town like projectiles.
> 
>                          How would your family
>                        feel if they had to tell
>                        The generations that you
>                         got killed by a flying
>                                 Banana.

Sorry, can't take this seriously or humorously after that point.  I can
see a Dubya-like grin at the podium as Sr. Cruz reads this.

- Jim


From cstroffo at earthlink.net  Thu Sep 16 22:11:38 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 18:11:38 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] sent/rat
Message-ID: <200409170052.i8H0qmNm274070@pimout3-ext.prodigy.net>

Rosie--

Great questions....
Others tend to be better at determining such boundaries
between say 'rational" and "sentimental"--
I think it's because they need a map to tame the unfamiliar
which is fine as long as they don't force me to follow their directions.

And it makes great arguments of course,
as one person's "over rational" is another person's "oversentimental"--

I believe in balance too--
but I tend to really go for what many called 'extremes"
(or excesses and deficiencies in aristotle's terms
if living in the "mean" can make some people, uh, mean)--

so that the balance doesn't have to be in one poem
but rather can be found in reading 3 or 4--
kind of more like seasons in the northeast usa
than say in oakland, cal.
though there's balance there too

----------
>From: Rossitza Shkodrova <shkodrov at yahoo.com>
>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp, Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
O'Keefe)
>Date: Thu, Sep 16, 2004, 12:27 PM
>

> And here... after the sentimentality discussion... and
> reading the last postings about this poem... I came to
> think about rationality... Is there a space to
> over-rationalize things in poetry? Where is the
> boundary between rational and sentimental?


My question is one about balance I guess. I would hate
to read ?rational? poems all the time, but I?m sure I
can enjoy some from time to time, especially when they
are used as a tool to demystify reality...


Rosie



From jsafdie at comcast.net  Thu Sep 16 20:59:17 2004
From: jsafdie at comcast.net (Joe Safdie)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 17:59:17 -0700
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_=5BNew-Poetry=5D_Problems_with_Hurricanes_--_by_Victor?=
	=?iso-8859-1?Q?_Hern=E1ndez_Cruz?=
References: <a3.63aa6252.2e7b4364@cs.com><20040916200646.99111.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com><6.0.3.0.2.20040916153758.01f89b20@mail.ilstu.edu>
	<414A2DB0.69DA8E52@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <009301c49c51$8ea441f0$f7131118@D6T95L21>

Perhaps you're taking it a bit too seriously, Jim. Anyone who knows Victor 
knows that his town in Puerto Rico was devastated by a huge hurricane back 
in the late 80s or early 90s. I value his determination to come out the 
other side of tragedy here a lot; he's a great poet.

Here's a short prose poem I wrote, unbelievably, 26 years ago . . . today, 
I'd dedicate it to the Bush administration . . .

HURRICANE

I'm in the middle of the eye of a hurricane. There may be tension and murder 
outside but here everything is calm. Don't try and tempt me with tales of 
compassion; I can see your property rushing past and know you spent your 
whole life saving for it. That's the way things go on the outside: a few 
strong winds, twisted romance, and everything you've dreamed about is gone. 
You should have spent some time considering these things. But then there's 
not many people who make it to the eye.

Don't bother with the history books: here there's no rise and fall. You 
dress the winds with proper names but it's the silence you really fear, like 
the quiet on the other side of sleep.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Cervantes" <jvcervantes at earthlink.net>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 5:20 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Problems with Hurricanes -- by Victor Hern?ndez 
Cruz


>
>
> Gabriel Gudding wrote:
>>
>>                        Problems with Hurricanes
>>
>>                      A campesino looked at the air
>>                              And told me:
>>                    With hurricanes it's not the wind
>>                       or the noise or the water.
>>                         I'll tell you he said:
>>                       it's the mangoes, avocados
>>                       Green plantains and bananas
>>                   flying into town like projectiles.
>>
>>                          How would your family
>>                        feel if they had to tell
>>                        The generations that you
>>                         got killed by a flying
>>                                 Banana.
>
> Sorry, can't take this seriously or humorously after that point.  I can
> see a Dubya-like grin at the podium as Sr. Cruz reads this.



From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Thu Sep 16 22:01:39 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 22:01:39 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
In-Reply-To: <8d.154edc38.2e7b3d66@cs.com>
References: <8d.154edc38.2e7b3d66@cs.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409162155150.3174@shell1.oit.umass.edu>

I think that is right, rsgwynn,  - that what I am reacting to, among other
things - is the dated quality of it. Thank you for placing it in a
context.

And hey, I have nothing against psychological investigation.
It has kept me walking and talking... for years...

On Thu, 16 Sep 2004
Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:

> In a message dated 9/16/2004 1:48:36 PM Central Daylight Time,
> jkok at hfa.umass.edu writes:
> >
> > Something about taking a huge, sprawling, unruly, messy, MYSTERIOUS
> > experience such as gestation and birth, combining it with the sensibility
> > of a full grown man, and cramming the whole thing into form at its most
> > tight-assed - it is a little repulsive to me insofar as he ends up
> > sounding false and, dear god, a little regressed...I have an image of a
> > full grown man sitting in a playpen
> >
> > I tend to react strongly to things - one way or the other - but those last
> > lines ring badly, tritely
> >
> > these is a perfectly exterior explanation of the experience - like a
> > little rubik's cube - certainly its own achievement - in an origami kind
> > of way - just not deeply useful to yours truly except for in the ways that
> > it fails.
> >
> > Kerry
> >
> >
> It's a pretty bad poem by today's standards, but you've got to remember the
> 50s formalist context and the rampant Freudianism of those days.  As Ms.
> O'Connor's character says, "They wasn't as advanced as we are."
>

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http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry

From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Thu Sep 16 22:27:04 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 22:27:04 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
In-Reply-To: <20040916202743.97214.qmail@web13906.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040916202743.97214.qmail@web13906.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409162220160.3174@shell1.oit.umass.edu>

Poems I have yet to write:

-the mystery of feeling the impatient spirits of my children, flutterin
somewhere in the vicinity of my neck from time to time, BEFORE they were
ever conceived (they knew I was old and were nagging)

-the mysterious experience of being in the doctor's office and being told
that the child I had miscarried was indeed gone but there was another
heart beating since I had unbeknownst to anyone been carrying TWINS

-the mystery of sitting pregnant with my first child, a girl, having a
waking dream and hearing the voice of the little boy I would give birth to
two years later.  He wouldn't develop the voice I had heard until he was
about a year and a half or so, a sweet husky little boy's voice that
stayed with him for a couple of years.

When it comes to mystery, I keep my own counsel.  there is so much Irish
blood pumping through this body, I can probably find the mystery in a pack
of gum...

ANd now that I have said it, I will, indeed hold myself responsible
for finding these poems


On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, Rossitza Shkodrova wrote:

> And here... after the sentimentality discussion... and
> reading the last postings about this poem... I came to
> think about rationality... Is there a space to
> over-rationalize things in poetry? Where is the
> boundary between rational and sentimental?
>
> Reading Kerry?s posting, I wanted to say this:
>
> First, there is nothing so Mysterious in the
> experience of giving birth... (You will have to take
> my word on this... I went through it twice, and can
> assure you that MYSTERIOUS is not the word I would use
> for it.) It might be messy, but none of the other
> adjectives trigger any response in me... I don?t have
> recollection about the time I went through this as I
> was born, but this should be because I didn?t find it
> mysterious or huge either...
>
> I find this compression a good one. On one hand it
> rationalizes the gestation process (demystifying it
> somehow), concentrating and transferring the whole
> tension in the last lines (where I do believe the
> mystery/journey begins), which is quite nice, because
> it really represents the culmination of the separation
> process ? physically ? nothing mysterious
> what-so-ever! And... because it is not mysterious (but
> IS painful), its sounding doesn?t bother me that much.
> This ?Am I? does sound a bit artificial on the
> rational base of everything else, but I guess this
> might be stretched to represent the rest of the life
> for the new human being...
>
> Anyway, I don?t particularly like the way this poem
> sounds, but I find it might be quite useful in our
> society, where everything tends to be mystified and
> complicated...
> --
>
> My question is one about balance I guess. I would hate
> to read ?rational? poems all the time, but I?m sure I
> can enjoy some from time to time, especially when they
> are used as a tool to demystify reality...
>
>
> Rosie
>
> --- Kerry O'Keefe <jkok at hfa.umass.edu> wrote:
>
> > Something about taking a huge, sprawling, unruly,
> > messy, MYSTERIOUS
> > experience such as gestation and birth, combining it
> > with the sensibility
> > of a full grown man, and cramming the whole thing
> > into form at its most
> > tight-assed - it is a little repulsive to me insofar
> > as he ends up
> > sounding false and, dear god, a little regressed...I
> > have an image of a
> > full grown man sitting in a playpen
> >
> > I tend to react strongly to things - one way or the
> > other - but those last
> > lines ring badly, tritely
> >
> > these is a perfectly exterior explanation of the
> > experience - like a
> > little rubik's cube - certainly its own achievement
> > - in an origami kind
> > of way - just not deeply useful to yours truly
> > except for in the ways that
> > it fails.
> >
> > Kerry
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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 shkodrov at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 16 23:23:00 2004
From: shkodrov at yahoo.com (Rossitza Shkodrova)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:23:00 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409162220160.3174@shell1.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <20040917032300.75097.qmail@web13905.mail.yahoo.com>

My first reaction:
(self-censured)

And after counting to 10:
Sorry Kerry,
I didn't want to sound sarcastic or offensive at
all... I was just thinking about the relation between
"rational" and "sentimental" and this looked as a good
example... My personal likes and dislikes doesn't
necessarily make something "good" or "bad"... Sorry
one more time if I managed somehow to offend you.


Rosie


--- Kerry O'Keefe <jkok at hfa.umass.edu> wrote:

> Poems I have yet to write:
> 
> -the mystery of feeling the impatient spirits of my
> children, flutterin
> somewhere in the vicinity of my neck from time to
> time, BEFORE they were
> ever conceived (they knew I was old and were
> nagging)
> 
> -the mysterious experience of being in the doctor's
> office and being told
> that the child I had miscarried was indeed gone but
> there was another
> heart beating since I had unbeknownst to anyone been
> carrying TWINS
> 
> -the mystery of sitting pregnant with my first
> child, a girl, having a
> waking dream and hearing the voice of the little boy
> I would give birth to
> two years later.  He wouldn't develop the voice I
> had heard until he was
> about a year and a half or so, a sweet husky little
> boy's voice that
> stayed with him for a couple of years.
> 
> When it comes to mystery, I keep my own counsel. 
> there is so much Irish
> blood pumping through this body, I can probably find
> the mystery in a pack
> of gum...
> 
> ANd now that I have said it, I will, indeed hold
> myself responsible
> for finding these poems
> 
> 
> On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, Rossitza Shkodrova wrote:
> 
> > And here... after the sentimentality discussion...
> and
> > reading the last postings about this poem... I
> came to
> > think about rationality... Is there a space to
> > over-rationalize things in poetry? Where is the
> > boundary between rational and sentimental?
> >
> > Reading Kerry?s posting, I wanted to say this:
> >
> > First, there is nothing so Mysterious in the
> > experience of giving birth... (You will have to
> take
> > my word on this... I went through it twice, and
> can
> > assure you that MYSTERIOUS is not the word I would
> use
> > for it.) It might be messy, but none of the other
> > adjectives trigger any response in me... I don?t
> have
> > recollection about the time I went through this as
> I
> > was born, but this should be because I didn?t find
> it
> > mysterious or huge either...
> >
> > I find this compression a good one. On one hand it
> > rationalizes the gestation process (demystifying
> it
> > somehow), concentrating and transferring the whole
> > tension in the last lines (where I do believe the
> > mystery/journey begins), which is quite nice,
> because
> > it really represents the culmination of the
> separation
> > process ? physically ? nothing mysterious
> > what-so-ever! And... because it is not mysterious
> (but
> > IS painful), its sounding doesn?t bother me that
> much.
> > This ?Am I? does sound a bit artificial on the
> > rational base of everything else, but I guess this
> > might be stretched to represent the rest of the
> life
> > for the new human being...
> >
> > Anyway, I don?t particularly like the way this
> poem
> > sounds, but I find it might be quite useful in our
> > society, where everything tends to be mystified
> and
> > complicated...
> > --
> >
> > My question is one about balance I guess. I would
> hate
> > to read ?rational? poems all the time, but I?m
> sure I
> > can enjoy some from time to time, especially when
> they
> > are used as a tool to demystify reality...
> >
> >
> > Rosie
> >
> > --- Kerry O'Keefe <jkok at hfa.umass.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > Something about taking a huge, sprawling,
> unruly,
> > > messy, MYSTERIOUS
> > > experience such as gestation and birth,
> combining it
> > > with the sensibility
> > > of a full grown man, and cramming the whole
> thing
> > > into form at its most
> > > tight-assed - it is a little repulsive to me
> insofar
> > > as he ends up
> > > sounding false and, dear god, a little
> regressed...I
> > > have an image of a
> > > full grown man sitting in a playpen
> > >
> > > I tend to react strongly to things - one way or
> the
> > > other - but those last
> > > lines ring badly, tritely
> > >
> > > these is a perfectly exterior explanation of the
> > > experience - like a
> > > little rubik's cube - certainly its own
> achievement
> > > - in an origami kind
> > > of way - just not deeply useful to yours truly
> > > except for in the ways that
> > > it fails.
> > >
> > > Kerry
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > 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 anny.ballardini at tin.it  Fri Sep 17 04:48:17 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 10:48:17 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Call for papers
Message-ID: <00d801c49c93$139390a0$1dd73152@yourpk9x5fuc06>

> Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 18:38:02 +0200
 > From: Jean Kempf <Jean.Kempf at univ-lyon2.fr>


Call for papers
Another look at the Sixties in the United States

TransatlanticA (http://www.transatlantica.org) the French e-journal of
American Studies is planning a 2005 issue a dossier devoted to the new
interpretation of the Sixties in the United States. In the 1970s and the
1980s, the field was essentially dominated by historians, many of whom were
deeply influenced by the new radicalism of the 1960s. They were mainly looking
for the reasons of the failure of the New Left: many, echoing criticisms by
the Old Left, and faulted the Movement's lack of coherent ideology and
disciplined organization. Others, more sympathetic to the Movement, put the
blame on its disintegration into sectarian radicalism. In the past ten years,
a new generation of historians departing from this political interpretation
have tried to re-evaluate the decade's meanings and significance. Scholars are
now focusing on the origins of 60s radicalism, the links between radicalism
and liberalism, and the impact of conservatism -- so much so that even the
very extent of radicalism has been questioned as new works on racial, sexual
and social relations have appeared.

Proposals (300 words max) should be sent to Romain Huret 
(MAILTO:rhuret at ehess.fr )
December 15, 2004

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From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Fri Sep 17 09:26:47 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:26:47 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
In-Reply-To: <20040917032300.75097.qmail@web13905.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040917032300.75097.qmail@web13905.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409170925320.6297@shell1.oit.umass.edu>

merci.

I am not nearly so fiery in person...!

ah cyberspace

K.




From JforJames at aol.com  Fri Sep 17 09:44:03 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:44:03 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Poem
Message-ID: <90.4bafd23e.2e7c4423@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/16/2004 8:18:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
Rsgwynn1 at cs.com writes:
  Be glad to back-channel a copy to anyone who's interested. 
front & center would be okay. It's interesting that both poems posted thus 
far take a comic approach to these vasty buzzsaws of wind & wave.
Finnegan
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Fri Sep 17 09:45:26 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 08:45:26 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] WCW
Message-ID: <BD7054A6.B475%grahamd@ripon.edu>

It's the birthday of William Carlos Williams.


Complete Destruction

It was an icy day. 
We buried the cat, 
then took her box 
and set match to it

in the back yard. 
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire 
died by the cold. 

--William Carlos Williams


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From JforJames at aol.com  Fri Sep 17 09:52:07 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:52:07 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] WCW
Message-ID: <87.1644cb95.2e7c4607@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/17/2004 9:45:27 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes:
Complete Destruction

It was an icy day. 
We buried the cat, 
then took her box 
and set match to it

in the back yard. 
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire 
died by the cold. 

--William Carlos Williams
Is Williams havig a go at
Frost?
Fire and Ice 
  
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
>From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. 

--
Finnegan
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Fri Sep 17 09:52:44 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:52:44 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Poem
Message-ID: <92.156747d9.2e7c462c@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/17/2004 8:44:56 AM Central Daylight Time, 
JforJames at aol.com writes: 
> 
> In a message dated 9/16/2004 8:18:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
> Rsgwynn1 at cs.com writes:
>  
> >>   Be glad to back-channel a copy to anyone who's interested. 
> 
> front &center would be okay. It's interesting that both poems posted thus 
> far take a comic approach to these vasty buzzsaws of wind &wave.
>  Finnegan
> 
> 
It's pretty long for posting on the board.  Here's a link:

http://www.poemtree.com/poems/CleanteToElmire.htm
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Fri Sep 17 10:10:36 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:10:36 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] WCW & Frost
In-Reply-To: <87.1644cb95.2e7c4607@aol.com>
Message-ID: <BD705A8C.B47B%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Very interesting speculation, and Williams was certainly capable of this
kind of tweaking--he did it to Stevens, Eliot, & others at various times.

But probably not in this case.  "Complete Destruction" was published in
*Sour Grapes*, 1921, and Frost's "Fire & Ice" in *New Hampshire*, 1923.  Not
sure about original magazine appearances. . . .

Frost was also capable of this kind of satire, of course, but I very much
doubt that Williams was even on his radar at that point, despite the Pound
connection.  
-----------------------



on 9/17/04 8:52 AM, JforJames at aol.com at JforJames at aol.com wrote:

In a message dated 9/17/2004 9:45:27 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
grahamd at ripon.edu writes:
Complete Destruction

It was an icy day. 
We buried the cat, 
then took her box 
and set match to it

in the back yard. 
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire 
died by the cold. 

--William Carlos Williams
Is Williams havig a go at
Frost?
Fire and Ice 

  

Some say the world will end in fire;

Some say in ice. 

>From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To know that for destruction ice

Is also greatAnd would suffice.

--
Finnegan


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================


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From JforJames at aol.com  Fri Sep 17 10:19:57 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 10:19:57 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Homer Pyle, PFC
Message-ID: <78.6157e3c9.2e7c4c8d@aol.com>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27053-2004Sep16.html?nav=rss_po
litics
 
Modern Soldiers From Ancient Texts
Physician Advising Army on Personnel Policy Takes Lessons From Homer
 
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A25 
 
What do the works of the Greek poet Homer have to do with the nitty-gritty 
details of personnel policy in today's U.S. Army? 
 
Plenty, says Jonathan Shay. In fact, so much that the former assistant 
professor at Harvard Medical School, who has written two well-received books 
examining Homer as a chronicler of military men in "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," 
signed on this month as an adviser to the Army's personnel chief. Shay's task is 
far from literary. Rather, it is to help boost "cohesion" -- that is, the 
essential psychological glue that holds soldiers together -- in Army units. 
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Fri Sep 17 10:37:11 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:37:11 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] PBO: Carl Dennis
Message-ID: <BD7060C7.B483%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Invitation

This is your invitation to the Ninth-Grade Play
At Jackson Park Middle School
8:00 P.M., November 17, 1947.
Macbeth, authored by Shakespeare
And directed by Mr. Grossman and Mrs. Silvio
With scenery from Miss Ferguson's art class.

A lot of effort has gone into it.
Dozens of students have chosen to stay after school
Week after week with their teachers
Just to prepare for this one evening,
A gift to lift you a moment beyond the usual.
Even if you've moved away, you'll want to return.
Jackson Park, in case you've forgotten, stands
At the end of Jackson Street at the top of the hill.
Doubtless you recall that Macbeth is about ambition.
This is the play for you if you've been tempted
To claw your way to the top. If you haven't been,
It should make you feel grateful.
Just allow time to get lost before arriving.
So many roads are ready to take you forward
Into the empty world to come, misty with promises.
So few will lead you back to what you've missed.

Just get an early start.
Call in sick to the office this once.
Postpone your vacation a day or two.
Prepare to find the road neglected,
The street signs rusted, the school dark,
The doors locked, the windows broken.
This is where the challenge comes in.

Do you suppose our country would have been settled
If the pioneers had worried about being lonely?

Somewhere the students are speaking the lines
You can't remember. Somewhere, days before that,
This invitation went out, this one you're reading
On your knees in the attic, the contents of a trunk
Piled beside you. Forget about your passport.
You don't need to go to Paris just yet.
Europe will seem even more beautiful
Once you complete the journey you begin today.

-- Carl Dennis.  *New and Selected Poems*.  Penguin.





====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu  Fri Sep 17 04:28:43 2004
From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 03:28:43 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Problems with Hurricanes -- by Victor  Hern
	=?ISO-8859-1?B?4Q==?=ndez Cruz
In-Reply-To: <6.0.3.0.2.20040916153758.01f89b20@mail.ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <BD700A6B.703A%paul.lake@mail.atu.edu>

On 9/16/04 3:38 PM, "Gabriel Gudding" <gmguddi at ilstu.edu> wrote:

> 
> Problems with Hurricanes
> 
> A campesino looked at the air
> And told me:
> With hurricanes it's not the wind
> or the noise or the water.
> I'll tell you he said:
> it's the mangoes, avocados
> Green plantains and bananas
> flying into town like projectiles.
> 
> How would your family
> feel if they had to tell
> The generations that you
> got killed by a flying
> Banana.
> 
> Death by drowning has honor
> If the wind picked you up
> and slammed you
> Against a mountain boulder
> This would not carry shame
> But
> to suffer a mango smashing
> Your skull
> or a plantain hitting your
> Temple at 70 miles per hour
> is the ultimate disgrace.
> 
> The campesino takes off his hat ?
> As a sign of respect
> toward the fury of the wind
> And says:
> Don't worry about the noise
> Don't worry about the water
> Don't worry about the wind ?
> If you are going out
> beware of mangoes
> And all such beautiful
> sweet things.
> 
> From Maraca New and Selected Poems 1965-2000, by Victor Hern?ndez Cruz
> Copyright ? 2001 Victor Hern?ndez Cruz
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 

I?ve been terrified of mangos ever since I saw the character by that name on
SNL.

Paul  Lake
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Fri Sep 17 11:50:25 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 11:50:25 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Michael Donaghy, 1954-2004
Message-ID: <7b.3430fec0.2e7c61c1@cs.com>

Michael Donaghy, whom some of you know, died in London today after suffering 
a massive stroke.

The River in Spate

       sweeps us both down its cold grey current.
Grey now as your father was when I met you,
I wake even now on that shore where once,
sweat slick and still, we breathed together--
in--soft rain gentling the level of the lake,
out--bright mist rising from the lake at dawn.
How long before we gave each other to sleep,
to air--drawing the mist up, exhaling the rain?
Though we fight now for breath and weaken
in the torrent's surge to the dark of its mouth,
you are still asleep in my arms by its source,
small waves lapping the gravel shore,
and I am still awake and watching you,
in wonder, without sadness, like a child.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Fri Sep 17 12:10:20 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 12:10:20 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
Message-ID: <8e.156c9196.2e7c666c@aol.com>

I said earlier that I wasn't keen on this Justice piece.
(reposted below). I understand that it can be excused 
as being early work. But that also makes me think perhaps 
Justice is doing a take-off, or parodic study, of Emity Dickinson's
style. Now I don't want to be seen as insulting a great poet,
who had her lapses like all the best do, but doesn't the clipped
diction, the simple nature of the rhyme, and the psychologic
cum philosophic (even if flawed) musing, remind one
of some of her work. And not to go out of my way
to insult Kay Ryan, but there's something in this 
poem that makes me think of her lesser efforts, as well, 
which can seem slight at times, more like ditties than poems.
Finnegan

In a message dated 9/16/2004 4:28:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
shkodrov at yahoo.com writes:
I find this compression a good one. On one hand it
rationalizes the gestation process (demystifying it
somehow), concentrating and transferring the whole
tension in the last lines (where I do believe the
mystery/journey begins), which is quite nice, because
it really represents the culmination of the separation
process ? physically ? nothing mysterious
what-so-ever! And... because it is not mysterious (but
IS painful), its sounding doesn?t bother me that much.
This ?Am I? does sound a bit artificial on the
rational base of everything else, but I guess this
might be stretched to represent the rest of the life
for the new human being...

Anyway, I don?t particularly like the way this poem
sounds, but I find it might be quite useful in our
society, where everything tends to be mystified and
complicated.. 

Autobiography
> > 
> > 
> > First was not,
> > Became a spot,
> > Then through and in
> > Felt heart begin,
> > And learning size
> > Nor needed eyes,
> > Yet colors grew
> > (Began with blue),
> > Nor ears yet felt
> > The silence melt,
> > Till wanting room
> > Broke through the womb,
> > From one with Mother
> > Became Another,
> > Began to cry
> > Am I!  Am I!
. 
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From cstroffo at earthlink.net  Fri Sep 17 13:41:04 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:41:04 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
	O'Keefe)
Message-ID: <200409171622.i8HGMEIt387348@pimout2-ext.prodigy.net>

I don't feel parody---I feel "stylistic exercise"
(and that doesn't have to be a put down)
and yeah maybe some dickinson affinity/attempt
or perhaps some aspects of early laura riding...
if this is a "lesser effort" or perhaps, uh, "lite verse,"
i think the world could do much worse.
at least it's not pompous


----------
From: JforJames at aol.com
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Mystery Poet Revealed/Poetry pop quiz (Kerry
O'Keefe)
Date: Fri, Sep 17, 2004, 8:10 AM


But that also makes me think perhaps
Justice is doing a take-off, or parodic study, of Emity Dickinson's
style. Now I don't want to be seen as insulting a great poet,
who had her lapses like all the best do, but doesn't the clipped
diction, the simple nature of the rhyme, and the psychologic
cum philosophic (even if flawed) musing, remind one
of some of her work.
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From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Sat Sep 18 01:05:19 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 00:05:19 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems by Others: Siddhatta Gotama,
	the historical Buddha
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040918000356.02a69468@mail.ilstu.edu>

Let us live in joy,
in love among those who hate:
Among those who hate,
let us live in love.

Let us live in joy
in peace among those who struggle:
among those who struggle,
let us live in peace.

Let us live in joy
although we have nothing:
let us live in joy
like spirits of light.

  -- Siddhatta Gotama, the historical Buddha, from _The Dhammapada_, trans 
Juan Mascaro



From mandolin at mac.com  Sat Sep 18 01:25:23 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 01:25:23 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Poem
In-Reply-To: <92.156747d9.2e7c462c@cs.com>
References: <92.156747d9.2e7c462c@cs.com>
Message-ID: <23CA505C-0933-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>

after reminding Sam about his hurricane poem, I realized I'd forgotten 
my own -- two attempts to tell the same story:



Mysterious Ways


I found her on my porch one night, half stoned,
Black-eyed, and broke. I had a sofa-bed,
Where passing out "Will I be safe?" she  moaned--
I figured while she snored she wasn't dead.
Next morning came the tale. It was her son
Who'd beat her up and robbed her for cocaine,
And daughter who, not to be outdone,
Had dropped her off with whiskey for her pain.
She wouldn't call the cops, and I got mad.
I didn't see her till the hurricane
Had come and gone and taken all she had:
"My Kenny stole so much from me God swore
He'd send a storm so he can't steal no more."



Mysterious Ways


Kenny just took and took from me till God
Said "That's enough!" and washed away my house.
I reckon it's because I spared the rod
Kenny just took and took from me till God
Had had enough of him and gave His nod
To the hurricane to stop the thieving louse.
Kenny just took and took from me till God
Said "That's enough," and washed away my house.






From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sat Sep 18 14:20:58 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 20:20:58 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] A Hurricane Party - Lynskey
Message-ID: <003f01c49dac$3f6e3760$5b8d3052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

  A Hurricane Party

  Edward C. Lynskey

___________________________




  Those giants of wind shall have their
  stomping grounds, no red light-
  green light at the intersection of
  Folly & Killjoy, zigzagging drunkenly all
  over the Gulf, kebabs on a hibachi
  sizzling, riding it out on beanstalks
  bent -- oops! -- broken, radio broadcast
  drowned out, one terrible red eye,
  an icy keg of Black Label, right smack
  dab in the middle, swept up and away,
  take-out chop suey, a homewrecking wind,
  they didn't have a prayer, mean and sly
  and awful to behold, came as they were,
  no rain checks, get out of town,
  long-winded local tv, this time feeling
  the cry of the wolf, popped windows,
  Merle Haggard on an 8-track, caught in
  the Cyclop's fleer, best time to flee
  was early, candles snuffed, beach-front apt.
  a sand castle, caskets afloat, those
  giants of wind shall have their stomping grounds.
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From mandolin at mac.com  Sat Sep 18 15:19:06 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 15:19:06 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Michael Donaghy, 1954-2004
In-Reply-To: <7b.3430fec0.2e7c61c1@cs.com>
References: <7b.3430fec0.2e7c61c1@cs.com>
Message-ID: <9BCFC6D2-09A7-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>


On Sep 17, 2004, at 11:50 AM, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:

> Michael Donaghy, whom some of you know, died in London today after 
> suffering a massive stroke.
>
>  The River in Spate
>
>  ?????? sweeps us both down its cold grey current.
>  Grey now as your father was when I met you,
>  I wake even now on that shore where once,
>  sweat slick and still, we breathed together--
>  in--soft rain gentling the level of the lake,
>  out--bright mist rising from the lake at dawn.
>  How long before we gave each other to sleep,
>  to air--drawing the mist up, exhaling the rain?
>  Though we fight now for breath and weaken
>  in the torrent's surge to the dark of its mouth,
>  you are still asleep in my arms by its source,
>  small waves lapping the gravel shore,
>  and I am still awake and watching you,
>  in wonder, without sadness, like a 
> child._______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>

Very sad news, Sam. I played music with him at West Chester 4 years 
ago, and the reading he gave that night was magical. "Black Ice and 
Rain" haunted me for months.

Another poem of his:


The Classics


I remember it like it was last night,
Chicago, the back room of Flanagan's
malignant with accordions and cigarettes,
Joe Cooley bent above his Paolo Soprani,
its asthmatic bellows pumping as if to revive
the half-corpse strapped about it.
It's five a.m. Everyone's packed up.
His brother Seamus grabs Joe's elbow mid-arpeggio.
'Wake up man. We have to catch a train.'
His eyelids fluttering, opening. The astonishment ?

I saw this happen. Or heard it told so well
I've staged the whole drunk memory:
What does it matter now? It's ancient history.
Who can name them? Where lie their bones and armour?





From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sat Sep 18 16:29:29 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 15:29:29 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry?  Again!
Message-ID: <BD7204D9.B4FD%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Joseph Epstein just can't seem to let it go.  Poetry's been dead for a long
time, as he keeps telling us; nonetheless he always returns to the scene of
the crime.

What's new this time around?  Well, maybe the suspect list is a little
longer: it turns out that Poet Laureates are in on the crime of debasing
poetry's once lofty estate. . . especially those women and minority poets.

Prose feature from *Poetry*, currently online:

http://www.poetrymagazine.org/epstein_sept_prose.html



====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Sat Sep 18 16:41:25 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 16:41:25 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry?  Again!
Message-ID: <fc.19392be.2e7df775@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/18/2004 3:29:39 PM Central Daylight Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes: 
> 
> Joseph Epstein just can't seem to let it go.  Poetry's been dead for a long
> time, as he keeps telling us; nonetheless he always returns to the scene of
> the crime.
> 
> What's new this time around?  Well, maybe the suspect list is a little
> longer: it turns out that Poet Laureates are in on the crime of debasing
> poetry's once lofty estate. . . especially those women and minority poets.
> 
> Prose feature from *Poetry*, currently online:
> 
> http://www.poetrymagazine.org/epstein_sept_prose.html
> 
It was ill-informed, as usual from J. E., but that list of other jobs in the 
opening paragraph he'd rather have was pretty funny.
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From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Sat Sep 18 19:20:35 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 15:20:35 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
In-Reply-To: <fc.19392be.2e7df775@cs.com>
References: <fc.19392be.2e7df775@cs.com>
Message-ID: <6b279deb040918162062d10248@mail.gmail.com>

Here's what I get from that piece, with which are you in such disagreement?

Being the Poet Laureate is a thankless position

Those selected to be Poet Laureates are mainstream, safe selections
(Who's the closest to representing anything progressive-- Kunitz?)

Poet Laureates are largely ineffectual at promoting poetry to the
general populace (any examples of those who haven't been?)

Poetry is an acquired taste that even with positive exposure doesn't
appeal to most (true in my experience)

A number of selections have been political and based on race and
gender (I'll make that argument plainly: Rita Dove is pretty poor
poet, and Gwendolyn Brooks even worse. Is there really any question
about why they were given the position? Are you telling me with a
straight face that they were the best poets or the best
representatives for poetry possible? Not to mention Ted Kooser, one of
the lamest selections I could imagine.)

It's a stretch to call being the Poet Laureate a "job" since they
don't actually have much in the way of duties (the main thing I
admired about Gluck was her transparency on this issue-- making it
clear she didn't plan to do much)

There's an overabundance of prizes and writers as readers when it
comes to the audience and market for poetry (it's true enough in my
experience that there are more contests for poetry than outlets, and
the biggest market of poetry readers are poets themselves).

The poet's job is to write good poetry and leave national promotions
to the marketers and hucksters (I agree because obvious promotions
about poetry being "good for you" are bound to fail, and certainly
some past efforts have seen no end of attacks on this very list).

c


From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sun Sep 19 10:11:31 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 16:11:31 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane
Message-ID: <000e01c49e52$91cdb160$26d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Here is Bob Grumman's entry on his blog dated August 30:

Daily Notes on Poetry 

18 August 2004. "Hmmm, Friday, the thirteenth, with a hurricane coming my way. But I feel lucky." Those were the last words I posted before Charlie hit. My house was close to the bull's-eye, but I survived to finally coin a word I've been wanting for a long time: "drucky." That's for describing the "good luck" one has when a truck runs over him and he "only" loses a leg. Not that I lost the equivalent of a leg--just a lanai (Floridian for screen porch) and a lot of shingles off my roof. I'll need a new roof but it looks like FEMA, the government agency, will cover the cost of one. 


No electricty or phone. The heat and humidity are no fun, and we may have to put up with them for two more weeks or more. Dunno when I'll get phone service, either. I'm at an MCI trailer now, taking advantage of free phone and Internet connections. I'm in good shape, though: we have plentiful water and food from the Salvation Army, Red Cross, local businesses, neighbors, etc. Just about everyone seems to be pitching in to help others. 


That's it for now. Let everybody know I'm okay, you few who visit this blog.



Anny Ballardini

http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky

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From hruggier at localnet.com  Sun Sep 19 11:34:56 2004
From: hruggier at localnet.com (Helen Ruggieri)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 11:34:56 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry?  Again!
References: <BD7204D9.B4FD%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <00b801c49e5e$382d8c00$c40b9942@Helen>

I'd like to see him do an essay about the decline of the essay etc. etc.

h
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Graham" <grahamd at ripon.edu>
To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 18, 2004 4:29 PM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!


> Joseph Epstein just can't seem to let it go.  Poetry's been dead for a
long
> time, as he keeps telling us; nonetheless he always returns to the scene
of
> the crime.
>
> What's new this time around?  Well, maybe the suspect list is a little
> longer: it turns out that Poet Laureates are in on the crime of debasing
> poetry's once lofty estate. . . especially those women and minority poets.
>
> Prose feature from *Poetry*, currently online:
>
> http://www.poetrymagazine.org/epstein_sept_prose.html
>
>
>
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>




From halvard at gmail.com  Sun Sep 19 11:44:43 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 11:44:43 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
In-Reply-To: <00b801c49e5e$382d8c00$c40b9942@Helen>
References: <BD7204D9.B4FD%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<00b801c49e5e$382d8c00$c40b9942@Helen>
Message-ID: <f160a121040919084444150407@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 11:34:56 -0400, Helen Ruggieri
<hruggier at localnet.com> wrote:

> I'd like to see him do an essay about the decline of the essay etc. etc.

Or maybe about the decline of Joseph Epstein.

-- 
Hal        "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid,
              but most stupid people are conservatives."
                                --John Stuart Mill
             
Halvard Johnson
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard  <updated 9/8/04


From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sun Sep 19 12:42:13 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 11:42:13 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
In-Reply-To: <6b279deb040918162062d10248@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu>

As I've recently said on another list, Chris, I do disagree with (or would
have to unpack the rhetoric of & heavily qualify any agreement I might have
with) most if not all the items on your little list.

For instance, is the poet laureateship a "thankless position"?  Well, yes
and no.  Even the Presidency might be called a thankless position, in that
even the hardest working, most noble-minded holder of the office is the
target of all sorts of attack, when he isn't being taken for granted. Such
has certainly been true, within the poetry community, of various Laureates.

On the other hand, when I think of the good work accomplished by poets such
as Dove, Pinsky, Hass, and Collins, I wonder what "thankless" means in their
cases?  Seems to me that they've been rather thoroughly thanked, in a number
of ways.  Hasn't hurt their book sales at all, I imagine, nor do I see how
American Poetry was damaged by their service.

Furthermore:  no, I don't think Gwendolyn Brooks was a poor poet.  Quite the
reverse.  I rank her among the best of her generation.  I also highly
respect Rita Dove and Ted Kooser, for what it's worth, and applaud both as
good laureate choices.  But--and this is a key objection I have to Epstein,
in this and other essays--he never argues such points, seldom or never
naming names; he just waves his mandarin hand in the air and considers that
sufficient proof.  

Moreover, I don't understand Epstein's assertion that "poet laureateship is
marked?-marred, is more precise?-.. . by the kiss of death of being an
official job..."  Marred in what way?  What's the harm, to poet or public?
And isn't this point undercut by Epstein's next-breath assertion that it's,
well, not really much of a job at all?  I don't see how he can argue on the
one hand that the job is a levelling or corrupting force, and on the other
hand that it has no force at all.  Why's he so threatened?

And by the way, callilng what some Laureates have done in the post
"marketing" or "hucksterism" applies scorn to the issue, but doesn't explain
where the harm lies.

Well, I could go on, but that's more than enough for now.  I honestly don't
care greatly what the Poet Laureate does, but I just don't see the harm this
little bit of national promotion brings to the estate of poetry.  Or how it
devalues or diverts attention from the real stuff in any significant way.
Still, it's curious how heated these discussions frequently get.  Obviously
there are some hot buttons here.

What strikes me as the hottest button relates to what I think it's fair to
call Epstein's unapologetic snobbery, coupled with a very tedious golden-age
nostalgia.  He obviously feels, though seldom naming names, that the vast
majority of poetry appearing is awful stuff, a falling off from some
ever-vaguely defined golden age.   He frequently goes out of his way to heap
scorn particularly at any efforts in the direction of broadening the
definitions of what good poetry can be, and this takes the form, usually, of
broad-stroke disdain for the "political correctness" of multiculturalism.

I strenuously disagree.  I believe that there is no golden age, and thus no
falling-off from its fabled glories.  I further feel that some of the most
interesting work of the past half century has been produced by poets who
fall under the multicultural banner, and the broadening definition of what
good poetry can be has been mostly to the good.



on 9/18/04 6:20 PM, Chris Lott at Chris.Lott at gmail.com wrote:

> Here's what I get from that piece, with which are you in such disagreement?
> 
> Being the Poet Laureate is a thankless position
> 
> Those selected to be Poet Laureates are mainstream, safe selections
> (Who's the closest to representing anything progressive-- Kunitz?)
> 
> Poet Laureates are largely ineffectual at promoting poetry to the
> general populace (any examples of those who haven't been?)
> 
> Poetry is an acquired taste that even with positive exposure doesn't
> appeal to most (true in my experience)
> 
> A number of selections have been political and based on race and
> gender (I'll make that argument plainly: Rita Dove is pretty poor
> poet, and Gwendolyn Brooks even worse. Is there really any question
> about why they were given the position? Are you telling me with a
> straight face that they were the best poets or the best
> representatives for poetry possible? Not to mention Ted Kooser, one of
> the lamest selections I could imagine.)
> 
> It's a stretch to call being the Poet Laureate a "job" since they
> don't actually have much in the way of duties (the main thing I
> admired about Gluck was her transparency on this issue-- making it
> clear she didn't plan to do much)
> 
> There's an overabundance of prizes and writers as readers when it
> comes to the audience and market for poetry (it's true enough in my
> experience that there are more contests for poetry than outlets, and
> the biggest market of poetry readers are poets themselves).
> 
> The poet's job is to write good poetry and leave national promotions
> to the marketers and hucksters (I agree because obvious promotions
> about poetry being "good for you" are bound to fail, and certainly
> some past efforts have seen no end of attacks on this very list).
> 
> c
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================





From tad at opus40.org  Sun Sep 19 12:50:38 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 12:50:38 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
References: <BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <000601c49e68$cb491bd0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

Doesn't Epstein have anything better to do with his time, or Poetry to do 
with its space?



Let me get this straight:  the Laureateship/Consultantship is reserved for 
mediocrities, or  -- even worse? --  Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Robert 
Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Maxine Kumin - "all the usual 
suspect." Yeah, but they're the usual suspects because they were among the 
leading poets of their time, and they earned a certain amount of respect. 
Epstein rejects the obscure (like Auslander) for not being remembered,and he 
rejects Frost and Bishop for being remembered).



So, yeah, people aren't always remembered for the right reasons, and they 
aren't always forgotten for the right reasons. And middlebrow, mainstream 
honors like laureateships don't hurt poetry. They are what they are.



I googled Joseph Auslander and found this poem by him. It's a little too 
drama queenish for today's tastes, but I liked a lot about it:



To My Despoiler





Yes, you have taken everything from me:

Beauty and love and all the measureless

Impatience of proud April; even our sea

Shouting under the gulls; all loveliness

Of form and sound and colour; all that we

Had touched; the curve of things we used to press

Glowing against our senses; mystery

And movement. . . everything taken. . . taken. . . Yes,

Even the little brave irrelevancies

Like brooding water, dripping water-cress,

The cool dark noise of cropping; cruising bees

On hot gold expeditions--even these

You took from me--Oh spare me your caress,

Leave me at least my own stark loneliness!





--Tad

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Graham" <grahamd at ripon.edu>
To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 12:42 PM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!


As I've recently said on another list, Chris, I do disagree with (or would
have to unpack the rhetoric of & heavily qualify any agreement I might have
with) most if not all the items on your little list.

For instance, is the poet laureateship a "thankless position"?  Well, yes
and no.  Even the Presidency might be called a thankless position, in that
even the hardest working, most noble-minded holder of the office is the
target of all sorts of attack, when he isn't being taken for granted. Such
has certainly been true, within the poetry community, of various Laureates.

On the other hand, when I think of the good work accomplished by poets such
as Dove, Pinsky, Hass, and Collins, I wonder what "thankless" means in their
cases?  Seems to me that they've been rather thoroughly thanked, in a number
of ways.  Hasn't hurt their book sales at all, I imagine, nor do I see how
American Poetry was damaged by their service.

Furthermore:  no, I don't think Gwendolyn Brooks was a poor poet.  Quite the
reverse.  I rank her among the best of her generation.  I also highly
respect Rita Dove and Ted Kooser, for what it's worth, and applaud both as
good laureate choices.  But--and this is a key objection I have to Epstein,
in this and other essays--he never argues such points, seldom or never
naming names; he just waves his mandarin hand in the air and considers that
sufficient proof.

Moreover, I don't understand Epstein's assertion that "poet laureateship is
marked<-marred, is more precise<-.. . by the kiss of death of being an
official job..."  Marred in what way?  What's the harm, to poet or public?
And isn't this point undercut by Epstein's next-breath assertion that it's,
well, not really much of a job at all?  I don't see how he can argue on the
one hand that the job is a levelling or corrupting force, and on the other
hand that it has no force at all.  Why's he so threatened?

And by the way, callilng what some Laureates have done in the post
"marketing" or "hucksterism" applies scorn to the issue, but doesn't explain
where the harm lies.

Well, I could go on, but that's more than enough for now.  I honestly don't
care greatly what the Poet Laureate does, but I just don't see the harm this
little bit of national promotion brings to the estate of poetry.  Or how it
devalues or diverts attention from the real stuff in any significant way.
Still, it's curious how heated these discussions frequently get.  Obviously
there are some hot buttons here.

What strikes me as the hottest button relates to what I think it's fair to
call Epstein's unapologetic snobbery, coupled with a very tedious golden-age
nostalgia.  He obviously feels, though seldom naming names, that the vast
majority of poetry appearing is awful stuff, a falling off from some
ever-vaguely defined golden age.   He frequently goes out of his way to heap
scorn particularly at any efforts in the direction of broadening the
definitions of what good poetry can be, and this takes the form, usually, of
broad-stroke disdain for the "political correctness" of multiculturalism.

I strenuously disagree.  I believe that there is no golden age, and thus no
falling-off from its fabled glories.  I further feel that some of the most
interesting work of the past half century has been produced by poets who
fall under the multicultural banner, and the broadening definition of what
good poetry can be has been mostly to the good.



on 9/18/04 6:20 PM, Chris Lott at Chris.Lott at gmail.com wrote:

> Here's what I get from that piece, with which are you in such 
> disagreement?
>
> Being the Poet Laureate is a thankless position
>
> Those selected to be Poet Laureates are mainstream, safe selections
> (Who's the closest to representing anything progressive-- Kunitz?)
>
> Poet Laureates are largely ineffectual at promoting poetry to the
> general populace (any examples of those who haven't been?)
>
> Poetry is an acquired taste that even with positive exposure doesn't
> appeal to most (true in my experience)
>
> A number of selections have been political and based on race and
> gender (I'll make that argument plainly: Rita Dove is pretty poor
> poet, and Gwendolyn Brooks even worse. Is there really any question
> about why they were given the position? Are you telling me with a
> straight face that they were the best poets or the best
> representatives for poetry possible? Not to mention Ted Kooser, one of
> the lamest selections I could imagine.)
>
> It's a stretch to call being the Poet Laureate a "job" since they
> don't actually have much in the way of duties (the main thing I
> admired about Gluck was her transparency on this issue-- making it
> clear she didn't plan to do much)
>
> There's an overabundance of prizes and writers as readers when it
> comes to the audience and market for poetry (it's true enough in my
> experience that there are more contests for poetry than outlets, and
> the biggest market of poetry readers are poets themselves).
>
> The poet's job is to write good poetry and leave national promotions
> to the marketers and hucksters (I agree because obvious promotions
> about poetry being "good for you" are bound to fail, and certainly
> some past efforts have seen no end of attacks on this very list).
>
> c
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================



_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sun Sep 19 13:05:25 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 12:05:25 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Death to the Death of Poetry
Message-ID: <BD732685.B54C%grahamd@ripon.edu>

A poem of mine from several years back, written in response to one of
Epstein's earlier screeds on the subject. Hope I haven't posted it before.



ON THE REPORTED DEATH OF POETRY

     *. . . it was during the 1950's that poetry last had this religious
aura.*
            --Joseph Epstein, "Who Killed Poetry?"


Look, I've got a little gift
for you, Poetry?-bit
of seashell worn smooth
as a lip; and more to come,
lint on a windowsill,
sound of a woodthrush
at dusk, lawnmowers distant
as the music of the spheres. . . .

Poetry, only you can tie
such bootlaces, only you
witness mudflakes shaken off
by the dog, snatch of Bach
fading under the announcer's
cheerful catastrophes.

I bring you the swish
of a nightgown to the floor,
cool drift of cloud over
one grave, the moment when
a boy's liquid nattering
first coalesces into a sentence.

I bring you valediction
and animal blurt, I commend
you to God in a whirlwind
and the squirrel-chitter rhythms
of Thelonious Monk:  *Epistrophy*,
*Sphere*, and *Ugly Beauty* above all.

Poetry, you've died so many times,
each age preceded by a better,
giants of utterance walking
profligate earth.  You would think
we'd tire of the visionary funeral,
but here we come to the wake
in our shiny black suits, now
we loosen our ties and,
as the first fire of scotch
warms our throats, begin again
the old stories, fruit-heavy bough
and golden stranger at the door.



====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================





From halvard at gmail.com  Sun Sep 19 13:19:24 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 13:19:24 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Boyhood Home Encased in Bronze
Message-ID: <f160a12104091910192f5c4061@mail.gmail.com>

Saturday, September 18, 2004
JANET I. MARTINEAU
THE SAGINAW NEWS

In 1999, the boyhood home of Pulitzer-winning poet Theodore M. Roethke
received a Michigan Historical Marker, and later was named to the
National Register of Historic Sites.

On Wednesday, Sept. 29, poetry lovers will gather again at 1805
Gratiot to celebrate yet another honor: designation of the home to the
Literary Landmark Register, administered by the Friends of Libraries
U.S.A.

Also a member of that roster are the homes of William Faulkner, Robert
Frost, Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams. And it joins two other
such sites in Michigan -- the home of John Voelker, the judge who
wrote "Anatomy of a Murder," and Dudley Randall, the founder of
Broadside Press and Detroit poet laureate.

"Nominating the Theodore Roethke house as Michigan's third Literary
Landmark was an obvious choice," says Linda Farynk, director of the
Saginaw Valley State University Library and a board member of the
Michigan Center for the Book program operated by the Library of
Michigan.

"Growing up in this house and working in the back yard greenhouses of
his family's floral company provided the fertile ground for so much of
Roethke's poetry."

Adds Christie Pearson Brandau, the state librarian, "This designation
pays tribute to one of Michigan's true literary treasures. It also
plays an important role in our ongoing efforts to foster a greater
knowledge and appreciation of Michigan's rich literary heritage."

It was Farynk who nominated the house and submitted the paperwork that
won the designation, says Annie Ransford, the president of the Friends
of Theodore Roethke group, which owns the house and operates it as a
site for literary workshops, tours and summer picnics. The group will
install a plaque on the front porch of the home.

"She wrote the nominating letter to the headquarters in Philadelphia
and has been so supportive of what we do at this house."

Speaking during the dedication ceremonies and at a banquet later that
evening at Saginaw Valley State University is Pulitzer Prize-winning
poet W.D. Snodgrass -- who earlier in his career crossed paths with a
supportive Roethke (see related story on Snodgrass).

The designation comes as the Friends of Theodore Roethke, a nonprofit
organization, is about to take a giant step.

The group also purchased the adjoining home at 1759 Gratiot, which
belonged to Roethke's uncle and was a part of the greenhouse complex
Roethke's father and uncle operated. Both homes are in need of
restoration.

"After a series of vision planning meetings in 2003," says Ransford, a
teacher in the Caro schools, "our membership decided to renovate 1759
first. We will soon be announcing a major fund-raising campaign to do
that."

The home at 1759 is in greater need of repair, Ransford says, "and the
vision for it includes making it a community center with a large
kitchen to serve lunch to members of student writing workshops and
other groups, a back porch for writing, a fieldstone fireplace for
meetings, three upstairs bedrooms for visiting artists to stay while
working in our community, and a basement computer center for a
neighborhood homework club.

"In addition, renovating 1759 first will take the wear and tear off
1805, which in turn will become a museum of original furnishings; a
more private, quieter home with tours by appointment in contrast to
the more public one at 1759."

The dinner at SVSU following the unveiling of the plaque at the home
will begin that fund-raising effort, says Ransford.

"We are still working on the price tag for this renovation," says
Ransford. "Les Tincknell (a retired architect with Wigen Tincknell
Meyer and Associates) has been working on the blueprints pro bono for
the past two years.

"He also has ideas for a pavilion greenhouse and room for parking.
This Literary Landmark designation is a shot in the arm for us in this
mission to raise money."

Ransford reports that Roethke's widow, Beatrice, now remarried and
living in England, recently sent a check for $10,000 for use at 1805.

In addition to the unveiling of the plaque and the evening banquet,
the Public Libraries of Saginaw has a display of Roethke materials
from its archives at the Hoyt Library in downtown Saginaw. And the
SVSU Library has an exhibit of rare Roethke books on loan from Jett
Whitehead Rare Books of Bay City. t

Janet I. Martineau is the arts/entertainment editor at The Saginaw
News. To reach her, call 776-9707 or e-mail her at
jmartineau at thesaginawnews.com.



-- 
Hal        "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid,
              but most stupid people are conservatives."
                                --John Stuart Mill
             
Halvard Johnson
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard  <updated 9/8/04


From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sun Sep 19 14:00:02 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 20:00:02 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Death to the Death of Poetry
References: <BD732685.B54C%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <00ec01c49e72$7ce94820$26d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Re.: Poetry, you've died so many times,
each age preceded by a better,
giants of utterance walking
profligate earth.

I'm reminded of Montaigne who said that his father said that his father said
that when he was young, things were much better...

(well, something very similar)

From: "David Graham" <grahamd at ripon.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 7:05 PM


> A poem of mine from several years back, written in response to one of
> Epstein's earlier screeds on the subject. Hope I haven't posted it before.
>
>
>
> ON THE REPORTED DEATH OF POETRY
>
>      *. . . it was during the 1950's that poetry last had this religious
> aura.*
>             --Joseph Epstein, "Who Killed Poetry?"
>
>
> Look, I've got a little gift
> for you, Poetry<-bit
> of seashell worn smooth
> as a lip; and more to come,
> lint on a windowsill,
> sound of a woodthrush
> at dusk, lawnmowers distant
> as the music of the spheres. . . .
>
> Poetry, only you can tie
> such bootlaces, only you
> witness mudflakes shaken off
> by the dog, snatch of Bach
> fading under the announcer's
> cheerful catastrophes.
>
> I bring you the swish
> of a nightgown to the floor,
> cool drift of cloud over
> one grave, the moment when
> a boy's liquid nattering
> first coalesces into a sentence.
>
> I bring you valediction
> and animal blurt, I commend
> you to God in a whirlwind
> and the squirrel-chitter rhythms
> of Thelonious Monk:  *Epistrophy*,
> *Sphere*, and *Ugly Beauty* above all.
>
> Poetry, you've died so many times,
> each age preceded by a better,
> giants of utterance walking
> profligate earth.  You would think
> we'd tire of the visionary funeral,
> but here we come to the wake
> in our shiny black suits, now
> we loosen our ties and,
> as the first fire of scotch
> warms our throats, begin again
> the old stories, fruit-heavy bough
> and golden stranger at the door.
>
>
>
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sun Sep 19 14:02:34 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 20:02:34 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
References: <BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<000601c49e68$cb491bd0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <00f401c49e72$d73d84d0$26d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

I think this is a good poem, and besides that, I also think that with a
continuous effort, one can get things back.

From: "The Old Mole" <tad at opus40.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 6:50 PM


> Doesn't Epstein have anything better to do with his time, or Poetry to do
> with its space?
>
>
>
> Let me get this straight:  the Laureateship/Consultantship is reserved for
> mediocrities, or  -- even worse? --  Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate,
Robert
> Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Maxine Kumin - "all the usual
> suspect." Yeah, but they're the usual suspects because they were among the
> leading poets of their time, and they earned a certain amount of respect.
> Epstein rejects the obscure (like Auslander) for not being remembered,and
he
> rejects Frost and Bishop for being remembered).
>
>
>
> So, yeah, people aren't always remembered for the right reasons, and they
> aren't always forgotten for the right reasons. And middlebrow, mainstream
> honors like laureateships don't hurt poetry. They are what they are.
>
>
>
> I googled Joseph Auslander and found this poem by him. It's a little too
> drama queenish for today's tastes, but I liked a lot about it:
>
>
>
> To My Despoiler
>
>
>
>
>
> Yes, you have taken everything from me:
>
> Beauty and love and all the measureless
>
> Impatience of proud April; even our sea
>
> Shouting under the gulls; all loveliness
>
> Of form and sound and colour; all that we
>
> Had touched; the curve of things we used to press
>
> Glowing against our senses; mystery
>
> And movement. . . everything taken. . . taken. . . Yes,
>
> Even the little brave irrelevancies
>
> Like brooding water, dripping water-cress,
>
> The cool dark noise of cropping; cruising bees
>
> On hot gold expeditions--even these
>
> You took from me--Oh spare me your caress,
>
> Leave me at least my own stark loneliness!
>
>
>
>
>
> --Tad
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "David Graham" <grahamd at ripon.edu>
> To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 12:42 PM
> Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
>
>
> As I've recently said on another list, Chris, I do disagree with (or would
> have to unpack the rhetoric of & heavily qualify any agreement I might
have
> with) most if not all the items on your little list.
>
> For instance, is the poet laureateship a "thankless position"?  Well, yes
> and no.  Even the Presidency might be called a thankless position, in that
> even the hardest working, most noble-minded holder of the office is the
> target of all sorts of attack, when he isn't being taken for granted. Such
> has certainly been true, within the poetry community, of various
Laureates.
>
> On the other hand, when I think of the good work accomplished by poets
such
> as Dove, Pinsky, Hass, and Collins, I wonder what "thankless" means in
their
> cases?  Seems to me that they've been rather thoroughly thanked, in a
number
> of ways.  Hasn't hurt their book sales at all, I imagine, nor do I see how
> American Poetry was damaged by their service.
>
> Furthermore:  no, I don't think Gwendolyn Brooks was a poor poet.  Quite
the
> reverse.  I rank her among the best of her generation.  I also highly
> respect Rita Dove and Ted Kooser, for what it's worth, and applaud both as
> good laureate choices.  But--and this is a key objection I have to
Epstein,
> in this and other essays--he never argues such points, seldom or never
> naming names; he just waves his mandarin hand in the air and considers
that
> sufficient proof.
>
> Moreover, I don't understand Epstein's assertion that "poet laureateship
is
> marked<-marred, is more precise<-.. . by the kiss of death of being an
> official job..."  Marred in what way?  What's the harm, to poet or public?
> And isn't this point undercut by Epstein's next-breath assertion that
it's,
> well, not really much of a job at all?  I don't see how he can argue on
the
> one hand that the job is a levelling or corrupting force, and on the other
> hand that it has no force at all.  Why's he so threatened?
>
> And by the way, callilng what some Laureates have done in the post
> "marketing" or "hucksterism" applies scorn to the issue, but doesn't
explain
> where the harm lies.
>
> Well, I could go on, but that's more than enough for now.  I honestly
don't
> care greatly what the Poet Laureate does, but I just don't see the harm
this
> little bit of national promotion brings to the estate of poetry.  Or how
it
> devalues or diverts attention from the real stuff in any significant way.
> Still, it's curious how heated these discussions frequently get.
Obviously
> there are some hot buttons here.
>
> What strikes me as the hottest button relates to what I think it's fair to
> call Epstein's unapologetic snobbery, coupled with a very tedious
golden-age
> nostalgia.  He obviously feels, though seldom naming names, that the vast
> majority of poetry appearing is awful stuff, a falling off from some
> ever-vaguely defined golden age.   He frequently goes out of his way to
heap
> scorn particularly at any efforts in the direction of broadening the
> definitions of what good poetry can be, and this takes the form, usually,
of
> broad-stroke disdain for the "political correctness" of multiculturalism.
>
> I strenuously disagree.  I believe that there is no golden age, and thus
no
> falling-off from its fabled glories.  I further feel that some of the most
> interesting work of the past half century has been produced by poets who
> fall under the multicultural banner, and the broadening definition of what
> good poetry can be has been mostly to the good.
>
>
>
> on 9/18/04 6:20 PM, Chris Lott at Chris.Lott at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > Here's what I get from that piece, with which are you in such
> > disagreement?
> >
> > Being the Poet Laureate is a thankless position
> >
> > Those selected to be Poet Laureates are mainstream, safe selections
> > (Who's the closest to representing anything progressive-- Kunitz?)
> >
> > Poet Laureates are largely ineffectual at promoting poetry to the
> > general populace (any examples of those who haven't been?)
> >
> > Poetry is an acquired taste that even with positive exposure doesn't
> > appeal to most (true in my experience)
> >
> > A number of selections have been political and based on race and
> > gender (I'll make that argument plainly: Rita Dove is pretty poor
> > poet, and Gwendolyn Brooks even worse. Is there really any question
> > about why they were given the position? Are you telling me with a
> > straight face that they were the best poets or the best
> > representatives for poetry possible? Not to mention Ted Kooser, one of
> > the lamest selections I could imagine.)
> >
> > It's a stretch to call being the Poet Laureate a "job" since they
> > don't actually have much in the way of duties (the main thing I
> > admired about Gluck was her transparency on this issue-- making it
> > clear she didn't plan to do much)
> >
> > There's an overabundance of prizes and writers as readers when it
> > comes to the audience and market for poetry (it's true enough in my
> > experience that there are more contests for poetry than outlets, and
> > the biggest market of poetry readers are poets themselves).
> >
> > The poet's job is to write good poetry and leave national promotions
> > to the marketers and hucksters (I agree because obvious promotions
> > about poetry being "good for you" are bound to fail, and certainly
> > some past efforts have seen no end of attacks on this very list).
> >
> > c
> > _______________________________________________
> > New-Poetry mailing list
> > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
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> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry




From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Sun Sep 19 14:18:06 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 10:18:06 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
In-Reply-To: <BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <6b279deb040918162062d10248@mail.gmail.com>
	<BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <6b279deb04091911182a320987@mail.gmail.com>

> For instance, is the poet laureateship a "thankless position"?  Well, yes
> and no.  Even the Presidency might be called a thankless position,

Sure it is.

> On the other hand, when I think of the good work accomplished by poets such
> as Dove, Pinsky, Hass, and Collins, I wonder what "thankless" means in their
> cases?  Seems to me that they've been rather thoroughly thanked, in a number
> of ways.  Hasn't hurt their book sales at all, I imagine, nor do I see how
> American Poetry was damaged by their service.

But was it helped? Epstein is *in this essay* making a smaller
argument-- that the position of poet laureate is ineffectual in
precisely the area it is supposed to pursue-- promoting poetry.

> Furthermore:  no, I don't think Gwendolyn Brooks was a poor poet.  Quite the
> reverse.  I rank her among the best of her generation.  I also highly
> respect Rita Dove and Ted Kooser, for what it's worth, and applaud both as
> good laureate choices.

Well, that's really unbelievable to me. Brooks is the best poet of her
generation? Are you serious or engaging in your own rhetoric? Ted
Kooser is a fine-- if bland-- poet who is matched by hundreds of
others. Shouldn't the premier representative of poetry stand out from
the crowd in some way?

> Moreover, I don't understand Epstein's assertion that "poet laureateship is
> marked?-marred, is more precise?-.. . by the kiss of death of being an
> official job..."  Marred in what way?  What's the harm, to poet or public?
> And isn't this point undercut by Epstein's next-breath assertion that it's,
> well, not really much of a job at all?  I don't see how he can argue on the
> one hand that the job is a levelling or corrupting force, and on the other
> hand that it has no force at all.  Why's he so threatened?

It isn't about being threated *in this essay*. And Epstein has it
exactly right-- because it is an official, political position in an
aesthetic realm, it has very little hope of sucecss (you can't
legislate liking poetry). Which, essentially, robs the "job" of its
only duty. If the Laureate is just meant to be a money prize for a
poet, then that's cool, but I personally would rather see such dollars
going somewhere else.

> And by the way, callilng what some Laureates have done in the post
> "marketing" or "hucksterism" applies scorn to the issue, but doesn't explain
> where the harm lies.

But where's the good? Or more importantly, why does it matter? Look,
I'm in the minority in supporting Collins' selection as Laureate, and
he and Pinsky were certainly the most active. And I recall no small
amount of grief heaped upon selections on this very list. But did
anything he or Pinsky did make *any* difference in "the world of
poetry?" I'd have no problem with marketing if I thought it were
possible to market, but it strikes me that marketing is almost exactly
the wrong way to go. You don't market a love of art, you instill and
inculcate it in much more subtle ways.
 
> Well, I could go on, but that's more than enough for now.  I honestly don't
> care greatly what the Poet Laureate does, but I just don't see the harm this
> little bit of national promotion brings to the estate of poetry.  Or how it
> devalues or diverts attention from the real stuff in any significant way.

You exhibit a curious logic here. If it doesn't harm X it must be good
for X, right? I am arguing-- and this is how I am reading Epstein--
that the Laureateship isn't good for poetry. It is, in effect, a waste
of time, money and intellectual space. I can't help but agree. It's a
tiny, miserable token thrown at artists by the state to try to buy
them off and show how "art is supported" when in fact it is being
gutted at every turn where it counts.

> Still, it's curious how heated these discussions frequently get.  Obviously
> there are some hot buttons here.

I'm not heated up except that I really hate it when I see a question
asked (or ask one myself) about Piece A and I get all kinds of
response about the author and other pieces in which I am-- at the
moment-- not interested.

> I strenuously disagree.  I believe that there is no golden age, and thus no
> falling-off from its fabled glories.  I further feel that some of the most
> interesting work of the past half century has been produced by poets who
> fall under the multicultural banner, and the broadening definition of what
> good poetry can be has been mostly to the good.

I agree that there is no golden age (if Gwendolyn Brooks is the best
of her generation, then I double my agreement). I also agree that much
of the interesting work has been multicultural. I just think an
"elevation" (as it is still perceived) should be directed at oe of the
the best, not one of the safest choices. Promoting mediocre poetry
because it fits someone's idea of expanding the definition of who a
good poet can be does more harm than good.

c



From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sun Sep 19 14:44:54 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 20:44:54 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
References: <6b279deb040918162062d10248@mail.gmail.com><BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<6b279deb04091911182a320987@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <012501c49e78$c1161310$26d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

It is always the same story. I see society as a classroom. If you accept the
most intelligent student as the brilliant one, you end up being excluded as
a teacher. While if you choose to help the mediocre, then everybody is with
you. There are strange energies at work here, because anybody would
logically state that the best is the best, but that is not the way it works.
Too many interests and too many manipulations due to envy and whatever.

Anyhow I am not against Ted Kooser. A man who earned his life, got up early
every morning to write poetry, and succeeded in writing some good poems
becomes an example for many. And I think that the American society (and I
consider it the best, whatever people say) is based on the need of finding
an appropriate prototype, and this was also Leonardo's teaching method. He
put his pupils in competition because he knew that good things only come out
of hard work.


From: "Chris Lott" <Chris.Lott at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 8:18 PM


> > For instance, is the poet laureateship a "thankless position"?  Well,
yes
> > and no.  Even the Presidency might be called a thankless position,
>
> Sure it is.
>
> > On the other hand, when I think of the good work accomplished by poets
such
> > as Dove, Pinsky, Hass, and Collins, I wonder what "thankless" means in
their
> > cases?  Seems to me that they've been rather thoroughly thanked, in a
number
> > of ways.  Hasn't hurt their book sales at all, I imagine, nor do I see
how
> > American Poetry was damaged by their service.
>
> But was it helped? Epstein is *in this essay* making a smaller
> argument-- that the position of poet laureate is ineffectual in
> precisely the area it is supposed to pursue-- promoting poetry.
>
> > Furthermore:  no, I don't think Gwendolyn Brooks was a poor poet.  Quite
the
> > reverse.  I rank her among the best of her generation.  I also highly
> > respect Rita Dove and Ted Kooser, for what it's worth, and applaud both
as
> > good laureate choices.
>
> Well, that's really unbelievable to me. Brooks is the best poet of her
> generation? Are you serious or engaging in your own rhetoric? Ted
> Kooser is a fine-- if bland-- poet who is matched by hundreds of
> others. Shouldn't the premier representative of poetry stand out from
> the crowd in some way?
>
> > Moreover, I don't understand Epstein's assertion that "poet laureateship
is
> > marked?-marred, is more precise?-.. . by the kiss of death of being an
> > official job..."  Marred in what way?  What's the harm, to poet or
public?
> > And isn't this point undercut by Epstein's next-breath assertion that
it's,
> > well, not really much of a job at all?  I don't see how he can argue on
the
> > one hand that the job is a levelling or corrupting force, and on the
other
> > hand that it has no force at all.  Why's he so threatened?
>
> It isn't about being threated *in this essay*. And Epstein has it
> exactly right-- because it is an official, political position in an
> aesthetic realm, it has very little hope of sucecss (you can't
> legislate liking poetry). Which, essentially, robs the "job" of its
> only duty. If the Laureate is just meant to be a money prize for a
> poet, then that's cool, but I personally would rather see such dollars
> going somewhere else.
>
> > And by the way, callilng what some Laureates have done in the post
> > "marketing" or "hucksterism" applies scorn to the issue, but doesn't
explain
> > where the harm lies.
>
> But where's the good? Or more importantly, why does it matter? Look,
> I'm in the minority in supporting Collins' selection as Laureate, and
> he and Pinsky were certainly the most active. And I recall no small
> amount of grief heaped upon selections on this very list. But did
> anything he or Pinsky did make *any* difference in "the world of
> poetry?" I'd have no problem with marketing if I thought it were
> possible to market, but it strikes me that marketing is almost exactly
> the wrong way to go. You don't market a love of art, you instill and
> inculcate it in much more subtle ways.
>
> > Well, I could go on, but that's more than enough for now.  I honestly
don't
> > care greatly what the Poet Laureate does, but I just don't see the harm
this
> > little bit of national promotion brings to the estate of poetry.  Or how
it
> > devalues or diverts attention from the real stuff in any significant
way.
>
> You exhibit a curious logic here. If it doesn't harm X it must be good
> for X, right? I am arguing-- and this is how I am reading Epstein--
> that the Laureateship isn't good for poetry. It is, in effect, a waste
> of time, money and intellectual space. I can't help but agree. It's a
> tiny, miserable token thrown at artists by the state to try to buy
> them off and show how "art is supported" when in fact it is being
> gutted at every turn where it counts.
>
> > Still, it's curious how heated these discussions frequently get.
Obviously
> > there are some hot buttons here.
>
> I'm not heated up except that I really hate it when I see a question
> asked (or ask one myself) about Piece A and I get all kinds of
> response about the author and other pieces in which I am-- at the
> moment-- not interested.
>
> > I strenuously disagree.  I believe that there is no golden age, and thus
no
> > falling-off from its fabled glories.  I further feel that some of the
most
> > interesting work of the past half century has been produced by poets who
> > fall under the multicultural banner, and the broadening definition of
what
> > good poetry can be has been mostly to the good.
>
> I agree that there is no golden age (if Gwendolyn Brooks is the best
> of her generation, then I double my agreement). I also agree that much
> of the interesting work has been multicultural. I just think an
> "elevation" (as it is still perceived) should be directed at oe of the
> the best, not one of the safest choices. Promoting mediocre poetry
> because it fits someone's idea of expanding the definition of who a
> good poet can be does more harm than good.
>
> c
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry




From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Sun Sep 19 16:44:48 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 12:44:48 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
In-Reply-To: <012501c49e78$c1161310$26d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
References: <6b279deb040918162062d10248@mail.gmail.com>
	<BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<6b279deb04091911182a320987@mail.gmail.com>
	<012501c49e78$c1161310$26d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <6b279deb04091913443ba4710c@mail.gmail.com>

I'm not against Kooser either. Seems like a nice fellow. I just think
he is by no stretch of the imagination the "best" poet working today
nor is the the most deserving recipient of a "lifetime achievement"
award. If the position of poet laureate is meant to just be a random
drawing from the hat, then that's fine... but there is some contention
tht it is otherwise. Given that and the lack of any effect on poetry--
positive or negative-- it's no wonder Epstein (and many others here, I
might note) find it so easy to pick on the position of Poet Laureate,
whether Epstein himself floats one's boat or not.

So let's imagine I cared enough to explain the Kooser to my child.
Daddy, the poet laureate must be the BEST poet in the country, right?
Well, no. Then he must be the most POPULAR. Well, no. But he must have
written a lot of GREAT poems, right? Well, not exactly. He must have
GRAND plans then to make poetry stronger and more vital (this is a
sophisticated child)? No. Then I'm sure that over his illustrious
career he has achieved MORE than pretty much all the others, right?
Well, no, and don't even ask me what other Poet Laureates have
achieved.

But it sure seems like good work if you can get it, like one of those
mafia construction jobs where you ge to be the "project manager"  :)

c


From mandolin at mac.com  Sun Sep 19 17:38:54 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 17:38:54 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
In-Reply-To: <6b279deb04091913443ba4710c@mail.gmail.com>
References: <6b279deb040918162062d10248@mail.gmail.com>
	<BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<6b279deb04091911182a320987@mail.gmail.com>
	<012501c49e78$c1161310$26d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<6b279deb04091913443ba4710c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4DF9EFDA-0A84-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>


On Sep 19, 2004, at 4:44 PM, Chris Lott wrote:

> I'm not against Kooser either. Seems like a nice fellow. I just think
> he is by no stretch of the imagination the "best" poet working today
> nor is the the most deserving recipient of a "lifetime achievement"
> award. If the position of poet laureate is meant to just be a random
> drawing from the hat, then that's fine... but there is some contention
> tht it is otherwise. Given that and the lack of any effect on poetry--
> positive or negative-- it's no wonder Epstein (and many others here, I
> might note) find it so easy to pick on the position of Poet Laureate,
> whether Epstein himself floats one's boat or not.
>
> So let's imagine I cared enough to explain the Kooser to my child.
> Daddy, the poet laureate must be the BEST poet in the country, right?
> Well, no. Then he must be the most POPULAR. Well, no. But he must have
> written a lot of GREAT poems, right? Well, not exactly. He must have
> GRAND plans then to make poetry stronger and more vital (this is a
> sophisticated child)? No. Then I'm sure that over his illustrious
> career he has achieved MORE than pretty much all the others, right?
> Well, no, and don't even ask me what other Poet Laureates have
> achieved.
>
> But it sure seems like good work if you can get it, like one of those
> mafia construction jobs where you ge to be the "project manager"  :)
>
> c
> ___________________________

Chris,

It's an honor, not a job. And since the appointment is normally for one 
year, there's no way that a different person could be appointed each 
term and all of those people be the "best" or the "most ambitious" or 
whatever when the appointment is made.  I, for one, am glad that our 
government chooses to honor poets in this way, and asks essentially 
nothiong  in return.

Michael



From mandolin at mac.com  Sun Sep 19 17:41:18 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 17:41:18 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Can't Count
Message-ID: <A38FBDBC-0A84-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>

I posted what I thought was a sonnet here  yesterday. Heh. 13 lines. 
Screwed up the rhyme and made line 8 both the end of the second 
quatrain and start of the third. They'll never make me laureate.

Michael with 80 hours of math.



From cc at opus0.com  Sun Sep 19 18:05:06 2004
From: cc at opus0.com (Crisman Cooley)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 15:05:06 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: Who Killed Poetry?  Again!
In-Reply-To: <200409191754.i8JHsgYD009728@wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Message-ID: <IFEJKAJEJBEOJGHBHOCHCEBADAAA.cc@opus0.com>

Read both this and the previous Epstein pieces, and must commend you David
for your reasoned critiques, both in prose and verse, of JE's from-the-hip
negativism.  I think JE has done nothing but confirm (needlessly) what
posterity worked out decades ago.  And he's avoiding posterity's current
(needed) work.  I especially appreciate your willingness to state poetry's
case by a positive example of what it does in _On the Reported Death of
Poetry_.

Cc

> From: David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu>
> Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
>
> As I've recently said on another list, Chris, I do disagree with (or would
> have to unpack the rhetoric of & heavily qualify any agreement I
> might have
> with) most if not all the items on your little list.
etc.

> > ON THE REPORTED DEATH OF POETRY
> >
> >      *. . . it was during the 1950's that poetry last had this religious
> > aura.*
> >             --Joseph Epstein, "Who Killed Poetry?"
> >
> >
> > Look, I've got a little gift
> > for you, Poetry<-bit
> > of seashell worn smooth
> > as a lip; and more to come,
> > lint on a windowsill,
> > sound of a woodthrush
> > at dusk, lawnmowers distant
> > as the music of the spheres. . . .
> >
> > Poetry, only you can tie
> > such bootlaces, only you
> > witness mudflakes shaken off
> > by the dog, snatch of Bach
> > fading under the announcer's
> > cheerful catastrophes.
> >
> > I bring you the swish
> > of a nightgown to the floor,
> > cool drift of cloud over
> > one grave, the moment when
> > a boy's liquid nattering
> > first coalesces into a sentence.
> >
> > I bring you valediction
> > and animal blurt, I commend
> > you to God in a whirlwind
> > and the squirrel-chitter rhythms
> > of Thelonious Monk:  *Epistrophy*,
> > *Sphere*, and *Ugly Beauty* above all.
> >
> > Poetry, you've died so many times,
> > each age preceded by a better,
> > giants of utterance walking
> > profligate earth.  You would think
> > we'd tire of the visionary funeral,
> > but here we come to the wake
> > in our shiny black suits, now
> > we loosen our ties and,
> > as the first fire of scotch
> > warms our throats, begin again
> > the old stories, fruit-heavy bough
> > and golden stranger at the door.



From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sun Sep 19 18:29:27 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 17:29:27 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
In-Reply-To: <6b279deb04091913443ba4710c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BD737277.B57F%grahamd@ripon.edu>

I'd guess that there are any number of criteria that could or have been
applied to picking suitable poets laureate.  I'm not aware that anyone
besides Epstein has been so silly as to say that we should always choose
"the best," even if there were some way to agree on such.  As Michael Snider
points out, that line of argument would pretty much lose all force soon as
you pick the *next* poet:  I mean, they can't all be best, can they?

As far as I can tell, the poets chosen have all been distinguished enough,
in the only ways that can be reasonably measured with contemporaries that
time has not yet sorted out into a canon:  they have been widely published,
honored with various prizes, prominently anthologized, and so forth.

One could debate the quality of Rita Dove's work, for example, and compare
her favorably or unfavorably with others, but one could hardly argue that
she was, at the time of her appointment, a mere nobody in terms of
reputation.  She'd won the Pulitzer Prize, among other indicators of her
status in the world of poetry.  Was she the best?  In a real sense, that's
not too meaningful a question, I think.

Likewise with Kooser.  He's a surprising choice mainly due to the
traditional coastal bias of such honors, and perhaps to his not being
primarily an academic.  He's not to everyone's taste, obviously, but neither
were Collins, Gluck, Pinsky, Dove and the others universally loved.  Again,
he's been around a long while, won some honors, and convinced at least some
intelligent and influential readers (Dana Gioia, most notably) that he is in
fact an excellent poet.  At the very least, it's not a slam-dunk to consider
him a mediocrity.  

The larger problem, of course, would be to find any common ground in the
poetry "community" as to who *are* the best poets.  This doesn't strike me
as a trivial objection to Epstein's sort of argument.  It's one of the
reasons I object to his habit of firm but vague dismissals of whole rafts of
poets.  He seems to *know* who's best, and who's not, but shouldn't he let
us in on that little secret in the course of making his arguments?

And in addition to the quality question there is the matter of the nature of
the choices.  He makes much of the supposed fact that poets laureate are
"safe" and mainstream poets, as in this passage:

"Heterodoxy is one of the things serious poetry is, or at least ought to be,
about. The poet laureate of the United States should also be the best poet
in the country; if he isn?t, then the job is meaningless."

The either/or fallacy at the end of that little flourish seems obvious
enough.  As for the matter of heterodoxy, I wouldn't particularly dispute
that the poets chosen so far have not been particular radicals (Williams
was, I guess), but I would first ask why mainstream is necessarily bad in
such a public post.  It's certainly not synonymous with mediocrity, in my
book.

Then I would dispute the implication in "safe," or at least want to see the
argument, if any, spelled out.

And does it follow that Epstein would have preferred a radical in the job?
I see no evidence of that.  He appreciates Ginsberg's candor but not his
poetry, clearly.  Who are Epstein's favorite contemporaries, anyway?  He's
always saying he loves poetry.  Well, we're back to the question of who the
best poets are, and are any of the members of Epstein's pantheon heterodox?
For him to make this argument without specifying a single great & heterodox
contemporary poet strikes me as just one of the many flaws in this essay and
others he's written.



====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================





From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Sun Sep 19 19:40:12 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 15:40:12 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
In-Reply-To: <4DF9EFDA-0A84-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>
References: <6b279deb040918162062d10248@mail.gmail.com>
	<BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<6b279deb04091911182a320987@mail.gmail.com>
	<012501c49e78$c1161310$26d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<6b279deb04091913443ba4710c@mail.gmail.com>
	<4DF9EFDA-0A84-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>
Message-ID: <6b279deb04091916404dea9649@mail.gmail.com>

> It's an honor, not a job. And since the appointment is normally for one
> year, there's no way that a different person could be appointed each
> term and all of those people be the "best" or the "most ambitious" or
> whatever when the appointment is made.  I, for one, am glad that our
> government chooses to honor poets in this way, and asks essentially
> nothiong  in return.

Which is of course why I have been careful to say 'one of the best.'
Is it really news that the Poet Laureate is expected to be a high
quality poet? Is it unreasonable to think that if you asked people to,
with no hint of the reason, list their own top 20 poets living and
working in the US today, that the peson nominated for Laureate might
appear on many-- if not most-- of the lists?

Honor, job, whatever (I argued right here on this forum that it wasn't
a job, but I get to play devil's advocate too, sometimes)-- both have
motivations and criteria and I'm trying hard to discern what they
might be when a Ted Kooser gets selected.

Not because he's a bad man or a bad poet, but because he isn't in the
top echelon.

c


From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Sun Sep 19 20:06:14 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 16:06:14 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
In-Reply-To: <BD737277.B57F%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <6b279deb04091913443ba4710c@mail.gmail.com>
	<BD737277.B57F%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <6b279deb04091917064a098d55@mail.gmail.com>

"The larger problem, of course, would be to find any common ground in the
poetry "community" as to who *are* the best poets.  This doesn't strike me
as a trivial objection to Epstein's sort of argument."

But it *is* a trivial argument in general if it seems clear to you
that Kooser is not amongst the best, would not likely be named by very
many if asked to name a group of the best, and that the selection
wasn't made because he was thought to be the best. And it remains a
trivial objection when we consider that despite not being able to
pinpoint "the best" we operate with an injunction that doing our own
best to do so is good enough, whether it be to choose the best
manuscript, hand out a prize, or recognize with an honor. So that "we
can't know the best" has hardly stopped any of us before.

But it isn't about being the best. If someone's honestly telling me
that in making their group of the best 10 or 20 poets in the United
States, that Kooser would be on that list, then OK, I'll accept that
out of honor. But I have reason to suspect that, outside of
revisionism, it's not likely to happen often. Strangely, on this list
which talks so much about poetry, before his nomination Kooser was
involved in exactly two threads in three years, one of those threads
being about Kooser's stance about fiction/nonfiction, not about his
poetry at all.

While I haven't read all of Kooser's work, I have spent some time now
reading a large chunk of it and he strikes me as an adequate, if
unexciting poet. His poetry has never struck me as especially
intersting. If the Laureateship is an honor, is it an honor akin to a
lifetime service award, a postal award for most dedicated employee, or
something else? And what criteria does he fit, exactly, that makes him
any different from about 500 other poets?

An argument about Kooser isn't as interesting as hearing what YOU
would look for in a Laureate and who would you name?

Rae Armantrout comes to mind for me.

c


From grahamd at ripon.edu  Sun Sep 19 20:57:20 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 19:57:20 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet
In-Reply-To: <6b279deb04091917064a098d55@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BD739520.B588%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Making lists of the Top 10 or Top 20 or even Top 40 current poets seems like
a fool's errand to me, for reasons I've already touched on.

But in terms of Kooser, I do think a case can be made that he's a superb
poet, and even "heterodox" in some ways unrecognized by Joseph Epstein.

In any event, if anyone would like to see a lively argument for Kooser's
significance, I suggest a look at Dana Gioia's essay, "The Anonymity of the
Regional Poet," collected in *Can Poetry Matter?*.  A lengthy excerpt is
online, too:

http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ekooser.htm

I pretty much agree with Gioia about Kooser, for whatever that's worth.

I've certainly noticed a lot of negative opinions since his appointment as
Laureate; clearly his brand of small understated lyric is not everyone's cup
of tea at all.  And no, he's not been anywhere near as famous as someone
like Gluck, at least within elite po-biz circles.  I was a little surprised,
even so, to see how little he seemed to be known among many dogged poetry
readers.  On another list a genuinely famous poet/critic made some negative
remarks after Kooser was nominated, then took them back partly after sitting
down to read his work more deeply.

And here I thought Dana Gioia had made Kooser famous way back when!

But even these matters of fame and reputation aren't always so simple to
sort out.  For instance, I imagine it's possible that more Americans have
heard Kooser read on Garrison Keillor's radio spot than have read Gluck in
*The New Yorker*.  

As far as my own taste is concerned he's the equal, in terms of quality, of
many past Laureates.

I don't think the nation *needs* a Poet Laureate, particularly, but I'm glad
enough to have one.  And even gladder when some of nominees, like Billy
Collins or Rita Dove, choose to employ this honorary post to do some small
good.  No harm no foul, so I just don't see what someone like Epstein gets
so exercised about.  Since the post is privately funded, one can't even trot
out that old warhorse about wasting tax dollars, either.

If I were selecting Laureates, they would all be chosen from the Top 500
Poets of Today, according to a secret algorithm I've devised, available to
anyone who asks for the low low price of $35,000.


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Sun Sep 19 21:28:33 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 17:28:33 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet
In-Reply-To: <BD739520.B588%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <6b279deb04091917064a098d55@mail.gmail.com>
	<BD739520.B588%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <6b279deb0409191828ae586fe@mail.gmail.com>

Bringing Gioia out to support Kooser, when Dana G has been savaged so
thoroughly on this list, seems a bit quixotic. As does making a list
of the best poets, but I think we do it subconsciously all the time...
which is why I asked about who people here would nominate for
Laureate, not what their lists would be. I'd be surprised if there
were *anyone* who would have picked Kooser if they'd been asked to
submit a name, which strikes me as the hallmark of either a very poor
or a very inspired selection. Can't say the same about Collins,
Pinsky, Hass, or Gluck, for instance.

Since "promoting poetry' in general is at least as much of a fool's
game as making lists of the top 20, it wouldn't hurt to see the
position "used" in some more productive way. Maybe in this case it has
been and I just don't like it :)

c


From tad at opus40.org  Sun Sep 19 21:54:57 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 21:54:57 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet
References: <6b279deb04091917064a098d55@mail.gmail.com><BD739520.B588%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<6b279deb0409191828ae586fe@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <000c01c49eb4$d541fcf0$6601a8c0@MoleHQ>

I can promote poetry in general, according to a secret formula I've 
developed, which is available for a mere $25,000.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Lott" <Chris.Lott at gmail.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp,Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 9:28 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet


> Bringing Gioia out to support Kooser, when Dana G has been savaged so
> thoroughly on this list, seems a bit quixotic. As does making a list
> of the best poets, but I think we do it subconsciously all the time...
> which is why I asked about who people here would nominate for
> Laureate, not what their lists would be. I'd be surprised if there
> were *anyone* who would have picked Kooser if they'd been asked to
> submit a name, which strikes me as the hallmark of either a very poor
> or a very inspired selection. Can't say the same about Collins,
> Pinsky, Hass, or Gluck, for instance.
>
> Since "promoting poetry' in general is at least as much of a fool's
> game as making lists of the top 20, it wouldn't hurt to see the
> position "used" in some more productive way. Maybe in this case it has
> been and I just don't like it :)
>
> c
> _______________________________________________
> 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 Sep 19 23:35:46 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 23:35:46 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet
Message-ID: <1e2.2b1402a1.2e7faa12@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/19/2004 7:57:24 PM Central Daylight Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes: 
> 
> Making lists of the Top 10 or Top 20 or even Top 40 current poets seems like
> a fool's errand to me, for reasons I've already touched on.
> 
> But in terms of Kooser, I do think a case can be made that he's a superb
> poet, and even "heterodox" in some ways unrecognized by Joseph Epstein.
> 
> In any event, if anyone would like to see a lively argument for Kooser's
> significance, I suggest a look at Dana Gioia's essay, "The Anonymity of the
> Regional Poet," collected in *Can Poetry Matter?*.  A lengthy excerpt is
> online, too:
> 
> http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ekooser.htm
> 
> I pretty much agree with Gioia about Kooser, for whatever that's worth.
> 
> I've certainly noticed a lot of negative opinions since his appointment as
> Laureate; clearly his brand of small understated lyric is not everyone's cup
> of tea at all.  And no, he's not been anywhere near as famous as someone
> like Gluck, at least within elite po-biz circles.  I was a little surprised,
> even so, to see how little he seemed to be known among many dogged poetry
> readers.  On another list a genuinely famous poet/critic made some negative
> remarks after Kooser was nominated, then took them back partly after sitting
> down to read his work more deeply.
> 
> And here I thought Dana Gioia had made Kooser famous way back when!
> 
> But even these matters of fame and reputation aren't always so simple to
> sort out.  For instance, I imagine it's possible that more Americans have
> heard Kooser read on Garrison Keillor's radio spot than have read Gluck in
> *The New Yorker*.  
> 
> As far as my own taste is concerned he's the equal, in terms of quality, of
> many past Laureates.
> 
> I don't think the nation *needs* a Poet Laureate, particularly, but I'm glad
> enough to have one.  And even gladder when some of nominees, like Billy
> Collins or Rita Dove, choose to employ this honorary post to do some small
> good.  No harm no foul, so I just don't see what someone like Epstein gets
> so exercised about.  Since the post is privately funded, one can't even trot
> out that old warhorse about wasting tax dollars, either.
> 
> If I were selecting Laureates, they would all be chosen from the Top 500
> Poets of Today, according to a secret algorithm I've devised, available to
> anyone who asks for the low low price of $35,000.
> 
I agree with this.  Kooser was a fine choice, and the Poet Laureate position 
does credit, in some obscure way, to the best aspirations of our country--and, 
god knows, there's precious little of that these days.  I think that anyone 
who accepts this post (Donald Justice didn't, for health reasons) deserves our 
attention, even if we don't personally care for his or her poetry.  I have no 
doubt that Jefferson, J. Q. Adams, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, and even, God save 
the mark, Bill Clinton, all of whom had an abiding respect for poetry, would 
likewise applaud the honor.  I suspect that a lot of the carping about Kooser 
has to do with his appointment under Bush (but no one seemed to carp about Gluck 
in this way).
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From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Mon Sep 20 00:19:59 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 20:19:59 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet
In-Reply-To: <1e2.2b1402a1.2e7faa12@cs.com>
References: <1e2.2b1402a1.2e7faa12@cs.com>
Message-ID: <6b279deb040919211934db4fa0@mail.gmail.com>

Actually, Gluck was complained about as well, both for her "flat"
language and her direct statements that she wasn't going to be
promoting poetry in the way Collins and others had. Oh, and the
inevitable "she's too mainstream" comments. The list archives are a
treasure :)

I doubt Bush being in office has much to do with the commentary
because I doubt that Bush or anyone who really matters when it comes
to Administration policy cares enough to influence the selection...

c


From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep 20 00:26:23 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 06:26:23 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
References: <6b279deb040918162062d10248@mail.gmail.com><BD732115.B549%grahamd@ripon.edu><6b279deb04091911182a320987@mail.gmail.com><012501c49e78$c1161310$26d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<6b279deb04091913443ba4710c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <007801c49ec9$fd4243d0$37a93452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

A personal comment, with that mafia hint you brought me back home, any
conversation about anything ends in the same way...

And yes, I love Rae Armantrout, an excellent choice.
Good morning from here,
Anny


From: "Chris Lott" <Chris.Lott at gmail.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp,Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 10:44 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!


> I'm not against Kooser either. Seems like a nice fellow. I just think
> he is by no stretch of the imagination the "best" poet working today
> nor is the the most deserving recipient of a "lifetime achievement"
> award. If the position of poet laureate is meant to just be a random
> drawing from the hat, then that's fine... but there is some contention
> tht it is otherwise. Given that and the lack of any effect on poetry--
> positive or negative-- it's no wonder Epstein (and many others here, I
> might note) find it so easy to pick on the position of Poet Laureate,
> whether Epstein himself floats one's boat or not.
>
> So let's imagine I cared enough to explain the Kooser to my child.
> Daddy, the poet laureate must be the BEST poet in the country, right?
> Well, no. Then he must be the most POPULAR. Well, no. But he must have
> written a lot of GREAT poems, right? Well, not exactly. He must have
> GRAND plans then to make poetry stronger and more vital (this is a
> sophisticated child)? No. Then I'm sure that over his illustrious
> career he has achieved MORE than pretty much all the others, right?
> Well, no, and don't even ask me what other Poet Laureates have
> achieved.
>
> But it sure seems like good work if you can get it, like one of those
> mafia construction jobs where you ge to be the "project manager"  :)
>
> c
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep 20 00:30:06 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 06:30:06 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet
References: <1e2.2b1402a1.2e7faa12@cs.com>
	<6b279deb040919211934db4fa0@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <008301c49eca$8298a240$37a93452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

And here is another woman poet I think could deserve some good recognition:
Beverly Matherne:
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=116

Maybe in the future, hopefully, Anny


From: "Chris Lott" <Chris.Lott at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2004 6:19 AM


> Actually, Gluck was complained about as well, both for her "flat"
> language and her direct statements that she wasn't going to be
> promoting poetry in the way Collins and others had. Oh, and the
> inevitable "she's too mainstream" comments. The list archives are a
> treasure :)
>
> I doubt Bush being in office has much to do with the commentary
> because I doubt that Bush or anyone who really matters when it comes
> to Administration policy cares enough to influence the selection...
>
> c
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Mon Sep 20 05:02:22 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 10:02:22 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet
In-Reply-To: <1e2.2b1402a1.2e7faa12@cs.com>
References: <1e2.2b1402a1.2e7faa12@cs.com>
Message-ID: <1095670942.414e9c9e0c1f0@webmail.ukonline.net>

 I suspect that a lot of the carping about Kooser
> 
> has to do with his appointment under Bush (but no one seemed to carp about
> Gluck 
> in this way).
> 


Well, of course it did, because that's much more interesting than saying that 
Kooser just happened to be next on the list and that his appointment meant 
nothing. (And obviously it doesn't mean nothing.) And besides, a case could be 
made for Kooser (in an honourable way) representing values dear to the 
Republican heartland; if Rae Armantrout (for instance) had been the next name 
on the list, we couldn't have pursued the Bush line. 

But there's something depressing about the forced diversity of a list, like a 
committee trying to balance conflicting interests and thinking that it's time 
the Olympics was back on the Pacific rim. 

Epstein's particular objection, i.e. the laureate system, has no substance and 
is just journalistic fun. The substance of his piece concerns the seriousness 
of the art and a certain unease that we all must feel about the system of 
promotions, prizes, grants and sinecures that surround the poetry world. The 
cause of that unease deserves more attention - I venture the idea that it is 
to do with something importantly private and subjective in the art itself. 
Other arts such as sculpture, art music, and, above all, architecture are 
absolutely dependent on a system of prizes. Poetry clearly is not.   




----------------------------------------------
This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net


From ron.silliman at verizon.net  Mon Sep 20 07:49:46 2004
From: ron.silliman at verizon.net (Ron)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 07:49:46 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Silliman's Damp Blog
Message-ID: <000001c49f07$ee0f15d0$6501a8c0@Dell>

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

RECENT TOPICS:

60 hours in New York

Tom Pickard's Dark Months of May

The Elder Poem -
Robert Duncan's concept of the late epic

The Day Book as Ur-Blog:
Robert Duncan's plotless prose

Forthcoming readings & talks by Ron Silliman:
NYC, Philly, Lawrence, KS & SF
(& that's just the next three weeks)

"Pieces of the past arise out of the rubble."

Learning about trade presses the hard way

Meeting Robert Duncan

What exists & what is available
in Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book

In search of Robert Hogg

Philadelphia Progressive Poetry Calendar

Bill Knott's Short Poems --
short poems . not!

The Opening of Field --
Robert Duncan's major themes

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/




From halvard at gmail.com  Mon Sep 20 09:23:04 2004
From: halvard at gmail.com (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 09:23:04 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Can't Count
In-Reply-To: <A38FBDBC-0A84-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>
References: <A38FBDBC-0A84-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>
Message-ID: <f160a12104092006231553d4c5@mail.gmail.com>

> I posted what I thought was a sonnet here  yesterday. Heh. 13 lines.
> Screwed up the rhyme and made line 8 both the end of the second
> quatrain and start of the third. They'll never make me laureate.
> 
> Michael with 80 hours of math.

Oh, I think we can forgive you for that, Michael. Many
poets over the years have screwed up by writing them
in English instead of Italian as God intended.

-- 
Hal        "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid,
              but most stupid people are conservatives."
                                --John Stuart Mill
             
Halvard Johnson
halvard at gmail.com
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard  <updated 9/8/04


From marcus at designerglass.com  Mon Sep 20 09:35:04 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 09:35:04 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Can't Count
In-Reply-To: <f160a12104092006231553d4c5@mail.gmail.com>
References: <A38FBDBC-0A84-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>
Message-ID: <414EA448.26787.128F5D@localhost>

On 20 Sep 2004 at 9:23, Halvard Johnson wrote:
>        "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid,
>         but most stupid people are conservatives."
>                                 --John Stuart Mill

Every Fool

While I admit your general rule
That each conservative's a fool,
In politics that's just hors d'oeuvreative:
For every fool is not conservative.

Marcus






From grahamd at ripon.edu  Mon Sep 20 09:47:49 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 08:47:49 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser poem
Message-ID: <BD7449B5.B5BE%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Walking to Work

Today, it's the obsidian
ice on the sidewalk
with its milk white bubbles
popping under my shoes
that pleases me, and upon it
a lump of old snow
with a trail like a comet,
that somebody, 
probably falling in love,
has kicked
all the way to the corner.

-- Ted Kooser.  *Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems* University of
Pittsburgh Press. 


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Mon Sep 20 10:19:36 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 06:19:36 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser poem
In-Reply-To: <BD7449B5.B5BE%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <BD7449B5.B5BE%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <6b279deb0409200719a617952@mail.gmail.com>

I like this. I don't know why discussion of Kooser rubs me the wrong
way. His poetry generally doesn't. In fact, it's right up my alley in
terms of style and length (I've always been a proponent of the short
form). I'm a sucker for interjections like "probably falling in love"
in this poem, though the poem will not satisfy many.

Perhaps it's the whole "regional poet" thing and a deep-seated
antipathy to those who parlay their physical environs into literary
currency. It drives me crazy watching mediocre writers receive acclaim
because of where they live and being hoisted upon the sloped-shoulders
of their rural brethren while better writers are ignored or even
actively discouraged. And I'm just talking about Alaska here... which
is one of the reasons why I rarely write anything that is tied to this
state or the North/Arctic, at least not obviously.

At the same time that these yahoos are being over-promoted, I've seen
too many good writers who can't transcend the label of "regional
writer" even if their only real commonality with the region is that
they happen to live there. I should know better than to let it bother
me. It's just rare that someone finds the sweet spot, being both a
regional and a relevant writer at the same time...

c


From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Mon Sep 20 10:39:33 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 07:39:33 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser poem 
In-Reply-To: <6b279deb0409200719a617952@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20040920143933.16024.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>

Indeed.

I remember the first time I heard the term "regional
poet" used derisively.  In a graduate class on
literary theory, someone brought up Robert Frost
during a discussion (on what, I don't know).  One of
my peers in the room dismissed Frost as "that regional
New England guy," or something of the sort.

A question:  does "regional" mean only "rural?"  What
about a poet like Frank O'Hara, whose work clearly
identifies him as a New York-based poet.  Is he a
regional poet?

Jeff Newberry

--- Chris Lott <Chris.Lott at gmail.com> wrote:

> I like this. I don't know why discussion of Kooser
> rubs me the wrong
> way. His poetry generally doesn't. In fact, it's
> right up my alley in
> terms of style and length (I've always been a
> proponent of the short
> form). I'm a sucker for interjections like "probably
> falling in love"
> in this poem, though the poem will not satisfy many.
> 
> Perhaps it's the whole "regional poet" thing and a
> deep-seated
> antipathy to those who parlay their physical
> environs into literary
> currency. It drives me crazy watching mediocre
> writers receive acclaim
> because of where they live and being hoisted upon
> the sloped-shoulders
> of their rural brethren while better writers are
> ignored or even
> actively discouraged. And I'm just talking about
> Alaska here... which
> is one of the reasons why I rarely write anything
> that is tied to this
> state or the North/Arctic, at least not obviously.
> 
> At the same time that these yahoos are being
> over-promoted, I've seen
> too many good writers who can't transcend the label
> of "regional
> writer" even if their only real commonality with the
> region is that
> they happen to live there. I should know better than
> to let it bother
> me. It's just rare that someone finds the sweet
> spot, being both a
> regional and a relevant writer at the same time...
> 
> c
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Mon Sep 20 10:49:17 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 09:49:17 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
Message-ID: <s14ea7bc.027@mail.highland.edu>

David Graham said,

"For him (Epstein) to make this argument without specifying a single
great & heterodox contemporary poet strikes me as just one of the many
flaws in this essay and others he's written."

Maybe so many evident choices are available from the "heterodox"
tradition that Epstein didn't feel the need? Just for more or less
random starters (and keeping in mind that the "heterodox" has its own
variety of traditions, obviously), how about Robert Creeley, John
Ashbery, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Robert Kelly, Susan Howe,
Jerome Rothenberg, Gary Snyder, Michael Palmer, Anne Waldman, Charles
Bernstein, C.D. Wright, well, one could go on for a long time. Maybe
most of these poets were asked and refused, I don't know. But probably
not. 

The interesting matter about the position, it seems to me, is not its
degree of practical "utility," but rather how Laureates are repeatedly
chosen from what is a clearly restricted slice of the American poetic
spectrum, i.e., a decidedly conservative and traditional one. What
institutional reasons would account for such bias? And what does this
suggest to us about the ideological and power arrangements operating
inside the art, if you'll forgive those terms? I mean, isn't it
interesting that the most "natural-sounding," prosaic poets are also
assumed to be the most "natural" choices, to the point where deeply
sophisticated practitioners in the field (some of whom I mention above)
hardly even enter the converstation as possibilites? 

All this is old stuff, of course. David Graham's view that the yearly
position shouldn't reflect the rich and contentious variety of the art
(he said as much when he suggested that the Laureate should best be
"populist" in her or his approach), is a very prevalent one, obviously.
But matters of representational fairness aside, wouldn't poetry and the
public be well served if *every now and then* the Laureate were chosen
to reflect the richness of linguistic and conceptual possibility current
American poetry affords?

Kent


From Thom424 at aol.com  Mon Sep 20 10:56:37 2004
From: Thom424 at aol.com (Thom424 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 10:56:37 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser poem & regionalism
Message-ID: <1ac.2975e9bf.2e8049a5@aol.com>

i wonder if it would be more helpful/useful to think about "regionalism" as a 
descriptor, the way a writer works with his or her materials (landscape, 
linguistic idioms, regional iconography), instead of thinking about regionalism as 
a term of valuation (regional writers = minor or less than, which usually 
seems to be the way it is defined)?

thom tammaro
moorhead, mn
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From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Mon Sep 20 11:09:03 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:09:03 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] (no subject)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409071030090.28264@shell2.oit.umass.edu>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com> <413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>
	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>
	<413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com> <413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com>
	<1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
	<413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com>
	<Pine.GSO.4.55.0409071030090.28264@shell2.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <1095692943.414ef28f88e91@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>

I have a poem today in Worm 31, thanks to the call for submissions from this
listserv.  Given that I am a little, um, challenged as far as internet stuff, I
am not sure how anybody gets that current issue of the ezine, since it hasn't
been archived yet, and I got it on my email.  Anyhow, I am sure, you guys know
about how to do this...

cheers, K.


From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Mon Sep 20 11:21:52 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:21:52 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser poem 
Message-ID: <fd.1b7359d.2e804f90@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/20/2004 9:40:04 AM Central Daylight Time, 
jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com writes: 
> 
> A question:  does "regional" mean only "rural?"  What
> about a poet like Frank O'Hara, whose work clearly
> identifies him as a New York-based poet.  Is he a
> regional poet?
> 
> Jeff Newberry

It's kind of like calling Grace Paley a "local colorist."
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From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Mon Sep 20 11:32:46 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 10:32:46 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A379@mail.ripon.edu>

Coupla thoughts.  I suspect that the reason Epstein didn't specify his
favorite heterodox contemporary poets is that, well, he can't.  Either he
doesn't know contemporary poetry very well (an impression reinforced by his
example-free essays), or else (also quite possible) he just doesn't like
much of it.  His comments on Ginsberg & multiculturalism, etc., might
suggest a certain bias toward the conventional proprieties, seems to me.  

I would never say that the Po-Lariat shouldn't "reflect the rich and
contentious variety of the art," and if I seemed to imply so, shame on me.
Personally I'd be delighted to see Robert Creeley as Laureate, or Snyder, or
others on Kent's list.  My own list would also include some mavericks who
seldom get much noticed by the experimental wing *or* the mainstream
phalanx.  But that's just me.  In any case, it's just not gonna happen, as
Charles Bernstein isn't going to take up the post in my lifetime, short of a
miracle.

Of course, Kooser never dreamed it would go to a midwestern "regional" poet,
either, I suppose.

I just don't think that it's all that *shocking* or even harmful for such an
official posting to go, as it most often does, to mainstream poets.  The
mainstream is, after all, where most poets are situated, demographically
speaking.  Not to mention most common readers of poetry, if such beasts
still exist.  It's only a "restricted" slice of the American pie by way of
some tortured definitional manipulations.

	OK, time to start lobbying for future Lariats.  I say let's go with
Lucille Clifton to start.  

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	Kent Johnson
> Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> Sent: 	Monday, September 20, 2004 9:49 AM
> To: 	new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> Subject: 	[New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
> 
> David Graham said,
> 
> "For him (Epstein) to make this argument without specifying a single
> great & heterodox contemporary poet strikes me as just one of the many
> flaws in this essay and others he's written."
> 
> Maybe so many evident choices are available from the "heterodox"
> tradition that Epstein didn't feel the need? Just for more or less
> random starters (and keeping in mind that the "heterodox" has its own
> variety of traditions, obviously), how about Robert Creeley, John
> Ashbery, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Robert Kelly, Susan Howe,
> Jerome Rothenberg, Gary Snyder, Michael Palmer, Anne Waldman, Charles
> Bernstein, C.D. Wright, well, one could go on for a long time. Maybe
> most of these poets were asked and refused, I don't know. But probably
> not. 
> 
> The interesting matter about the position, it seems to me, is not its
> degree of practical "utility," but rather how Laureates are repeatedly
> chosen from what is a clearly restricted slice of the American poetic
> spectrum, i.e., a decidedly conservative and traditional one. What
> institutional reasons would account for such bias? And what does this
> suggest to us about the ideological and power arrangements operating
> inside the art, if you'll forgive those terms? I mean, isn't it
> interesting that the most "natural-sounding," prosaic poets are also
> assumed to be the most "natural" choices, to the point where deeply
> sophisticated practitioners in the field (some of whom I mention above)
> hardly even enter the converstation as possibilites? 
> 
> All this is old stuff, of course. David Graham's view that the yearly
> position shouldn't reflect the rich and contentious variety of the art
> (he said as much when he suggested that the Laureate should best be
> "populist" in her or his approach), is a very prevalent one, obviously.
> But matters of representational fairness aside, wouldn't poetry and the
> public be well served if *every now and then* the Laureate were chosen
> to reflect the richness of linguistic and conceptual possibility current
> American poetry affords?
> 
> Kent
> 


From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Mon Sep 20 11:38:41 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:38:41 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
Message-ID: <13f.1c628d3.2e805381@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/20/2004 10:33:20 AM Central Daylight Time, 
GrahamD at ripon.edu writes: 
> Coupla thoughts.  I suspect that the reason Epstein didn't specify his
> favorite heterodox contemporary poets is that, well, he can't.  Either he
> doesn't know contemporary poetry very well (an impression reinforced by his
> example-free essays), or else (also quite possible) he just doesn't like
> much of it.  His comments on Ginsberg &multiculturalism, etc., might
> suggest a certain bias toward the conventional proprieties, seems to me.  

He must know a few since he edited The American Scholar all those years.
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From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Mon Sep 20 11:43:18 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 10:43:18 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A37A@mail.ripon.edu>

> ----------
> From: 	Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
> <<File: ATT2815866.txt>>
> In a message dated 9/20/2004 10:33:20 AM Central Daylight Time,
> GrahamD at ripon.edu writes: 
> 
> 
> 	Coupla thoughts.  I suspect that the reason Epstein didn't specify
> his
> 	favorite heterodox contemporary poets is that, well, he can't.
> Either he
> 	doesn't know contemporary poetry very well (an impression reinforced
> by his
> 	example-free essays), or else (also quite possible) he just doesn't
> like
> 	much of it.  His comments on Ginsberg &multiculturalism, etc., might
> 	suggest a certain bias toward the conventional proprieties, seems to
> me.  
> 
> 
> 
> He must know a few since he edited The American Scholar all those years.
===============

Shoulda said he doesn't know or like the "heterodox" wing.  How many times
did Ginsberg or Waldman or Silliman appear in *The American Scholar*?


============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================






From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Mon Sep 20 11:53:11 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 10:53:11 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Regionalism & Identifying Poets
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A37B@mail.ripon.edu>

A poem from one of my favorite "regionalists."

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul'
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel---
'Here is the march along these iron stones'
That was the year of the Munich bother.  Which
Was more important?  I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind
He said:  I made the Iliad from such
A local row.  Gods make their own importance.

	---Patrick Kavanagh
-------------------------

I read a good book some years ago called *Identifying Poets:  Self &
Territory in 20th Century Poetry*.  
By Robert Crawford.  I like the term "identifying poet" more than
"regionalist," since it puts the emphasis not on the way place limits a
poet, but on the ways poets construct their own "territories," which
includes but is not limited to place.  


============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	Thom424 at aol.com
> Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> Sent: 	Monday, September 20, 2004 9:56 AM
> To: 	new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> Subject: 	Re: [New-Poetry] Kooser poem & regionalism
> 
> <<File: ATT2815464.txt>>
> i wonder if it would be more helpful/useful to think about "regionalism"
> as a descriptor, the way a writer works with his or her materials
> (landscape, linguistic idioms, regional iconography), instead of thinking
> about regionalism as a term of valuation (regional writers = minor or less
> than, which usually seems to be the way it is defined)?
> 
> thom tammaro
> moorhead, mn
> 


From hruggier at localnet.com  Mon Sep 20 12:34:16 2004
From: hruggier at localnet.com (Helen Ruggieri)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 12:34:16 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet
References: <1e2.2b1402a1.2e7faa12@cs.com>
	<6b279deb040919211934db4fa0@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <004f01c49f2f$acd7a730$cd099942@Helen>

Do you think Kooser will have to write a poem for the inauguration before he
gets paid? Isn't that one of the duities of a laureate?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Lott" <Chris.Lott at gmail.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp,Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2004 12:19 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Kooser, Top Poet


> Actually, Gluck was complained about as well, both for her "flat"
> language and her direct statements that she wasn't going to be
> promoting poetry in the way Collins and others had. Oh, and the
> inevitable "she's too mainstream" comments. The list archives are a
> treasure :)
>
> I doubt Bush being in office has much to do with the commentary
> because I doubt that Bush or anyone who really matters when it comes
> to Administration policy cares enough to influence the selection...
>
> c
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>




From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Mon Sep 20 13:54:34 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 12:54:34 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
Message-ID: <s14ed319.020@mail.highland.edu>

David,

I certainly don't think it's "shocking" either that the post
consistently goes to representatives of more readily digestible, prosaic
kinds of poetry. But this imbalance is not merely a "natural" thing, nor
(as a number of other countries show, where poetic innovation enjoys
considerable popularity and is honored) absolutely inevitable-- it's
also very much a matter of dynamics with institutional and ideological
sources, ones which can be questioned and challenged. To say, regarding
Charles Bernstein (who, by the way, has become quite "mainstream" in
important ways!), that his becoming Laureate is "just not gonna happen
in my lifetime...short of a miracle," may be true, but it's hardly a
reason for sitting back and accepting the same old-same old predictable
appointments. Controversy and polemic are the plumbing to the waterworks
of poetic development, and poets serve poetry by upping the pressures of
discussion and debate.

We've both mentioned Robert Creeley, an obvious choice for the Laureate
postition, though perhaps he'd never accept it. Could I ask if anyone on
this list really believes that Billy Collins or Ted Kooser, bless them,
are half as vital to the history of American poetry as is Robert
Creeley? (the latter who provoked, incidentally, such hilarious outrage
from "official" quarters with his refreshingly catholic selections for
the Best of American Poetry a couple years back...)

By the way, David, I think your statement about the "mainstream" being
"where most poets are situated" is not as evident as you seem to have
it. Things have changed substantially in the demographics, as you put
it, of American poetry over the past fifteen or so years, to the point
where "experimentalist" approaches have come to be quite dominant within
the upper-tier creative writing programs, and most journals of
seriousness and ambition today generously feature--when they don't
openly promote--such work. It's been pretty clear for some time, in
fact, that the kind of soft-surrealist narrative that was once the
dominant mode is quickly fading under the spreading influence of
"post-avant," and derivative quasi-Language approaches. This is how a
great slice of sophisticated younger poets want to write these days. Not
many of them want to write like Ted Kooser or Dana Gioia!

So I would propose that your statement about the Collins/Kooser/Prairie
Home Companion "mainstream" being much more than just one slice of the
spectrum is not so obvious as it might seem. 

Kent

*

David Graham said:

Coupla thoughts.  I suspect that the reason Epstein didn't specify his
favorite heterodox contemporary poets is that, well, he can't.  Either
he
doesn't know contemporary poetry very well (an impression reinforced by
his
example-free essays), or else (also quite possible) he just doesn't
like
much of it.  His comments on Ginsberg & multiculturalism, etc., might
suggest a certain bias toward the conventional proprieties, seems to
me.  

I would never say that the Po-Lariat shouldn't "reflect the rich and
contentious variety of the art," and if I seemed to imply so, shame on
me.
Personally I'd be delighted to see Robert Creeley as Laureate, or
Snyder, or
others on Kent's list.  My own list would also include some mavericks
who
seldom get much noticed by the experimental wing *or* the mainstream
phalanx.  But that's just me.  In any case, it's just not gonna happen,
as
Charles Bernstein isn't going to take up the post in my lifetime, short
of a
miracle.

Of course, Kooser never dreamed it would go to a midwestern "regional"
poet,
either, I suppose.

I just don't think that it's all that *shocking* or even harmful for
such an
official posting to go, as it most often does, to mainstream poets. 
The
mainstream is, after all, where most poets are situated,
demographically
speaking.  Not to mention most common readers of poetry, if such
beasts
still exist.  It's only a "restricted" slice of the American pie by way
of
some tortured definitional manipulations.

	OK, time to start lobbying for future Lariats.  I say let's go
with
Lucille Clifton to start.  



From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep 20 14:23:09 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 20:23:09 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] (no subject)
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily><413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com><413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com><000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER><413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com>
	<413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com><1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu><413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com><Pine.GSO.4.55.0409071030090.28264@shell2.oit.umass.edu>
	<1095692943.414ef28f88e91@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <003f01c49f3e$e288c760$c2ad3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Hi Jane,

Worm 31 is not online yet, maybe in a few days, just click here:
http://www.villarana.freeserve.co.uk/wormhome.htm

Take care, Anny

From: "Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe" <jkok at hfa.umass.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2004 5:09 PM


> I have a poem today in Worm 31, thanks to the call for submissions from
this
> listserv.  Given that I am a little, um, challenged as far as internet
stuff, I
> am not sure how anybody gets that current issue of the ezine, since it
hasn't
> been archived yet, and I got it on my email.  Anyhow, I am sure, you guys
know
> about how to do this...
>
> cheers, K.
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep 20 14:29:46 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 20:29:46 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A379@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <004a01c49f3f$ce7756a0$c2ad3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Opened up the first link and here it is (the mississippi), I would give the
chair of Lariat to all those who wrote of the Mississippi:

the mississippi river empties into the gulf

and the gulf enters the sea and so forth,
none of them emptying anything,
all of them carrying yesterday
forever on their white tipped backs,
all of them dragging forward tomorrow.
it is the great circulation
of the earth's body, like the blood
of the gods, this river in which the past
is always flowing. every water
is the same water coming round.
everyday someone is standing on the edge
of this river, staring into time,
whispering mistakenly:
only here. only now.



Lucille Clifton
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/clifton/onlinepoems.htm

From: "Graham, David" <GrahamD at ripon.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2004 5:32 PM


> Coupla thoughts.  I suspect that the reason Epstein didn't specify his
> favorite heterodox contemporary poets is that, well, he can't.  Either he
> doesn't know contemporary poetry very well (an impression reinforced by
his
> example-free essays), or else (also quite possible) he just doesn't like
> much of it.  His comments on Ginsberg & multiculturalism, etc., might
> suggest a certain bias toward the conventional proprieties, seems to me.
>
> I would never say that the Po-Lariat shouldn't "reflect the rich and
> contentious variety of the art," and if I seemed to imply so, shame on me.
> Personally I'd be delighted to see Robert Creeley as Laureate, or Snyder,
or
> others on Kent's list.  My own list would also include some mavericks who
> seldom get much noticed by the experimental wing *or* the mainstream
> phalanx.  But that's just me.  In any case, it's just not gonna happen, as
> Charles Bernstein isn't going to take up the post in my lifetime, short of
a
> miracle.
>
> Of course, Kooser never dreamed it would go to a midwestern "regional"
poet,
> either, I suppose.
>
> I just don't think that it's all that *shocking* or even harmful for such
an
> official posting to go, as it most often does, to mainstream poets.  The
> mainstream is, after all, where most poets are situated, demographically
> speaking.  Not to mention most common readers of poetry, if such beasts
> still exist.  It's only a "restricted" slice of the American pie by way of
> some tortured definitional manipulations.
>
> OK, time to start lobbying for future Lariats.  I say let's go with
> Lucille Clifton to start.
>
> ============================================
> David Graham
> Department of English, Ripon College
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>      Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>      My Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
>
> Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
> ============================================
>
>
> > ----------
> > From: Kent Johnson
> > Reply To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> > Sent: Monday, September 20, 2004 9:49 AM
> > To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> > Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
> >
> > David Graham said,
> >
> > "For him (Epstein) to make this argument without specifying a single
> > great & heterodox contemporary poet strikes me as just one of the many
> > flaws in this essay and others he's written."
> >
> > Maybe so many evident choices are available from the "heterodox"
> > tradition that Epstein didn't feel the need? Just for more or less
> > random starters (and keeping in mind that the "heterodox" has its own
> > variety of traditions, obviously), how about Robert Creeley, John
> > Ashbery, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Robert Kelly, Susan Howe,
> > Jerome Rothenberg, Gary Snyder, Michael Palmer, Anne Waldman, Charles
> > Bernstein, C.D. Wright, well, one could go on for a long time. Maybe
> > most of these poets were asked and refused, I don't know. But probably
> > not.
> >
> > The interesting matter about the position, it seems to me, is not its
> > degree of practical "utility," but rather how Laureates are repeatedly
> > chosen from what is a clearly restricted slice of the American poetic
> > spectrum, i.e., a decidedly conservative and traditional one. What
> > institutional reasons would account for such bias? And what does this
> > suggest to us about the ideological and power arrangements operating
> > inside the art, if you'll forgive those terms? I mean, isn't it
> > interesting that the most "natural-sounding," prosaic poets are also
> > assumed to be the most "natural" choices, to the point where deeply
> > sophisticated practitioners in the field (some of whom I mention above)
> > hardly even enter the converstation as possibilites?
> >
> > All this is old stuff, of course. David Graham's view that the yearly
> > position shouldn't reflect the rich and contentious variety of the art
> > (he said as much when he suggested that the Laureate should best be
> > "populist" in her or his approach), is a very prevalent one, obviously.
> > But matters of representational fairness aside, wouldn't poetry and the
> > public be well served if *every now and then* the Laureate were chosen
> > to reflect the richness of linguistic and conceptual possibility current
> > American poetry affords?
> >
> > Kent
> >
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Mon Sep 20 14:33:00 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 10:33:00 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
In-Reply-To: <004a01c49f3f$ce7756a0$c2ad3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A379@mail.ripon.edu>
	<004a01c49f3f$ce7756a0$c2ad3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <6b279deb0409201133713665a6@mail.gmail.com>

Funny you should mention Clifton-- she's one of the few poets I've
seen read and literally convert people from not caring at all about
poetry to being poetry readers. And they weren't writers either...
just some skeptical friends I basically blackmailed to come to a
reading.

c


From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Mon Sep 20 14:52:39 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 14:52:39 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] (no subject)
In-Reply-To: <003f01c49f3e$e288c760$c2ad3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>
	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com> <413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>
	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>
	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>
	<413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com> <413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com>
	<1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
	<413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com>
	<Pine.GSO.4.55.0409071030090.28264@shell2.oit.umass.edu>
	<1095692943.414ef28f88e91@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
	<003f01c49f3e$e288c760$c2ad3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409201451390.875@shell2.oit.umass.edu>

Thank you, Anny!  Ciao ciao




From jkok at hfa.umass.edu  Mon Sep 20 14:54:48 2004
From: jkok at hfa.umass.edu (Kerry O'Keefe)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 14:54:48 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
In-Reply-To: <6b279deb0409201133713665a6@mail.gmail.com>
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A379@mail.ripon.edu>
	<004a01c49f3f$ce7756a0$c2ad3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<6b279deb0409201133713665a6@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409201453470.875@shell2.oit.umass.edu>

Which brings up an interesting question - by what means did she convert?

K.




From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Mon Sep 20 15:14:35 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:14:35 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.55.0409201453470.875@shell2.oit.umass.edu>
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A379@mail.ripon.edu>
	<004a01c49f3f$ce7756a0$c2ad3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<6b279deb0409201133713665a6@mail.gmail.com>
	<Pine.GSO.4.55.0409201453470.875@shell2.oit.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <6b279deb040920121468d21361@mail.gmail.com>

> Which brings up an interesting question - by what means did she convert?

Just through her reading and her enthusiasm. And she was one of those
that actually catered directly to the non-writers in the crowd... 
I've dragged a lot of friends to poetry readings, which most often
turned out to be counter-productive. The best ones, the ones who
through their poems and presentation actually made a dent in my
friends' anti-poetic armor, were Lucille Clifton, Robert Pinsky, and
E. Ethelbert Miller.

I don't have experimental evidence for many of the readings, though.
For instance David Graham came up here many moons ago and the only
person I could get to go with me was my wife. We got divorced later,
but I try not to hold that against him :)

c


From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Mon Sep 20 15:33:40 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 12:33:40 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
Message-ID: <20040920193340.55378.qmail@web52606.mail.yahoo.com>

Does anybody know if Storyline Press is ever going to
release *Story Hour:  Contemporary American Poems*
edited by Sonny Williams?

I've had it on my radar for a while now, but I can
find a mention of it at the Storyline website.  Amazon
just says that it hasn't been released yet.

What's the deal?  Anyone know?

Thanks,

jln

=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 


From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep 20 16:13:13 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 16:13:13 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Can't Count
Message-ID: <12a.4c0c2300.2e8093d9@aol.com>

13 lines.
>Screwed up the rhyme and made line 8 both the end of the second
>quatrain and start of the third. They'll never make me laureate.
>
>Michael with 80 hours of math.



Michael, your 13-liner coud be seen as an 'innovation' as well. 
You could even give the form a name, like  'unlucky sonnets' 
or something catchier. Also it could crafted into a mild insult
for a poet you thought had lost it: "He's a line short 
of a sonnet."
And it's better than making a mistake with one's checkbook
and getting a $30 NSF fee from the bank.
Finnegan
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From mandolin at mac.com  Mon Sep 20 19:05:24 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:05:24 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Can't Count
In-Reply-To: <12a.4c0c2300.2e8093d9@aol.com>
References: <12a.4c0c2300.2e8093d9@aol.com>
Message-ID: <8D9F7F30-0B59-11D9-AE99-000393C29586@mac.com>


On Sep 20, 2004, at 4:13 PM, JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> 13 lines.
> >Screwed up the rhyme and made line 8 both the end of the second
> >quatrain and start of the third. They'll never make me laureate.
> >
> >Michael with 80 hours of math.
>
>
> Michael, your 13-liner coud be seen as an 'innovation' as well.
> You could even give the form a name, like? 'unlucky sonnets'
> or something catchier. Also it could crafted into a mild insult
> for a poet you thought had lost it: "He's a line short
> of a sonnet."
> And?it's better than making a mistake with one's checkbook
> and getting a $30 NSF fee from the bank.
> Finnegan
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>

It's  a kind of interesting form, especially the way the rhyme sort of 
herniates, but I can't pretend it's anything but a mistake--this time. 
And you don't want to see my  checkbook.


Michael



From JforJames at aol.com  Tue Sep 21 08:32:42 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 08:32:42 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
Message-ID: <1cf.2bb2a191.2e81796a@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/20/2004 10:50:27 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes:

> Maybe so many evident choices are available from the "heterodox"
> tradition that Epstein didn't feel the need? Just for more or less
> random starters (and keeping in mind that the "heterodox" has its own
> variety of traditions, obviously), how about Robert Creeley, John
> Ashbery, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Robert Kelly, Susan Howe,
> Jerome Rothenberg, Gary Snyder, Michael Palmer, Anne Waldman, Charles
> Bernstein, C.D. Wright, well, one could go on for a long time. Maybe
> most of these poets were asked and refused, I don't know. But probably
> not. 
> 
> The interesting matter about the position, it seems to me, is not its
> degree of practical "utility," but rather how Laureates are repeatedly
> chosen from what is a clearly restricted slice of the American poetic
> spectrum, i.e., a decidedly conservative and traditional one. What
> institutional reasons would account for such bias? And what does this
> suggest to us about the ideological and power arrangements operating
> inside the art, if you'll forgive those terms? I mean, isn't it
> interesting that the most "natural-sounding," prosaic poets are also
> assumed to be the most "natural" choices, to the point where deeply
> sophisticated practitioners in the field (some of whom I mention above)
> hardly even enter the converstation as possibilites? 
> 
> All this is old stuff, of course. David Graham's view that the yearly
> position shouldn't reflect the rich and contentious variety of the art
> (he said as much when he suggested that the Laureate should best be
> "populist" in her or his approach), is a very prevalent one, obviously.
> But matters of representational fairness aside, wouldn't poetry and the
> public be well served if *every now and then* the Laureate were chosen
> to reflect the richness of linguistic and conceptual possibility current
> American poetry affords?
> 
> Kent
> 

Kent, I think it would nice if 'aesthetic diversity' was more in play
when picking the Laureate. I'd really love to know how the panel
itself gets picked...the panel is going to tell you what kind of poet 
we'll get. We don't really know who was on it...but I think we can 
guess Dana Gioia was, and few past Laureates. I do like the Kooser 
choice for its sheer oddity. Unlike Chris Lott, I find merit in his work, 
as well. But surely Creeley, Ashberry, Guest, Snyder, et al, from 
your short list, would seem more logical choices. Aside from taste
most seem to have had  more cirtical attention. But it was only 
disclosed after his death, that Justice was asked, but had to decline 
for health reasons. I suspect most from your short weren't asked at 
all...but we don't know for sure. It does seem almost criminal if 
Creeley has never been asked; or Ashbery, for that matter. With 
the recent flap over Baraka in the New Jersey Laureate appointment, 
the panel's motto or mantra may have been, "Safety first."
Finnegan
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From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Tue Sep 21 10:12:20 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 15:12:20 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
In-Reply-To: <1cf.2bb2a191.2e81796a@aol.com>
References: <1cf.2bb2a191.2e81796a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <1095775940.415036c4f2dde@webmail.ukonline.net>

Re: Kent's remarks about the demographics of post-avant vs soft 
surreal, "SoQ", whatever you want to call it. Everything suggests to me he's 
right about the practitioners and academic life-support being now 
overwhelmingly committed to the post-avant. Admittedly the internet may 
distort that impression further - older writers may be "invisible" if their 
dialogue remains based around non-electronic media. 

On the other hand, in the UK you can walk into any High Street bookstall and 
see a quite different picture. It's clear, in my judgment, that what we 
call "mainstream" poetry has a very much larger readership. (Perhaps it's not 
the same in the US, but I suspect it is) .

Yes, it's different in Finland. But then Finnish modernist is different; it 
has grown from popular roots. Anglo-US post-avant has always set its stall out 
to affront. Good choice, but it's not reasonable to complain that its poets 
don't get chosen as laureates. 



----------------------------------------------
This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net


From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Tue Sep 21 11:07:25 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 07:07:25 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
In-Reply-To: <1cf.2bb2a191.2e81796a@aol.com>
References: <1cf.2bb2a191.2e81796a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <6b279deb0409210807669a7ab3@mail.gmail.com>

> Unlike Chris Lott, I find merit in his work

Now, now, now. That's not what I said. I just don't have him seated
(yet) in my personal "top tier" and think for a variety of reasons
there would be better choices. Surely that's a bit different than
finding no merit in his work... and through logical discussions here,
particularly thinking about regionalism and identity, I'll probably
come to a better appreciation of his work.

c


From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Tue Sep 21 11:12:10 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 07:12:10 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
In-Reply-To: <1095775940.415036c4f2dde@webmail.ukonline.net>
References: <1cf.2bb2a191.2e81796a@aol.com>
	<1095775940.415036c4f2dde@webmail.ukonline.net>
Message-ID: <6b279deb0409210812199a96a3@mail.gmail.com>

> Admittedly the internet may
> distort that impression further - older writers may be "invisible" if their
> dialogue remains based around non-electronic media.

If one were to judge solely by the online presence of the poets, then
the mainstream would hardly seem to exist at all, dwarfed by high
school students, rank amateurs, and the heavy presence of the avant,
particularly in the weblog community. But if I go into most bookstores
there isn't a trace of the latter groups to be found.

Which isn't surprising, only irritating because I like to thumb
through the pages before buying something (and be able to browse to
determine what to buy) and because I'd like to see more of that large
base of readers and writers on the web who aren't there now...

c


From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Tue Sep 21 12:58:25 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 11:58:25 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Po-Demography
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A384@mail.ripon.edu>

From:  m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk

Re: Kent's remarks about the demographics of post-avant vs soft 
surreal, "SoQ", whatever you want to call it. Everything suggests to me he's

right about the practitioners and academic life-support being now 
overwhelmingly committed to the post-avant. 
---------------------

Kent, and others--

I would agree that the "mainstream" may well be more open than it was not
long ago to various strains of experiment.   Whether this is A Good Thing
remains something less than a closed question, to my mind, though time will
tell.  But if we can use the term descriptively rather than evaluatively,
I'd say that the mainstream simply *is* where "most poets are situated"--by
definition.  

How *much* the mainstream has evolved in Langpo directions in recent years,
well, that's a very good question.  I wonder how one would go about
assessing it.  Or more precisely, how one would avoid the old problem of
seeing what one wants to see.  In any case, I'm not yet convinced the shift
has been quite as dramatic as you paint it.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I've not
noticed any landslide victory yet of experimental stuff over the old
Aristotelean unities. Of course, we *may* just possibly follow different
journals, and have differing notions of which ones are "journals of
seriousness and ambition."

I wonder what others' takes on this issue might be.




============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	Kent Johnson
> Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> Sent: 	Monday, September 20, 2004 12:54 PM
> To: 	new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> Subject: 	[New-Poetry] Laureates and poetic politics
> 
> David,
> 
> I certainly don't think it's "shocking" either that the post
> consistently goes to representatives of more readily digestible, prosaic
> kinds of poetry. But this imbalance is not merely a "natural" thing, nor
> (as a number of other countries show, where poetic innovation enjoys
> considerable popularity and is honored) absolutely inevitable-- it's
> also very much a matter of dynamics with institutional and ideological
> sources, ones which can be questioned and challenged. To say, regarding
> Charles Bernstein (who, by the way, has become quite "mainstream" in
> important ways!), that his becoming Laureate is "just not gonna happen
> in my lifetime...short of a miracle," may be true, but it's hardly a
> reason for sitting back and accepting the same old-same old predictable
> appointments. Controversy and polemic are the plumbing to the waterworks
> of poetic development, and poets serve poetry by upping the pressures of
> discussion and debate.
> 
> We've both mentioned Robert Creeley, an obvious choice for the Laureate
> postition, though perhaps he'd never accept it. Could I ask if anyone on
> this list really believes that Billy Collins or Ted Kooser, bless them,
> are half as vital to the history of American poetry as is Robert
> Creeley? (the latter who provoked, incidentally, such hilarious outrage
> from "official" quarters with his refreshingly catholic selections for
> the Best of American Poetry a couple years back...)
> 
> By the way, David, I think your statement about the "mainstream" being
> "where most poets are situated" is not as evident as you seem to have
> it. Things have changed substantially in the demographics, as you put
> it, of American poetry over the past fifteen or so years, to the point
> where "experimentalist" approaches have come to be quite dominant within
> the upper-tier creative writing programs, and most journals of
> seriousness and ambition today generously feature--when they don't
> openly promote--such work. It's been pretty clear for some time, in
> fact, that the kind of soft-surrealist narrative that was once the
> dominant mode is quickly fading under the spreading influence of
> "post-avant," and derivative quasi-Language approaches. This is how a
> great slice of sophisticated younger poets want to write these days. Not
> many of them want to write like Ted Kooser or Dana Gioia!
> 
> So I would propose that your statement about the Collins/Kooser/Prairie
> Home Companion "mainstream" being much more than just one slice of the
> spectrum is not so obvious as it might seem. 
> 
> Kent
> 
> *


From halvard at earthlink.net  Tue Sep 21 14:11:46 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 14:11:46 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Po-Demography
In-Reply-To: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A384@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEGEGMINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


{    Kent, and others--
{    
{    I would agree that the "mainstream" may well be more open than it was not
{    long ago to various strains of experiment.   Whether this is A Good Thing
{    remains something less than a closed question, to my mind, though time will
{    tell.  But if we can use the term descriptively rather than evaluatively,
{    I'd say that the mainstream simply *is* where "most poets are situated"--by
{    definition.  
{    
{    How *much* the mainstream has evolved in Langpo directions in recent years,
{    well, that's a very good question.  I wonder how one would go about
{    assessing it.  Or more precisely, how one would avoid the old problem of
{    seeing what one wants to see.  In any case, I'm not yet convinced the shift
{    has been quite as dramatic as you paint it.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I've not
{    noticed any landslide victory yet of experimental stuff over the old
{    Aristotelean unities. Of course, we *may* just possibly follow different
{    journals, and have differing notions of which ones are "journals of
{    seriousness and ambition."
{    
{    I wonder what others' takes on this issue might be.

As for me, David, I'm wondering if we don't need to rethink some 
of our metaphors. The river imagery implicit in "mainstream" seems 
less and less interesting and useful (as does the military imagery, 
which, in your message, that segues into). Not that I have any
particularly interesting alternatives at hand, dontcha know.

Hal     "Walk your horses."
                 --Mystic, Conn., drawbridge

Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard






From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Tue Sep 21 14:39:37 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 13:39:37 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: Po-Demography
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A385@mail.ripon.edu>

> ----------
> From: 	Halvard Johnson
> Subject: 	RE: [New-Poetry] Po-Demography
> 
> As for me, David, I'm wondering if we don't need to rethink some 
> of our metaphors. The river imagery implicit in "mainstream" seems 
> less and less interesting and useful (as does the military imagery, 
> which, in your message, that segues into). Not that I have any
> particularly interesting alternatives at hand, dontcha know.
> 
> Hal     "Walk your horses."
>                  --Mystic, Conn., drawbridge
> 
	======================

	Just guessing here, Hal, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm
thinking you probably wouldn't go for *any* metaphor that divided all Gaul
into 3 parts, or 2, or whatever.

	Am I right?

	I don't have any better alternatives, either, if we're agreed that
the trends and phenomena we're looking at are more than imaginary.  But I
suspect we're not agreed, you and I.

	Personally, I tend to favor "mainstream" since it sounds to my ears
more descriptive than judgmental.  And accurately vague at the borders, not
to mention fluid.

	Others see it differently, obviously.   But as for me I get pretty
tired of seeing rhetoric that puts, on one "side,"
innovation/experiment/excitement/advance, and, on the other "side," those
gray spectres of staleness, predictability, tameness, etc.  

	Or vice versa.

Still wondering if I've somehow missed a groundswell of "innovation" in
contemporary poetry; wondering how others see it; and wondering what the
measures of it all might be, and so forth.  

Just saw an obit for Virginia Hamilton Adair, the geriatric whiz-kid who
just died, and was somewhat surprised to learn that her first book has sold
28,000 copies.  Those seem like mighty big numbers to me, especially for a
mainstreamer whom no one would probably deem major in any way.  I guess one
way to look at the issue might be to count readers, huh?  Easier said than
done, especially when readers of *Talisman* rarely speak to the readers of
*The Hudson Review*, and vice versa.

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================



From halvard at earthlink.net  Tue Sep 21 15:14:42 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 15:14:42 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: Po-Demography
In-Reply-To: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A385@mail.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJECEHAINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


Now that you put it to me, David, I guess I'd rather think of poetry
as "oceanic" than river-like (flowing from one place to another). Like
an ocean it can encompass currents, provide bays and inlets, and be
swept by storms--just to explore the idea a bit.

I've nothing against metaphors, as I'm sure you know, but we do
get set in our ways.

Hal
   
{    > ----------
{    > From: 	Halvard Johnson
{    > Subject: 	RE: [New-Poetry] Po-Demography
{    > 
{    > As for me, David, I'm wondering if we don't need to rethink some 
{    > of our metaphors. The river imagery implicit in "mainstream" seems 
{    > less and less interesting and useful (as does the military imagery, 
{    > which, in your message, that segues into). Not that I have any
{    > particularly interesting alternatives at hand, dontcha know.
{    > 
{    > Hal     "Walk your horses."
{    >                  --Mystic, Conn., drawbridge
{    > 
{    	======================
{    
{    	Just guessing here, Hal, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm
{    thinking you probably wouldn't go for *any* metaphor that divided all Gaul
{    into 3 parts, or 2, or whatever.
{    
{    	Am I right?
{    
{    	I don't have any better alternatives, either, if we're agreed that
{    the trends and phenomena we're looking at are more than imaginary.  But I
{    suspect we're not agreed, you and I.
{    
{    	Personally, I tend to favor "mainstream" since it sounds to my ears
{    more descriptive than judgmental.  And accurately vague at the borders, not
{    to mention fluid.
{    
{    	Others see it differently, obviously.   But as for me I get pretty
{    tired of seeing rhetoric that puts, on one "side,"
{    innovation/experiment/excitement/advance, and, on the other "side," those
{    gray spectres of staleness, predictability, tameness, etc.  
{    
{    	Or vice versa.
{    
{    Still wondering if I've somehow missed a groundswell of "innovation" in
{    contemporary poetry; wondering how others see it; and wondering what the
{    measures of it all might be, and so forth.  
{    
{    Just saw an obit for Virginia Hamilton Adair, the geriatric whiz-kid who
{    just died, and was somewhat surprised to learn that her first book has sold
{    28,000 copies.  Those seem like mighty big numbers to me, especially for a
{    mainstreamer whom no one would probably deem major in any way.  I guess one
{    way to look at the issue might be to count readers, huh?  Easier said than
{    done, especially when readers of *Talisman* rarely speak to the readers of
{    *The Hudson Review*, and vice versa.
{    
{    ============================================
{    David Graham
{    Department of English, Ripon College
{    grahamd at ripon.edu
{         Home Page:  
{    http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
{         My Poetry Library:
{    http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
{    
{    Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
{    ============================================
{    
{    _______________________________________________
{    New-Poetry mailing list
{    New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
{    http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Tue Sep 21 16:14:56 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:14:56 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: Po-Demography
In-Reply-To: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJECEHAINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A385@mail.ripon.edu>
	<KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJECEHAINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <6b279deb04092113144d32ff85@mail.gmail.com>

With that definition of mainstream (where most poets are situated),
then the question for me is: has the mainstream evolved/changed/grown?
Is the mainstream of 2004 different from 1994 or 1984 (and how fine
should the increments be)? Seems to me that at the heart of many
objections from the non-mainstream is the idea that the mainstream
doesn't change and has become moribund. This is an even worse
accusation if the mainstream is used only as a descriptor *and* it
hasn't really changed for 10, 20, 30 or more years...

c
--
Chris Lott


From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Tue Sep 21 19:00:53 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 16:00:53 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] RE: Po-Demography
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A385@mail.ripon.edu>
	<KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJECEHAINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
	<6b279deb04092113144d32ff85@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4150B2A5.365D8DA3@earthlink.net>

I like "mainstream" simply because one can play with the trope.  Every
stream has banks, for example, and you can wax geographic with north,
south, west, or east bank . . . or even left or right stream, but we
won't go there.  Then there's a question of whether the mainstream is
dammed or damned or not.  Or you can wax philosophical and ask whether
you can step into the same mainstream twice.  For you sporting types,
you can discuss what fish there are in the mainstream and what size they
have to be before you have to throw them back, or if foreign species
have been introduced, to the detriment of native species.  Then there
are ecological concerns . . .

- Jim

Chris Lott wrote:
> 
> With that definition of mainstream (where most poets are situated),
> then the question for me is: has the mainstream evolved/changed/grown?
> Is the mainstream of 2004 different from 1994 or 1984 (and how fine
> should the increments be)? Seems to me that at the heart of many
> objections from the non-mainstream is the idea that the mainstream
> doesn't change and has become moribund. This is an even worse
> accusation if the mainstream is used only as a descriptor *and* it
> hasn't really changed for 10, 20, 30 or more years...
> 
> c
> --
> Chris Lott
> _______________________________________________
> 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  Tue Sep 21 23:16:16 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 23:16:16 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Who Killed Poetry? Again!
Message-ID: <83.16b7d33f.2e824880@aol.com>

n a message dated 9/19/2004 8:06:34 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
Chris.Lott at gmail.com writes: 
But it *is* a trivial argument in general if it seems clear to you
that Kooser is not amongst the best, would not likely be named by very
many if asked to name a group of the best, and that the selection
wasn't made because he was thought to be the best. And it remains a
trivial objection when we consider that despite not being able to
pinpoint "the best" we operate with an injunction that doing our own
best to do so is good enough, whether it be to choose the best
manuscript, hand out a prize, or recognize with an honor. So that "we
can't know the best" has hardly stopped any of us before.

But it isn't about being the best. If someone's honestly telling me
that in making their group of the best 10 or 20 poets in the United
States, that Kooser would be on that list, then OK, I'll accept that
out of honor. But I have reason to suspect that, outside of
revisionism, it's not likely to happen often. Strangely, on this list
which talks so much about poetry, before his nomination Kooser was
involved in exactly two threads in three years, one of those threads
being about Kooser's stance about fiction/nonfiction, not about his
poetry at all.
Chris, I didn't mean  to mischaracterize your objection to
Kooser's appointment. I agree it's a bizarre choice. As
I said, that's for me a good reason to approve of it. There
are many names one could put in front of Kooser's. The fact
that he's not been talked about much on this list I don't think
should be held against him. There are plenty of worthy
poets we've missed. For the hell of it a few years ago
I just started compiling a list of living American poets.
Just started writing down names I could easily dredge 
up from memory. Most were those whose bios I knew a bit 
about (where they were from, ethnicity, where they taught, etc.), 
and whose work I could at least vaguely characterize (mainstream, 
outsider, language, performance, etc), and I came up with 
nearly 700 names...700 poets. (& it's not unlikely that the
real number of active American poets is many times 700.)

About 100 or so of the 700 names I flagged as being 
'A-tier'. This was not a value judgment per se, rather it was 
my rough assessment of their notoriety based on my (fairly wide) 
reading of book review sources, anthologies, journals,
email lists, litcrit, etc., and some other intangible factors 
like bookstore browsing, journal advertisements & announcements
of prizes, book publications, graduate writing program
mastheads, writers conferences, etc, and casual conversations 
with friends. Kooser would have been in the B-tier 
in my idiosyncratic ordering. But he has good company 
there (with about 300 other names). And I don't think it would 
be a stretch to say that at least half the poets in that tier
(or caste) could have easily risen to A-tier visibility with 
a couple of breaks along the way in the course of their 
careers. It wasn't just a matter of quality/talent that was 
keeping them down. The vagaries of fame and notoriety 
play their part in who gets the attention. 

Also, I think it's important to point out here is that this 
is not different in any of the sub-realms within the greater 
community of poets. It's no harder to be overlooked in 
the mainstream than it is in post-avant, language, outsider, 
or whatever categories one comes up with. Kent pointed 
out that Charles Bernstein, as a leading representative of
the language poetry, believes he has 'nil chance'
of being named Poet Laureate. (Ignoring for the moment
if he wants the appointment or not.) But Charles Bernstein
and the other taste makers of language poetry no doubt
have within their ranks a "Todd Coolzer": a practitioner who
has done fine work in the art, who has paid his/her dues, 
etc., and is, by all accounts, worthy, but who has not been
elevated into the pantheon of the 10 most notable language
poets. The system is the same. Charles Bernstein is,
in a manner of speaking, the Dana Gioia of language 
and avant-garde poetry.
Finnegan
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From dbarone at sjc.edu  Wed Sep 22 07:27:14 2004
From: dbarone at sjc.edu (Barone, Dennis)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 07:27:14 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] laureate
Message-ID: <954A5413620E074797298540927621C52F3311@sjcexchange.SJC.EDU>

I'd say just do away with state and national poet laureate positions and
then one doesn't have to worry about Gioia or Bernstein, Creeley or Collins.


May I take a moment to promote myself?  My new book, The Walls of
Circumstance, just came out last week from Avec Books (available from SPD,
$10).

Dennis


From grahamd at ripon.edu  Wed Sep 22 10:18:02 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 09:18:02 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Tracking down a quotation
Message-ID: <BD76F3CA.B6F8%grahamd@ripon.edu>

 
I dimly remember Denise Levertov once quoting an Arabic proverb, to the
effect that "the soul can only travel as fast as a camel can walk."  I love
that.  

Does anyone recognize that proverb?  Or the source in Levertov?  I'm not
having any luck tracking it down so far, and I don't recall the actual
words.

Putting "camel" into Google brings up a zillion hits, of course, even if
paired with Levertov, oddly enough.




====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Wed Sep 22 11:31:41 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 16:31:41 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] Tracking down a quotation
In-Reply-To: <BD76F3CA.B6F8%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <BD76F3CA.B6F8%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <1095867101.41519addc6317@webmail.ukonline.net>






'"The soul of man cannot travel faster than the speed of a running camel" - 
old Arab saying', according to this worthy pro-cycling poet: 
http://www.charts.force9.co.uk/background/content/Poem%204.pdf

- but that doesn't really get you much further. 

The most interesting analogue I found was this National Geographic article on 
Saharan salt-trains:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0528_030528_saltcaravan.html

Most of what I turned up was a mountain of secular-mystical-NewAge blurb 
written by western travel agencies hoping to send rich westerners around the 
world on awe-inspiring but safe adventures. Kind of depressing, yet the desert 
writing of Adrienne Rich and others probably helped to swell this flood of 
soul-searching.    






Quoting David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu>:

>  
> I dimly remember Denise Levertov once quoting an Arabic proverb, to the
> effect that "the soul can only travel as fast as a camel can walk."  I love
> that.  
> 
> Does anyone recognize that proverb?  Or the source in Levertov?  I'm not
> having any luck tracking it down so far, and I don't recall the actual
> words.
> 
> Putting "camel" into Google brings up a zillion hits, of course, even if
> paired with Levertov, oddly enough.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 




----------------------------------------------
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From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Wed Sep 22 11:51:18 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 08:51:18 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Tracking down a quotation
Message-ID: <4402518.1095868279432.JavaMail.root@bert.psp.pas.earthlink.net>

Remember the ad?  "I'd walk a mile for a Camel."  Nothing said about speed.

- Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu>
Sent: Sep 22, 2004 7:18 AM
To: "new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Subject: [New-Poetry] Tracking down a quotation

 
I dimly remember Denise Levertov once quoting an Arabic proverb, to the
effect that "the soul can only travel as fast as a camel can walk."  I love
that.  

Does anyone recognize that proverb?  Or the source in Levertov?  I'm not
having any luck tracking it down so far, and I don't recall the actual
words.

Putting "camel" into Google brings up a zillion hits, of course, even if
paired with Levertov, oddly enough.




====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================


_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Cervantes:  http://www.poetserv.net/jvchome/index.html
Salt River Review:  http://www.poetserv.org
RelativeLinks: http://www.poetserv.com/relativelinks/home.html


From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Wed Sep 22 11:18:26 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 11:18:26 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
References: <045701c4943c$72ce2e40$4c331c40@Emily>	<413CC19B.3070807@ix.netcom.com><413CD988.7000204@ix.netcom.com>	<413CE48D.3070305@ix.netcom.com>	<000d01c49466$1e52bb90$6d94c044@MULDER>	<413CFDDF.7020700@ix.netcom.com><413D02B8.3090703@ix.netcom.com><1094527933.413d2bbd07862@mail-www4.oit.umass.edu>
	<413D3AEC.2040508@ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <000201c4a0bc$7b50b880$2db831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

Shoot, gone a few weeks and I can't even make Parcelli's list of
sub-mediocrities.

--Bob G.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 12:37 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?


> Thanks Kerry,
>
> Many poems and articles can be found at:
> http://www.flashpointmag.com/
>
> Most people gravitate to:
> Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe
> http://www.flashpointmag.com/tribefp5.htm
>
> which itself is being deconstructed as we speak.
>
> If I seem a little agressive on these lists its because I've been
> attacked by a rather large number of characters herin.
> Characters not character. Gabe Gudding was thrown off the Buffalo list
> because frankly they were too prissy and anal to handle Gabe at the
> time. But then he went back to them and begged to be let back on the
> list and promised to be a good boy for career and company. How has that
> compromise with langpo morons affected his poetry?
>
> Sondheim once told me I didn't know him so my criticism was off the
> mark. I applied myself forthwith reading a great deal of his voluminous
> ouvre only to discover I had known him all along perhaps better than he
> had known himself. Sondheim is a milktoast once letting an anti-semite
> off the hook because he couldn't stand the fireworks and leaving myself
> and a friend to defend him.
>
> Kent is the Karl Rove of the poetry lists. He is an inveterate liar who
> made a minor splash by perpetrating a fifth rate fraud in a 6th rate
> discipline years ago and flogging it to death. The only way to treat
> anything Kent says, unless he sees some advantage in knowing you, is as
> pure baiting bullshit., Don't take him seriously and have a good time at
> his expense. For a laugh ask to see his poetry.
>
> Silliman is a snooze from the old langpos who will be best known for
> creating an utterly sleep inducing blog cluttered with his tired and
> predictable commentary. Once again, if he sees no advantage in it, he
> won't talk to you.
>
> Richard Dillon is a twit of the first order who thinks he's a right
> winger, but when you pry he is just a ignoarnt blowhard vulnerable to
> the smallest fact or insight.  My introduction to Richard was a diatribe
> of his against the current leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung. When I
> pointed out Kim Il Sung was dead and Kim Jong Il was in power, he seemed
> embarrassed but not bright enough to learn anything.  When I referred to
> international economic embargoes he was once again lost.  He's so
> stupid, looking up to Bush is appropriate posture and might reflect
> relative IQ.
>
> Jeff Newberry's a Dillon only dumber.
>
> Paul Lake is a neo-formalist as stiff as his tiny little poems squeezed
> through the tiny orifice of neo-formalism. God only knows where he
> thinks that act is going.
>
> Graham doesn't have a clue and is dead set on making sure it stays that
> way. Only then will he get the break so many around him have been
> afforded. Taking a new tact for him would be unthinkable. He's too
> invested in being all mawked up.
>
> Congrats;
> "Keep the dogs out of your dish." CP
>
> Jane Kerrigan O'Keefe wrote:
>
> >Carlo,
> >
> >As much as I shudder when required to think down some of the roads you
have led
> >us in terms of literary/cultural/political criticism, I applaud your
spirit.  I
> >do feel nicely jostled (in this lovely anonymous world of cyberspace
where one
> >can easily escape) and to see revealed some of my own literary
> >unconsciousness,. most of which willl probably remain intact, but
> >nonetheless...I don't mind witnessing a good fight. At some level, it
calms me
> >down...
> >
> >My point is, where would a person find a few of your poems?
> >
> >I have to say, I am sick, to some degree, of telling stories in my own
work.  I
> >am sick of writing the stories from my mind.  OF trying to sum everything
up.
> >I am interested in, in the words of Edward Bartok-Baratta (a sometimes
> >wonderful poet), keeping a little of dream nearby.  I am interested in
writing
> >more from my unconscious mind, more, from, really, my toes.  Finding more
than
> >the story can tell, perhaps.
> >
> >As far as the evil machinations of the culture - I simply try to stay
> >psychologically awake - for which i HAVE TAKEN SOME OF THE SAME GRIEF AS
i AM
> >SURE YOU ARE USED TO.  sorry about the caps lock.  I really truly do not
have
> >the strength to face wholesale evil - by now I understand that I become
> >completely ineffective.  So it is a consciousness to the small things.
> >
> >Combined with a laziness, yes... so I will, indeed, make myself reread
some of
> >your uproarious diatribes and try and make some sense for myself...and
possibly
> >bring a different awareness to my work.
> >
> >meanwhile, your poems??
> >
> >Kerry O'Keefe
> >Quoting "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" <alphavil at ix.netcom.com>:
> >
> >
> >
> >>You gotta admit folks. Its something to write about while most of you
> >>rummage around in their daily experience for pseudo-interesting scrap
> >>9/10 of the way to sentimental blither like Levine. Can I have that? No.
CP
> >>
> >>R.Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>Dan,
> >>>
> >>>You have so much as said it out of psychology:
> >>>
> >>><which taxonomizes and seeks to
> >>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.>
> >>>
> >>>where 'general' is expressed as a number, series of numbers or
> >>>quantity or series of quantities etc.
> >>>
> >>>A dimension is 'spatial' not temporal until the Einsteinian trope. If
> >>>time becomes the fourth dimension, it is troped into spatiality and
> >>>mathematically quite literally takes on spatial qualities that respond
> >>>to the static mathematical appropriations available in three
> >>>dimensions and is no longer time as we think, Bohr would say,
> >>>visualize it.
> >>>
> >>>If you work through Charles Olson you find that among his reading list
> >>>to Ed Dorn, he recommends A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality, a book
> >>>which in part tries to keep all the plates spinning as regards
> >>>actuality and mathematico/physical formalism. As I've said before
> >>>formalisms are reductive and as you say that formailsm can express
> >>>itself as 'taxonomic.'
> >>>
> >>>Many disciplines, psychology included tried to ape the successes of
> >>>the sciences by adopting what were perceived as the virtues of
> >>>science. The gateays were all mathematical based formailzation of
> >>>actual, as Whitehead would say, nexi. The influence became evident in
> >>>nearly every discipline. Sometimes its just an internal logical
> >>>consistency which caused disastrous tropes to be put into action.
> >>>Sometimes it was formal logic, statistics, something as crude as
> >>>Taylor's Scientific Management or eugenics, but always it required a
> >>>consistency bordering on mathematical fungibility. Marx, no stranger
> >>>to scientific positivism said, "Logic is the money of the mind."
> >>>
> >>>Now, the literature is loaded with these failures. Psychoanalysis has
> >>>taken a particular beating as a scientific method. But as in all of
> >>>western capitalist politics the real culprit has been
> >>>exonerated---Science. Its insisted that science is immune from the
> >>>considerations of the quasi-scientific disciplnes and that its
> >>>'successes' are prove positiv-ism. The instigatorr walks free.
> >>>
> >>>When I started writing poetry 35 years ago which accused the sciences
> >>>of being a menace because of their reliance on formalisms, what few
> >>>people noticed laughed. At best they thought I was about just
> >>>rehashing cold science/warm humanities crap.
> >>>
> >>>But as the ecological movement and concerns for the environment began
> >>>knocking around for an eschatology, I found I had already done a lot
> >>>of the groundwork---Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel, Hume and
> >>>others. My Deconstructing the Demiurge: Tale of the Tribe touches on
> >>>these topice, specifically the historical limits of formalisms with
> >>>history represented by what we normally think of as time.
> >>>Millennial Mathematics even more so as well, "Chlorpyrifos, the end of
> >>>the world is within us." as does Eschatology of Reason: The Twin
> >>>Towers. It turns out that specializing does cut out the big picture,
> >>>and the big picture is now fucked. Mooks like Gross and Levitt and all
> >>>the rest of the scientific community think science can turn the nose
> >>>of spaceship earth back up. Fat chance.
> >>>
> >>>Now, when able I'm doing for Game Theory what Decon. the Demiurge did
> >>>for physics in a poem with the borrowed title, De Rerum Natura. Game
> >>>Theory and its many sister disciplines is very interesting because Von
> >>>Neumann, who looms large in D the D in 20th century physics, computers
> >>>and defense policy(strategic bombing) and his fellows saw early on the
> >>>problems of quantifying say large populations for the purpose of
> >>>controlling or destroying them. The first computers were designed to
> >>>calculate artillery shell trajectories.
> >>>The Game theorists tried to force the vagaries and infinite variables
> >>>of actuality and Process and Reality, into the formalistic world of
> >>>the hard sciences while maintaing the integrity of a non-mathematical
> >>>expression of infinite variables. This royal fuck up that has wider
> >>>reaching implications by far than the failure of psychoanalysis also
> >>>represents the most sophisticated apparatus of our official saviors.
> >>>
> >>>Is it any wonder that Von Neumann wrote Self-Reproducing Automata? He
> >>>knew we were goners so he created self-sufficient machines with Johnny
> >>>Von Neumann programmed in as their creator, read deity, while they
> >>>universe hopped gobbling a stray planet here or asteroid there for
> >>>sustenance. Shit. Ain't that dreary. CP
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>Daniel Zimmerman wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>Carlo,
> >>>>
> >>>>I've always felt suspicious about--even averse to--any approach in
> >>>>poerty to
> >>>>mawkishness rather than feeling produced by penetrating description or
> >>>>depiction.
> >>>>Poetry seems to me a science of individual instances of
> >>>>feelings/perceptions
> >>>>, as opposed to psychology, for example, which taxonomizes and seeks
to
> >>>>articulate general principles about species of feelings/perceptions.
> >>>>Physics--ever since experiment replaced the testimony of witnesses
about
> >>>>unique, often unrepeatable events--also seems concerned pretty much
> >>>>exclusively with general principles. Could you elaborate a little on
the
> >>>>fourth dimension correlate? I'd have thought that physicists use the
> >>>>fourth
> >>>>dimension to describe rather than to ape (or manipulate or coerce),
but
> >>>>perhaps you see some crossover there (in poetics, for example).
> >>>>
> >>>>~ Dan Zimmerman
> >>>>
> >>>>----- Original Message ----- From: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli"
> >>>><alphavil at ix.netcom.com>
> >>>>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
> >>>><new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> >>>>Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:28 PM
> >>>>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Q: sentiment or sentimentality?
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>>The hallmark of sentiment or sentimentality is to manipulate the
reader
> >>>>>or viewer. Understanding this characteristic is crucial because when
> >>>>>manipulation is a perceived condition in direct, non-aesthetically
> >>>>>mediated contacts between people expressing sentiment the aesthetic
> >>>>>patina falls away and such manipulation is considered worse than
lying.
> >>>>>In writing poetry for example the sentiment and its contexts are by
> >>>>>defintion artifice and by definition artifice is going to contain
more
> >>>>>than a dollop of manipulation to conform to the conditions of art.
> >>>>>Therefore, in poetry e.g. sentiment should be viewed as a degrading
and
> >>>>>negative quality if sentiment in actual non-artifice driven
> >>>>>discourse/living is to retain its distinct humanitas.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>However the situation is now so corrupted that the distinction
between
> >>>>>sentiment in actual life and its artistic expression have become
> >>>>>utterly
> >>>>>blurred. The former is driven by actual conditions. The latter by a
set
> >>>>>of aesthetics that attempt to ape responses that take place in actual
> >>>>>conditions. The situation has a correlate in physics where time
within
> >>>>>which individual conditions unfold is reduced temporarily and
> >>>>>independent of real conditions, to the so-called fourth dimension, a
> >>>>>spatial expression,  in order to anaesthetize time and impose a
static
> >>>>>mathematical/aesthetic framework over it which grids off and
considers
> >>>>>utterly finite the number of variables possible within the 'given'
> >>>>>domain. CP
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>_______________________________________________
> >>>>>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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >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  Wed Sep 22 13:17:15 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 13:17:15 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems by others:  Charles Bernstein,
	"Lost in Drowned Bliss"
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEIEKAINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


Lost In Drowned Bliss 
 
"Things are what they are, but we are never 
what we are," she said as she wrapped the sand- 
wich in plastic and tucked away the tears 
in a flute. 
 
"No it's things. They hourly 
change before our eyes while we stay stuck in 
who we are and where we have been." 
 
"Things are 
solid; we stumble, unglue, recombine." 
 
"Or what we see is no more a part of 
us than the baby who beckons from the 
forest: we splinter in the void to catch 
the light, then hail the sparks as paradise." 
 
--Charles Bernstein
 

fr. *Golden Handcuffs Review*, 
Fall/Winter 2003


Hal         
 
Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard 



From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Wed Sep 22 13:44:00 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 19:44:00 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems by others:  Charles Bernstein,
	"Lost in Drowned Bliss"
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEIEKAINAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <005501c4a0cb$bf061a70$60ad3252@yourpk9x5fuc06>

It seems impossible to me, in this moment, that people can write such
things, I'm translating a contract, and entering my (minute more, minute
less) 10th hour of work...
Thus, thank you Hal,

Anny

From: "Halvard Johnson" <halvard at earthlink.net>
Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2004 7:17 PM


>
> Lost In Drowned Bliss
>
> "Things are what they are, but we are never
> what we are," she said as she wrapped the sand-
> wich in plastic and tucked away the tears
> in a flute.
>
> "No it's things. They hourly
> change before our eyes while we stay stuck in
> who we are and where we have been."
>
> "Things are
> solid; we stumble, unglue, recombine."
>
> "Or what we see is no more a part of
> us than the baby who beckons from the
> forest: we splinter in the void to catch
> the light, then hail the sparks as paradise."
>
> --Charles Bernstein
>
>
> fr. *Golden Handcuffs Review*,
> Fall/Winter 2003
>
>
> Hal
>
> Halvard Johnson
> ===============
> email: halvard at earthlink.net
> website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>




From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 23 13:41:30 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:41:30 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Not A Creature Was Stirring . . . 
Message-ID: <20040923174130.59866.qmail@web52609.mail.yahoo.com>

Not even a mouse.  Any life out there?

I haven't seen a posting all day.  

The following poem was on Verse Daily yesterday, and I
really enjoyed it.  I'm a sucker for narrative, and I
really love dramatic monologues.  

The line breaks are bit screwed below, but here is a
link to the poem: 
http://www.versedaily.org/wifejob.shtml

Jeff Newberry



The Wife of Job 
by Morris Creech


    Well, now, I never heard the whirlwind speak
            to me?though I did lose
my children to a windstorm, saw the lightning's sleek
                    flame have its way,
        scorching the servants and the sheep,
              and though I won't deny
that my husband here?the most pious man in Uz?
     still claims an angel whispers in his sleep,
a plain fact that I don't discuss in mixed company.

     You've seen such men, eyes dazed with
righteousness,
              who think they catch a whiff
of sin in everything: a neighbor's Sunday dress
                 hitched just above
      the ankle, or a child's stray smile
           when pies cooled on the stove
or a few idle hours, say, tempt him to mischief.
     Such men may fast, or pray; all the while
salt loses its savor and milk sours in the pail.

    And wives grow tired. Oh, not that I complain,
            mind you?but certain nights
Job prayed above me as if Jehovah lay between
                 the sheets with us:
      his breath in my hair was like a psalm,
         each spasm a new promise
heaven might fullfill. Job's ways were just and right,
     no doubting that; though later, in the calm,
I'd listen to him snore and know we were alone.

    Still, who would strive to be more just than God?
            My husband, I suppose.
And everyone knows that saints are first to feel the
rod
                 and lash of grace
       descend upon their lives, to bear
             the blade of sacrifice
above their squirming sons, or as the future grows
     in their daughter's wombs, to know they've sown
it there?
needless to say, their wives and children share that
grace.

    We've sheep and sons to spare now, true enough;
            and I've long salved the sores
that once blistered my husband's skin. But I've no
love
                 or patience now
      for piety. I do my chores,
         ?darn clothes or mend the plough?
and try not to think how such foolishness could stir
     whirlwinds and voices, storms and random fires,
or draw down on us the thunder of the Lord's error.





=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Thu Sep 23 15:25:17 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 15:25:17 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Not A Creature Was Stirring . . . 
References: <20040923174130.59866.qmail@web52609.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <00f901c4a1a3$127adec0$2bb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

> Not even a mouse.  Any life out there?
>
> I haven't seen a posting all day.

Aah, word has probably spread that I have access to New Poetry again, after
being knocked off by Hurricane Charley for over a month.

--Bob G.




From wjbat at conncoll.edu  Thu Sep 23 15:39:18 2004
From: wjbat at conncoll.edu (Wendy Battin)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 15:39:18 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Not A Creature Was Stirring . . . 
In-Reply-To: <00f901c4a1a3$127adec0$2bb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
References: <20040923174130.59866.qmail@web52609.mail.yahoo.com>
	<00f901c4a1a3$127adec0$2bb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <429B03C8-0D98-11D9-B387-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>

On Sep 23, 2004, at 3:25 PM, Bob Grumman wrote:
> Aah, word has probably spread that I have access to New Poetry again, 
> after
> being knocked off by Hurricane Charley for over a month.

Welcome back, Bob; glad you survived.
I hear Charlie has reconstituted himself.  Impressive.

Wendy


Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

When I'm dead, everybody's dead -- and the pig too.
Italian



From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Thu Sep 23 18:15:12 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 18:15:12 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Not A Creature Was Stirring . . . 
References: <20040923174130.59866.qmail@web52609.mail.yahoo.com><00f901c4a1a3$127adec0$2bb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
	<429B03C8-0D98-11D9-B387-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>
Message-ID: <014301c4a1ba$cecd0c30$2bb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



> On Sep 23, 2004, at 3:25 PM, Bob Grumman wrote:
> > Aah, word has probably spread that I have access to New Poetry again,
> > after
> > being knocked off by Hurricane Charley for over a month.
>
> Welcome back, Bob; glad you survived.
> I hear Charlie has reconstituted himself.  Impressive.
>
> Wendy

I didn't hear that, but wouldn't put it past him.  Meanwhile, I heard Jeanne
is doing interesting things.  She's on the other side of Florida from me,
but could still do some dismantling here.  She could fizzle, too.  That'd be
nicer.

--Bob




From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Thu Sep 23 19:38:46 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 18:38:46 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob
Message-ID: <s1531858.041@mail.highland.edu>

Oh Pleaese, God, I Pray Hurricane Bob don't hite us I Prey to You. Shit,
all I got is my littlel garden of okrae an Tomatos and my Manuscriptes
of concrete poms in Papirus and Stuffe and my Bible and my Rifrigerator
Whear tha Bud Is. Please Don't Let Him Hit Us Lord. Heaven Help Us and
Forgive my Grammerr! I got a PHDee in Poetry but I CAnt Remember When
This Was NOW that I Think a It. it was so Long Agoe. SHit. Im Not
Kidding. I gottta PHD!!! Its Like I'm a Gonna Die Soon. Here I Am
Hurrican Bob. Come and Take ME!!!




From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep 23 21:40:14 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 03:40:14 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob
References: <s1531858.041@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <00db01c4a1d7$705fe5b0$6ed73152@yourpk9x5fuc06>

You didn't forget Kent those lille statues of All the Holy Saints on your
Refrigerator, why are you hiding them to us, when they helped you sooo much
along the years against all those hurricanes and tornadoes, be sincere Boy,
and thank yow Lowd fow all the gooooddamn days he's giving you along,
blessing, a

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kent Johnson" <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu>
To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 1:38 AM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob


> Oh Pleaese, God, I Pray Hurricane Bob don't hite us I Prey to You. Shit,
> all I got is my littlel garden of okrae an Tomatos and my Manuscriptes
> of concrete poms in Papirus and Stuffe and my Bible and my Rifrigerator
> Whear tha Bud Is. Please Don't Let Him Hit Us Lord. Heaven Help Us and
> Forgive my Grammerr! I got a PHDee in Poetry but I CAnt Remember When
> This Was NOW that I Think a It. it was so Long Agoe. SHit. Im Not
> Kidding. I gottta PHD!!! Its Like I'm a Gonna Die Soon. Here I Am
> Hurrican Bob. Come and Take ME!!!
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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 Sep 23 21:45:02 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 21:45:02 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] FULCRUM 3 KGB Bar Launch in NYC Sept. 25
Message-ID: <13e.238f72f.2e84d61e@aol.com>

Date:? ? Wed, 22 Sep 2004 20:56:55 -0400
From:? ? Fulcrum Annual <editor at FULCRUMPOETRY.COM>
Subject: FULCRUM 3 KGB Bar Launch in NYC Sept. 25

Celebrating the publication of Fulcrum 3

Sat. Sept. 25 at 6-9 p.m.
KGB Bar, 85 East 4th St (betw. 2nd & 3rd Aves.), NYC
Landis Everson, Glyn Maxwell, Katia Kapovich, Ben Mazer, Philip
Nikolayev, Mark Lamoureux, John Hennessy

Landis Everson was an inner member of the Berkeley Renaissance of the
late 1940s, the fourth intimate of the famed Spicer-Duncan-Blaser
circle. To Jack Spicer he was a myth and a god. To Robert Duncan he was
the Poet King. John Ashbery admired his poetry in New York in the early
1950s, and published selections in Locus Solus in 1962 (Everson's last
appearance in print until now!). In 1960 Everson participated in a
pivotal three-person weekly Sunday poetry group with Spicer and Blaser
in San Francisco. While Spicer was writing Homage to Creeley, Everson
was composing Postcard from Eden and The Little Ghosts I Played With,
two great sequences which now appear in print for the first time in
Fulcrum 3, in The Berkeley Renaissance, edited by Ben Mazer. Fulcrum is
proud to present Landis Everson's first public appearances in over forty
years.

John Hennessy's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in
Fulcrum, The Sewanee Review, Salt, The Yale Review, LIT, and Ontario
Review. He teaches at UMass Amherst.

Katia Kapovich's collection of English language poetry is Gogol in Rome
(Salt, 2004). She is also a well-known Russian poet.

Mark Lamoureux's chapbooks are CITY/TEMPLE (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2003)
and 29 CHEESEBURGERS (Pressed Wafer, 2004).

Glyn Maxwell, born in Hertfordshire, England, now lives in NY City. His
several books of poetry include The Breakage and The Nerve (both
Houghton Mifflin). He is the poetry editor of The New Republic and
teaches at Princeton and Columbia.

Ben Mazer's chapbook selection of poetry, with cover art by Mary
Fabilli, is forthcoming from Fulcrum this fall. He is the editor of The
Berkeley Renaissance (Fulcrum, 2004) and The Collected Poems of John
Crowe Ransom (Handsel, 2005).

Philip Nikolayev's latest book of poetry is Monkey Time, 2001 Verse
Prize winner. His new collection is forthcoming from Salt.

Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, Number Three, 2004, edited
by Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich.

510 pp., perfectbound.
Publication date: September 21

FULCRUM 3: SPECIAL FEATURES

An Anthology of the Berkeley Renaissance, edited by Ben Mazer, featuring
work by Mary Fabilli, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, Charles
Olson, Landis Everson, plus artwork & photos

We Who Live in Darkness: Poems from New Zealand by 21 Leading Poets,
edited by Gregory O'Brien

Fulcrum Debate: Joan Houlihan and Chris Stroffolino

Artwork by Konstantin Simun

CONTRIBUTIONS by Bill Berkson, David Baratier, Alison Croggon, Fred
D'Aguiar, Arjen Duinker, Michael Farrell, Annie Finch, Edwin Frank,
Peter Gizzi, Joe Green, Jeffrey Harrison, John Hennessy, Bruce
Holsapple, Joan Houlihan, Coral Hull,? Kabir, David Kennedy, John
Kinsella, Mark Lamoureux, Glyn Maxwell, Ben Mazer, Andrew McCord,
Richard McKane, Ange Mlinko, Richard Murphy, Vivek Narayanan, Gregory
O'Brien, Fan Ogilvie, Simon Perchik, Mai Van Phan, Peter Richards,
Michael Rothenberg, Tomaz Salamun, Don Share, Chris Stroffolino, Jeet
Thayil, Mark Weiss, Harriet Zinnes, and many others.

SUBSCRIPTION rates in the US are $15 per issue for individuals, $30 for
institutions. International subscriptions are $20 and $40 per issue,
respectively. (Add $5/copy for international airmail.) Send check or
money order drawn in US currency and payable to Fulcrum Annual to
Fulcrum, 334 Harvard Street, Suite D-2, Cambridge, MA 02139.

PREORDER Fulcrum 3 now! Fulcrum 2 sold out in 2 months and is reviewed
in Jacket at

http://jacketmagazine.com/25/kam-fulcr.html

Philip Nikolayev & Katia Kapovich, eds.
Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics
334 Harvard Street, Suite D-2
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
phone 617-864-7874
e-mail editor at fulcrumpoetry.com


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From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep 23 22:03:59 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 22:03:59 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] prose chapbook opportunity
Message-ID: <e1.1976b75.2e84da8f@aol.com>

From:   jill.patterson at ttu.edu  
    

Please consider sharing with your students and friends the following
opportunity for publishing a prose chapbook.? Such chapbook opportunities
are rare for prose writers, but Predator Press wants to provide such a forum
for prose writers to publish their first book or to publish a "small"
collection of related stories or essays or short-shorts, a collection that
doesn?t require the expanse of a full, traditional book-length collection.


The Predator Press Chapbook Competition

Inkwell Literary Services invites submissions to the second bi-annual
Predator Press Chapbook Competition.? Each fall, Predator Press will host a
prose chapbook competition.? Each spring, Predator Press will host a poetry
chapbook competition.

Fall 2004 Competition

Prose writers should submit a chapbook of stories, essays, or short-shorts
by October 15, 2004.? The winning manuscript will be chosen in November and
will be published as a professionally-designed chapbook with a four-color,
glossy cover by December 2004.

The winning poet will also receive $400 and 25 copies.? Additional copies
will be available at an author?s discount.

Submission Guidelines:
? Manuscripts must be typed, double-spaced, with each new piece beginning on
a separate page.? 
? Manuscripts must be 28-32 pages in length, including the acknowledgements
page (listing prior publications included in the chapbook) and the table of
contents.
? With the manuscript, please include a cover sheet, listing the author?s
name, address, phone number, email, and the manuscript?s title.
? The author?s name should not appear anywhere else on the manuscript.
? Entries must have a postmark no later than October 15, 2004 (Note the
extended deadline).
? Electronic submissions will not be accepted.
? Manuscripts not following these guidelines will be disqualified.

Include a $10 reading fee with your submission, payable to Inkwell Literary
Services. Writers may submit more than one chapbook, but a $10 reading fee
must accompany each entry.? Include an additional $5 if you would like to
receive a copy of the winning chapbook.? Winners will be notified by email
unless a SASE is provided.? Manuscripts will not be returned.

Send materials to:? Inkwell Literary Services, P.O. Box 758, Ridgway, CO
81432.? 

In the event that the judge does not find an entry worthy of publication,
reading fees will be returned to all entrants.? Manuscripts will be judged
by the faculty of The San Juan Workshops or faculty at Texas Tech
University.? Students enrolled at Texas Tech University will not be
considered.? 

Prose Chapbook Competition Deadline:? October 15, 2004
Next Poetry Chapbook Competition Deadline: February 15, 2005
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep 23 22:19:06 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 22:19:06 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob
Message-ID: <d.33953f03.2e84de1a@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/23/2004 6:39:43 PM Central Daylight Time, 
Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes: 
> 
> Oh Pleaese, God, I Pray Hurricane Bob don't hite us I Prey to You. Shit,
> all I got is my littlel garden of okrae an Tomatos and my Manuscriptes
> of concrete poms in Papirus and Stuffe and my Bible and my Rifrigerator
> Whear tha Bud Is. Please Don't Let Him Hit Us Lord. Heaven Help Us and
> Forgive my Grammerr! I got a PHDee in Poetry but I CAnt Remember When
> This Was NOW that I Think a It. it was so Long Agoe. SHit. Im Not
> Kidding. I gottta PHD!!! Its Like I'm a Gonna Die Soon. Here I Am
> Hurrican Bob. Come and Take ME!!!
> 
I don't quite know what this signifies, but, as one who is currently under a 
tropical storm warning, I find it repellent.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep 23 22:27:03 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 22:27:03 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
Message-ID: <1d0.2bfc8277.2e84dff7@aol.com>

Skoyles John  JohnFX at comcast.net <JohnFX at comcast.net>

Pettit Michael litcenter at recursos.org
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep 23 22:30:31 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 04:30:31 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob
References: <d.33953f03.2e84de1a@cs.com>
Message-ID: <018b01c4a1de$7688e070$6ed73152@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Kent was clearly referring to Bob's post where he said that he might be the cause of the sudden silence on the list. You can notice in the first line of Kent's post 
_I pray Hurricane Bob_
he was playing with language, and if there is any irony, that was to himself. I cannot see why this is not evident.

If there is anything repellent, then it can be my subsequent post, when I added to Kent's self-irony, my own irony calling him Boy, but any intelligent person can read a linguistic pun in it, and notice that I did not wish to be unrespectful towards Kent, but liked his sing-song style and continued it, once it got to my ears.

Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com 
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 4:19 AM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob


  In a message dated 9/23/2004 6:39:43 PM Central Daylight Time, Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes: 


    Oh Pleaese, God, I Pray Hurricane Bob don't hite us I Prey to You. Shit,
    all I got is my littlel garden of okrae an Tomatos and my Manuscriptes
    of concrete poms in Papirus and Stuffe and my Bible and my Rifrigerator
    Whear tha Bud Is. Please Don't Let Him Hit Us Lord. Heaven Help Us and
    Forgive my Grammerr! I got a PHDee in Poetry but I CAnt Remember When
    This Was NOW that I Think a It. it was so Long Agoe. SHit. Im Not
    Kidding. I gottta PHD!!! Its Like I'm a Gonna Die Soon. Here I Am
    Hurrican Bob. Come and Take ME!!!


  I don't quite know what this signifies, but, as one who is currently under a tropical storm warning, I find it repellent. 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep 23 22:34:26 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 04:34:26 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob
References: <d.33953f03.2e84de1a@cs.com>
Message-ID: <01b701c4a1df$02caca80$6ed73152@yourpk9x5fuc06>


And I am very sorry to hear that you are under the warning, here is my wish that it is diverted somehow and disappears.

Take care, Anny

From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob


  In a message dated 9/23/2004 6:39:43 PM Central Daylight Time, Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes: 


    Oh Pleaese, God, I Pray Hurricane Bob don't hite us I Prey to You. Shit,
    all I got is my littlel garden of okrae an Tomatos and my Manuscriptes
    of concrete poms in Papirus and Stuffe and my Bible and my Rifrigerator
    Whear tha Bud Is. Please Don't Let Him Hit Us Lord. Heaven Help Us and
    Forgive my Grammerr! I got a PHDee in Poetry but I CAnt Remember When
    This Was NOW that I Think a It. it was so Long Agoe. SHit. Im Not
    Kidding. I gottta PHD!!! Its Like I'm a Gonna Die Soon. Here I Am
    Hurrican Bob. Come and Take ME!!!


  I don't quite know what this signifies, but, as one who is currently under a tropical storm warning, I find it repellent. 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Thu Sep 23 19:59:25 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 19:59:25 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob
References: <s1531858.041@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <018401c4a1c9$5e2afaf0$2bb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



> Oh Pleaese, God, I Pray Hurricane Bob don't hite us I Prey to You. Shit,
> all I got is my littlel garden of okrae an Tomatos and my Manuscriptes
> of concrete poms in Papirus and Stuffe and my Bible and my Rifrigerator
> Whear tha Bud Is. Please Don't Let Him Hit Us Lord. Heaven Help Us and
> Forgive my Grammerr! I got a PHDee in Poetry but I CAnt Remember When
> This Was NOW that I Think a It. it was so Long Agoe. SHit. Im Not
> Kidding. I gottta PHD!!! Its Like I'm a Gonna Die Soon. Here I Am
> Hurrican Bob. Come and Take ME!!!
> 
Dang, I wuz sure I hit you--twicet!  Okay, I'll swing back agin.

--Hurricane Robert (They won't lemme do it as Bob).



From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep 23 22:43:44 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 22:43:44 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
Message-ID: <bf.45cd79ea.2e84e3e0@aol.com>

Sorry, that last email was way off topic.
I see the former Laureate Pinsky's 
Favorite Poem Project lives on....
---
Think about poetry

We hope lots of local residents will take some time out this week to consider 
poetry. 

Some great poets and thinkers of the last century certainly did.

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the 
noble emotions. 

John Ruskin 1819-1900

Sir, what is poetry?'

Why sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; 
but it is not easy to tell what it is.' 

Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. 

Robert Frost 1874-1963

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes it origin 
from emotion recollected in tranquility.

William Wordsworth 1770-1850

Poetry can make your day: 


Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should 
strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a 
remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the 
reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of 
imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.

John Keats 1795-1821

Distract you:

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over 
my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin 
bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

A.E. Housman 1859-1936

Or, make you suffer fools:

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my 
conversation.

Anthony Hope 1863-1933

It can inspire you:

Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should 
strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a 
remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the 
reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of 
imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.

John Keats 1795-1821

And it can make you laugh:

We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

Owen Meredith, Earl of Lytton 1981-1891

Dig into your memories, your emotions, the things you think about on a clear 
spring day, in front of a winter hearth or when you see your best love. Let 
that line of poetry stray into your memory and share it with Ukiah.

The Favorite Poem Project wants to hear about your favorite poem. Some 
entrants will get to read their favorite poem at a celebration of poetry in Ukiah in 
October. Get an application at the Ukiah library, the Grace Hudson Museum of 
Leaves of Grass in Willits. The deadline is Friday.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep 23 22:48:14 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 22:48:14 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry, wine, and the publisher of Maxim
Message-ID: <86.16fc5749.2e84e4ee@aol.com>


http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/books/09/21/felixdennis.biz.poet.ap/index.html
Poetry, wine, and the publisher of Maxim
Felix Dennis is on a mission to make poetry popular
Tuesday, September 21, 2004 Posted: 2002 GMT (0402 HKT) 

Felix Dennis reciting his poetry -- and offering some wine -- to his 
audience. 
  
NEW YORK (AP) -- Felix Dennis, the publisher of Maxim magazine, 
made himself a fortune by taking on the U.S. magazine establishment 
and giving young men what they wanted: stories about sex, beer, 
and frat-house humor.

Now he's taking on another institution: Free verse.
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep 23 22:55:23 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 04:55:23 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
References: <bf.45cd79ea.2e84e3e0@aol.com>
Message-ID: <01fd01c4a1e1$f0331690$6ed73152@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Do you think I can add some of these quotations to the other ones?
http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=287

Thank you, Anny

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 4:43 AM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] ns


  Sorry, that last email was way off topic.
  I see the former Laureate Pinsky's 
  Favorite Poem Project lives on....
  ---
  Think about poetry

  We hope lots of local residents will take some time out this week to consider poetry. 

  Some great poets and thinkers of the last century certainly did.

  What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions. 

  John Ruskin 1819-1900

  Sir, what is poetry?'

  Why sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.' 

  Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

  Poetry is what gets lost in translation. 

  Robert Frost 1874-1963

  Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes it origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

  William Wordsworth 1770-1850

  Poetry can make your day: 


  Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.

  John Keats 1795-1821

  Distract you:

  Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

  A.E. Housman 1859-1936

  Or, make you suffer fools:

  I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

  Anthony Hope 1863-1933

  It can inspire you:

  Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.

  John Keats 1795-1821

  And it can make you laugh:

  We may live without poetry, music and art;
  We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
  We may live without friends; we may live without books;
  But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

  Owen Meredith, Earl of Lytton 1981-1891

  Dig into your memories, your emotions, the things you think about on a clear spring day, in front of a winter hearth or when you see your best love. Let that line of poetry stray into your memory and share it with Ukiah.

  The Favorite Poem Project wants to hear about your favorite poem. Some entrants will get to read their favorite poem at a celebration of poetry in Ukiah in October. Get an application at the Ukiah library, the Grace Hudson Museum of Leaves of Grass in Willits. The deadline is Friday.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Fri Sep 24 03:21:45 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 03:21:45 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob
Message-ID: <1a0.2a1588d6.2e852509@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/23/2004 11:53:40 PM Central Daylight Time, 
anny.ballardini at tin.it writes: 
>  
>  And I am very sorry to hear that you are under the warning, here is my wish 
> that it is diverted somehow and disappears.
>   
>  Take care, Anny
> 
I think it has. And I apologize for misreading Kent's message.
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Fri Sep 24 06:24:55 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 06:24:55 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] prose chapbook opportunity
References: <e1.1976b75.2e84da8f@aol.com>
Message-ID: <007201c4a220$bfb77120$78b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

At least they're naming themselves honestly.

--Bob



Please consider sharing with your students and friends the following
opportunity for publishing a prose chapbook.  Such chapbook opportunities
are rare for prose writers, but Predator Press wants to provide such a forum
for prose writers to publish their first book or to publish a "small"
collection of related stories or essays or short-shorts, a collection that
doesn?t require the expanse of a full, traditional book-length collection.


The Predator Press Chapbook Competition

Inkwell Literary Services invites submissions to the second bi-annual
Predator Press Chapbook Competition.  Each fall, Predator Press will host a
prose chapbook competition.  Each spring, Predator Press will host a poetry
chapbook competition.

Fall 2004 Competition

Prose writers should submit a chapbook of stories, essays, or short-shorts
by October 15, 2004.  The winning manuscript will be chosen in November and
will be published as a professionally-designed chapbook with a four-color,
glossy cover by December 2004.

The winning poet will also receive $400 and 25 copies.  Additional copies
will be available at an author?s discount.

Submission Guidelines:
? Manuscripts must be typed, double-spaced, with each new piece beginning on
a separate page.  
? Manuscripts must be 28-32 pages in length, including the acknowledgements
page (listing prior publications included in the chapbook) and the table of
contents.
? With the manuscript, please include a cover sheet, listing the author?s
name, address, phone number, email, and the manuscript?s title.
? The author?s name should not appear anywhere else on the manuscript.
? Entries must have a postmark no later than October 15, 2004 (Note the
extended deadline).
? Electronic submissions will not be accepted.
? Manuscripts not following these guidelines will be disqualified.

Include a $10 reading fee with your submission, payable to Inkwell Literary
Services. Writers may submit more than one chapbook, but a $10 reading fee
must accompany each entry.  Include an additional $5 if you would like to
receive a copy of the winning chapbook.  Winners will be notified by email
unless a SASE is provided.  Manuscripts will not be returned.

Send materials to:  Inkwell Literary Services, P.O. Box 758, Ridgway, CO
81432.  

In the event that the judge does not find an entry worthy of publication,
reading fees will be returned to all entrants.  Manuscripts will be judged
by the faculty of The San Juan Workshops or faculty at Texas Tech
University.  Students enrolled at Texas Tech University will not be
considered.  

Prose Chapbook Competition Deadline:  October 15, 2004
Next Poetry Chapbook Competition Deadline: February 15, 2005




------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Fri Sep 24 06:30:19 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 06:30:19 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob
References: <d.33953f03.2e84de1a@cs.com>
Message-ID: <008201c4a221$80316dc0$78b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>


    Oh Pleaese, God, I Pray Hurricane Bob don't hite us I Prey to You. Shit,
    all I got is my littlel garden of okrae an Tomatos and my Manuscriptes
    of concrete poms in Papirus and Stuffe and my Bible and my Rifrigerator
    Whear tha Bud Is. Please Don't Let Him Hit Us Lord. Heaven Help Us and
    Forgive my Grammerr! I got a PHDee in Poetry but I CAnt Remember When
    This Was NOW that I Think a It. it was so Long Agoe. SHit. Im Not
    Kidding. I gottta PHD!!! Its Like I'm a Gonna Die Soon. Here I Am
    Hurrican Bob. Come and Take ME!!!


  I don't quite know what this signifies, but, as one who is currently under a tropical storm warning, I find it repellent. 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  I find people who can't laugh at things like impending tropical storms or hurricanes . . . well, not repellent, but close to it because a lid on free expression.  On the other hand, I can't say I quite know what Kent was up to in his post, so maybe he was saying something worser than I took him to be.

  --Bob G.


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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Fri Sep 24 06:34:21 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 06:34:21 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
References: <bf.45cd79ea.2e84e3e0@aol.com>
	<01fd01c4a1e1$f0331690$6ed73152@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <00b701c4a222$102f4e60$78b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

I liked the quotation, too, but it'd be nice if you could find and post some that actually tell us what poetry is.

--Bob G.

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Anny Ballardini 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views 
  Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2004 10:55 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] ns


  Do you think I can add some of these quotations to the other ones?
  http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=287

  Thank you, Anny

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: JforJames at aol.com 
    To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
    Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 4:43 AM
    Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] ns


    Sorry, that last email was way off topic.
    I see the former Laureate Pinsky's 
    Favorite Poem Project lives on....
    ---
    Think about poetry

    We hope lots of local residents will take some time out this week to consider poetry. 

    Some great poets and thinkers of the last century certainly did.

    What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions. 

    John Ruskin 1819-1900

    Sir, what is poetry?'

    Why sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.' 

    Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

    Poetry is what gets lost in translation. 

    Robert Frost 1874-1963

    Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes it origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

    William Wordsworth 1770-1850

    Poetry can make your day: 


    Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.

    John Keats 1795-1821

    Distract you:

    Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

    A.E. Housman 1859-1936

    Or, make you suffer fools:

    I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

    Anthony Hope 1863-1933

    It can inspire you:

    Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.

    John Keats 1795-1821

    And it can make you laugh:

    We may live without poetry, music and art;
    We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
    We may live without friends; we may live without books;
    But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

    Owen Meredith, Earl of Lytton 1981-1891

    Dig into your memories, your emotions, the things you think about on a clear spring day, in front of a winter hearth or when you see your best love. Let that line of poetry stray into your memory and share it with Ukiah.

    The Favorite Poem Project wants to hear about your favorite poem. Some entrants will get to read their favorite poem at a celebration of poetry in Ukiah in October. Get an application at the Ukiah library, the Grace Hudson Museum of Leaves of Grass in Willits. The deadline is Friday.



----------------------------------------------------------------------------


    _______________________________________________
    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
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Fri Sep 24 06:38:35 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 12:38:35 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hurricane Bob
References: <1a0.2a1588d6.2e852509@cs.com>
Message-ID: <00a201c4a222$a55d27f0$38ae3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>



  From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com 
  Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 9:21 AM


  In a message dated 9/23/2004 11:53:40 PM Central Daylight Time, anny.ballardini at tin.it writes: 


    And I am very sorry to hear that you are under the warning, here is my wish that it is diverted somehow and disappears.
      
    Take care, Anny


  I think it has. 


  I am very happy. I remember I was in New Orleans and there was this hurricane coming. They didn't evacuate at the time, about 20 years ago, and I realized there was absolutely nothing I could do, and was seized by a strange passivity. We just listened to the news, without commenting. And when it was very close, it turned away.

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From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu  Fri Sep 24 04:23:05 2004
From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 03:23:05 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
In-Reply-To: <20040920193340.55378.qmail@web52606.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <BD794399.710B%paul.lake@mail.atu.edu>

On 9/20/04 2:33 PM, "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Does anybody know if Storyline Press is ever going to
> release *Story Hour:  Contemporary American Poems*
> edited by Sonny Williams?
> 
> I've had it on my radar for a while now, but I can
> find a mention of it at the Storyline website.  Amazon
> just says that it hasn't been released yet.
> 
> What's the deal?  Anyone know?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> jln
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> ---
> [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]
> 
> 
Don't know the answer to this. Story Line moved suddenly a few weeks ago.
I'm not sure it has--or will--reconstitute itself, though David Mason, who
publishes with Story Line and knows Robert McDowell the editor/publisher has
said on another list that the book you referred to, Story Hour, will come
out this fall.

Paul Lake

---
[This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]



From JforJames at aol.com  Fri Sep 24 12:34:51 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 12:34:51 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
Message-ID: <bd.46754adc.2e85a6ab@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/24/2004 11:24:48 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
paul.lake at mail.atu.edu writes:
Story Line moved suddenly a few weeks ago.
I'm not sure it has--or will--reconstitute it
That doesn't sound good. They'd been rumored
to be in financial straits for some time. But I
guess that's an everyday affair for literary presses.

I was just noticed that on Storline's website they 
nailed up a manifesto of sorts. Each item can be clicked
on for further explanation/example of the point...

http://www.storylinepress.com/demands/demands.html
Non-Negotiable Demands

1. Take prosody off the hit list. 
2. Stop calling formless writing poetry. 
3. Accuracy, at all costs. 
4. No emotion without narrative. 
5. No more meditating on the meditation. 
6. No more poems about poetry. 
7. No more irresponsibility of expression. 
8. Raze the House of Fashion. 
9. Dismantle the Office of Translation. 
10. Spring open the Jail of the Self

An outgrowth of Jarman & McDowell's 
Reaper Essays.
Finnegan
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From JforJames at aol.com  Fri Sep 24 13:41:37 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:41:37 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
Message-ID: <e4.589d0e05.2e85b651@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/24/2004 6:35:07 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:
I liked the quotation, too, but it'd be nice if you could find and post some 
that actually tell us what poetry is.

--Bob G.
Bob, that's one of my favorite unresolvable topics...here's
a nice quote on the subject...

Most people have so vague an idea of poetry that their vagueness 
on this score serves as their definition of poetry. 
--Paul Val?ry, Litt?rature (1930)

--

Finnegan 
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From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Fri Sep 24 15:12:24 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 11:12:24 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
In-Reply-To: <00b701c4a222$102f4e60$78b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
References: <bf.45cd79ea.2e84e3e0@aol.com>
	<01fd01c4a1e1$f0331690$6ed73152@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<00b701c4a222$102f4e60$78b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <6b279deb040924121234add067@mail.gmail.com>

> I liked the quotation, too, but it'd be nice if you could find and 
> post some that actually tell us what poetry is. 

Kind of take the fun out of it no, like searchinf for the most
clinically accurate description of sex...

c


From jsafdie at comcast.net  Fri Sep 24 16:09:00 2004
From: jsafdie at comcast.net (Joe Safdie)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:09:00 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
References: <bd.46754adc.2e85a6ab@aol.com>
Message-ID: <00d001c4a272$55b7b210$56001118@D6T95L21>

The Non-Negotiable Demands on the Story Line Press website were vaguely amusing to me -- I've always been partial to manifestos, ever since Pound's Imagism -- but finally inconsequential. It was hard, for example, to see any difference whatsoever in the various poems quoted as examples -- they all seemed the same to me. Did someone mention "mainstream"?

The site was nostalgic in another way, too -- I met Mark (Jarman) and Robert (McDowell) at UC Santa Cruz in the mid-70s; they were a year ahead of me, and were editors of the campus literary magazine the year before me (I've forgotten its name -- Epoch, maybe?). I was just coming into poetry then, so they were ahead of me in that as well -- Mark, especially, was already thought of as a prodigy. But as my education progressed, and the Black Mountain and New York "schools" captured my imagination, I lost touch with them. I've always, though, shared their appreciation of George Hitchcock, the editor of Kayak, who published my first poems and even gave me the paper to self-publish my first chapbook. George was a fabulous, hilarious surrealist poet, and an extremely generous man . . .

I would see poems by Mark from time to time, and realized he was making a name for himself. Didn't he become some sort of Christian?

Their speculations about the line engaged me the most; I'd recommend Dale Smith's recent essay in the latest *House Organ* (edited by Ken Warren) for some up-to-date and very useful thoughts about that. He goes back to one of Olson's essays that I've always found useful, "Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays" and shows its continued relevance, as well as entertains thoughts about how the line is affected by one's local geography. Great stuff.

Anybody else see anything in those "demands"?

Joe Safdie

 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 9:34 AM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Story Hour


  In a message dated 9/24/2004 11:24:48 AM Eastern Daylight Time, paul.lake at mail.atu.edu writes:
    Story Line moved suddenly a few weeks ago.
    I'm not sure it has--or will--reconstitute it
  That doesn't sound good. They'd been rumored

  to be in financial straits for some time. But I

  guess that's an everyday affair for literary presses.



  I was just noticed that on Storline's website they 

  nailed up a manifesto of sorts. Each item can be clicked

  on for further explanation/example of the point...



  http://www.storylinepress.com/demands/demands.html

  Non-Negotiable Demands



  1. Take prosody off the hit list. 

  2. Stop calling formless writing poetry. 

  3. Accuracy, at all costs. 

  4. No emotion without narrative. 

  5. No more meditating on the meditation. 

  6. No more poems about poetry. 

  7. No more irresponsibility of expression. 

  8. Raze the House of Fashion. 

  9. Dismantle the Office of Translation. 

  10. Spring open the Jail of the Self

  An outgrowth of Jarman & McDowell's 
  Reaper Essays.
  Finnegan


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From antrobin at clipper.net  Fri Sep 24 16:52:55 2004
From: antrobin at clipper.net (Anthony Robinson)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:52:55 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
In-Reply-To: <00d001c4a272$55b7b210$56001118@D6T95L21>
Message-ID: <01e501c4a278$86bb8cf0$bd3e1c40@Emily>

I've been alternately amused and annoyed by these demands since I first
discovered them as an undergraduate with an eye on "becoming" a poet.  I
was intrigued by "new formalism" but not traditional narrative; around
the same time I saw Charles Bernstein read for the first time and I
became equally, if differently intrigued by language poetry.  Strange
combo, maybe.
 
In any case, I admired much of Jarman's early work, though I couldn't
help but notice how man of his non-negotiable demands he neglected in
his own poetry. In recent years he's written a lot of prose poems that
probably violate one or the other of the first two demands.
 
And what's wrong with poems about poetry?  What's wrong with meditation?
How, exactly, does one express oneself "irresponsibly."
 
A couple years after my first encounter with The Reaper and these
demands, I found myself in an MFA program that more or less regarded
these rules as gospel.  The urge to rebel grew too strong, and I left
the program.   Not long after, I published a non-narrative,
semi-formless poem in an online journal.  Two days after publication,
Jarman (who I've never met) emailed me saying he admired the poem.
 
I don't (and never will, I imagine) know my place in the world.
 
Tony
 
-----Original Message-----
From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
[mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Joe Safdie
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 1:09 PM
To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
 
The Non-Negotiable Demands on the Story Line Press website were vaguely
amusing to me -- I've always been partial to manifestos, ever since
Pound's Imagism -- but finally inconsequential. It was hard, for
example, to see any difference whatsoever in the various poems quoted as
examples -- they all seemed the same to me. Did someone mention
"mainstream"?
 
The site was nostalgic in another way, too -- I met Mark (Jarman) and
Robert (McDowell) at UC Santa Cruz in the mid-70s; they were a year
ahead of me, and were editors of the campus literary magazine the year
before me (I've forgotten its name -- Epoch, maybe?). I was just coming
into poetry then, so they were ahead of me in that as well -- Mark,
especially, was already thought of as a prodigy. But as my education
progressed, and the Black Mountain and New York "schools" captured my
imagination, I lost touch with them. I've always, though, shared their
appreciation of George Hitchcock, the editor of Kayak, who published my
first poems and even gave me the paper to self-publish my first
chapbook. George was a fabulous, hilarious surrealist poet, and an
extremely generous man . . .
 
I would see poems by Mark from time to time, and realized he was making
a name for himself. Didn't he become some sort of Christian?
 
Their speculations about the line engaged me the most; I'd recommend
Dale Smith's recent essay in the latest *House Organ* (edited by Ken
Warren) for some up-to-date and very useful thoughts about that. He goes
back to one of Olson's essays that I've always found useful, "Quantity
in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays" and shows its continued
relevance, as well as entertains thoughts about how the line is affected
by one's local geography. Great stuff.
 
Anybody else see anything in those "demands"?
 
Joe Safdie
 
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: JforJames at aol.com 
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
 
In a message dated 9/24/2004 11:24:48 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
paul.lake at mail.atu.edu writes:
Story Line moved suddenly a few weeks ago.
I'm not sure it has--or will--reconstitute it
That doesn't sound good. They'd been rumored
to be in financial straits for some time. But I
guess that's an everyday affair for literary presses.
 
I was just noticed that on Storline's website they 
nailed up a manifesto of sorts. Each item can be clicked
on for further explanation/example of the point...
 
http://www.storylinepress.com/demands/demands.html
Non-Negotiable Demands
 
1. Take prosody off the hit list. 
2. Stop calling formless writing poetry. 
3. Accuracy, at all costs. 
4. No emotion without narrative. 
5. No more meditating on the meditation. 
6. No more poems about poetry. 
7. No more irresponsibility of expression. 
8. Raze the House of Fashion. 
9. Dismantle the Office of Translation. 
10. Spring open the Jail of the Self
 
An outgrowth of Jarman & McDowell's 
Reaper Essays.
Finnegan

  _____  

_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Fri Sep 24 17:04:54 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 16:04:54 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Library Toot & Plea
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A396@mail.ripon.edu>

I've been doing some long-overdue housecleaning and updating lately on my
web pages.  Among other things, I've added some of my own poems, essays, and
reviews to my Sample Writings page.  You are cordially invited to visit:

http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/grahamd/DGsamples.html

On my Poetry Library pages, there are a few additions and corrections, too,
but I have much still to do.  

http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/grahamd/PoetryLib.html

Let me also make my periodic plea for further links and suggestions that
might be good additions to the Library.  Backchannel, please.

I always welcome feedback and suggestions, and when teachers use the Library
in teaching I am delighted to learn about it. 

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================



From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Sat Sep 25 08:38:36 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 05:38:36 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
In-Reply-To: <01e501c4a278$86bb8cf0$bd3e1c40@Emily>
Message-ID: <20040925123836.79601.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>

That sounds exactly like Mark.  He's a gracious guy
and very open minded, despite what these
non-negotiable demands say.  He told me at West
Chester this past summer that he tried to talk Robert
McDowell out of putting those demands on the website. 
He seemed kind of embarrased by them.

I was vaguely amused at another post asking if Mark
had become "some kind of Christian."  

Jeff Newberry


--- Anthony Robinson <antrobin at clipper.net> wrote:

> I've been alternately amused and annoyed by these
> demands since I first
> discovered them as an undergraduate with an eye on
> "becoming" a poet.  I
> was intrigued by "new formalism" but not traditional
> narrative; around
> the same time I saw Charles Bernstein read for the
> first time and I
> became equally, if differently intrigued by language
> poetry.  Strange
> combo, maybe.
>  
> In any case, I admired much of Jarman's early work,
> though I couldn't
> help but notice how man of his non-negotiable
> demands he neglected in
> his own poetry. In recent years he's written a lot
> of prose poems that
> probably violate one or the other of the first two
> demands.
>  
> And what's wrong with poems about poetry?  What's
> wrong with meditation?
> How, exactly, does one express oneself
> "irresponsibly."
>  
> A couple years after my first encounter with The
> Reaper and these
> demands, I found myself in an MFA program that more
> or less regarded
> these rules as gospel.  The urge to rebel grew too
> strong, and I left
> the program.   Not long after, I published a
> non-narrative,
> semi-formless poem in an online journal.  Two days
> after publication,
> Jarman (who I've never met) emailed me saying he
> admired the poem.
>  
> I don't (and never will, I imagine) know my place in
> the world.
>  
> Tony
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> [mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On
> Behalf Of Joe Safdie
> Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 1:09 PM
> To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
>  
> The Non-Negotiable Demands on the Story Line Press
> website were vaguely
> amusing to me -- I've always been partial to
> manifestos, ever since
> Pound's Imagism -- but finally inconsequential. It
> was hard, for
> example, to see any difference whatsoever in the
> various poems quoted as
> examples -- they all seemed the same to me. Did
> someone mention
> "mainstream"?
>  
> The site was nostalgic in another way, too -- I met
> Mark (Jarman) and
> Robert (McDowell) at UC Santa Cruz in the mid-70s;
> they were a year
> ahead of me, and were editors of the campus literary
> magazine the year
> before me (I've forgotten its name -- Epoch,
> maybe?). I was just coming
> into poetry then, so they were ahead of me in that
> as well -- Mark,
> especially, was already thought of as a prodigy. But
> as my education
> progressed, and the Black Mountain and New York
> "schools" captured my
> imagination, I lost touch with them. I've always,
> though, shared their
> appreciation of George Hitchcock, the editor of
> Kayak, who published my
> first poems and even gave me the paper to
> self-publish my first
> chapbook. George was a fabulous, hilarious
> surrealist poet, and an
> extremely generous man . . .
>  
> I would see poems by Mark from time to time, and
> realized he was making
> a name for himself. Didn't he become some sort of
> Christian?
>  
> Their speculations about the line engaged me the
> most; I'd recommend
> Dale Smith's recent essay in the latest *House
> Organ* (edited by Ken
> Warren) for some up-to-date and very useful thoughts
> about that. He goes
> back to one of Olson's essays that I've always found
> useful, "Quantity
> in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays" and shows
> its continued
> relevance, as well as entertains thoughts about how
> the line is affected
> by one's local geography. Great stuff.
>  
> Anybody else see anything in those "demands"?
>  
> Joe Safdie
>  
>  
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: JforJames at aol.com 
> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
> Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 9:34 AM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
>  
> In a message dated 9/24/2004 11:24:48 AM Eastern
> Daylight Time,
> paul.lake at mail.atu.edu writes:
> Story Line moved suddenly a few weeks ago.
> I'm not sure it has--or will--reconstitute it
> That doesn't sound good. They'd been rumored
> to be in financial straits for some time. But I
> guess that's an everyday affair for literary
> presses.
>  
> I was just noticed that on Storline's website they 
> nailed up a manifesto of sorts. Each item can be
> clicked
> on for further explanation/example of the point...
>  
> http://www.storylinepress.com/demands/demands.html
> Non-Negotiable Demands
>  
> 1. Take prosody off the hit list. 
> 2. Stop calling formless writing poetry. 
> 3. Accuracy, at all costs. 
> 4. No emotion without narrative. 
> 5. No more meditating on the meditation. 
> 6. No more poems about poetry. 
> 7. No more irresponsibility of expression. 
> 8. Raze the House of Fashion. 
> 9. Dismantle the Office of Translation. 
> 10. Spring open the Jail of the Self
>  
> An outgrowth of Jarman & McDowell's 
> Reaper Essays.
> Finnegan
> 
>   _____  
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 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
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Sat Sep 25 09:28:28 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 09:28:28 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
References: <bf.45cd79ea.2e84e3e0@aol.com><01fd01c4a1e1$f0331690$6ed73152@yourpk9x5fuc06><00b701c4a222$102f4e60$78b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
	<6b279deb040924121234add067@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <009e01c4a303$8e129b70$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



>> I liked the quotation, too, but it'd be nice if you could find and 
>> post some that actually tell us what poetry is. 
> 
> Kind of take the fun out of it no, like searchinf for the most
> clinically accurate description of sex...
> 
> c

For me, knowledge is always more fun than ignorance.  But to each his own.

--Bob





From wjbat at conncoll.edu  Sat Sep 25 09:33:03 2004
From: wjbat at conncoll.edu (Wendy Battin)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 09:33:03 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
In-Reply-To: <20040925123836.79601.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040925123836.79601.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <6D508E70-0EF7-11D9-9A7E-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>

On Sep 25, 2004, at 8:38 AM, Jeff Newberry wrote:
> I was vaguely amused at another post asking if Mark
> had become "some kind of Christian."

Explain the joke to those of us who don't know him, then?
I've read some of his work in journals and have found it generally 
well-crafted and intelligent, but I'm not very familiar with him.  
He'll be reading here as the Connecticut Poetry Circuit pick this 
year--no idea how they're selected, and no one has ever asked us for 
suggestions--so I'm curious.

Wendy

Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html


Ch?eng-t?ien was asked, ?How should I apply my mind twenty-four hours a 
day?? He replied, ?When chickens are cold, they roost in trees; when 
ducks are cold, they plunge into water.? The questioner said, ?Then I 
don?t need cultivated realization, and won?t pursue Buddhahood or Zen 
mastery.? Ch?eng-t?ien responded, ?You?ve saved half my effort.?




From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Sat Sep 25 09:42:25 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 09:42:25 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e4.589d0e05.2e85b651@aol.com>
Message-ID: <00b201c4a305$80e5e310$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

I liked the quotation, too, but it'd be nice if you could find and post some that actually tell us what poetry is.

--Bob G.
  Bob, that's one of my favorite unresolvable topics...here's
  a nice quote on the subject...


  Most people have so vague an idea of poetry that their vagueness 

  on this score serves as their definition of poetry. 
  --Paul Val?ry, Litt?rature (1930)

  --

  Finnegan 
  I think one problem here is that most quoted "definitions" of "poetry" are really just attempts to hint at what makes for good poetry.  Defining good poetry is a lot harder than defining poetry.  I think even that can be done, though.  Certainly it can be done better than the gushers who have emoted about it have done it.

  --Bob




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From halvard at earthlink.net  Sat Sep 25 10:23:32 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 10:23:32 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
In-Reply-To: <009e01c4a303$8e129b70$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEIEABIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>

    
{    >> I liked the quotation, too, but it'd be nice if you could find and 
{    >> post some that actually tell us what poetry is. 
{    > 
{    > Kind of take the fun out of it no, like searchinf for the most
{    > clinically accurate description of sex...
{    > 
{    > c
{    
{    For me, knowledge is always more fun than ignorance.  But to each his own.
{    
{    --Bob

And maybe wisdom is more fun than either.

Hal     "Those who cast the ballots decide nothing.
           Those who count the ballots decide everything."
                                    --Joseph Stalin
Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard



From halvard at earthlink.net  Sat Sep 25 10:55:39 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 10:55:39 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEIEACIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


Sonnet:  Faith-based Initiative

Coming home, I see my next-door neighbor at his door-
step licking the door. Every other week or so this happens.
He stands there licking and licking and licking, pausing

every so often to wipe off his chin before going on with his
licking. Cheerily, I wave to him, saying, "Still haven't found 
that key you lost, eh?" He grins and then makes a sour 

face at the taste of the door's varnish. And I ask, "So 
how's the wife?" And he says, "I'm praying she's still alive  
when I'm through. Last time I saw her she was fine." 

"Give her my best," I say, "when you're in." 



Hal                

Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard






From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Sat Sep 25 11:16:58 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 07:16:58 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
In-Reply-To: <009e01c4a303$8e129b70$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
References: <bf.45cd79ea.2e84e3e0@aol.com>
	<01fd01c4a1e1$f0331690$6ed73152@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<00b701c4a222$102f4e60$78b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
	<6b279deb040924121234add067@mail.gmail.com>
	<009e01c4a303$8e129b70$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <6b279deb04092508164042a1fd@mail.gmail.com>

> For me, knowledge is always more fun than ignorance.  But to each his own.

False opposition, Bob. A clinical accounting doesn't necessarily
entail any more "knowledge" than a glancing observation that gets at
the heart of the matter. Likewise, if you want to learn about sex I
guess you could turn to the encyclopedia, but I think there are a few
novels that would do a much better job in a much shorter space.

For me, knowing and wisdom is better than knowledge and ignorance. But
to each his own.

c


From Chris.Lott at gmail.com  Sat Sep 25 11:19:46 2004
From: Chris.Lott at gmail.com (Chris Lott)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 07:19:46 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <00b201c4a305$80e5e310$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
References: <e4.589d0e05.2e85b651@aol.com>
	<00b201c4a305$80e5e310$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <6b279deb04092508194b93723c@mail.gmail.com>

> Defining good poetry is a lot harder than defining poetry.  
> I think even that can be done, though.  Certainly it 
> can be done better than the gushers who have 
> emoted about it have done it. 

Since you haven't satisfactorily done the first, I don't see how you
can do the second. But either way I bet it would be a lot more
enjoyable for people to actually have you do it instead of just
threatening to do so, which you have been doing for the whole of the
short time I've been on this list.

Then, having writ, perhaps you'll feel free to move to another topic :)

c
--
Chris Lott


From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Sat Sep 25 16:48:46 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 13:48:46 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEIEACIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <4155D9AE.28111AA3@earthlink.net>

Choice.  Absolutely choice.  I think we need an anthology of like
poetry, and perhaps all in some form of the sonnet, which we might title
Sonnets From The Portly Geese.  As a matter of fact, I'm taking my own
suggestion seriously and will soon produce a sonnet titled "Original
Sin: An Imitation."

- Jim

Halvard Johnson wrote:
> 
> Sonnet:  Faith-based Initiative
> 
> Coming home, I see my next-door neighbor at his door-
> step licking the door. Every other week or so this happens.
> He stands there licking and licking and licking, pausing
> 
> every so often to wipe off his chin before going on with his
> licking. Cheerily, I wave to him, saying, "Still haven't found
> that key you lost, eh?" He grins and then makes a sour
> 
> face at the taste of the door's varnish. And I ask, "So
> how's the wife?" And he says, "I'm praying she's still alive
> when I'm through. Last time I saw her she was fine."
> 
> "Give her my best," I say, "when you're in."
> 
> Hal
> 
> Halvard Johnson
> ===============
> email: halvard at earthlink.net
> website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 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 Sep 25 17:22:23 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 17:22:23 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative
Message-ID: <1cd.2c2e8afd.2e873b8f@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/25/2004 4:54:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
jvcervantes at earthlink.net writes:

> Sonnet:? Faith-based Initiative
> >
> >Coming home, I see my next-door neighbor at his door-
> >step licking the door. Every other week or so this happens.
> >He stands there licking and licking and licking, pausing
> >
> >every so often to wipe off his chin before going on with his
> >licking. Cheerily, I wave to him, saying, "Still haven't found
> >that key you lost, eh?" He grins and then makes a sour
> >
> >face at the taste of the door's varnish. And I ask, "So
> >how's the wife?" And he says, "I'm praying she's still alive
> >when I'm through. Last time I saw her she was fine."
> >
> >"Give her my best," I say, "when you're in."
> 

Love the image of a door like a popsicle...
Wait a minute. This is shorter than Michael's 
lapse of a single line. The incredible shrinking 
sonnet, soon to cohabit with the lowly haiku. 
Hal, have you no shame, man?
Finnegan
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From MillB at aol.com  Sat Sep 25 17:46:47 2004
From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 17:46:47 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Carl Dennis
Message-ID: <111.3865b265.2e874147@aol.com>

Greetings all,
 
For a local paper, I am writing a review of Carl Dennis'  work  and aside 
from being at Yaddo while he was ( a few summers ago) and finding him  to be 
kind, modest, unassuming and talented, I do not know much more.
 
I have read and admired his books, and I have researched his background and  
read a number of reviews and interviews, but I was thinking if someone had a  
good story which might provide insight into his personality, that would be  
helpful. And if you are willing to share it, that would be even better.   Along 
with his work, I would like to offer my readers a bit of human interest  about 
the man as well. . .
 
Thanks,
 
Mill
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sat Sep 25 17:59:51 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 23:59:51 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative
References: <1cd.2c2e8afd.2e873b8f@aol.com>
Message-ID: <002f01c4a34a$fc229a10$3eaa3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Believe it or not, I am laughing in front of the screen, I'm also wondering how many lines the "Original Sin : an imitation" will have as a Sonnet.


Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com 
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2004 11:22 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative


  In a message dated 9/25/2004 4:54:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, jvcervantes at earthlink.net writes:


    Sonnet:  Faith-based Initiative
    >
    >Coming home, I see my next-door neighbor at his door-
    >step licking the door. Every other week or so this happens.
    >He stands there licking and licking and licking, pausing
    >
    >every so often to wipe off his chin before going on with his
    >licking. Cheerily, I wave to him, saying, "Still haven't found
    >that key you lost, eh?" He grins and then makes a sour
    >
    >face at the taste of the door's varnish. And I ask, "So
    >how's the wife?" And he says, "I'm praying she's still alive
    >when I'm through. Last time I saw her she was fine."
    >
    >"Give her my best," I say, "when you're in."



  Love the image of a door like a popsicle...
  Wait a minute. This is shorter than Michael's 
  lapse of a single line. The incredible shrinking 
  sonnet, soon to cohabit with the lowly haiku. 
  Hal, have you no shame, man?
  Finnegan



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Sat Sep 25 18:05:54 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 18:05:54 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
References: <bf.45cd79ea.2e84e3e0@aol.com><01fd01c4a1e1$f0331690$6ed73152@yourpk9x5fuc06><00b701c4a222$102f4e60$78b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc><6b279deb040924121234add067@mail.gmail.com><009e01c4a303$8e129b70$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
	<6b279deb04092508164042a1fd@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <011b01c4a34b$d8f86a50$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



>> For me, knowledge is always more fun than ignorance.  But to each his 
>> own.
>
> False opposition, Bob.

All knowledge is definition, all ignorance a preference for empty 
emotionalism.

--Bob 




From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Sat Sep 25 18:10:54 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 18:10:54 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e4.589d0e05.2e85b651@aol.com><00b201c4a305$80e5e310$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
	<6b279deb04092508194b93723c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <011e01c4a34c$8b9b76c0$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



>> Defining good poetry is a lot harder than defining poetry.
>> I think even that can be done, though.  Certainly it
>> can be done better than the gushers who have
>> emoted about it have done it.
>
> Since you haven't satisfactorily done the first, I don't see how you
> can do the second. But either way I bet it would be a lot more
> enjoyable for people to actually have you do it instead of just
> threatening to do so, which you have been doing for the whole of the
> short time I've been on this list.

Actually, I have done it (near-conclusively, which is all one can do to 
definie anything) and given directions to my essay on it.  What I haven't 
done is thoroughly answered all the opposition it's gotten.

It's somewhere on Comprepoetica.

http://www.geocities.com/comprepoetica

Notes Toward a Full Taxonomy of Literature

--Bob 




From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Sat Sep 25 18:18:12 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 18:18:12 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEIEABIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <014301c4a34d$923b0fd0$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

> {    For me, knowledge is always more fun than ignorance.  But to each his 
> own.
> {
> {    --Bob
>
> And maybe wisdom is more fun than either.
>
> Hal

It certainly is, but it can't exist without knowledge, nor with ignorance. 
Actually, I have trouble understanding what "wisdom" would be if not 
knowledge.  This idea that someone can know things but be unwise seems 
absurd to me; if he's unwise, there's something he doesn't know--how to use 
what knowledge he has.

I keep thinking of people who love food and therefore buy culinary recipe 
books, and people who love poetry and therefore avoid culinary recipe books.

--Bob G. 




From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Sat Sep 25 18:28:39 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 18:28:39 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative
References: <1cd.2c2e8afd.2e873b8f@aol.com>
	<002f01c4a34a$fc229a10$3eaa3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <017b01c4a34f$06632040$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

Believe it or not, I am laughing in front of the screen, I'm also wondering how many lines the "Original Sin : an imitation" will have as a Sonnet.

As long as it has one rhyme as good as door/sour, who cares?

--Bob
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From halvard at earthlink.net  Sat Sep 25 19:20:34 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 19:20:34 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
In-Reply-To: <014301c4a34d$923b0fd0$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEMEAPIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


{    > And maybe wisdom is more fun than either.
{    >
{    > Hal
{    
{    It certainly is, but it can't exist without knowledge, nor with ignorance. 
{    Actually, I have trouble understanding what "wisdom" would be if not 
{    knowledge.  This idea that someone can know things but be unwise seems 
{    absurd to me; if he's unwise, there's something he doesn't know--how to use 
{    what knowledge he has.

I'd say that one good step toward wisdom is getting a sense
of what can and cannot be known--what poetry is being one
of the latter.

Hal     "Those who cast the ballots decide nothing.
           Those who count the ballots decide everything."
                                    --Joseph Stalin
Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard



From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Sat Sep 25 19:53:05 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 19:53:05 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEMEAPIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <01a001c4a35a$d26a4320$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

> I'd say that one good step toward wisdom is getting a sense
> of what can and cannot be known--what poetry is being one
> of the latter.
>
> Hal

Why do you speak of it if you can't know it, then?  How do you recognize it? 
How do you know you have no knowledge of it if you have no knowledge of it?

To be no unknowable is to be non-existent, as far as I'm concerned.

--Bob 




From JforJames at aol.com  Sat Sep 25 21:32:33 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 21:32:33 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] On Demand 
Message-ID: <1e1.2b48c317.2e877631@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/24/2004 4:10:05 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
jsafdie at comcast.net writes:

> The Non-Negotiable Demands on the Story Line Press website were vaguely 
> amusing to me -- I've always been partial to manifestos, ever since Pound's 
> Imagism -- but finally inconsequential. It was hard, for example, to see any 
> difference whatsoever in the various poems quoted as examples -- they all seemed 
> the same to me. Did someone mention "mainstream"?
>   
> The site was nostalgic in another way, too -- I met Mark (Jarman) and Robert 
> (McDowell) at UC Santa Cruz in the mid-70s; they were a year ahead of me, 
> and were editors of the campus literary magazine the year before me (I've 
> forgotten its name -- Epoch, maybe?). I was just coming into poetry then, so they 
> were ahead of me in that as well -- Mark, especially, was already thought of 
> as a prodigy. But as my education progressed, and the Black Mountain and New 
> York "schools" captured my imagination, I lost touch with them. I've always, 
> though, shared their appreciation of George Hitchcock, the editor of Kayak, 
> who published my first poems and even gave me the paper to self-publish my 
> first chapbook. George was a fabulous, hilarious surrealist poet, and an 
> extremely generous man . . .
>   
> I would see poems by Mark from time to time, and realized he was making a 
> name for himself. Didn't he become some sort of Christian?
>   
> Their speculations about the line engaged me the most; I'd recommend Dale 
> Smith's recent essay in the latest *House Organ* (edited by Ken Warren) for 
> some up-to-date and very useful thoughts about that. He goes back to one of 
> Olson's essays that I've always found useful, "Quantity in Verse, and 
> Shakespeare's Late Plays" and shows its continued relevance, as well as entertains 
> thoughts about how the line is affected by one's local geography. Great stuff.
>   
> Anybody else see anything in those "demands"?
>   
> Joe Safdie
> 
Joe,
I like manifestos too. But I think their beauty really
lies in their "excluded middles"...since they 
posit everything as 'Is' or 'Is Not', one is invited to
explore the gulf between, to see if a bidirectional bridge 
is possible. Often it is. Often the best art lies 
in that excluded middle.

A few comments & quibbles re...
http://www.storylinepress.com/demands/demands.html

In #2, they say "It seems the one requirement a poem
must meet is that it move 'down the page' compellingly,
whether it is unfolding an image or following a narrative."
(This is could be a  definition of a poem, or almost any literary
text worth reading.) Then they go on to quote Larkin:
"Form is nothing to me, content is everything."
That statement is an indictment of the Chase Twitchell
poem they praised so lavishly in #1. If ever there was poem
driven by form over content or compelling thought,
that is one.

#3 Accuracy, at all costs.
That's sensible enough. Rilke says in Notebook of 
Malte Laurids Brigge, "He was a poet and abhorred 
the approximate."  But the Vern Rutsala poem 
they praise as an exemplar is mostly (approx. 6/7) 
just set-up for its final stanza, which contains 
a very shaky and inaccurate verb:

       I scavenged every frame
       For the smallest sign of him.
       I found none.

I'm not at all sure how one 'scavenges' a
frame of a movie as it passes in front of
one's eyes. (Rutsala's only motive for that
word seems to be fact that he used it correctly
earlier in the poem, so it functions as parallel 
structure and is echoic.)

#4 No emotion without narrative. 
This is true, almost without exception, as I argued 
in recent discussion on sentiment v. sentimentality. 

#6 No more poems about poetry.
Well, I appreciate the weariness that may result
from encountering too many of these poems. But
it would seem to cut poets off from an important
theme and perhaps one of the few joys of writing
poetry which is read primarily by other poets,
who presumably are interested in this subject.
I'd amend this at bit, but I'd be equally arbitrary 
and say something like: You get to write as many 
ars poeticas as you want to...but  you can publish 
no more than one per decade.
. 
#7 No more irresponsibility of expression.
I find the James Galvin poem that they admire to be 
utterly irresponsible in its first stanza. Much too 
much unnecessary humanizing of the pine trees 
(and of the sky, for that matter):

       Evergreens have reasons          
       For stopping where they do, 
       At timberline or the clean edge 
       Of sage and prairie grass. 
       There are quantities of wind 
       They know they cannot cross. 
       They come down from the tundra 
       On waves of ridges and stop, 
       Starting out over open country, 
       Like pilgrims on the shore 
       Of an unexpected ocean. 
       The sky is still the sky, they know; 
       It won't understand ordinary language. 

The last two stanzas of Galvin's poem,
with a quirky domestic narrative and 
good sense of space/landscape, almost 
redeem the false start of the poem's beginning.

But here's a statement that says nothing when you
get right down to it: "The Reaper does not clamor
for a return to the heyday of rhyme and meter,
the elegant formal poem, but for a preoccupation
with prosody, even in free verse, that will require
the new poet to be a master of phrasing, of lines,
of stanzas, of form itself. In other words, anything
he says must fit."
What does this mean? 'Preoccupation' can not
be good for advice. And mastering 'form itself," 
in context of free verse, seems contradictory. 

#8. Raze the House of Fashion
Hard to disagree with a periodic clearing away. In fact, 
Jarman and McDowell were pushing for a return to prosody
and narrative just as other movements (language,
post-mo) were bearing down on poetry's house,
taking their own shots at the modes of  free verse 
(minor meditations, telling vignettes, and personal 
lyrics/epiphanies) that so dominated poetry of the period. 
The wrecking balls were synchronized in their razing. 
At least the hearth and foundation walls, the most solid 
sections, of that old house still stand. What is happening
now is that new movements don't entirely obliterate the old
ones...they all stand together and move through time
contemporaneously. 

Finnegan


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From halvard at earthlink.net  Sat Sep 25 23:11:29 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 23:11:29 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
In-Reply-To: <01a001c4a35a$d26a4320$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEAEBEIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>

  
{    > I'd say that one good step toward wisdom is getting a sense
{    > of what can and cannot be known--what poetry is being one
{    > of the latter.
{    >
{    > Hal
{    
{    Why do you speak of it if you can't know it, then?  How do you recognize it? 
{    How do you know you have no knowledge of it if you have no knowledge of it?
{    
{    To be no unknowable is to be non-existent, as far as I'm concerned.
{    
{    --Bob 

Then, by that logic, your thoughts are non-existent since I have no way
of knowing them. I have access only to your words, dontcha know?

Hal     "Those who cast the ballots decide nothing.
           Those who count the ballots decide everything."
                                    --Joseph Stalin
Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard



From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sun Sep 26 04:25:39 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 10:25:39 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative
References: <1cd.2c2e8afd.2e873b8f@aol.com><002f01c4a34a$fc229a10$3eaa3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<017b01c4a34f$06632040$2fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <007701c4a3a2$67e8dc80$84ac3452@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Hi Bob, 

I could do a female version of the same sonnet with a she licking instead of a he. The problem resides somewhere else. Maybe in our stubborness of still wanting to set forth relationships that cannot exist. Is it because we are lazy? Because we do not want to give up our adolescent dreams? Because society and governments have invested so much in laws and rules to regulate _l'amour_? Because we fear the answer so much that we do not want to have any answers? Because we like to be blind and do as if nothing has ever happened? Because we do not sleep at night but we always say it was what I ate, what I didn't eat? Because manipulation has become so thick and heavy that by now to get out of it (talking from the point of view of the licker, the victim) we should literally leave our heads there?

The twist done by Hal into unreal tones but characterized by a plastic view made me laugh as a relief,

- someone else knows
- it is a common fact
- I fundamentally cannot stand sonnets or rhymes, and never did. Well sort of (I do if I evaluate them in an historical context).

Take care,

Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com 
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bob Grumman 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views 
  Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2004 12:28 AM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative


  Believe it or not, I am laughing in front of the screen, I'm also wondering how many lines the "Original Sin : an imitation" will have as a Sonnet.

  As long as it has one rhyme as good as door/sour, who cares?

  --Bob


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Sun Sep 26 07:39:57 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 07:39:57 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEAEBEIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <001601c4a3bd$90916290$95b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



>
> {    > I'd say that one good step toward wisdom is getting a sense
> {    > of what can and cannot be known--what poetry is being one
> {    > of the latter.
> {    >
> {    > Hal
> {
> {    Why do you speak of it if you can't know it, then?  How do you 
> recognize it?
> {    How do you know you have no knowledge of it if you have no knowledge 
> of it?
> {
> {    To be unknowable is to be non-existent, as far as I'm concerned.
> {
> {    --Bob
>
> Then, by that logic, your thoughts are non-existent since I have no way
> of knowing them. I have access only to your words, dontcha know?

> Hal

My words allow you to know my thoughts.  Thoughts, by one definition, being 
that which is revealed by words.  Now, how about telling me how you 
recognize poetry as poetry if you can't know poetry.  What are you talking 
about when you speak of poetry, which is something you can't have knowledge 
of?

--Bob 




From halvard at earthlink.net  Sun Sep 26 08:13:57 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 08:13:57 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
In-Reply-To: <001601c4a3bd$90916290$95b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEMEBIIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>

    
{    My words allow you to know my thoughts.  Thoughts, by one definition, being 
{    that which is revealed by words.  Now, how about telling me how you 
{    recognize poetry as poetry if you can't know poetry.  What are you talking 
{    about when you speak of poetry, which is something you can't have knowledge 
{    of?
{    
{    --Bob 

I wouldn't say I can't know poetry, though I'm not always sure as to
whether what I'm looking at is poetry or not. The difference between
you and me (one difference, perhaps) is that I don't mind not knowing.
A blurry line between poetry and whatever surrounds it is fine with me.
The boundaries can change, for me, from day to day and minute to
minute. It's pretty clear to me that you set the boundaries of poetry
more widely than do some who'd like strict adherence to traditional
forms and rules. Where we differ, I suspect, is that I'm not particularly
interested in setting the boundaries.

Hal     "Those who cast the ballots decide nothing.
           Those who count the ballots decide everything."
                                    --Joseph Stalin
Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard



From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Sun Sep 26 09:05:26 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 09:05:26 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] ns
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEMEBIIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <004501c4a3c9$8180ea80$95b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



> I wouldn't say I can't know poetry, though I'm not always sure as to
> whether what I'm looking at is poetry or not. 

I win, I win!


>The difference between
> you and me (one difference, perhaps) is that I don't mind not knowing.
> A blurry line between poetry and whatever surrounds it is fine with me.

I believe there is a blurry line between any A and not-A.  Where we differ on this, I think, is that I believe the blurry line between poetry and not-poetry is no thicker than the blurry line between any A and not-A.  Toast, for instance.  I said toast because it's breakfast time here, no doubt, but it's a perfect example I now see.  Can you imagine how people would carry on if toast was up there with symphonies and sonnets as a cultural object?  When is a piece of bread toast?  What's the difference between a heated roll and a piece of toast?

> The boundaries can change, for me, from day to day and minute to
> minute. It's pretty clear to me that you set the boundaries of poetry
> more widely than do some who'd like strict adherence to traditional
> forms and rules. Where we differ, I suspect, is that I'm not particularly
> interested in setting the boundaries.

I don't feel I'm setting boundaries; I believe I'm trying to be precise, so people can understand as close to exactly as possible what I'm talking about.  As a literary critic.  As a poet--as an artist, actually--I never worry about boundaries.  I make what interests me.  (Note, I do concern myself with boundaries, but don't worry about whether or not I'm adhering to them--except as a game.  A sometime part of poetry for me is playing the game of trying to say something others will enjoy while adhering to rules accepted in advance.

As a poet, however, I do consider definitions of poetry hugely important--as collections of pointers to what in varfious poems I can use.  A serious definition of poetry may teach me something, may tell me what I've been missing in my attempts to appreciate some variety of poetry.  I greatly enjoy many "definitions of poetry" that are actually "only" descriptions, usually, of the effects of poetry that could be applied to any artwork, but they can't help me as a poet.  I'm not likely after reading Emily's blurt, to think, ah, what I have to do is go for the hair in my poems!

--Bob   
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From grahamd at vbe.com  Sun Sep 26 12:42:01 2004
From: grahamd at vbe.com (David Graham)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 11:42:01 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Some People Like Poetry
Message-ID: <BD7C5B89.347C%grahamd@vbe.com>

Some People Like Poetry

Some people--
that means not everyone.
Not even most of them, only a few.
Not counting school, where you have to,
and poets themselves,
you might end up with something like two per thousand.

Like--
but then, you can like chicken noodle soup,
or compliments, or the color blue,
your old scarf,
your own way,
petting the dog.

Poetry--
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question first was raised.
But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail.
 
--Wislawa Szymborska. *Poems:  New & Collected, 1957-1997*.  Trans.
Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh.  Harcourt, 1998.


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at vbe.com
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================



From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Sun Sep 26 13:44:21 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 19:44:21 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] On poetry
References: <BD7C5B89.347C%grahamd@vbe.com>
Message-ID: <006b01c4a3f0$74d485e0$172ab750@yourpk9x5fuc06>

I am reading David Nemeth's Blog http://nemski.com/, pasting here his post
on 2004.09.08

I'm still reading Alex Cumberbatch's Piece in 950 Parts . . . didn't it use
to be 940 parts? It's taking me some time since I'm reading Lyn Hejinian's
The Cell parallel to Alex's poem.

>From Alex's work, some thoughts on poetry.

159
New improved and more pathetic
Fallacies. Is poetry a form static
Or a continuous fluxive practice?
For me, it is the latter: form
Is incidental-it will happen anyway.

160
There is no 'true', 'correct', or 'perfect'
Way to write a poem; in this perhaps
The 'untrue', 'incorrect' and 'imperfect'
Are to be valued as the aesthetic
Benchmarks of the most valuable excitements.

167
Is poetry more than a practice,
A category of knowledge-a special
Apprehension of the world through
Its self-conscious rhythm and its
Obsession with the right word-juste mot?

168
Am I a state of reverie-
Which is more or less than
True contemplation? Reduce
>From sensation's organic game
Discover against intellect.




From tad at opus40.org  Sun Sep 26 19:20:40 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 19:20:40 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] On Demand 
References: <1e1.2b48c317.2e877631@aol.com>
Message-ID: <001c01c4a41f$708eba80$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>

Doesn't the Rutsala poem somewhat violate Rule #1?
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2004 9:32 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] On Demand 


  In a message dated 9/24/2004 4:10:05 PM Eastern Standard Time, jsafdie at comcast.net writes:


    The Non-Negotiable Demands on the Story Line Press website were vaguely amusing to me -- I've always been partial to manifestos, ever since Pound's Imagism -- but finally inconsequential. It was hard, for example, to see any difference whatsoever in the various poems quoted as examples -- they all seemed the same to me. Did someone mention "mainstream"?
      
    The site was nostalgic in another way, too -- I met Mark (Jarman) and Robert (McDowell) at UC Santa Cruz in the mid-70s; they were a year ahead of me, and were editors of the campus literary magazine the year before me (I've forgotten its name -- Epoch, maybe?). I was just coming into poetry then, so they were ahead of me in that as well -- Mark, especially, was already thought of as a prodigy. But as my education progressed, and the Black Mountain and New York "schools" captured my imagination, I lost touch with them. I've always, though, shared their appreciation of George Hitchcock, the editor of Kayak, who published my first poems and even gave me the paper to self-publish my first chapbook. George was a fabulous, hilarious surrealist poet, and an extremely generous man . . .
      
    I would see poems by Mark from time to time, and realized he was making a name for himself. Didn't he become some sort of Christian?
      
    Their speculations about the line engaged me the most; I'd recommend Dale Smith's recent essay in the latest *House Organ* (edited by Ken Warren) for some up-to-date and very useful thoughts about that. He goes back to one of Olson's essays that I've always found useful, "Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays" and shows its continued relevance, as well as entertains thoughts about how the line is affected by one's local geography. Great stuff.
      
    Anybody else see anything in those "demands"?
      
    Joe Safdie


  Joe,
  I like manifestos too. But I think their beauty really
  lies in their "excluded middles"...since they 
  posit everything as 'Is' or 'Is Not', one is invited to
  explore the gulf between, to see if a bidirectional bridge 
  is possible. Often it is. Often the best art lies 
  in that excluded middle.

  A few comments & quibbles re...
  http://www.storylinepress.com/demands/demands.html

  In #2, they say "It seems the one requirement a poem
  must meet is that it move 'down the page' compellingly,
  whether it is unfolding an image or following a narrative."
  (This is could be a  definition of a poem, or almost any literary
  text worth reading.) Then they go on to quote Larkin:
  "Form is nothing to me, content is everything."
  That statement is an indictment of the Chase Twitchell
  poem they praised so lavishly in #1. If ever there was poem
  driven by form over content or compelling thought,
  that is one.

  #3 Accuracy, at all costs.
  That's sensible enough. Rilke says in Notebook of 
  Malte Laurids Brigge, "He was a poet and abhorred 
  the approximate."  But the Vern Rutsala poem 
  they praise as an exemplar is mostly (approx. 6/7) 
  just set-up for its final stanza, which contains 
  a very shaky and inaccurate verb:

         I scavenged every frame
         For the smallest sign of him.
         I found none.

  I'm not at all sure how one 'scavenges' a
  frame of a movie as it passes in front of
  one's eyes. (Rutsala's only motive for that
  word seems to be fact that he used it correctly
  earlier in the poem, so it functions as parallel 
  structure and is echoic.)

  #4 No emotion without narrative. 
  This is true, almost without exception, as I argued 
  in recent discussion on sentiment v. sentimentality. 

  #6 No more poems about poetry.
  Well, I appreciate the weariness that may result
  from encountering too many of these poems. But
  it would seem to cut poets off from an important
  theme and perhaps one of the few joys of writing
  poetry which is read primarily by other poets,
  who presumably are interested in this subject.
  I'd amend this at bit, but I'd be equally arbitrary 
  and say something like: You get to write as many 
  ars poeticas as you want to...but  you can publish 
  no more than one per decade.
  . 
  #7 No more irresponsibility of expression.
  I find the James Galvin poem that they admire to be 
  utterly irresponsible in its first stanza. Much too 
  much unnecessary humanizing of the pine trees 
  (and of the sky, for that matter):

         Evergreens have reasons      
         For stopping where they do, 
         At timberline or the clean edge 
         Of sage and prairie grass. 
         There are quantities of wind 
         They know they cannot cross. 
         They come down from the tundra 
         On waves of ridges and stop, 
         Starting out over open country, 
         Like pilgrims on the shore 
         Of an unexpected ocean. 
         The sky is still the sky, they know; 
         It won't understand ordinary language. 

  The last two stanzas of Galvin's poem,
  with a quirky domestic narrative and 
  good sense of space/landscape, almost 
  redeem the false start of the poem's beginning.

  But here's a statement that says nothing when you
  get right down to it: "The Reaper does not clamor
  for a return to the heyday of rhyme and meter,
  the elegant formal poem, but for a preoccupation
  with prosody, even in free verse, that will require
  the new poet to be a master of phrasing, of lines,
  of stanzas, of form itself. In other words, anything
  he says must fit."
  What does this mean? 'Preoccupation' can not
  be good for advice. And mastering 'form itself," 
  in context of free verse, seems contradictory. 

  #8. Raze the House of Fashion
  Hard to disagree with a periodic clearing away. In fact, 
  Jarman and McDowell were pushing for a return to prosody
  and narrative just as other movements (language,
  post-mo) were bearing down on poetry's house,
  taking their own shots at the modes of  free verse 
  (minor meditations, telling vignettes, and personal 
  lyrics/epiphanies) that so dominated poetry of the period. 
  The wrecking balls were synchronized in their razing. 
  At least the hearth and foundation walls, the most solid 
  sections, of that old house still stand. What is happening
  now is that new movements don't entirely obliterate the old
  ones...they all stand together and move through time
  contemporaneously. 

  Finnegan





------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
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From JforJames at aol.com  Sun Sep 26 19:57:54 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 19:57:54 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] poem slip (tanzaku)
Message-ID: <ff.2889914.2e88b182@aol.com>

poem slip (tanzaku)
http://www.artinstituteshop.org/
http://www.artinstituteshop.org/item.asp?catID=7&subcatID=77&productID=526

Flowering Cherry with Poem Slips Framed Reproduction
(Art Institute of Chicagp)

While observing the custom of spring and autumn foliage viewing, slips of 
paper were affixed to trees by courtiers. Japanese screen painting flourished as 
a magnificent art form from the 15th century onward, as evidenced by these 
pieces in the Art Institute's superb collection of traditional folding screens. 

--
I bought a notecard for someone with this image. 
I wasn't familiar with "poem slips" before this.
Nice idea, I thought. I wonder if it's still practiced.
Finnegan
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From halvard at earthlink.net  Sun Sep 26 20:05:29 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 20:05:29 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative
In-Reply-To: <1cd.2c2e8afd.2e873b8f@aol.com>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEAECFIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>

Shame? Not a speck of it. I hope. 

Btw, Dick Allen and I had a little run of shrunken sonnets
going awhile back. Maybe I'll see if I can't rustle some of
them up.

Hal
  Love the image of a door like a popsicle...
  Wait a minute. This is shorter than Michael's 
  lapse of a single line. The incredible shrinking 
  sonnet, soon to cohabit with the lowly haiku. 
  Hal, have you no shame, man?
  Finnegan
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From JforJames at aol.com  Sun Sep 26 22:56:34 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 22:56:34 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] To define poetry
Message-ID: <1d6.2bb1c6d0.2e88db62@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/26/2004 9:06:54 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:

> >I wouldn't say I can't know poetry, though I'm not always sure as to
> >whether what I'm looking at is poetry or not. 
>  
> I win, I win!
>   
>  
> >The difference between
> >you and me (one difference, perhaps) is that I don't mind not knowing.
> >A blurry line between poetry and whatever surrounds it is fine with me.
>   
> I believe there is a blurry line between any A and not-A.  Where we differ 
> on this, I think, is that I believe the blurry line between poetry and 
> not-poetry is no thicker than the blurry line between any A and not-A.  
> 

Bob, you're like a dog with a bone. You won't let go, will you? 
You have perfectly described the 'law of the excluded middle', 
which I brought up before. It seems to me that metaphor,
which one could claim is the foundation of all poetry, is, in fact,
an intentional violation of this law. The point of metaphor, and by
extension of all poetry, is getting at what lies between the poles
of A and not-A.

I said I was interested in the subject of answering: What is poetry? 
But not because I believe any one definition will nail it down. I think
the interesting aspect of this issue is to look at the data, so to speak.
To assess all the various and sundry definitions, which surely number
in the hundreds, if not thousands, to see what they might point to. I''m 
influenced, at present, by ideas based on the use of a large numbers 
of examples, of 'organizing many errors' so that they, in fact, point 
to a useful truth value. Each of us will glom onto particular definitions, 
because this or that one reinforces our conception, nods toward
our preconceived notion, of what poetry is. But taken as whole, all the 
definitions, faulty as they are, might actually get us to some kind of
useful answer. I'm not sure; this is speculation. And the trouble is, and 
you'll appreciate this as someone interested in taxonomy, to organize 
the data elements one has to assess and make some judgments about 
sentences (language),,which is a slippery business to say the least. 
So the process may lead to faulty conclusions in the end.

Here's what I think I know about the ways poetry is defined...

1) A definition is time bound: Someone defining poetry in
the 1700s is going to foreground different aspects of the art
than someone asserting a definition in 1900s. No surprise that. 
But it means the definition you or I craft in late 2004 is going to be
musty or much less than complete by 3004.

2) A definition is a defense of one's poetry:  I stated this
earlier when the subject arose. But one's ideas about poetry
are personal and not universal. My biases can't but present
themselves in any definition I might promulgate. Your definition
would similarly lean toward the elements you've come to value
in poetry.

3) The definitions have different occasions. We must recognize
that many of the definitions through the ages were presented
almost as asides, cropping up as parts of letters/treatises/essays, 
or arose casually in the course of interviews. Only an unknown subset 
were actually 'crafted' to answer formally the question: What is poetry?

4) The definitions themselves seem to fall out into categories:

       Technical - specific, in dictionary-like diction (often dull)
                "Poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest 
                specific gravity in the most effective and externally 
                inevitable sequence." --Joseph Brodsky

       Instructive - trying to guide poets/readers along a certain path 
(useful 
                but less than complete)
                Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by 
singularity; it should              strike the reader as a wording of his own highest 
thoughts, and appear            almost a remembrance." --John Keats 

       Encompassing  - trying to fit everything a poem can be into one
                catch-all definition (usually windy, and even with a 
half-paragraph
                can't create an ample enough vessel) 
                "Whenever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed 
on
                the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the 
emotion, to 
                bring other objects into accord with it, and to give the same 
movement
                of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied 
according
                to the occasion, to the sounds that express it--that is 
poetry"
                --Wm. Hazlitt               

        Pithy - going for aphoristic impact (spot on, but idiosyncratic in 
its emphasis)
                "poetry: the best words in the best order" --Coleridge        
                  

       Witty - knowing the folly of the task, the author says something 
                improbable but humorous because, only half-joking, it touches
                on some kind of truth about the art. (think Oscar Wilde)
                "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."
                --Carl Sandburg

       Romantic - alluding to some metaphysical aspect of poetic composition 
(either
                the reader ooh's-n-ah's or starts rolling his/her eyes) 
                 "[poetry] is the music of the soul and, above all,
                 of great and feeling souls."--Voltaire
                            
       Recalcitrant - grudgingly giving a definition, but often phrasing it 
in the negative
                (a three-card-Monte approach: lifting the cards that aren't 
the queen)
                "Poetry may be defined as a way of remembering what it would
                impoverish us to forget" --Frost

Of course nothing's been pinned down just yet.
Finnegan
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep 27 02:53:08 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 08:53:08 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] a document
Message-ID: <009701c4a45e$a72d6e30$b3aa3252@yourpk9x5fuc06>

I published yesterday one of Alan Sondheim's posts to the Buffalo List on my Blog:
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com

and on the Poets' Corner:
http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=764

because it seems to me more than a personal message _and it is_, a document of our times.

Plus, on my blog, my statement (shifted from the profile to a post), and some other tiny things,

take care,

Anny

Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com 
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky

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From marcus at designerglass.com  Mon Sep 27 07:23:06 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 07:23:06 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <e4.589d0e05.2e85b651@aol.com>
Message-ID: <4157BFDA.6973.8EAF8@localhost>

On 24 Sep 2004 at 13:41, JforJames at aol.com wrote:
> ... one of my favorite unresolvable topics...here's
> a nice quote on the subject...
> Most people have so vague an idea of poetry that their vagueness on
> this score serves as their definition of poetry. --Paul Val?ry,
> Litt?rature (1930)
> Finnegan 

Well, it seems to me that poetry begins in verse, an identifiable and 
repeating meter; nothing that does not begin in verse can be poetry; 
not everything that is verse is poetry. 

Marcus










From clitophon at yahoo.com  Mon Sep 27 07:28:05 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 04:28:05 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <4157BFDA.6973.8EAF8@localhost>
Message-ID: <20040927112805.80004.qmail@web40408.mail.yahoo.com>

I think that you are repeating the classic fallacy of
Western Liberals, that the West is the Best and the
others fell outside the path of Enlightenment. 
Enlightenment is not intrinsically a European thing
nor, if one looks at European or more specifically
Western European history, did the European ruling
classes or even the philosophes, initiate it and this
is the heart of the paradox.  Enlightenment originated
among non-Europeans, specifically the Medieval Arabs
of Spain, and was latterly hi-jacked by the
philosophes and other Enlightenment figures of the
18th century in order to initiate a phoney project
which espoused progress, order and rationalism but if
you look at the lives of the philosophes you will see
that they advanced their views in very similar ways to
those they choose to oppose, namely the Church and the
ancien regime.  You seem to-but may not be doing-
imply that the alternative to this conservative
authoritarianism is Medieval pseudo-barbarism and that
is quite simply a complete betrayal of a very much
more complex tapestry, riven with many complex
contradictions and, needless to say, great tragedy.
Also much European culture evolved out of movements
that were quite contrary to the Enlightenment, one of
the salient ones being the Romantic Movement in art,
music and literature, the Sturm und Drang movement in
Germany.  This was a deliberate reaction to
intellectualism, rationalism, logic, order - all of
the things the Enlightenment supported.  The Romantic
Movement - in my view -offers much richer
possibilities than the dreary insistence on the
intellect espoused by the Enlightenment.  Perhaps it
led to the worst excesses and nightmares of European
'civilisation' but I hardly think so.  
For these reasons I'm not a Liberal and nor do I
support the key tenets of Liberal thinking and nor am
I a very avid Guardian reader although I do read the
Guardian.  Essentially the Guardian persisently
insists that it knows best and in the best of all
Liberal traditions - offers platforms to every shade
of the political spectrum including some people who
could hardly be described as Liberals.  There comes a
point when a paper has to define its own views, beyond
simply saying that all views should be presented apart
from those views that are clearly nonsensical and I
suppose that that is where my views would be placed by
them.  In the best of all Liberal traditions the
Guardian will say nonsense to any idealist,
non-materialist philosophy or very simply those things
it doesn't understand or think are simple fronts for
the anti-semitic/anti-Liberal/anti anti conspiracy. 
But there comes a point when all things are
questionable
more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are
dreamt of in your philosophy
www.theengine.net



	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Mon Sep 27 08:55:46 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 08:55:46 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Michael Donaghy Memorial Fund
Message-ID: <fc.2895b3a.2e8967d2@cs.com>


>As you may know, a very small funeral service for Michael will be held
>this Friday 24th September.
>
>Maddy has asked that no floral tributes be sent. Instead, a trust fund 
>for their son Ruairi has been established. As a first step, people may wish 
to 
>express their sympathies in a tangible way by contributing to this.
>
>Please also forward this message to anyone who may wish to contribute 
>and is not on my mailing list.
>
>Please send any contributions to:
>
>c/o Roslyn Cassidy
>Green Endings
>141 Fortess Road
>London NW5 2HR
>
>Make cheques payable to "Green Endings" and attach a note saying in 
>memory of Michael Donaghy. She will keep a record and pass this on to Maddy.
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 09:12:23 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 09:12:23 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] To define poetry
References: <1d6.2bb1c6d0.2e88db62@aol.com>
Message-ID: <00d001c4a493$a5985c30$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

    >I wouldn't say I can't know poetry, though I'm not always sure as to
    >whether what I'm looking at is poetry or not. 

    I win, I win!
      

    >The difference between
    >you and me (one difference, perhaps) is that I don't mind not knowing.
    >A blurry line between poetry and whatever surrounds it is fine with me.
      
    I believe there is a blurry line between any A and not-A.  Where we differ on this, I think, is that I believe the blurry line between poetry and not-poetry is no thicker than the blurry line between any A and not-A.  



  Bob, you're like a dog with a bone. You won't let go, will you?

  I notice you're chewing the same bone, James.

   
  You have perfectly described the 'law of the excluded middle', 
  which I brought up before. It seems to me that metaphor,
  which one could claim is the foundation of all poetry, is, in fact,
  an intentional violation of this law. The point of metaphor, and by
  extension of all poetry, is getting at what lies between the poles
  of A and not-A.

  I disagree that I've described any law of an excluded middle, although there probably are big excluded middles between the many stupid definitions of poetry there are out there.  The blurry line I'm speaking of is between a competent definition of poetry and what that definition excludes.  There would be very little on it.  Or in it.  In other words, a competent definition of poetry would mention qualities a through y, and part of z.  The "excluded middle" would consist of a vague fragment of z.

  I said I was interested in the subject of answering: What is poetry? 
  But not because I believe any one definition will nail it down. I think
  the interesting aspect of this issue is to look at the data, so to speak.
  To assess all the various and sundry definitions, which surely number
  in the hundreds, if not thousands, to see what they might point to. I''m 
  influenced, at present, by ideas based on the use of a large numbers 
  of examples, of 'organizing many errors' so that they, in fact, point 
  to a useful truth value. Each of us will glom onto particular definitions, 
  because this or that one reinforces our conception, nods toward
  our preconceived notion, of what poetry is. But taken as whole, all the 
  definitions, faulty as they are, might actually get us to some kind of
  useful answer. I'm not sure; this is speculation. And the trouble is, and 
  you'll appreciate this as someone interested in taxonomy, to organize 
  the data elements one has to assess and make some judgments about 
  sentences (language),,which is a slippery business to say the least. 
  So the process may lead to faulty conclusions in the end.


  Again, it seems to me you're interested in defining what makes for good poetry, not in defining poetry.

  Here's what I think I know about the ways poetry is defined...

  1) A definition is time bound: Someone defining poetry in
  the 1700s is going to foreground different aspects of the art
  than someone asserting a definition in 1900s. No surprise that. 
  But it means the definition you or I craft in late 2004 is going to be
  musty or much less than complete by 3004.


  I disagree.  A person defining a knife in 3000 BC was as probably correct as one defining it today.

  2) A definition is a defense of one's poetry:  I stated this
  earlier when the subject arose. But one's ideas about poetry
  are personal and not universal. My biases can't but present
  themselves in any definition I might promulgate. Your definition
  would similarly lean toward the elements you've come to value
  in poetry.


  A competent definition would have nothing to do with what the definer likes in poetry, but with what is objectively in poems.  Ironically, my own definition of poetry excludes artworks that I value very much--since I claim that poetry must contain words or near-words, asemantic typography isn't enough.

  3) The definitions have different occasions. We must recognize
  that many of the definitions through the ages were presented
  almost as asides, cropping up as parts of letters/treatises/essays, 
  or arose casually in the course of interviews. Only an unknown subset 
  were actually 'crafted' to answer formally the question: What is poetry?


  We have to recognize, yes, that many comments on poetry were not definitions.


  4) The definitions themselves seem to fall out into categories:

         Technical - specific, in dictionary-like diction (often dull)
               "Poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest 
               specific gravity in the most effective and externally 
               inevitable sequence." --Joseph Brodsky


  A worthlessly subjective bit of bs--and not technical.


         Instructive - trying to guide poets/readers along a certain path (useful 
               but less than complete)
               Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should         strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear         almost a remembrance." --John Keats 


  Not a definition but, yes, an instruction on how to achieve effective poetry.

         Encompassing  - trying to fit everything a poem can be into one
               catch-all definition (usually windy, and even with a half-paragraph
               can't create an ample enough vessel) 
               "Whenever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on
               the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to 
               bring other objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement
               of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied according
               to the occasion, to the sounds that express it--that is poetry"
               --Wm. Hazlitt             


  This is like defining basketball as "the coming together of wonderful jumping ability, marvelous physical coordination and quickness and brilliant teamwork."  These definitions all ignore what poetry is; they start assuming that is known, then deal with what it is at its best.  Like defining basketball without mentioning the ball, the basket or dribbling.

          Pithy - going for aphoristic impact (spot on, but idiosyncratic in its emphasis)
               "poetry: the best words in the best order" --Coleridge                          


  As if crummy words in rhyming iambic verse would not be a poem.

         Witty - knowing the folly of the task, the author says something 
               improbable but humorous because, only half-joking, it touches
               on some kind of truth about the art. (think Oscar Wilde)
               "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."
               --Carl Sandburg

  And not even of the art of poetry, but of art in general.


         Romantic - alluding to some metaphysical aspect of poetic composition (either
               the reader ooh's-n-ah's or starts rolling his/her eyes) 
               "[poetry] is the music of the soul and, above all,
               of great and feeling souls."--Voltaire


  BS.  All he's saying is that it's great stuff.
                          
         Recalcitrant - grudgingly giving a definition, but often phrasing it in the negative
               (a three-card-Monte approach: lifting the cards that aren't the queen)
               "Poetry may be defined as a way of remembering what it would
               impoverish us to forget" --Frost


  Certain kinds of prose are not?  This definition, like the others, really tells us almost nothing about what poetry is.


  Of course nothing's been pinned down just yet.
  Finnegan 
  I find it interesting that you failed to provide a single definition of poetry.  The way I would approach the question is to begin with the broadest valid description: poetry is a composition using words.  Then go from there to distinguish it from other compositions using words.  That is what I did--to pin it down, pretty much, as far as I'm concerned.



  --Bob G.
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 09:22:44 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 09:22:44 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <4157BFDA.6973.8EAF8@localhost>
Message-ID: <00da01c4a495$176083a0$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

> Well, it seems to me that poetry begins in verse, an identifiable and
> repeating meter; nothing that does not begin in verse can be poetry;
> not everything that is verse is poetry.
>
> Marcus

I just got permission from Jim to take you on again, Marcus.  But we have to 
behave, which means, for me, sticking to the central topic.  I wanted to 
jump in to ask a simple question:

If nothing that does not begin in verse is poetry, what do we call free 
verse?  What, for instance, is Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow?"

Oh, a second question: what is verse but not poetry?

--Bob G. 




From grahamd at ripon.edu  Mon Sep 27 10:03:10 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 09:03:10 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <4157BFDA.6973.8EAF8@localhost>
Message-ID: <BD7D87CE.B975%grahamd@ripon.edu>

on 9/27/04 6:23 AM, Marcus Bales at marcus at designerglass.com wrote:

 
> Well, it seems to me that poetry begins in verse, an identifiable and
> repeating meter; nothing that does not begin in verse can be poetry;
> not everything that is verse is poetry.
> 
> Marcus
> 

This definition demonstrates the great advantages, as stipulative
definitions tend to, of simplicity and clarity.  (We're in the realm of what
Jim Finnegan calls "technical" definitions.)

My own technical definition would mostly widen things to encompass free
verse.  So, poetry begins in lineation.  OK, but how would I argue against
limiting the kingdom of poetry to metrical poems?  I wouldn't, because it
seems to me all such definitions are inherently arbitrary.  We must agree to
disagree.

What do I do with prose poetry, you may ask?  Well, I enjoy it.  If I had to
draw a line, I'd prefer to call it something else than poetry.   But I'm not
sure how productive a definitional argument might be.

My own preference for lineation as the defining factor has mainly to do with
the fact that it can be easily discerned.  I've not seen any definition of
prose poetry that didn't dissolve pretty quickly into vapor.

I don't have to draw a line, naturally.  And on a day-to-day basis I'm more
amenable to Hal's sort of attitude than any rage to order, I suppose.  But
like Finnegan I also enjoy, from time to time, batting around such notions,
hearing what others think.

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From marcus at designerglass.com  Mon Sep 27 10:27:05 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 10:27:05 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <20040927112805.80004.qmail@web40408.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <4157BFDA.6973.8EAF8@localhost>
Message-ID: <4157EAF9.8878.B15CA9@localhost>

On 27 Sep 2004 at 4:28, Paul Murphy wrote:
> I think that you are repeating the classic fallacy of Western
> Liberals, that the West is the Best and the others fell outside the
> path of Enlightenment. Enlightenment is not intrinsically a
> European thing nor, if one looks at European or more specifically
> Western European history, did the European ruling classes or even
> the philosophes, initiate it and this is the heart of the paradox. 
> Enlightenment originated among non-Europeans, specifically the
> Medieval Arabs of Spain,<

It has nothing to do with the West; it has to do with a particular 
sort of intellectual integrity which is commonly called the 
scientific method. Any human can use the scientific method, and where 
it first arose, or who first used it best, or most often, or 
whatever, is of considerably less moment than whether it is used and 
used properly.

In human history there have been all sorts of looney ideas, but the 
most common of them may be fairly called examples of "sympathetic 
magic", for example, sticking pins in dolls to try to hurt other 
people, or dancing and shouting to scare demons out of sick peoples? 
bodies. The notion of testing to see if the idea worked, and if it 
didn?t work, to try something else, seemed more honored in the breach 
than in the observance, if it was thought of at all.

But gradually, through a concatenation of circumstances the origins 
of which are really irrelevant, since it is the results of the thing 
that are important, enough people accepted the idea that observing 
the world, making hypotheses about it, controlling for variables, and 
then testing those hypotheses, and modifying those hypotheses and 
testing again that it became a practice generally accepted as worth 
the time and materials that went into it.

Even today, most people in what purports to be our scientific society 
believe an enormous number of things that science holds to be 
nonsense. It?s hard to believe how much junk belief there is out 
there, and how much of it is based on junk science, and why.

Why is easy: it?s difficult and expensive to do good science, to 
hypothesize, control for variables, and design tests that test for 
the thing one is testing for.  But junk science is easy: it?s almost 
as easy as sympathetic magic -- in fact, some of it is no better. 

After World War II, the enormous amounts of cargo, clothing, food, 
weapons, tents, radios, and the like, that were air-dropped or air-
lifted into New Guinea and the Melanesian islands during the US 
Pacific campaign against Japan created a vast lifestyle change for 
the islanders. But when the war moved on, and ultimately when it 
ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new cargo arrived. 
Naturally, the islanders made attempts to get cargo to fall by 
parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders did same things 
they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen do. They didn?t have 
radios, of course, so they carved headphones from wood, and wore them 
while sitting in control towers they built. They waved the landing 
signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and 
torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The islanders had 
concluded that the foreigners had some special connection to the 
powers that be, and by mimicking the foreigners, they hoped to 
achieve the same effect.

They were doing everything right, of course, except for one thing: 
they were pursuing the form without the substance, like writers who 
think that by employing meter, or by avoiding meter, they are writing 
poetry. 

What were they missing?  They were missing the essence, the guts of 
the thing: they had the earphones and the antennae, but they weren?t 
hooked up to a radio. The notion of a radio was only distantly 
emulated in the notion of prayer to the ancestors -- but before the 
foreigners came, prayers to the ancestors weren?t answered with a 
wealth of cargo from the sky. 

What they were missing was the scientific method -- they didn't have 
it, and they weren't taught it. And since, as Arthur C. Clarke 
famously said, "any sufficiently advanced technology is 
indistinguishable from magic", they thought it was the same old 
magic. They couldn't understand why it didn't work for them, though, 
and they finally, to their credit, gave it up.

The difference between magic and science is that science demands that 
you should report everything about your test of your hypothesis that 
you think might make it wrong -- not only what you think is right 
about it. You must search for, and present as part of your 
conclusions, other causes that could possibly explain your results, 
including the things you thought that you've eliminated by controls, 
or by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure 
people who are following your work can tell that variables have been 
eliminated, or at least controlled or accounted for.

You have to go into the details that could cast doubt upon your 
conclusions. It?s of the essence, it?s the guts of the thing, that 
you do the best you can to explain why things didn?t turn out the way 
you thought they would, if they didn?t -- even if the variance is 
pretty small. Not only that, but when you hypothesize, it?s not 
enough to hypothesize within a small ambit; you have not only to 
explain how your hypothesis and test explains one thing, you have to 
show how it fits in with other larger hypotheses, and how it throws 
some light on how those things work, too.

The notion of science is to make sure that everyone who may look at 
your work has every chance to judge your work fairly and justly -- 
that they have no doubt that your work is designed to investigate 
what really happens, and not merely argue self-interestedly for a 
particular result.

Contrast this idea with salesmanship. There?s a famous example of a 
salmon-canner who was canning perfectly good salmon, but the flesh of 
that fish was white instead of the traditional pink. Consumers were 
not buying it in droves, because they expected canned salmon to be 
pink. So the white-salmon canner changed the label on his can to 
include the phrase "Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can", and pink 
salmon turned into a drug on the market. The pink-salmon canners 
sued. The white-salmon canner claimed he was telling the truth -- and 
he was. But the thing he was implying by telling his small truth was 
not true at all. It?s not enough to tell the truth; you have to tell 
the truth in context.

It?s not just that the truth will come out, eventually, either -- 
it?s not because other people will try to repeat your experiment, and 
expose you if you were right or wrong; it?s the context in which you 
were right or wrong that makes an investigation scientific or not. 
Natural phenomena will agree or disagree with your hypothesis -- but 
it is the integrity with which you create your controls for 
variables, and with which you examine your own results before you 
make your conclusions, an extreme care not to fool yourself, that 
makes it science instead of carving headphones out of coconut shells, 
and antennae out of wood.

The first principle of the scientific method is not to fool yourself, 
and the second is that you are the easiest person for you to fool, so 
be very very careful. The third is that if you are careful not to 
fool yourself, you won?t be trying to figure out how to fool other 
people. That particular kind of integrity, scientific integrity, the 
attempt to show how you may be wrong, is the essence of the 
scientific method. If you are only interested in pointing at results 
that make you look good, you can think of yourself as a salesman; if 
you put forward results that *are* good, though, you can think of 
yourself as a scientist.

Marcus







From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Mon Sep 27 10:32:14 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 10:32:14 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
Message-ID: <1d1.2bb0b248.2e897e6e@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/27/2004 9:03:30 AM Central Daylight Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes: 
> My own technical definition would mostly widen things to encompass free
> verse.  So, poetry begins in lineation.  OK, but how would I argue against
> limiting the kingdom of poetry to metrical poems?  I wouldn't, because it
> seems to me all such definitions are inherently arbitrary.  We must agree to
> disagree.
> 
> What do I do with prose poetry, you may ask?  Well, I enjoy it.  If I had to
> draw a line, I'd prefer to call it something else than poetry.   But I'm not
> sure how productive a definitional argument might be.

Lew Turco makes the distinction between verse, a mode of writing, and poetry, 
a genre, though he doesn't go far enough with free lineation.  So I'd argue 
that anything that is written in lines--metrical, "free"--is verse, and that 
prose poetry is not verse because it's written in another mode, prose.  It 
should be obvious that all verse is not poetry, since you can chop anything into 
lines or rewrite IRS directions in heroic couplets.  All prose is not poetry, 
obviously, but some prose is poetry.  At this point I have to get out 
Fundamentals of Logic and start drawing diagrams.  Verse is pretty easy to define; 
poetry is not.
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 10:36:59 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 10:36:59 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <BD7D87CE.B975%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <012201c4a49f$7703ce70$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

>> Well, it seems to me that poetry begins in verse, an identifiable and
>> repeating meter; nothing that does not begin in verse can be poetry;
>> not everything that is verse is poetry.
>>
>> Marcus
>>
>
> This definition demonstrates the great advantages, as stipulative
> definitions tend to, of simplicity and clarity.  (We're in the realm of 
> what
> Jim Finnegan calls "technical" definitions.)

> My own technical definition would mostly widen things to encompass free
> verse.  So, poetry begins in lineation.

Surprise.  You and I are in total agreement, David.  So far.

> OK, but how would I argue against
> limiting the kingdom of poetry to metrical poems?  I wouldn't, because it
> seems to me all such definitions are inherently arbitrary.  We must agree 
> to
> disagree.

All definitions of anything are arbitrary.  So what?  My problem with 
limiting the term poetry to verse is taxonomical.  We still need a name for 
free verse or some X that isn't poetry or prose.  We can have three 
categories, but two seems . . . better.  For one thing, free verse is 
clearly much more like verse than it is like prose.  And I think the fewer 
categories at each level of a taxonomy, the better.  So I arbitrarily prefer 
to have literature, then poetry and prose, then verse and freeverse 
(although I have three categories here--I think), than literature, then 
poetry, freeverse and prose.  That the consensus of informed readers seems 
to agree with my preference seems to me decisive.

> What do I do with prose poetry, you may ask?  Well, I enjoy it.  If I had 
> to
> draw a line, I'd prefer to call it something else than poetry.   But I'm 
> not
> sure how productive a definitional argument might be.

I call it evocature, a form of prose.

> My own preference for lineation as the defining factor has mainly to do 
> with
> the fact that it can be easily discerned.

Right.  Easy to discern, and objectively there or not there.  Because I deal 
with forms of poetry outside David's purview, I introduce the "flow-break" 
as my main definitional term.  Lineation is the most common kind of flow 
break.  I need "flow-break" for such unorthodoxies as texts whose lines all 
go to the right margin, but don't start at the left margin, resulting in a 
kind of backwards lineation.

>  I've not seen any definition of
> prose poetry that didn't dissolve pretty quickly into vapor.

It is hard to come up with a rigorous definition of it.  I think of it as 
literature that makes significant use of many techniques associated with 
poetry but is not lineated. Nor does it narrate, but presents an 
environment.  Which brings me to a new word of mine: "envirative."  From 
whence, "envirate," parallel to "narrative" and "narrate."  A narrative is 
the telling of a story, an envirative the telling of a place and/or ambience 
and/or mood.

Can anyone tell me if there is already a word that means what "envirative" 
does?

--Bob G.
>
> I don't have to draw a line, naturally.  And on a day-to-day basis I'm 
> more
> amenable to Hal's sort of attitude than any rage to order, I suppose.  But
> like Finnegan I also enjoy, from time to time, batting around such 
> notions,
> hearing what others think.
>
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ====================================================
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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  Mon Sep 27 11:00:52 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 11:00:52 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <1d1.2bb0b248.2e897e6e@cs.com>
Message-ID: <014301c4a4a2$ce27d270$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

Lew Turco makes the distinction between verse, a mode of writing, and poetry, a genre, though he doesn't go far enough with free lineation.  So I'd argue that anything that is written in lines--metrical, "free"--is verse, and that prose poetry is not verse because it's written in another mode, prose.  It should be obvious that all verse is not poetry, since you can chop anything into lines or rewrite IRS directions in heroic couplets.  All prose is not poetry, obviously, but some prose is poetry.  At this point I have to get out Fundamentals of Logic and start drawing diagrams.  Verse is pretty easy to define; poetry is not. 

I feel that one of the greatest problems in getting people to agree of a definition of poetry is that too many people want to define it evaluatively.  For instance, Sam above suggests that prose chopped up into lines is not poetry.  I suspect that is an evluative judgement.  to me, chopping up a text into lines makes it poetry.

We really have two definitions to construct if we want to get anywhere.  One is what poetry is, and one is what good poetry is.  In my view, "My happy little dog/ is sitting on a log," is poetry but not good poetry.  I don't understand the point of dismissing it as not poetry.  

--Bob G.
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Mon Sep 27 11:07:54 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 11:07:54 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <BD7D87CE.B975%grahamd@ripon.edu>
References: <4157BFDA.6973.8EAF8@localhost>
Message-ID: <4157F48A.23046.D6B860@localhost>

On 27 Sep 2004 at 9:03, David Graham wrote:
> What do I do with prose poetry, you may ask?  Well, I enjoy it.  If I
> had to draw a line, I'd prefer to call it something else than poetry. 
>  But I'm not sure how productive a definitional argument might be.<

Well, if you're not sure how productive a definitional argument might 
be, you're probably not too sure about how useful a definition is, 
either, right? 

The point of definition, and of definitional argument, would be to 
come to some agreement on how to use a term, such as "poetry" in 
discussion. There is no point in having a discussion in which the 
term "poetry" means two things different enough that no agreement as 
to its meaning can be reached. Not only do interlocutors in that case 
have to agree to disagree about the meaning of the term, they have to 
agree to disagree about everything connected with the use of the term 
in the way EITHER OF THEM uses it.

Otherwise, all we have is a lot of talking-past and not talking-to or 
talking-with. 

And, in conclusion, if you can't bring yourself to accept the idea 
that agreement on definitions is useful, you have also to accept that 
you cannot do other than either preach to the choir or spout 
uselessly. 




From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Mon Sep 27 11:11:38 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 11:11:38 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
Message-ID: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/27/2004 10:02:16 AM Central Daylight Time, 
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: 
>  
>  I feel that one of the greatest problems in getting people to agree of a 
> definition of poetry is that too many people want to define it evaluatively.  
> For instance, Sam above suggests that prose chopped up into lines is not 
> poetry.  I suspect that is an evluative judgement.  to me, chopping up a text into 
> lines makes it poetry.
>   
> 
I didn't say that, Bob.  I said that prose, broken into lines, would be 
verse.  It might conceivably be poetry as well, as I've given students passages 
from Hemingway, T. Wolfe, Melville, etc. broken into lines and argued that prose 
can be considered "poetic" even if that may not have been the authors' primary 
intent.  But, as I said, "poetry" remains hard to define, very subjective.

Prose/Verse=Modes
Poetry/Drama/Fiction=Genres

Of course, this raises the whole question about how to classify poetic drama 
or narrative poetry.  Can of worms.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep 27 11:28:01 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 11:28:01 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Narrative poet
Message-ID: <1ce.2c7fb1ac.2e898b81@aol.com>

http://www.helenair.com/articles/2004/09/27/helena_top/a01092704_03.txt
 
In a still evening, when the water is calm, the light is low and everything 
seems to stand still, Loren Graham listens, fly rod in hand. Carried over the 
river in that stillness, he can sometimes hear the low conversations of his 
fellow fishermen. 
 
"You can't really hear what they're saying, but more the rhythm of what 
they're saying," he said.
 
That's poetry, at least in the very basic way Graham believes it to be.
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Mon Sep 27 11:30:10 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 11:30:10 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com>
Message-ID: <4157F9C2.13909.EB1B3F@localhost>

On 27 Sep 2004 at 11:11, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com wrote:
> ... I said that prose, broken into lines, would be
> verse. It might conceivably be poetry as well, as I've given students
> passages from Hemingway, T. Wolfe, Melville, etc. broken into lines
> and argued that prose can be considered "poetic" even if that may not
> have been the authors' primary intent. But, as I said, "poetry"
> remains hard to define, very subjective.

I agree that "poetry" remains hard to define because it's very 
subjective -- but verse is easier, and it can't merely be "prose 
broken up into lines" because that eliminates the notion of meter 
altogether -- because the difference between prose and verse is that 
the latter has meter and the former does not. Prose may have rhythm, 
but it doesn't have meter. Verse has to have meter to be verse, it 
seems to me, precisely to distinguish it from prose.

But as for prose that is "poetic", there is a difference between 
"poetic" and "poetry". It makes no sense to say that everything 
poetic is poetry, any more than it makes any sense to say that 
anything that is described as "poetry" as an analogy or metaphor (the 
runner was poetry in motion, for example) makes that thing poetry.

Poetic prose is not poetry any more than a horsey face is a horse.

Marcus





From paul.lake at mail.atu.edu  Mon Sep 27 04:28:59 2004
From: paul.lake at mail.atu.edu (Paul Lake)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 03:28:59 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
In-Reply-To: <20040925123836.79601.qmail@web52608.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <BD7D397B.715D%paul.lake@mail.atu.edu>

On 9/25/04 7:38 AM, "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> That sounds exactly like Mark.  He's a gracious guy
> and very open minded, despite what these
> non-negotiable demands say.  He told me at West
> Chester this past summer that he tried to talk Robert
> McDowell out of putting those demands on the website.
> He seemed kind of embarrased by them.
> 
> I was vaguely amused at another post asking if Mark
> had become "some kind of Christian."
> 
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> 
> --- Anthony Robinson <antrobin at clipper.net> wrote:
> 
>> I've been alternately amused and annoyed by these
>> demands since I first
>> discovered them as an undergraduate with an eye on
>> "becoming" a poet.  I
>> was intrigued by "new formalism" but not traditional
>> narrative; around
>> the same time I saw Charles Bernstein read for the
>> first time and I
>> became equally, if differently intrigued by language
>> poetry.  Strange
>> combo, maybe.
>>  
>> In any case, I admired much of Jarman's early work,
>> though I couldn't
>> help but notice how man of his non-negotiable
>> demands he neglected in
>> his own poetry. In recent years he's written a lot
>> of prose poems that
>> probably violate one or the other of the first two
>> demands.
>>  
>> And what's wrong with poems about poetry?  What's
>> wrong with meditation?
>> How, exactly, does one express oneself
>> "irresponsibly."
>>  
>> A couple years after my first encounter with The
>> Reaper and these
>> demands, I found myself in an MFA program that more
>> or less regarded
>> these rules as gospel.  The urge to rebel grew too
>> strong, and I left
>> the program.   Not long after, I published a
>> non-narrative,
>> semi-formless poem in an online journal.  Two days
>> after publication,
>> Jarman (who I've never met) emailed me saying he
>> admired the poem.
>>  
>> I don't (and never will, I imagine) know my place in
>> the world.
>>  
>> Tony
>>  
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> [mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On
>> Behalf Of Joe Safdie
>> Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 1:09 PM
>> To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views
>> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
>>  
>> The Non-Negotiable Demands on the Story Line Press
>> website were vaguely
>> amusing to me -- I've always been partial to
>> manifestos, ever since
>> Pound's Imagism -- but finally inconsequential. It
>> was hard, for
>> example, to see any difference whatsoever in the
>> various poems quoted as
>> examples -- they all seemed the same to me. Did
>> someone mention
>> "mainstream"?
>>  
>> The site was nostalgic in another way, too -- I met
>> Mark (Jarman) and
>> Robert (McDowell) at UC Santa Cruz in the mid-70s;
>> they were a year
>> ahead of me, and were editors of the campus literary
>> magazine the year
>> before me (I've forgotten its name -- Epoch,
>> maybe?). I was just coming
>> into poetry then, so they were ahead of me in that
>> as well -- Mark,
>> especially, was already thought of as a prodigy. But
>> as my education
>> progressed, and the Black Mountain and New York
>> "schools" captured my
>> imagination, I lost touch with them. I've always,
>> though, shared their
>> appreciation of George Hitchcock, the editor of
>> Kayak, who published my
>> first poems and even gave me the paper to
>> self-publish my first
>> chapbook. George was a fabulous, hilarious
>> surrealist poet, and an
>> extremely generous man . . .
>>  
>> I would see poems by Mark from time to time, and
>> realized he was making
>> a name for himself. Didn't he become some sort of
>> Christian?
>>  
>> Their speculations about the line engaged me the
>> most; I'd recommend
>> Dale Smith's recent essay in the latest *House
>> Organ* (edited by Ken
>> Warren) for some up-to-date and very useful thoughts
>> about that. He goes
>> back to one of Olson's essays that I've always found
>> useful, "Quantity
>> in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays" and shows
>> its continued
>> relevance, as well as entertains thoughts about how
>> the line is affected
>> by one's local geography. Great stuff.
>>  
>> Anybody else see anything in those "demands"?
>>  
>> Joe Safdie
>>  
>>  
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: JforJames at aol.com
>> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 9:34 AM
>> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Story Hour
>>  
>> In a message dated 9/24/2004 11:24:48 AM Eastern
>> Daylight Time,
>> paul.lake at mail.atu.edu writes:
>> Story Line moved suddenly a few weeks ago.
>> I'm not sure it has--or will--reconstitute it
>> That doesn't sound good. They'd been rumored
>> to be in financial straits for some time. But I
>> guess that's an everyday affair for literary
>> presses.
>>  
>> I was just noticed that on Storline's website they
>> nailed up a manifesto of sorts. Each item can be
>> clicked
>> on for further explanation/example of the point...
>>  
>> http://www.storylinepress.com/demands/demands.html
>> Non-Negotiable Demands
>>  
>> 1. Take prosody off the hit list.
>> 2. Stop calling formless writing poetry.
>> 3. Accuracy, at all costs.
>> 4. No emotion without narrative.
>> 5. No more meditating on the meditation.
>> 6. No more poems about poetry.
>> 7. No more irresponsibility of expression.
>> 8. Raze the House of Fashion.
>> 9. Dismantle the Office of Translation.
>> 10. Spring open the Jail of the Self
>>  
>> An outgrowth of Jarman & McDowell's
>> Reaper Essays.
>> Finnegan
>> 
>>   _____  
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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
>> 
> 
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> ---
> [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]
> 
> 
Mark's father was a minister, I believe. His books two books containing
"Unholy Sonnets" (the title of one of them) contain poems that wrestle with
religious belief.

Paul Lake

---
[This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]



From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Mon Sep 27 12:21:26 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:21:26 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <012201c4a49f$7703ce70$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
References: <BD7D87CE.B975%grahamd@ripon.edu>
	<012201c4a49f$7703ce70$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <1096302086.41583e0666e35@webmail.ukonline.net>


"Envirate" or whatever, seems to me adequately covered by "describe". It's 
true that the latter could be used of describing one's own swollen feet, plan 
to get a loan, love for one's children and other things that not everyone 
would willingly concede are part of an environment. But it does seem to cover 
the non-progressive timeless aspect which I assume is what you want to 
contrast with telling a story. 

Someone else said that all lines of verse have meter. This must be based on a 
misunderstanding of "meter" (as if it meant rhythm, or something). Most modern 
free verse does not employ meter. There are many kinds of poetry that do not 
use meter, e.g. the Psalms. 

Lineation seems to me too dependent on the technology of writing. Illiterate 
cultures produce poetry by the ton, yet would have no concept of a line. With 
that proviso I think it's useful. The line in poetry is somewhat as the phrase 
in melody - a convenient and practical length that is capable of being 
eloquent. Limitations of our lungs and powers of concentration proably come 
into it. 

But I think one needs some wider concept such as verbal pattern. This would 
incidentally eliminate any lingering issues with prose poems, concrete poems, 
and so on. Personally, I think poetry cannot be defined formally or in any 
other way; if someone says that something's a poem, then it is. But if one is 
going to have a go at it, it seems ridiculous to be driven to a position where 
you have to say that half the poems in Tomas Transtr?mer's M?rkerseende are 
poems but the other half are not (because they happen to be prose poems).   

 












Quoting Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>:

> >> Well, it seems to me that poetry begins in verse, an identifiable and
> >> repeating meter; nothing that does not begin in verse can be poetry;
> >> not everything that is verse is poetry.
> >>
> >> Marcus
> >>
> >
> > This definition demonstrates the great advantages, as stipulative
> > definitions tend to, of simplicity and clarity.  (We're in the realm of 
> > what
> > Jim Finnegan calls "technical" definitions.)
> 
> > My own technical definition would mostly widen things to encompass free
> > verse.  So, poetry begins in lineation.
> 
> Surprise.  You and I are in total agreement, David.  So far.
> 
> > OK, but how would I argue against
> > limiting the kingdom of poetry to metrical poems?  I wouldn't, because it
> > seems to me all such definitions are inherently arbitrary.  We must agree 
> > to
> > disagree.
> 
> All definitions of anything are arbitrary.  So what?  My problem with 
> limiting the term poetry to verse is taxonomical.  We still need a name for 
> free verse or some X that isn't poetry or prose.  We can have three 
> categories, but two seems . . . better.  For one thing, free verse is 
> clearly much more like verse than it is like prose.  And I think the fewer 
> categories at each level of a taxonomy, the better.  So I arbitrarily prefer
> 
> to have literature, then poetry and prose, then verse and freeverse 
> (although I have three categories here--I think), than literature, then 
> poetry, freeverse and prose.  That the consensus of informed readers seems 
> to agree with my preference seems to me decisive.
> 
> > What do I do with prose poetry, you may ask?  Well, I enjoy it.  If I had 
> > to
> > draw a line, I'd prefer to call it something else than poetry.   But I'm 
> > not
> > sure how productive a definitional argument might be.
> 
> I call it evocature, a form of prose.
> 
> > My own preference for lineation as the defining factor has mainly to do 
> > with
> > the fact that it can be easily discerned.
> 
> Right.  Easy to discern, and objectively there or not there.  Because I deal
> 
> with forms of poetry outside David's purview, I introduce the "flow-break" 
> as my main definitional term.  Lineation is the most common kind of flow 
> break.  I need "flow-break" for such unorthodoxies as texts whose lines all 
> go to the right margin, but don't start at the left margin, resulting in a 
> kind of backwards lineation.
> 
> >  I've not seen any definition of
> > prose poetry that didn't dissolve pretty quickly into vapor.
> 
> It is hard to come up with a rigorous definition of it.  I think of it as 
> literature that makes significant use of many techniques associated with 
> poetry but is not lineated. Nor does it narrate, but presents an 
> environment.  Which brings me to a new word of mine: "envirative."  From 
> whence, "envirate," parallel to "narrative" and "narrate."  A narrative is 
> the telling of a story, an envirative the telling of a place and/or ambience
> 
> and/or mood.
> 
> Can anyone tell me if there is already a word that means what "envirative" 
> does?
> 
> --Bob G.
> >
> > I don't have to draw a line, naturally.  And on a day-to-day basis I'm 
> > more
> > amenable to Hal's sort of attitude than any rage to order, I suppose.  But
> > like Finnegan I also enjoy, from time to time, batting around such 
> > notions,
> > hearing what others think.
> >
> > ====================================================
> > David Graham
> > grahamd at ripon.edu
> > Home Page:
> > http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> > Poetry Library:
> > http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> > ====================================================
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
> 




----------------------------------------------
This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net


From tad at opus40.org  Mon Sep 27 12:34:59 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 12:34:59 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com>
Message-ID: <006801c4a4af$f0a73ae0$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>

Hope this isn't a duplicate - I sent a similar thought from the wrong 
address. I'm completely with Bob on this one. I think any definition of 
poetry that also tries to be a definition of good poetry is doomed to 
failure.

If you chop a text up into lines, you're calling attention to it as a text 
which is to be read in some other way than clause by clause, sentence by 
sentence - in other words, you're saying "read this as a poem."

And at that point, it is a poem, and the reader who approaches it is 
entering into an implicit contract to read it as a poem, judge it as a poem, 
like it or hate it as a poem.

I don't know that this is a satisfactory definition. I'd like to add 
something like Annie Finch's "structured by the conspicuous repetition of 
any language-element," which still doesn't confuse a definition of poetry 
with a definition of good poetry.

But the minute you put any qualitative aesthetic judgment into it, then 
you're opening the door to allowing what Olympic gymnasts do to be described 
as "pure poetry." It's not good because it's poetry, and it's not poetry 
because it's good.

My favorite definition of art remains Calvino's -

"Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. It 
is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is 
outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at 
the same time, it recalls- and somehow stands for - everything that remains 
out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a 
production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through 
its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a glint of that 
unlimited vastness."

Calvino neatly defines art nonjudgmentally, then goes on to give a wonderful 
definition of good art which relates to, but separates itself from, the 
first definition. My only quibble is that he equates "poetic" with "good," 
but maybe that was the translator.  Anny? Any help on this?



----- Original Message ----- 
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 11:11 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] what poetry is


In a message dated 9/27/2004 10:02:16 AM Central Daylight Time, 
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:


I feel that one of the greatest problems in getting people to agree of a 
definition of poetry is that too many people want to define it evaluatively. 
For instance, Sam above suggests that prose chopped up into lines is not 
poetry.  I suspect that is an evluative judgement.  to me, chopping up a 
text into lines makes it poetry.



I didn't say that, Bob.  I said that prose, broken into lines, would be 
verse.  It might conceivably be poetry as well, as I've given students 
passages from Hemingway, T. Wolfe, Melville, etc. broken into lines and 
argued that prose can be considered "poetic" even if that may not have been 
the authors' primary intent.  But, as I said, "poetry" remains hard to 
define, very subjective.

Prose/Verse=Modes
Poetry/Drama/Fiction=Genres

Of course, this raises the whole question about how to classify poetic drama 
or narrative poetry.  Can of worms.



_______________________________________________
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 Sep 27 14:10:18 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 14:10:18 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Narrative poet
Message-ID: <1e.34700965.2e89b18a@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/27/2004 10:29:21 AM Central Daylight Time, 
JforJames at aol.com writes: 
> 
> http://www.helenair.com/articles/2004/09/27/helena_top/a01092704_03.txt
> 
>   
> 
>  In a still evening, when the water is calm, the light is low and everything 
> seems to stand still, Loren Graham listens, fly rod in hand. Carried over 
> the river in that stillness, he can sometimes hear the low conversations of his 
> fellow fishermen. 
> 
>  
> 
>  "You can't really hear what they're saying, but more the rhythm of what 
> they're saying," he said.
> 
>   
> 
> That's poetry, at least in the very basic way Graham believes it to be.
> 
Reminds me of Frost's discussion of "the sound of sense."

Also reminds me that I have a poem about fishing--Izaak Walton and John Donne 
fishing together actually--in the new (Spring) Sewanee Review.  It's titled 
"On the Lea."
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep 27 17:06:47 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:06:47 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] On truth & poetry
Message-ID: <013601c4a4d5$e6cde8e0$982ab750@yourpk9x5fuc06>

>From Nick Piombino's Blog:

Having heard only lies all our lives,
we must assume the truth is
unintelligible and start from there.
It's like panning for gold and not
knowing what gold is.

from my collection *Theoretical Objects*
(Green Integer, 1999)
********************************************
**************************************************************
Pont de Looney -Tokes on Poetry- {Jacques Kimball) {clique here} is on hand to essay the droll habits of poet-collectors of poetry collectibles, as we enter the heart-pounding
yard-sale, flea market and tchachkee emporium season.
**************************************************************
"We live now in an empire which, in the name of reasons, has stolen our
lives away from us, but which will sell them back to us at the cost of all that we
have, if only we can provide that empire with sufficient reason for letting us
live. Every time we speak of a reason, we let the theft occur all over again, we
participate in the theft....If we lived in a world where poetry existed, who knows
what it might be? It's a question I ask myself when i'm writing the poetry I can't
be writing..."

As Gary Norris puts it in DagZine {click here}:

"...poetry is not market-bound, left the market, for its own good, 
catapulted itself back into language, left the everyday behind
which it is consistently, obsessively even, attempting to regain,
and now is quite frankly bound up within itself and its own
problems. This isn't a problem. It should be only the slavish
versifiers of lilting sounds and nonsense, those who wear 
poet-masks of poets gone, who really care whether poetry
makes any sound sense in the market. The Poet Capitalists
have lost out, thankfully. The idealism is there, but the 
idealist is an isolationist."


Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com 
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky

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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 17:15:54 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:15:54 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com>
Message-ID: <01bd01c4a4d7$31d0ade0$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

I feel that one of the greatest problems in getting people to agree of a definition of poetry is that too many people want to define it evaluatively.  For instance, Sam above suggests that prose chopped up into lines is not poetry.  I suspect that is an evaluative judgement.  to me, chopping up a text into lines makes it poetry.
  


  I didn't say that, Bob. 

  Okay.  What you said was confusing because you were assuming that verse is not necessarily poetry, which I don't since it's another evaluative judgement.

   I said that prose, broken into lines, would be verse.  It might conceivably be poetry as well, as I've given students passages from Hemingway, T. Wolfe, Melville, etc. broken into lines and argued that prose can be considered "poetic" even if that may not have been the authors' primary intent.  But, as I said, "poetry" remains hard to define, very subjective.

  Only evaluatively.  Do you agree or disagree that we really need two definitions, one of poetry and one of good poetry?

  Prose/Verse=Modes
  Poetry/Drama/Fiction=Genres

  Of course, this raises the whole question about how to classify poetic drama or narrative poetry.  Can of worms. 

  Not to me.  Poetic Drama is poetry written for the stage.  Narrative poetry is narrative poetry.  Which I distinguish from envirative poetry--but way out in the least important suburbs of my taxonomy.  It seems to me that the subject matter is the least important factor in defining poetry.

  --Bob 
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 17:17:58 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:17:58 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Narrative poet
References: <1ce.2c7fb1ac.2e898b81@aol.com>
Message-ID: <01d001c4a4d7$7b44d910$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



  http://www.helenair.com/articles/2004/09/27/helena_top/a01092704_03.txt

   

  In a still evening, when the water is calm, the light is low and everything seems to stand still, Loren Graham listens, fly rod in hand. Carried over the river in that stillness, he can sometimes hear the low conversations of his fellow fishermen. 

   

  "You can't really hear what they're saying, but more the rhythm of what they're saying," he said.

   

  That's poetry, at least in the very basic way Graham believes it to be.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  You like it, so it's poetry.  Not very useful to anyone but you as a way of defining poetry, James.

  --Bob


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From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep 27 17:22:36 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:22:36 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Narrative poet
Message-ID: <e2.2209660.2e89de9c@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/27/2004 5:18:32 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:

> You like it, so it's poetry.  Not very useful to anyone but you as a way of 
> defining poetry, James.
> 
>  --Bob
> 
>   
> 
> 

Bob, I'm confused, or you are? What did I say I liked? 
I merely posted a link to an article...the article has nothing 
to do with the topic at hand: defining poetry.
Finnegan
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 17:27:58 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:27:58 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com>
	<006801c4a4af$f0a73ae0$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <01ee01c4a4d8$e18ecd60$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



> Hope this isn't a duplicate - I sent a similar thought from the wrong 
> address. I'm completely with Bob on this one. I think any definition of 
> poetry that also tries to be a definition of good poetry is doomed to 
> failure.
>
> If you chop a text up into lines, you're calling attention to it as a text 
> which is to be read in some other way than clause by clause, sentence by 
> sentence - in other words, you're saying "read this as a poem."
>
> And at that point, it is a poem, and the reader who approaches it is 
> entering into an implicit contract to read it as a poem, judge it as a 
> poem, like it or hate it as a poem.
>
> I don't know that this is a satisfactory definition. I'd like to add 
> something like Annie Finch's "structured by the conspicuous repetition of 
> any language-element," which still doesn't confuse a definition of poetry 
> with a definition of good poetry.

The problem with that is that there are many texts, lineated or containing 
other forms of flow-breaks, that everyone agrees are poems, except the 
extreme formalists.  High oratory has a lot of repetitition, too.  I don't 
see why anything would have to be added to lineation (except the burstnorm 
forms of lineation I call flow-breaks).

> But the minute you put any qualitative aesthetic judgment into it, then 
> you're opening the door to allowing what Olympic gymnasts do to be 
> described as "pure poetry." It's not good because it's poetry, and it's 
> not poetry because it's good.
>
> My favorite definition of art remains Calvino's -
>
> "Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. 
> It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is 
> outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but 
> at the same time, it recalls- and somehow stands for - everything that 
> remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider 
> poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires 
> prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it 
> retains a glint of that unlimited vastness."

But this is entirely evaluative.  But thanks for agreeing to my main point 
above, Mole.

--Bob 




From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep 27 17:36:55 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:36:55 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com>
	<006801c4a4af$f0a73ae0$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <000b01c4a4da$1c642f10$07d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Hi Tad,

the net does not help, do you maybe know where you got that quotation from?
I can look up the original, just need the source,
I also like his definition, thank you, Anny

From: "The Old Mole" <tad at opus40.org>
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 6:34 PM


> Hope this isn't a duplicate - I sent a similar thought from the wrong
> address. I'm completely with Bob on this one. I think any definition of
> poetry that also tries to be a definition of good poetry is doomed to
> failure.
>
> If you chop a text up into lines, you're calling attention to it as a text
> which is to be read in some other way than clause by clause, sentence by
> sentence - in other words, you're saying "read this as a poem."
>
> And at that point, it is a poem, and the reader who approaches it is
> entering into an implicit contract to read it as a poem, judge it as a
poem,
> like it or hate it as a poem.
>
> I don't know that this is a satisfactory definition. I'd like to add
> something like Annie Finch's "structured by the conspicuous repetition of
> any language-element," which still doesn't confuse a definition of poetry
> with a definition of good poetry.
>
> But the minute you put any qualitative aesthetic judgment into it, then
> you're opening the door to allowing what Olympic gymnasts do to be
described
> as "pure poetry." It's not good because it's poetry, and it's not poetry
> because it's good.
>
> My favorite definition of art remains Calvino's -
>
> "Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental.
It
> is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is
> outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but
at
> the same time, it recalls- and somehow stands for - everything that
remains
> out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a
> production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through
> its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a glint of
that
> unlimited vastness."
>
> Calvino neatly defines art nonjudgmentally, then goes on to give a
wonderful
> definition of good art which relates to, but separates itself from, the
> first definition. My only quibble is that he equates "poetic" with "good,"
> but maybe that was the translator.  Anny? Any help on this?
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 11:11 AM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
>
>
> In a message dated 9/27/2004 10:02:16 AM Central Daylight Time,
> bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:
>
>
> I feel that one of the greatest problems in getting people to agree of a
> definition of poetry is that too many people want to define it
evaluatively.
> For instance, Sam above suggests that prose chopped up into lines is not
> poetry.  I suspect that is an evluative judgement.  to me, chopping up a
> text into lines makes it poetry.
>
>
>
> I didn't say that, Bob.  I said that prose, broken into lines, would be
> verse.  It might conceivably be poetry as well, as I've given students
> passages from Hemingway, T. Wolfe, Melville, etc. broken into lines and
> argued that prose can be considered "poetic" even if that may not have
been
> the authors' primary intent.  But, as I said, "poetry" remains hard to
> define, very subjective.
>
> Prose/Verse=Modes
> Poetry/Drama/Fiction=Genres
>
> Of course, this raises the whole question about how to classify poetic
drama
> or narrative poetry.  Can of worms.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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  Mon Sep 27 18:02:13 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:02:13 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
Message-ID: <149.345774eb.2e89e7e5@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/27/2004 5:16:28 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:

> For instance, Sam above suggests that prose chopped up into lines is not 
> poetry.  I suspect that is an evaluative judgement.  to me, chopping up a text 
> into lines makes it poetry.
>  
> 

The whole emphasis on line/verse 
seems a little narrow to me,
because so many poets have used
'the field' of the page...have employed
a very discontinuous lines, indeed. Yes,
we read sequentially...but poets 
have attempted to disrupt this flow, 
to interrupt and to sidetrack the mind/eye, 
or, to say it another way, have splashed 
words and phrases across the white
space that lies bounded within the frame 
of the page.
Finnegan
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From halvard at earthlink.net  Mon Sep 27 18:07:32 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:07:32 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <01bd01c4a4d7$31d0ade0$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEOEDPIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>

I rather like eviscerative poetry--you know, the kind that
rips your guts out.

Hal         "I think pigs should be allowed to
               run free--just like politicians."
                              --Edna Buchanan
Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/

   Not to me.  Poetic Drama is poetry written for the stage.  Narrative
poetry is narrative poetry.  Which I distinguish from envirative poetry--but
way out in the least important suburbs of my taxonomy.  It seems to me that
the subject matter is the least important factor in defining poetry.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep 27 18:19:04 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:19:04 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
Message-ID: <190.2efb2293.2e89ebd8@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/27/2004 6:08:10 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
halvard at earthlink.net writes:

> I rather like eviscerative poetry--you know, the kind that
>  rips your guts out.
>   
> 

Hal, you might be steering us toward another 
aspect of the 'speaking of/about poetry'...
how poetry is spoken of or expressed "bodily.'

A couple of well-known examples....

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.--Robert Frost

when I feel the top of my head being taken off---Emily Dickinson

Finnegan
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From tad at opus40.org  Mon Sep 27 18:20:39 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:20:39 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com><006801c4a4af$f0a73ae0$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>
	<000b01c4a4da$1c642f10$07d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <005801c4a4e0$38ad0830$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>

It's in Calvino's book with Jaguar in the title...Under the Jaguar Sun. I 
think that's where I read it originally.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anny Ballardini" <anny.ballardini at tin.it>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 5:36 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] what poetry is


> Hi Tad,
>
> the net does not help, do you maybe know where you got that quotation 
> from?
> I can look up the original, just need the source,
> I also like his definition, thank you, Anny
>
> From: "The Old Mole" <tad at opus40.org>
> Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 6:34 PM
>
>
>> Hope this isn't a duplicate - I sent a similar thought from the wrong
>> address. I'm completely with Bob on this one. I think any definition of
>> poetry that also tries to be a definition of good poetry is doomed to
>> failure.
>>
>> If you chop a text up into lines, you're calling attention to it as a 
>> text
>> which is to be read in some other way than clause by clause, sentence by
>> sentence - in other words, you're saying "read this as a poem."
>>
>> And at that point, it is a poem, and the reader who approaches it is
>> entering into an implicit contract to read it as a poem, judge it as a
> poem,
>> like it or hate it as a poem.
>>
>> I don't know that this is a satisfactory definition. I'd like to add
>> something like Annie Finch's "structured by the conspicuous repetition of
>> any language-element," which still doesn't confuse a definition of poetry
>> with a definition of good poetry.
>>
>> But the minute you put any qualitative aesthetic judgment into it, then
>> you're opening the door to allowing what Olympic gymnasts do to be
> described
>> as "pure poetry." It's not good because it's poetry, and it's not poetry
>> because it's good.
>>
>> My favorite definition of art remains Calvino's -
>>
>> "Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental.
> It
>> is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is
>> outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but
> at
>> the same time, it recalls- and somehow stands for - everything that
> remains
>> out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a
>> production in which each individual experience acquires prominence 
>> through
>> its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a glint of
> that
>> unlimited vastness."
>>
>> Calvino neatly defines art nonjudgmentally, then goes on to give a
> wonderful
>> definition of good art which relates to, but separates itself from, the
>> first definition. My only quibble is that he equates "poetic" with 
>> "good,"
>> but maybe that was the translator.  Anny? Any help on this?
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
>> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 11:11 AM
>> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
>>
>>
>> In a message dated 9/27/2004 10:02:16 AM Central Daylight Time,
>> bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:
>>
>>
>> I feel that one of the greatest problems in getting people to agree of a
>> definition of poetry is that too many people want to define it
> evaluatively.
>> For instance, Sam above suggests that prose chopped up into lines is not
>> poetry.  I suspect that is an evluative judgement.  to me, chopping up a
>> text into lines makes it poetry.
>>
>>
>>
>> I didn't say that, Bob.  I said that prose, broken into lines, would be
>> verse.  It might conceivably be poetry as well, as I've given students
>> passages from Hemingway, T. Wolfe, Melville, etc. broken into lines and
>> argued that prose can be considered "poetic" even if that may not have
> been
>> the authors' primary intent.  But, as I said, "poetry" remains hard to
>> define, very subjective.
>>
>> Prose/Verse=Modes
>> Poetry/Drama/Fiction=Genres
>>
>> Of course, this raises the whole question about how to classify poetic
> drama
>> or narrative poetry.  Can of worms.
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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 tad at opus40.org  Mon Sep 27 18:22:36 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:22:36 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com><006801c4a4af$f0a73ae0$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>
	<01ee01c4a4d8$e18ecd60$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <006b01c4a4e0$7df58b10$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>

The first part isn't evaluative. It simply says that art is anything you put 
a frame around. If you separate it out from the rest of the existence by a 
frame of any kind and call it art, then your doing that makes it art.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Grumman" <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 5:27 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] what poetry is


>
>
>> Hope this isn't a duplicate - I sent a similar thought from the wrong 
>> address. I'm completely with Bob on this one. I think any definition of 
>> poetry that also tries to be a definition of good poetry is doomed to 
>> failure.
>>
>> If you chop a text up into lines, you're calling attention to it as a 
>> text which is to be read in some other way than clause by clause, 
>> sentence by sentence - in other words, you're saying "read this as a 
>> poem."
>>
>> And at that point, it is a poem, and the reader who approaches it is 
>> entering into an implicit contract to read it as a poem, judge it as a 
>> poem, like it or hate it as a poem.
>>
>> I don't know that this is a satisfactory definition. I'd like to add 
>> something like Annie Finch's "structured by the conspicuous repetition of 
>> any language-element," which still doesn't confuse a definition of poetry 
>> with a definition of good poetry.
>
> The problem with that is that there are many texts, lineated or containing 
> other forms of flow-breaks, that everyone agrees are poems, except the 
> extreme formalists.  High oratory has a lot of repetitition, too.  I don't 
> see why anything would have to be added to lineation (except the burstnorm 
> forms of lineation I call flow-breaks).
>
>> But the minute you put any qualitative aesthetic judgment into it, then 
>> you're opening the door to allowing what Olympic gymnasts do to be 
>> described as "pure poetry." It's not good because it's poetry, and it's 
>> not poetry because it's good.
>>
>> My favorite definition of art remains Calvino's -
>>
>> "Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. 
>> It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is 
>> outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but 
>> at the same time, it recalls- and somehow stands for - everything that 
>> remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider 
>> poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires 
>> prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it 
>> retains a glint of that unlimited vastness."
>
> But this is entirely evaluative.  But thanks for agreeing to my main point 
> above, Mole.
>
> --Bob
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Mon Sep 27 18:33:59 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 15:33:59 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <190.2efb2293.2e89ebd8@aol.com>
Message-ID: <41589556.9DBA810@earthlink.net>



JforJames at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In a message dated 9/27/2004 6:08:10 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> halvard at earthlink.net writes:
> 
> > I rather like eviscerative poetry--you know, the kind that
> > rips your guts out.
> >
> >
> 
> Hal, you might be steering us toward another
> aspect of the 'speaking of/about poetry'...
> how poetry is spoken of or expressed "bodily.'
> 
> A couple of well-known examples....
> 
> Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.--Robert Frost
> 
> when I feel the top of my head being taken off---Emily Dickinson

That last one's getting a lot of play in Baghdad lately.

- Jim


From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep 27 18:42:42 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:42:42 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] About the 'brontosaurus', my theory, which is mine
Message-ID: <158.40702231.2e89f162@aol.com>

ANNE ELK
 
Presenter (Graham Chapman):
Good evening.

CAPTION:
"THRUST - A QUITE CONTROVERSIAL LOOK AT THE WORLD AROUND US"

Presenter:
I have with me tonight Anne Elk. Mrs Anne Elk.

Miss Elk:
(John Cleese, as a very prim lady)
Miss.

SUPERIMPOSED CAPTION:
"ANNE ELK"

Presenter:
You have a new theory about the brontosaurus.

Miss Elk:
Can I just say here, Chris, for one moment that I have a new theory about the 
brontosaurus?

Presenter:
Er... exactly.
(he gestures but she does not say anything)
What is it?

Miss Elk:
Where? (looks round)

Presenter:
No, no. Your new theory.

Miss Elk:
Oh, what is my theory?

Presenter:
Yes.

Miss Elk:
Oh what is my theory that it is.
Well Chris you may well ask me what is my theory.

Presenter:
I am asking.

Miss Elk:
Good for you. My word yes.
Well Chris, what is it that it is - this theory of mine. Well, this is what 
it is - my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine

Presenter:
(beginning to show signs of exasperation)
Yes, I know it's yours, what is it?

Miss Elk:
Where? Oh, what is my theory? This is it.
(clears throat at some length)
My theory that belongs to me is as follows.
(clears throat at great length)
This is how it goes.
The next thing I"m going to say is my theory. Ready?

Presenter:
Yes!

Miss Elk:
My theory by A. Elk. Brackets Miss, brackets.
This theory goes as follows and begins now.
All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then 
thin again at the far end. That is my theory, it is mine, and belongs to me and 
I own it, and what it is too.

Presenter:
That's it, is it?

Miss Elk:
Spot on, Chris.

Presenter:
Well, er, this theory of yours appears to have hit the nail on the head.

Miss Elk:
And it's mine.

Presenter:
Yes, thank you very much for coming along to the studio. Thank you.

Miss Elk:
My pleasure, Chris ....

Presenter:
Next week Britain's newist wasp farm ...

Miss Elk:
It's been a lot of fun.

Presenter:
Yes, thank you very much.

Miss Elk:
Saying what my theory is.

Presenter:
Yes, thank you.

Miss Elk:
And whose it is.

Presenter:
Yes, thank you - that's all - thank you... opens next week.

Miss Elk:
I have another theory.

Presenter:
Yes.

Miss Elk:
Called my second theory, or my theory number two.

Presenter:
Thank you. Britian's newest wasp farm...

Miss Elk:
This second theory which was the one that I had said...

Presenter:
(the phone rings; he answers)
Yes, no I'm trying...

Miss Elk:
Which I could expound without doubt. This second theory which, with the one 
which I just said, forms the brace of theories which I own and which belong to 
me, goes like this...

Presenter:
(looking at his shoe)
9 and a half, wide fitting... Balleys of Bond Street.
What? No, sort of brogue.

Miss Elk:
This is what it is.
(clears throat)

Presenter:
8 and a half.

Miss Elk:
This is it...
(lots of noisy throat clearing)

The Presenter rises and leaves the set to go next door to the travel agents 
set, leaving Miss Elk behind for a moment.

Bounder is still on the phone.
His other phone rings; he answers it.

Bounder:
Hello, yes ... yes ...

The presenter enters the travel set. The tourist is still droning on from a 
previous sketch and Bounder is still on the phone.

Tourist:
(carrying on all through the scene below)
...and the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging choloera 
epidemic is mearly a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the last outbreak of Spanish 
tummy in 1660 which killed half London and descimated Europe, and meanwhile the 
bloody Guardia are busy arresting 16-year-olds for kissing in the streets and 
shooting anyone under 19 who doesn't like Franco...

The Presenter approaches Bounder.

Presenter:
The Fire Brigade are here. They're coming!

Bounder:
Hello! No, no, no I think they are all part of the British Shoe Corporation 
now.

Miss Elk follows the Presenter in.

Miss Elk:
Chris, this other theory of mine which is mine like
the other one I also own. The second theory...

The Fire Brigade enter and the secretary goes to greet them. They speak to 
her and she takes off her shoe to check the size.

 Meanwhile...

Miss Elk:
My second theory states that Fire Brigade choirs
seldom sing songs about Marcel Proust.

With only a half-beat pause the Fire Brigade starts singing the Proust song. 
After the usual number of lines we hear the gong.

Voice Over (Eric):
Start again.

The looney looks into the scene on overlay and waves at the camera just as we 
fade to black. We hold black for a few seconds and then the looney leans in 
to the black and waves again before fading away.

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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Mon Sep 27 18:45:12 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 00:45:12 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com><006801c4a4af$f0a73ae0$6501a8c0@MoleHQ><000b01c4a4da$1c642f10$07d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>
	<005801c4a4e0$38ad0830$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <000b01c4a4e3$a6a79af0$07d83052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

"exercise": by this word I mean the difficult challenge of a structural,
formal, thematic invention that crossed in an indirect, transversal way the
narrative tension; so that the narration was seized and used within a
mental, geometrical invention, an arduous meeting of abstraction and
tangibility.



Sotto il sole giaguaro, 1986, posthumous.



I will look for it and let you know, in the meantime I found this brief
autobiography, simple and clean.

 http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/calauto.html



Anny

From: "The Old Mole" <tad at opus40.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 12:20 AM


> It's in Calvino's book with Jaguar in the title...Under the Jaguar Sun. I
> think that's where I read it originally.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Anny Ballardini" <anny.ballardini at tin.it>
> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views"
> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 5:36 PM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
>
>
> > Hi Tad,
> >
> > the net does not help, do you maybe know where you got that quotation
> > from?
> > I can look up the original, just need the source,
> > I also like his definition, thank you, Anny
> >
> > From: "The Old Mole" <tad at opus40.org>
> > Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 6:34 PM
> >
> >
> >> Hope this isn't a duplicate - I sent a similar thought from the wrong
> >> address. I'm completely with Bob on this one. I think any definition of
> >> poetry that also tries to be a definition of good poetry is doomed to
> >> failure.
> >>
> >> If you chop a text up into lines, you're calling attention to it as a
> >> text
> >> which is to be read in some other way than clause by clause, sentence
by
> >> sentence - in other words, you're saying "read this as a poem."
> >>
> >> And at that point, it is a poem, and the reader who approaches it is
> >> entering into an implicit contract to read it as a poem, judge it as a
> > poem,
> >> like it or hate it as a poem.
> >>
> >> I don't know that this is a satisfactory definition. I'd like to add
> >> something like Annie Finch's "structured by the conspicuous repetition
of
> >> any language-element," which still doesn't confuse a definition of
poetry
> >> with a definition of good poetry.
> >>
> >> But the minute you put any qualitative aesthetic judgment into it, then
> >> you're opening the door to allowing what Olympic gymnasts do to be
> > described
> >> as "pure poetry." It's not good because it's poetry, and it's not
poetry
> >> because it's good.
> >>
> >> My favorite definition of art remains Calvino's -
> >>
> >> "Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is
fundamental.
> > It
> >> is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is
> >> outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest;
but
> > at
> >> the same time, it recalls- and somehow stands for - everything that
> > remains
> >> out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a
> >> production in which each individual experience acquires prominence
> >> through
> >> its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a glint of
> > that
> >> unlimited vastness."
> >>
> >> Calvino neatly defines art nonjudgmentally, then goes on to give a
> > wonderful
> >> definition of good art which relates to, but separates itself from, the
> >> first definition. My only quibble is that he equates "poetic" with
> >> "good,"
> >> but maybe that was the translator.  Anny? Any help on this?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message ----- 
> >> From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
> >> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> >> Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 11:11 AM
> >> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
> >>
> >>
> >> In a message dated 9/27/2004 10:02:16 AM Central Daylight Time,
> >> bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:
> >>
> >>
> >> I feel that one of the greatest problems in getting people to agree of
a
> >> definition of poetry is that too many people want to define it
> > evaluatively.
> >> For instance, Sam above suggests that prose chopped up into lines is
not
> >> poetry.  I suspect that is an evluative judgement.  to me, chopping up
a
> >> text into lines makes it poetry.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> I didn't say that, Bob.  I said that prose, broken into lines, would be
> >> verse.  It might conceivably be poetry as well, as I've given students
> >> passages from Hemingway, T. Wolfe, Melville, etc. broken into lines and
> >> argued that prose can be considered "poetic" even if that may not have
> > been
> >> the authors' primary intent.  But, as I said, "poetry" remains hard to
> >> define, very subjective.
> >>
> >> Prose/Verse=Modes
> >> Poetry/Drama/Fiction=Genres
> >>
> >> Of course, this raises the whole question about how to classify poetic
> > drama
> >> or narrative poetry.  Can of worms.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> 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 Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Mon Sep 27 19:33:15 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:33:15 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
Message-ID: <158.4071c32e.2e89fd3b@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/27/2004 4:16:53 PM Central Daylight Time, 
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: 
> Only evaluatively.  Do you agree or disagree that we really need two 
> definitions, one of poetry and one of good poetry?
>  
> 
> 
No, I think we need a definition of that explains the difference between 
verse and poetry.  The two terms are not mutually exclusive, to be sure, but 
neither are they identical.

I think that the difference between poetry and good poetry is always going to 
be subjective, a matter of taste and personal practice.  One reader's meat, 
etc.  If you want a critic who always had a clear sense of what is bad and what 
is good, you could go back to Yvor Winters, I guess.  But his taste is not 
what I would call consistent, nor is it totally disinterested.
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 19:33:41 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:33:41 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <149.345774eb.2e89e7e5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <027901c4a4ea$72cb11b0$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

For instance, Sam above suggests that prose chopped up into lines is not poetry.  I suspect that is an evaluative judgement.  to me, chopping up a text into lines makes it poetry.




  The whole emphasis on line/verse 
  seems a little narrow to me,
  because so many poets have used
  'the field' of the page...have employed
  a very discontinuous lines, indeed. Yes,
  we read sequentially...but poets 
  have attempted to disrupt this flow, 
  to interrupt and to sidetrack the mind/eye, 
  or, to say it another way, have splashed 
  words and phrases across the white
  space that lies bounded within the frame 
  of the page.
  Finnegan 


  Right.  Hence, my extension of lineation to include what I call the flow-break.



  --Bob


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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Mon Sep 27 19:34:50 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:34:50 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] About the 'brontosaurus', my theory, which is mine
Message-ID: <1ec.2a94f43d.2e89fd9a@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/27/2004 5:43:16 PM Central Daylight Time, 
JforJames at aol.com writes: 
> 
> ANNE ELK
> 
> Presenter (Graham Chapman):
> Good evening.
> 
> CAPTION:
> "THRUST - A QUITE CONTROVERSIAL LOOK AT THE WORLD AROUND US"
> 
> Presenter:
> I have with me tonight Anne Elk. Mrs Anne Elk.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> (John Cleese, as a very prim lady)
> Miss.
> 
> SUPERIMPOSED CAPTION:
> "ANNE ELK"
> 
> Presenter:
> You have a new theory about the brontosaurus.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Can I just say here, Chris, for one moment that I have a new theory about 
> the brontosaurus?
> 
> Presenter:
> Er... exactly.
> (he gestures but she does not say anything)
> What is it?
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Where? (looks round)
> 
> Presenter:
> No, no. Your new theory.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Oh, what is my theory?
> 
> Presenter:
> Yes.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Oh what is my theory that it is.
> Well Chris you may well ask me what is my theory.
> 
> Presenter:
> I am asking.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Good for you. My word yes.
> Well Chris, what is it that it is - this theory of mine. Well, this is what 
> it is - my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine
> 
> Presenter:
> (beginning to show signs of exasperation)
> Yes, I know it's yours, what is it?
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Where? Oh, what is my theory? This is it.
> (clears throat at some length)
> My theory that belongs to me is as follows.
> (clears throat at great length)
> This is how it goes.
> The next thing I"m going to say is my theory. Ready?
> 
> Presenter:
> Yes!
> 
> Miss Elk:
> My theory by A. Elk. Brackets Miss, brackets.
> This theory goes as follows and begins now.
> All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then 
> thin again at the far end. That is my theory, it is mine, and belongs to me 
> and I own it, and what it is too.
> 
> Presenter:
> That's it, is it?
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Spot on, Chris.
> 
> Presenter:
> Well, er, this theory of yours appears to have hit the nail on the head.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> And it's mine.
> 
> Presenter:
> Yes, thank you very much for coming along to the studio. Thank you.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> My pleasure, Chris ....
> 
> Presenter:
> Next week Britain's newist wasp farm ...
> 
> Miss Elk:
> It's been a lot of fun.
> 
> Presenter:
> Yes, thank you very much.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Saying what my theory is.
> 
> Presenter:
> Yes, thank you.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> And whose it is.
> 
> Presenter:
> Yes, thank you - that's all - thank you... opens next week.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> I have another theory.
> 
> Presenter:
> Yes.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Called my second theory, or my theory number two.
> 
> Presenter:
> Thank you. Britian's newest wasp farm...
> 
> Miss Elk:
> This second theory which was the one that I had said...
> 
> Presenter:
> (the phone rings; he answers)
> Yes, no I'm trying...
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Which I could expound without doubt. This second theory which, with the one 
> which I just said, forms the brace of theories which I own and which belong 
> to me, goes like this...
> 
> Presenter:
> (looking at his shoe)
> 9 and a half, wide fitting... Balleys of Bond Street.
> What? No, sort of brogue.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> This is what it is.
> (clears throat)
> 
> Presenter:
> 8 and a half.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> This is it...
> (lots of noisy throat clearing)
> 
> The Presenter rises and leaves the set to go next door to the travel agents 
> set, leaving Miss Elk behind for a moment.
> 
> Bounder is still on the phone.
> His other phone rings; he answers it.
> 
> Bounder:
> Hello, yes ... yes ...
> 
> The presenter enters the travel set. The tourist is still droning on from a 
> previous sketch and Bounder is still on the phone.
> 
> Tourist:
> (carrying on all through the scene below)
> ...and the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging choloera 
> epidemic is mearly a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the last outbreak of Spanish 
> tummy in 1660 which killed half London and descimated Europe, and meanwhile 
> the bloody Guardia are busy arresting 16-year-olds for kissing in the streets 
> and shooting anyone under 19 who doesn't like Franco...
> 
> The Presenter approaches Bounder.
> 
> Presenter:
> The Fire Brigade are here. They're coming!
> 
> Bounder:
> Hello! No, no, no I think they are all part of the British Shoe Corporation 
> now.
> 
> Miss Elk follows the Presenter in.
> 
> Miss Elk:
> Chris, this other theory of mine which is mine like
> the other one I also own. The second theory...
> 
> The Fire Brigade enter and the secretary goes to greet them. They speak to 
> her and she takes off her shoe to check the size.
> 
> Meanwhile...
> 
> Miss Elk:
> My second theory states that Fire Brigade choirs
> seldom sing songs about Marcel Proust.
> 
> With only a half-beat pause the Fire Brigade starts singing the Proust song. 
> After the usual number of lines we hear the gong.
> 
> Voice Over (Eric):
> Start again.
> 
> The looney looks into the scene on overlay and waves at the camera just as 
> we fade to black. We hold black for a few seconds and then the looney leans in 
> to the black and waves again before fading away.
> 
> 
I spotted the looney!  Did anyone else?
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 19:36:55 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:36:55 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Narrative poet
References: <e2.2209660.2e89de9c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <028601c4a4ea$e69f2b30$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>


    You like it, so it's poetry.  Not very useful to anyone but you as a way of defining poetry, James.

    --Bob

      




  Bob, I'm confused, or you are? What did I say I liked? 
  I merely posted a link to an article...the article has nothing 
  to do with the topic at hand: defining poetry.
  Finnegan 
  Your post:

  In a still evening, when the water is calm, the light is low and everything seems to stand still, Loren Graham listens, fly rod in hand. Carried over the river in that stillness, he can sometimes hear the low conversations of his fellow fishermen. 

   

  "You can't really hear what they're saying, but more the rhythm of what they're saying," he said.

   

  That's poetry, at least in the very basic way Graham believes it to be.

  I may well be confused, but I thought you were quoting some prose, then saying it was poetry.  I jumped from there to the belief that you said it was poetry because you liked it--because I couldn't think of any other reason you'd call it poetry.

  It's a pleasant passage but "just" sensitive prose, for me.



  --Bob


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From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Mon Sep 27 19:39:50 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:39:50 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Narrative poet
Message-ID: <149.345b55a8.2e89fec6@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/27/2004 6:37:34 PM Central Daylight Time, 
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: 
> In a still evening, 
   when the water is calm, 
    the light is low and everything 
    seems to stand still, 
    Loren Graham 
> listens, fly rod in hand. 
   Carried over the river in 
    that stillness, he can sometimes 
    hear the low conversations of 
his > fellow fishermen.
> 
> 
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 19:44:53 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:44:53 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <BD7D87CE.B975%grahamd@ripon.edu><012201c4a49f$7703ce70$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
	<1096302086.41583e0666e35@webmail.ukonline.net>
Message-ID: <029101c4a4ec$0385e440$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



> 
> "Envirate" or whatever, seems to me adequately covered by "describe". It's 
> true that the latter could be used of describing one's own swollen feet, plan 
> to get a loan, love for one's children and other things that not everyone 
> would willingly concede are part of an environment. But it does seem to cover 
> the non-progressive timeless aspect which I assume is what you want to 
> contrast with telling a story. 

I forgot about "descriptive poetry."  I cling to "envirate/envirative," though because (1) it's mine; (2) "envirative" specifies something significant as no term related to "describe" does; and (3) "describe" is too broad a term and so will confuse (since, for one reason, all poetry describes--that is, one can describe without envirating).

> Someone else said that all lines of verse have meter. This must be based on a 
> misunderstanding of "meter" (as if it meant rhythm, or something). Most modern 
> free verse does not employ meter. There are many kinds of poetry that do not 
> use meter, e.g. the Psalms. 

You're assuming everyone accepts free verse as poetry.  Our discussion is due in part to that not being true.

 
> Lineation seems to me too dependent on the technology of writing. Illiterate 
> cultures produce poetry by the ton, yet would have no concept of a line. With 
> that proviso I think it's useful. The line in poetry is somewhat as the phrase 
> in melody - a convenient and practical length that is capable of being 
> eloquent. Limitations of our lungs and powers of concentration proably come 
> into it. 

My taxonomy is for printed poetry BUT applicable to spoken poetry since dependent on flow-breaks, or pauses, which can be heard.  A text that is a traditional poem in print but read without pauses at the end of lines becomes prose, as far as I'm concerned.  (Or, is misread.)
 
> But I think one needs some wider concept such as verbal pattern. This would 
> incidentally eliminate any lingering issues with prose poems, concrete poems, 
> and so on. Personally, I think poetry cannot be defined formally or in any 
> other way; if someone says that something's a poem, then it is. But if one is 
> going to have a go at it, it seems ridiculous to be driven to a position where 
> you have to say that half the poems in Tomas Transtr?mer's M?rkerseende are 
> poems but the other half are not (because they happen to be prose poems).   

Should we call the introductions to poems in some anthologies poems because most of the works in the anthology are poems?  Another question strikes me: why not call all the texts in Transtromer's collection prose because half are prose?

--Bob
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 19:49:44 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:49:44 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEOEDPIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <02b301c4a4ec$b10023b0$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

I rather like eviscerative poetry--you know, the kind that
  rips your guts out.

  Hal         "I think pigs should be allowed to
                 run free--just like politicians."
                                --Edna Buchanan
  Halvard Johnson


  Do you not believe that a large amount of poetry is (easily recognized as) narrative, and another large amount is (easily recognized as) what I call envirative, and too little is (easily recognized as ) "eviscerative" for the term to be of any use--except, of course, to annoy people with analytical minds with?

  --Bob

   
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Mon Sep 27 19:58:45 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:58:45 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <e1.1e1c2d9.2e8987aa@cs.com><006801c4a4af$f0a73ae0$6501a8c0@MoleHQ><01ee01c4a4d8$e18ecd60$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
	<006b01c4a4e0$7df58b10$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <02c701c4a4ed$f402dfd0$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

> The first part isn't evaluative. It simply says that art is anything you 
> put a frame around. If you separate it out from the rest of the existence 
> by a frame of any kind and call it art, then your doing that makes it art.

Okay, but I was thinking of "I might venture a definition: we consider 
poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence 
through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a glint 
of that
unlimited vastness."  As for the frame, Calvino is close to my belief but I 
would want to define "frame" or "making a frame" first.  For instance, 
someone's framing something simply by saying it is art doesn't work for me. 
The frame should be something most people would agree was a frame, like a 
picture frame or a stage.  Unarbitrary.  We also get back to my distinction 
between art, science and propaganda.  Ads are framed but not art, in my 
view.  The displays in the museum of natural science are not works of art, 
but information.

--Bob






From mandolin at mac.com  Mon Sep 27 20:49:15 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 20:49:15 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Sonnet: Faith-based Initiative
In-Reply-To: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEAECFIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEAECFIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <38DB6A78-10E8-11D9-BCEE-000393C29586@mac.com>


On Sep 26, 2004, at 8:05 PM, Halvard Johnson wrote:

> Shame? Not a speck of it. I hope.
>  ?
> Btw, Dick Allen and I had a little run of shrunken sonnets
> going awhile back. Maybe I'll see if I can't rustle some of
> them up.
> ?
> Hal
> Love the image of a door like a popsicle...
> Wait a minute. This is shorter than Michael's
>  lapse of a single line. The incredible shrinking
>  sonnet, soon to cohabit with the lowly haiku.
>  Hal, have you no shame, man?
> Finnegan
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry

Been reading George Starbuck. Here's one of his Spacesaver Sonnets:

Poor Soul

Fly,
theif;
thy
feif-
dom
's torched.

Come,
Cur.
Fetch!

Get
your
scorched
earth
worth.




But hey, it's got 143 lines!


And then there's SLABS  -- Standard Length and Breadth Sonnets  (Best 
seen in a monospaced font)

SPIN CONTROL

OhHeDidDidHeOK
UseItLetHimSay
CrossMyHeartHe
DontKnowDiddly
InHisOwnYouMay
FireWhenYouAre
ReadyGridleyDo
ItOrScrewItWay
ThenWeCanPlead
TheIneptnessOf
HisIntrepidity

TaintTheNathan
HalenessItsThe
GGordonLiddity

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From wjbat at conncoll.edu  Mon Sep 27 21:40:43 2004
From: wjbat at conncoll.edu (Wendy Battin)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 21:40:43 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] readings for SE New England listers
Message-ID: <69497E99-10EF-11D9-9DE2-000A9573C758@conncoll.edu>

Eva Salzman is opening the reading series tomorrow night at Connecticut 
College in New London, CT.

Here's the fall schedule:
--Eva Salzman,  Tuesday Sept 28    7:00 pm
--Ingrid Wendt & Ralph Salisbury,   Tuesday Oct 12   7:30 pm
--Mark Jarman,  Tuesday Nov 9    7:30 pm

All readings are held in the (lovely) Charles Chu room in Shain 
Library.  Backchannel if you need directions or further info; we'd love 
to see you all there.

Wendy

Wendy Battin        wjbat at conncoll.edu
http://www.upwardcat.com/home.html

Better a handful of dry dates and content therewith than to own the 
Gate of Peacocks and be kicked in the eye by a broody camel.
Arabian



From jvcervantes at earthlink.net  Mon Sep 27 21:41:31 2004
From: jvcervantes at earthlink.net (James Cervantes)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:41:31 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
Subject: [New-Poetry] About the 'brontosaurus', my theory, which is mine
Message-ID: <12751470.1096335692333.JavaMail.root@thecount.psp.pas.earthlink.net>



-----Original Message-----
From: JforJames at aol.com
Sent: Sep 27, 2004 3:42 PM
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Subject: [New-Poetry] About the 'brontosaurus', my theory, which is mine

ANNE ELK
 
Presenter (Graham Chapman):
Good evening.

CAPTION:
"THRUST - A QUITE CONTROVERSIAL LOOK AT THE WORLD AROUND US"

Presenter:
I have with me tonight Anne Elk. Mrs Anne Elk.

Miss Elk:
(John Cleese, as a very prim lady)
Miss.

SUPERIMPOSED CAPTION:
"ANNE ELK"

Presenter:
You have a new theory about the brontosaurus.

Miss Elk:
Can I just say here, Chris, for one moment that I have a new theory about the 
brontosaurus?

Presenter:
Er... exactly.
(he gestures but she does not say anything)
What is it?

Miss Elk:
Where? (looks round)

Presenter:
No, no. Your new theory.

Miss Elk:
Oh, what is my theory?

Presenter:
Yes.

Miss Elk:
Oh what is my theory that it is.
Well Chris you may well ask me what is my theory.

Presenter:
I am asking.

Miss Elk:
Good for you. My word yes.
Well Chris, what is it that it is - this theory of mine. Well, this is what 
it is - my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine

Presenter:
(beginning to show signs of exasperation)
Yes, I know it's yours, what is it?

Miss Elk:
Where? Oh, what is my theory? This is it.
(clears throat at some length)
My theory that belongs to me is as follows.
(clears throat at great length)
This is how it goes.
The next thing I"m going to say is my theory. Ready?

Presenter:
Yes!

Miss Elk:
My theory by A. Elk. Brackets Miss, brackets.
This theory goes as follows and begins now.
All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then 
thin again at the far end. That is my theory, it is mine, and belongs to me and 
I own it, and what it is too.

Presenter:
That's it, is it?

Miss Elk:
Spot on, Chris.

Presenter:
Well, er, this theory of yours appears to have hit the nail on the head.

Miss Elk:
And it's mine.

Presenter:
Yes, thank you very much for coming along to the studio. Thank you.

Miss Elk:
My pleasure, Chris ....

Presenter:
Next week Britain's newist wasp farm ...

Miss Elk:
It's been a lot of fun.

Presenter:
Yes, thank you very much.

Miss Elk:
Saying what my theory is.

Presenter:
Yes, thank you.

Miss Elk:
And whose it is.

Presenter:
Yes, thank you - that's all - thank you... opens next week.

Miss Elk:
I have another theory.

Presenter:
Yes.

Miss Elk:
Called my second theory, or my theory number two.

Presenter:
Thank you. Britian's newest wasp farm...

Miss Elk:
This second theory which was the one that I had said...

Presenter:
(the phone rings; he answers)
Yes, no I'm trying...

Miss Elk:
Which I could expound without doubt. This second theory which, with the one 
which I just said, forms the brace of theories which I own and which belong to 
me, goes like this...

Presenter:
(looking at his shoe)
9 and a half, wide fitting... Balleys of Bond Street.
What? No, sort of brogue.

Miss Elk:
This is what it is.
(clears throat)

Presenter:
8 and a half.

Miss Elk:
This is it...
(lots of noisy throat clearing)

The Presenter rises and leaves the set to go next door to the travel agents 
set, leaving Miss Elk behind for a moment.

Bounder is still on the phone.
His other phone rings; he answers it.

Bounder:
Hello, yes ... yes ...

The presenter enters the travel set. The tourist is still droning on from a 
previous sketch and Bounder is still on the phone.

Tourist:
(carrying on all through the scene below)
...and the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging choloera 
epidemic is mearly a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the last outbreak of Spanish 
tummy in 1660 which killed half London and descimated Europe, and meanwhile the 
bloody Guardia are busy arresting 16-year-olds for kissing in the streets and 
shooting anyone under 19 who doesn't like Franco...

The Presenter approaches Bounder.

Presenter:
The Fire Brigade are here. They're coming!

Bounder:
Hello! No, no, no I think they are all part of the British Shoe Corporation 
now.

Miss Elk follows the Presenter in.

Miss Elk:
Chris, this other theory of mine which is mine like
the other one I also own. The second theory...

The Fire Brigade enter and the secretary goes to greet them. They speak to 
her and she takes off her shoe to check the size.

 Meanwhile...

Miss Elk:
My second theory states that Fire Brigade choirs
seldom sing songs about Marcel Proust.

With only a half-beat pause the Fire Brigade starts singing the Proust song. 
After the usual number of lines we hear the gong.

Voice Over (Eric):
Start again.

The looney looks into the scene on overlay and waves at the camera just as we 
fade to black. We hold black for a few seconds and then the looney leans in 
to the black and waves again before fading away.


====

I don't get it.

- Jim

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Cervantes:  http://www.poetserv.net/jvchome/index.html
Salt River Review:  http://www.poetserv.org
RelativeLinks: http://www.poetserv.com/relativelinks/home.html


From JforJames at aol.com  Mon Sep 27 23:15:58 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:15:58 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
Message-ID: <1e8.2aa999ea.2e8a316e@aol.com>

I> >> Only evaluatively.  Do you agree or disagree that we really need two 
>> definitions, one of poetry and one of good poetry?
>> 
>> 
>> 
> No, I think we need a definition of that explains the difference between 
> verse and poetry.  The two terms are not mutually exclusive, to be sure, but 
> neither are they identical.
> 
> I think that the difference between poetry and good poetry is always going 
> to be subjective, a matter of taste and personal practice.  One reader's meat, 
> etc.  If you want a critic who always had a clear sense of what is bad and 
> what is good, you could go back to Yvor Winters, I guess.  But his taste is 
> not what I would call consistent, nor is it totally disinterested. 
> 
> 

Yes, I think the taste issue is a different matter really.
When one bothers to build a definition of a poem one
is addressing the "whatness" of a successful or good poem.
The definition will touch on those elements that tend 
to add up to a poem, meaning something worthy of
the word 'poem', in the general case. 

We have a word for bad verse: doggerel. No word
for bad free verse except that oft-used appellation 
of "chopped prose". 
Finnegan 
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Tue Sep 28 00:14:51 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:14:51 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <027901c4a4ea$72cb11b0$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <BD7E4F6B.BA00%grahamd@ripon.edu>

on 9/27/04 6:33 PM, Bob Grumman at bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net wrote:



The whole emphasis on line/verse
seems a little narrow to me,
because so many poets have used
'the field' of the page...have employed
a very discontinuous lines, indeed. Yes,
we read sequentially...but poets
have attempted to disrupt this flow,
to interrupt and to sidetrack the mind/eye,
or, to say it another way, have splashed
words and phrases across the white
space that lies bounded within the frame
of the page.
Finnegan

Right.  Hence, my extension of lineation to include what I call the
flow-break. 

--Bob 
---------------------

I'm mostly staying out of this latest "what is poetry" go-round.  But I
wanted to say that I really do think Bob's term "flow-break" is a good one,
useful and descriptive of a lot of practice for  the reasons Finnegan
touches on above.  Although I am not very engaged by most "open field"
poetry or by other primarily visual rather than aural devices, I think that
they operate similarly to the linebreak.  They interrupt the flow of the
utterance, introducing a counter-rhythm to the sentence rhythm, and so on.

One of my favorite remarks about poetry is this passage from Wendell Berry,
which I have probably quoted here before.  I like it, in part, because it
speaks to the reason for poetic form.

"One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is
to resist glibness--to slow language down and make it thoughtful.  This
accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect,
within the dynamics of the growth of language:  verse checks the merely
impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to
extralinguistic consideration; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it
admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing. "

      --Wendell Berry.  *Standing By Words*.





====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================


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From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Tue Sep 28 07:08:20 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:08:20 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <029101c4a4ec$0385e440$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
References: <BD7D87CE.B975%grahamd@ripon.edu><012201c4a49f$7703ce70$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
	<1096302086.41583e0666e35@webmail.ukonline.net>
	<029101c4a4ec$0385e440$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <1096369700.41594624415f2@webmail.ukonline.net>

***********************

>I forgot about "descriptive poetry."  I cling to "envirate/envirative," 
though because (1) it's mine; (2) "envirative" specifies something significant 
as no term related to "describe" does; and (3) "describe" is too broad a term 
and so will confuse (since, for one reason, all poetry describes--that is, one 
can describe without envirating).

Yes, that's true, I suppose. 

I was thinking that "please describe the story" would invite some such 
response as "It is very weird and haunting" - as opposed to kicking straight 
in with "This guy has been living out in the sticks since his mother died 
and ...". 

But then, a detective might well say: "Please describe the events leading up 
to your meeting"

Alternatively, you might consider "depiction" or "evocation" . As you may 
gather, I feel an irrational aversion to introducing new terms, even though I 
would be the first to admit that those we have (e.g. regarding meter) are 
grossly inadequate.

**************

> Another question strikes me: why not call all the texts in Transtromer's 
collection prose because half are prose?

That wouldn't cause me too much of a problem, though I admit I certainly do 
not think of them as what a collection of prose normally connotes (e.g. like a 
collection of reviews or articles). But what I'd wish to say is that, whatever 
Transtromer's pieces are, they are all endeavours of the same kind, united by 
the same concentration, searching, the same goal. I mentioned this 
collection because traditionally there's many a poet who has thrown the odd 
sprinkle of prose poems into a collection of otherwise short-lined stuff, just 
as they might throw in the occasional translation or the odd bit of light 
verse or a poem entitled "Song" - all those subtle indications that these 
makeweights have been put in to add a bit of variety but are somehow not the 
real meat - but this Transtromer's collection seemed a good example of someone 
putting prose poems in what one thinks of as key positions, e.g. 
the last poem in the book. It is true that using your definitions one could 
still spell it out and say something like "Transtromer obstinately pursues his 
goal using a mixture of verse and prose.." but for my taste this tends to 
suggest mixed sequences in which poems are "embedded" in prose, e.g. Menippean 
satire, La Vita Nuova, Narrow Road to the Deep North...



  

----------------------------------------------
This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net


From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Tue Sep 28 07:29:10 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 07:29:10 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <1e8.2aa999ea.2e8a316e@aol.com>
Message-ID: <004001c4a54e$63d852d0$63b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

I
      Only evaluatively.  Do you agree or disagree that we really need two definitions, one of poetry and one of good poetry?




    No, I think we need a definition of that explains the difference between verse and poetry.  The two terms are not mutually exclusive, to be sure, but neither are they identical.

    I think that the difference between poetry and good poetry is always going to be subjective, a matter of taste and personal practice.  One reader's meat, etc.  If you want a critic who always had a clear sense of what is bad and what is good, you could go back to Yvor Winters, I guess.  But his taste is not what I would call consistent, nor is it totally disinterested. 




  Yes, I think the taste issue is a different matter really.
  When one bothers to build a definition of a poem one
  is addressing the "whatness" of a successful or good poem.
  The definition will touch on those elements that tend 
  to add up to a poem, meaning something worthy of
  the word 'poem', in the general case. 

  You don't speak for me, James.  When I "bother to build a definition of a poem," I try to build a definition of a poem, not effuse on what things I like about texts some people call poetry.  This need of people to establish their tastes rather than objectively to say what a poem is seems to me the biggest obstacle toward defining poetry.

  We have a word for bad verse: doggerel. No word
  for bad free verse except that oft-used appellation 
  of "chopped prose". 

  Actually, exactly what doggerel means is contested.  I claim it means unmetrical texts with rhymes.  But the people who can't define without forcing their subjective taste into it want it to stand for "bad verse."  

  A word I've been hoping to find for years is one that stands for good poetry.  An opposite of "doggerel," as the latter is used by evaluators.  I"ve been using "highverse," with "verse understood as a synonym for "poetry," as it is for many people (and not for metrical text).  I would prefer a word without "verse" in it, and "high" also has connotations I don't like.

  A main problem with "poetry" as "good poetry" is that it leaves texts that have all the attributes of poetry by any standard but which do not succeed.  Okay, you might call them doggerel, but doggerel has always meant unserious poetry.  Also non-freeverse, as James notes.

  --Bob G.
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Tue Sep 28 07:32:29 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 07:32:29 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <BD7E4F6B.BA00%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <004c01c4a54e$d9c9a700$63b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

what poetry is

The whole emphasis on line/verse 
seems a little narrow to me,
because so many poets have used
'the field' of the page...have employed
a very discontinuous lines, indeed. Yes,
we read sequentially...but poets 
have attempted to disrupt this flow, 
to interrupt and to sidetrack the mind/eye, 
or, to say it another way, have splashed 
words and phrases across the white
space that lies bounded within the frame 
of the page.
Finnegan

Right.  Hence, my extension of lineation to include what I call the flow-break. 

--Bob 
---------------------

I'm mostly staying out of this latest "what is poetry" go-round.  But I wanted to say that I really do think Bob's term "flow-break" is a good one, useful and descriptive of a lot of practice for  the reasons Finnegan touches on above.  Although I am not very engaged by most "open field" poetry or by other primarily visual rather than aural devices, I think that they operate similarly to the linebreak.  They interrupt the flow of the utterance, introducing a counter-rhythm to the sentence rhythm, and so on.  

One of my favorite remarks about poetry is this passage from Wendell Berry, which I have probably quoted here before.  I like it, in part, because it speaks to the reason for poetic form.

"One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is to resist glibness--to slow language down and make it thoughtful.  This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language:  verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extralinguistic consideration; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing. "

      --Wendell Berry.  *Standing By Words*.       

Yes, this is exactly the kind of thinking behind my conception of the "flow-break."  Maybe even one of its sources.  Thanks for the backing, David.

--Bob






  ====================================================
  David Graham
  grahamd at ripon.edu
  Home Page:
  http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
  Poetry Library:
  http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
  ====================================================




------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Tue Sep 28 11:12:12 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 10:12:12 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] C.D. Wright/ MacArthur
Message-ID: <s1593909.064@mail.highland.edu>

I've just learned that C.D. Wright has been named a MacArthur Fellow for
2004. I'm tremendously happy for her; she tremendously deserves it!

An interview I did with C.D. is available at Jacket #15, along with
excerpts from Deep Step Come Shining, at 
http://www.jacketmagazine.com/15/cdwright-iv.html

There are also fantastic photographs here from her prison project with
Deborah Luster.

Kent


From Thom424 at aol.com  Tue Sep 28 11:24:16 2004
From: Thom424 at aol.com (Thom424 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:24:16 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] 2004 MacArthur Fellows
Message-ID: <1d2.2c7c7845.2e8adc20@aol.com>

Full Details:     http://www.macfound.org/programs/fel/winners_overview.htm
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From JforJames at aol.com  Tue Sep 28 12:21:29 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:21:29 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] C.D. Wright/ MacArthur
Message-ID: <105.5207fcc6.2e8ae989@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/28/2004 11:13:08 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
Kent.Johnson at highland.edu writes:
I've just learned that C.D. Wright has been named a MacArthur Fellow for
2004. I'm tremendously happy for her; she tremendously deserves it!

An interview I did with C.D. is available at Jacket #15, along with
excerpts from Deep Step Come Shining, at 
http://www.jacketmagazine.com/15/cdwright-iv.html

There are also fantastic photographs here from her prison project with
Deborah Luster.
Congrats to C.D. That's "cool beans"as my daughter 
likes to say. And a nice bunch of beans to count. 
Finnegan
Here are all of the past & fast company in 
Poetry:
Ammons, A. R.
Ashbery, John
Bierds, Linda
Brodsky, Joseph
Carson, Anne
Clampitt, Amy
Crase, Douglas
Feldman, Irving
Fulton, Alice
Graham, Jorie
Grossman, Allen
Gunn, James E.
Hass, Robert
Hine, Daryl
Hirsch, Edward
Hollander, John
Howard, Richard
Kenney, Richard
Kinnell, Galway
Lauterbach, Ann
Leithauser, Brad
McGrath, Campbell
Moss, Thylias
Perillo, Lucia
Powell, Jim
Ramanujan, A. K.
Rich, Adrienne
Simic, Charles
Strand, Mark
Swenson, May
Walcott, Derek
Warren, Robert Penn
Wilner, Eleanor
Wright, C.D.
Wright, Jay
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From Thom424 at aol.com  Tue Sep 28 13:46:27 2004
From: Thom424 at aol.com (Thom424 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 13:46:27 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] kooser & wright
Message-ID: <77E1A669.1AA00DD6.001A46F6@aol.com>

Something about the regional and accessibility that seems to be garnering awards this season.

"Despite [C.D. Wright's] frequent ?use of experimental structures, her mode of expression is clear and ?accessible, and her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in Arkansas, often engaging issues of social importance." ? 

--from the website of the MacArthur Foundation


"On making the appointment [to Poet Laureate], Billington said, 'Ted Kooser ?is a major poetic voice for rural and small town America and ?the first Poet Laureate chosen from the Great Plains. His verse ?reaches beyond his native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways.' " 

--Official Press Release of the Library of Congress



Thom Tammaro
Moorhead, MN 



From cstroffo at earthlink.net  Tue Sep 28 15:14:42 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:14:42 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] kooser & wright
Message-ID: <200409281755.i8SHtgxQ327116@pimout2-ext.prodigy.net>

I wonder if this is a new form of snobbism
     ---against those forced into nomadism due to economic reasons.

Chris

----------
>From: Thom424 at aol.com
>To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>Subject: [New-Poetry] kooser & wright
>Date: Tue, Sep 28, 2004, 9:46 AM
>

> Something about the regional and accessibility that seems to be garnering
> awards this season.
>
> "Despite [C.D. Wright's] frequent ?use of experimental structures, her mode
> of expression is clear and ?accessible, and her poetry is rooted in the
> landscape and people of her childhood in Arkansas, often engaging issues of
> social importance." ?
>
> --from the website of the MacArthur Foundation
>
>
> "On making the appointment [to Poet Laureate], Billington said, 'Ted Kooser
> ?is a major poetic voice for rural and small town America and ?the first
> Poet Laureate chosen from the Great Plains. His verse ?reaches beyond his
> native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways.' "
>
> --Official Press Release of the Library of Congress
>
>
>
> Thom Tammaro
> Moorhead, MN
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry



From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Tue Sep 28 14:19:58 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 13:19:58 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Wright/ Kooser
Message-ID: <s1596526.008@mail.highland.edu>

Chris Stroffolino surprisingly said:

>...maybe this is a new form of snobbery.

I trust there would be general agreement that Wright's conceptually
wild, formally idiosyncratic, and often edgily erotic poetry bears *very
little* in common with Kooser's. The MacArthur blurb for Wright from the
awards page is really quite silly...

Kent


From antrobin at clipper.net  Tue Sep 28 14:27:11 2004
From: antrobin at clipper.net (Anthony Robinson)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:27:11 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] Wright/ Kooser
In-Reply-To: <s1596526.008@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <043901c4a588$cbe00cd0$bd3e1c40@Emily>

>The MacArthur blurb for Wright from the
>awards page is really quite silly...

Post it, Kent?

t.






From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Tue Sep 28 14:15:32 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:15:32 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] What Are You Reading?
Message-ID: <20040928181532.30768.qmail@web52609.mail.yahoo.com>

We used to do this thing on a blues listserv I
subscribed to:  everyone posted what was in the CD
player right then, at the moment of the post.  I
figured it might be fun to do that here.

What's on my night stand right now?

David Impastato's *Upholding Mystery*
Philip Levine's *New and Selected Poems"
Scott Cairn's "Philokalia*
St. Augustine's *Confessions*
B.H. Fairchild's "Early Occult Memory Systems of the
Lower Midwest*
Truman Capote's *In Cold Blood*
Dave Mason's *Arrivals*
Robert Ludlum's *The Bourne Identity*

Probably more, but I can't remember.  It's a big
stack, and I'm at work.

What about you all?

jln

=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Tue Sep 28 14:36:36 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 13:36:36 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Wright/ Kooser
Message-ID: <s1596902.026@mail.highland.edu>

Tony,

The award blurb was posted on the list earlier. It reads in part,
"Despite [C.D. Wright's] frequent  use of experimental structures, her
mode of expression is clear and  accessible..."

She won the MacArthur in spite of herself, apparently!

Kent

>>> "Anthony Robinson" <antrobin at clipper.net> 09/28/04 11:44AM >>>
Kent,

Thanks man. And thanks again.
The MacArthur gives you a whole shit-ton of money, don't it?  Sweet!

I haven't heard from Bill in a while.  I need to check in.  When I do,
I'll get back to you.

Best,
Tony


-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Johnson [mailto:Kent.Johnson at highland.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 8:01 AM
To: antrobin at clipper.net 
Subject: interview

Hey dude,

Great interview.

And the picture is your best.

Just heard that C.D. Wright won the MacArthur. Yippee.

How's Bill holding up in hurricane country?

Kent



From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Tue Sep 28 15:03:26 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 15:03:26 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] kooser & wright
Message-ID: <158.408ff92d.2e8b0f7e@cs.com>

Go, C. D.!  Go Hogs!
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Tue Sep 28 15:13:28 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 15:13:28 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
In-Reply-To: <006b01c4a4e0$7df58b10$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>
Message-ID: <41597F98.24238.6AE982@localhost>

On 27 Sep 2004 at 18:22, The Old Mole wrote:
> The first part isn't evaluative. It simply says that art is anything
> you put a frame around. If you separate it out from the rest of the
> existence by a frame of any kind and call it art, then your doing that
> makes it art.

Which is silly in the extreme. 

The difference between art and what?s natural is something to do with 
borders, to be sure: what?s natural has no borders, it goes on and 
on. Art has a border around it. The artist, the poet creates a 
border, and presents what?s inside the border as a poem, as art.

Merely framing the natural, though, is not enough. The framer must 
intend to make art in order to claim to be an artist, in order to 
claim to make art -- and that intent has to come across to the 
audience within the work, not merely because of the possible claim to 
art that a frame can, but does not necessarily all by itself, make.

Art requires that a good deal more self-knowledge and intellectual 
honesty comes across through the work than a mere frame can provide. 
Art is not merely overcoming technical difficulties, or finding a way 
around them, or art would be merely technique. Art is a complicated 
complex of intention and reception of that intention coming across 
from artist to audience through a made thing. Some three-dimensional 
objects are art; some are not. Some painted surfaces are art; some 
are not. Some collections of words are art; some are not. Some 
movements through space are art; some are not.

Why do we not call, for example, basketball "art" but we do call 
ballet "art"? What distinguishes sport from art?

Why do we not call, for example, a bridge "art" but we do call a 
mobile "art"? What distinguishes engineering or manufacturing, if 
anything does, from art?

Can basketball or bridge-building rise to the level of art from time 
to time? Is art not where you start but where you end up?

Marcus


> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Bob Grumman" <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>
> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views" 
> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 5:27 PM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
> 
> 
> >
> >
> >> Hope this isn't a duplicate - I sent a similar thought from the
> >> wrong address. I'm completely with Bob on this one. I think any
> >> definition of poetry that also tries to be a definition of good
> >> poetry is doomed to failure.
> >>
> >> If you chop a text up into lines, you're calling attention to it as
> >> a text which is to be read in some other way than clause by clause,
> >> sentence by sentence - in other words, you're saying "read this as
> >> a poem."
> >>
> >> And at that point, it is a poem, and the reader who approaches it
> >> is entering into an implicit contract to read it as a poem, judge
> >> it as a poem, like it or hate it as a poem.
> >>
> >> I don't know that this is a satisfactory definition. I'd like to
> >> add something like Annie Finch's "structured by the conspicuous
> >> repetition of any language-element," which still doesn't confuse a
> >> definition of poetry with a definition of good poetry.
> >
> > The problem with that is that there are many texts, lineated or
> > containing other forms of flow-breaks, that everyone agrees are
> > poems, except the extreme formalists.  High oratory has a lot of
> > repetitition, too.  I don't see why anything would have to be added
> > to lineation (except the burstnorm forms of lineation I call
> > flow-breaks).
> >
> >> But the minute you put any qualitative aesthetic judgment into it,
> >> then you're opening the door to allowing what Olympic gymnasts do
> >> to be described as "pure poetry." It's not good because it's
> >> poetry, and it's not poetry because it's good.
> >>
> >> My favorite definition of art remains Calvino's -
> >>
> >> "Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is
> >> fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the
> >> picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist,
> >> isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls- and
> >> somehow stands for - everything that remains out of the picture. I
> >> might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in
> >> which each individual experience acquires prominence through its
> >> detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a glint of
> >> that unlimited vastness."
> >
> > But this is entirely evaluative.  But thanks for agreeing to my main
> > point above, Mole.
> >
> > --Bob
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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 anny.ballardini at tin.it  Tue Sep 28 18:00:08 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 00:00:08 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] aurora
Message-ID: <00a901c4a5a6$84e6d110$418e3052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

I will never see an aurora in my life, because of my bad habit to sleep at that time, but there are some interesting pictures here for those who are like me,

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/apod/apod_search?aurora

Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com 
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky

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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Tue Sep 28 18:40:52 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 18:40:52 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] kooser & wright
References: <77E1A669.1AA00DD6.001A46F6@aol.com>
Message-ID: <005401c4a5ac$3a554040$a8b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

> Something about the regional and accessibility that seems to be garnering 
> awards this season.

Yeah, what an amazing turn-around!

--Bob G. 




From cstroffo at earthlink.net  Tue Sep 28 20:56:56 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 16:56:56 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] Wright/ Kooser
Message-ID: <200409282337.i8SNbuxQ143682@pimout2-ext.prodigy.net>

ah kent---

it was not cd's poetry i was referring to
it was the language of "regionalism"
used to "justify" the choices....

surprise surprise

----------
>From: "Kent Johnson" <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu>
>To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>Subject: [New-Poetry] Wright/ Kooser
>Date: Tue, Sep 28, 2004, 10:19 AM
>

> Chris Stroffolino surprisingly said:
>
>>...maybe this is a new form of snobbery.
>
> I trust there would be general agreement that Wright's conceptually
> wild, formally idiosyncratic, and often edgily erotic poetry bears *very
> little* in common with Kooser's. The MacArthur blurb for Wright from the
> awards page is really quite silly...
>
> Kent
> _______________________________________________
> 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 Sep 28 22:20:01 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 22:20:01 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] kooser & wright
Message-ID: <bf.4666cb87.2e8b75d1@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/28/2004 5:41:42 PM Central Daylight Time, 
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes: 
> 
> X-INFO: INVALID TO LINE
> >Something about the regional and accessibility that seems to be garnering 
> >awards this season.
> 
> Yeah, what an amazing turn-around!
> 
> --Bob G. 

Wright is rather experimental in technique but does use a lot of regional 
subject matter.  I'd hardly call the poems of hers I've read "accessible" in the 
way that Kooser's are.
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Tue Sep 28 22:39:23 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:39:23 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: What Are You Reading?
In-Reply-To: <20040928181532.30768.qmail@web52609.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <BD7F8A8B.BAD7%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Mine's a big stack, too, and I tend to flit around a lot.

Here's what's on top at the moment:  for the past few days I've been
revisiting Rexroth's *100 Poems from the Chinese*, one of my real
desert-island books.  I cherish my 30 year old paperback.

For some reason every fall I get the urge to read Tu Fu, Su Tung-Po, Lu Yu,
and the rest.  Something about the wild goose climbing into the void, I
suppose.


on 9/28/04 1:15 PM, Jeff Newberry at jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com wrote:

> We used to do this thing on a blues listserv I
> subscribed to:  everyone posted what was in the CD
> player right then, at the moment of the post.  I
> figured it might be fun to do that here.
> 
> What's on my night stand right now?
> 

> 
> jln
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From grahamd at ripon.edu  Tue Sep 28 22:42:12 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:42:12 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Tu Fu
Message-ID: <BD7F8B34.BADA%grahamd@ripon.edu>

TO WEI PA, A RETIRED SCHOLAR

The lives of many men are
Shorter than the years since we have
Seen each other. Aldebaran
And Antares move as we have.
And now, what night is this? We sit
Here together in the candle
Light. How much longer will our prime
Last? Our temples are already
Grey. I visit my old friends.
Half of them have become ghosts.
Fear and sorrow choke me and burn
My bowels. I never dreamed I would
Come this way, after twenty years,
A wayfarer to your parlor.
When we parted years ago,
You were unmarried. Now you have
A row of boys and girls, who smile
And ask me about my travels.
How have I reached this time and place?
Before I can come to the end
Of and endless tale, the children
Have brought out the wine. We go
Out in the night and cut young
Onions in the rainy darkness.
We eat them with hot, steaming,
Yellow millet. You say, "It is
Sad, meeting each other again."
We drink ten toasts rapidly from
The rhinoceros horn cups.
Ten cups, and still we are not drunk.
We still love each other as
We did when we were schoolboys.
Tomorrow morning mountain peaks
Will come between us, and with them
The endless, oblivious
Business of the world.


---Tu Fu, trans. Kenneth Rexroth.  *100 Poems from the Chinese*.  New
Directions.


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================




From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Tue Sep 28 22:52:10 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 22:52:10 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: What Are You Reading?
Message-ID: <1c0.1f24994a.2e8b7d5a@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/28/2004 9:39:16 PM Central Daylight Time, 
grahamd at ripon.edu writes: 
> 
> Mine's a big stack, too, and I tend to flit around a lot.
> 
> Here's what's on top at the moment:  for the past few days I've been
> revisiting Rexroth's *100 Poems from the Chinese*, one of my real
> desert-island books.  I cherish my 30 year old paperback.
> 
> For some reason every fall I get the urge to read Tu Fu, Su Tung-Po, Lu Yu,
> and the rest.  Something about the wild goose climbing into the void, I
> suppose.
> 
Just reviewed new books by:
Ted Kooser
Catherine Tufariello
Deborah Warren
Beth Ann Fennelly
Joseph Harrison
William Wenthe
Meg Schoerke

6 out of 7 were great.
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From halvard at earthlink.net  Tue Sep 28 23:05:58 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 23:05:58 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hamilton Stone Review, Issue 4, Fall 2004, Now Online
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEGEHHIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


Hamilton Stone Review, Issue 4, Fall 2004, Now Online!

This time--an all-fiction issue featuring Meredith Sue Willis,
Lynda Schor, Carole Rosenthal, Edith Konecky, Rebecca
Kavaler, and Halvard Johnson.

        http://www.hamiltonstone.org/hsr4.html

                  Submissions to the Hamilton Stone Review

At this time, the Hamilton Stone Review is not open to unsolicited
fiction submissions, but will be taking unsolicited poetry submissions
until December, 15, 2004, for Issue #5, which will be out in February 
2005. Poetry submissions should go directly to Halvard Johnson at 
halvard at earthlink.net or halvard at gmail.com.



From acgold01 at louisville.edu  Wed Sep 29 00:12:20 2004
From: acgold01 at louisville.edu (Alan C Golding)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 00:12:20 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
Message-ID: <s159fdfa.036@gwise.louisville.edu>

To echo Kent, yes, the idea that Wright is somehow "clear and
accessible" in the same way as Kooser is really quite bizarre.  But to
the point . . . on the nightstand sits

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
Rae Armantrout, Up to Speed
Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema
Dee Morris, How to Live / What To Do:  HD's Cultural Poetics
Jewish Fairy Tales
Borges, Labyrinths
Fanny Howe, Tis of Thee
Lohren Green, Poetical Dictionary
The Poker, # 3, ed. Daniel Bouchard
Heather Thomas, Resurrection Papers
Karen Mac Cormack, Implexures
Rodrigo Toscano, Platform
Hank Lazer, Deathwatch for my Father
Peter Gizzi, Some Values of Landscape and Weather

Also Rhyming and Stealing: A History of the Beastie Boys, which I
decided I didn't want my 6th. grader to read after all because of the
"bad words" and some of the apparently virulent attitudes ("apparently"
because he doesn't do irony full out yet--he's stuck at sarcasm).

This is a fun game that I've seen played on other po-lists.  Thanks for
starting it up, Jeff.

BTW, on the CD player is a Ten Years After anthology, Miles Davis, the
video of Hello, Dolly, the live half of Cream's Wheels of Fire, and
Debbie Friedman.  Go figure.

Alan 



From jsafdie at comcast.net  Wed Sep 29 00:33:41 2004
From: jsafdie at comcast.net (Joe Safdie)
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:33:41 -0700
Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
References: <s159fdfa.036@gwise.louisville.edu>
Message-ID: <017701c4a5dd$7f5e2bd0$56001118@D6T95L21>

Boy, Alan . . . Ten Years After . . . thanks for that. Haven't heard that 
particular term (or thought of that group) in many more than ten years . . . 
but to leap to the assignment, gladly, since it presupposes that the 
definition thread might finally be over, I'll quote one of the books on my 
nightstand, Charles Olson's *Collected Prose* . . .

    It's as though you were hearing it for the first time--who knows what a 
poem ought to sound like?   until it's that?   And how do you get it that 
except as you do--you, and nobody else (who's a poet?
    What's,
a poem?
    It ain't dreamt until it walks.   It talks.   It spreads its green 
barrazza

Exactly right. Anyway, the other books on my three-shelved nightstand are:

*A Natural History of the Senses* (Diane Ackerman)
*Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life* (Karl Kerenyi)
*Empire* (Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri)
*Nightmare in Pink* (John D. MacDonald)
*The Iliad* (Homer, translated by Robert Fagles)
*The Medium is the Massage* (Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore)

Kent, Chris -- are you gonna play this game?


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alan C Golding" <acgold01 at louisville.edu>
To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 9:12 PM
Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand


> BTW, on the CD player is a Ten Years After anthology, Miles Davis, the
> video of Hello, Dolly, the live half of Cream's Wheels of Fire, and
> Debbie Friedman.  Go figure.
>
> Alan



From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Wed Sep 29 06:55:43 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 06:55:43 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] kooser & wright
References: <bf.4666cb87.2e8b75d1@cs.com>
Message-ID: <005701c4a612$e1955960$9fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

>Something about the regional and accessibility that seems to be garnering 
>awards this season.

Yeah, what an amazing turn-around!

--Bob G. 


  Wright is rather experimental in technique but does use a lot of regional subject matter.  I'd hardly call the poems of hers I've read "accessible" in the way that Kooser's are. 
  But, surely, they aren't doing anything that non-mainstream, by most people's standards?  Even as Jorie Graham and John Ashbery are alleged to.  I think I like her poetry but still am not sure what Wright she is, though I knew for a while a few months ago.

  --Bob G.


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From clitophon at yahoo.com  Wed Sep 29 08:03:26 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 05:03:26 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <4157EAF9.8878.B15CA9@localhost>
Message-ID: <20040929120326.36282.qmail@web40407.mail.yahoo.com>

science itself is merely a metaphor for successful
magic
cars, cookers, vacuums, rockets are all magical
our ancestors believed in magic but much of it was
unsuccessful magic.
only successful magic survives and is then called
science.
it is up to the rulers of a country to subvert and
seize the successful magic and then pass some of it
along to their underlings, at a grossly distorted
price.  What they can't get by payment they achieve by
force.  If the people get hold of revolutionary
science then there will be a revolution and the old
order is booted out.  That is why the Russian
Revolution was a sham.  It was a temporary hiccup
because a majority of the people hadn't attained any
new, successful magic and therefore a new force of
exploiters wormed their way into power and behaved
worse than the Tsar and his minions.

--- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:

> On 27 Sep 2004 at 4:28, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > I think that you are repeating the classic fallacy
> of Western
> > Liberals, that the West is the Best and the others
> fell outside the
> > path of Enlightenment. Enlightenment is not
> intrinsically a
> > European thing nor, if one looks at European or
> more specifically
> > Western European history, did the European ruling
> classes or even
> > the philosophes, initiate it and this is the heart
> of the paradox. 
> > Enlightenment originated among non-Europeans,
> specifically the
> > Medieval Arabs of Spain,<
> 
> It has nothing to do with the West; it has to do
> with a particular 
> sort of intellectual integrity which is commonly
> called the 
> scientific method. Any human can use the scientific
> method, and where 
> it first arose, or who first used it best, or most
> often, or 
> whatever, is of considerably less moment than
> whether it is used and 
> used properly.
> 
> In human history there have been all sorts of looney
> ideas, but the 
> most common of them may be fairly called examples of
> "sympathetic 
> magic", for example, sticking pins in dolls to try
> to hurt other 
> people, or dancing and shouting to scare demons out
> of sick peoples? 
> bodies. The notion of testing to see if the idea
> worked, and if it 
> didn?t work, to try something else, seemed more
> honored in the breach 
> than in the observance, if it was thought of at all.
> 
> But gradually, through a concatenation of
> circumstances the origins 
> of which are really irrelevant, since it is the
> results of the thing 
> that are important, enough people accepted the idea
> that observing 
> the world, making hypotheses about it, controlling
> for variables, and 
> then testing those hypotheses, and modifying those
> hypotheses and 
> testing again that it became a practice generally
> accepted as worth 
> the time and materials that went into it.
> 
> Even today, most people in what purports to be our
> scientific society 
> believe an enormous number of things that science
> holds to be 
> nonsense. It?s hard to believe how much junk belief
> there is out 
> there, and how much of it is based on junk science,
> and why.
> 
> Why is easy: it?s difficult and expensive to do good
> science, to 
> hypothesize, control for variables, and design tests
> that test for 
> the thing one is testing for.  But junk science is
> easy: it?s almost 
> as easy as sympathetic magic -- in fact, some of it
> is no better. 
> 
> After World War II, the enormous amounts of cargo,
> clothing, food, 
> weapons, tents, radios, and the like, that were
> air-dropped or air-
> lifted into New Guinea and the Melanesian islands
> during the US 
> Pacific campaign against Japan created a vast
> lifestyle change for 
> the islanders. But when the war moved on, and
> ultimately when it 
> ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new cargo
> arrived. 
> Naturally, the islanders made attempts to get cargo
> to fall by 
> parachute or land in planes or ships again,
> islanders did same things 
> they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen do.
> They didn?t have 
> radios, of course, so they carved headphones from
> wood, and wore them 
> while sitting in control towers they built. They
> waved the landing 
> signals while standing on the runways. They lit
> signal fires and 
> torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The
> islanders had 
> concluded that the foreigners had some special
> connection to the 
> powers that be, and by mimicking the foreigners,
> they hoped to 
> achieve the same effect.
> 
> They were doing everything right, of course, except
> for one thing: 
> they were pursuing the form without the substance,
> like writers who 
> think that by employing meter, or by avoiding meter,
> they are writing 
> poetry. 
> 
> What were they missing?  They were missing the
> essence, the guts of 
> the thing: they had the earphones and the antennae,
> but they weren?t 
> hooked up to a radio. The notion of a radio was only
> distantly 
> emulated in the notion of prayer to the ancestors --
> but before the 
> foreigners came, prayers to the ancestors weren?t
> answered with a 
> wealth of cargo from the sky. 
> 
> What they were missing was the scientific method --
> they didn't have 
> it, and they weren't taught it. And since, as Arthur
> C. Clarke 
> famously said, "any sufficiently advanced technology
> is 
> indistinguishable from magic", they thought it was
> the same old 
> magic. They couldn't understand why it didn't work
> for them, though, 
> and they finally, to their credit, gave it up.
> 
> The difference between magic and science is that
> science demands that 
> you should report everything about your test of your
> hypothesis that 
> you think might make it wrong -- not only what you
> think is right 
> about it. You must search for, and present as part
> of your 
> conclusions, other causes that could possibly
> explain your results, 
> including the things you thought that you've
> eliminated by controls, 
> or by some other experiment, and how they worked --
> to make sure 
> people who are following your work can tell that
> variables have been 
> eliminated, or at least controlled or accounted for.
> 
> You have to go into the details that could cast
> doubt upon your 
> conclusions. It?s of the essence, it?s the guts of
> the thing, that 
> you do the best you can to explain why things didn?t
> turn out the way 
> you thought they would, if they didn?t -- even if
> the variance is 
> pretty small. Not only that, but when you
> hypothesize, it?s not 
> enough to hypothesize within a small ambit; you have
> not only to 
> explain how your hypothesis and test explains one
> thing, you have to 
> show how it fits in with other larger hypotheses,
> and how it throws 
> some light on how those things work, too.
> 
> The notion of science is to make sure that everyone
> who may look at 
> your work has every chance to judge your work fairly
> and justly -- 
> that they have no doubt that your work is designed
> to investigate 
> what really happens, and not merely argue
> self-interestedly for a 
> particular result.
> 
> Contrast this idea with salesmanship. There?s a
> famous example of a 
> salmon-canner who was canning perfectly good salmon,
> but the flesh of 
> that fish was white instead of the traditional pink.
> Consumers were 
> not buying it in droves, because they expected
> canned salmon to be 
> pink. So the white-salmon canner changed the label
> on his can to 
> include the phrase "Guaranteed not to turn pink in
> the can", and pink 
> salmon turned into a drug on the market. The
> pink-salmon canners 
> sued. The white-salmon canner claimed he was telling
> the truth -- and 
> 
=== message truncated ===



		
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Wed Sep 29 08:03:35 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 08:03:35 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
References: <s159fdfa.036@gwise.louisville.edu>
Message-ID: <00ad01c4a61c$5cf45cb0$9fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

> To echo Kent, yes, the idea that Wright is somehow "clear and
> accessible" in the same way as Kooser is really quite bizarre.

To me, it would be like saying Monet is clear and accessible in the same way 
Rembrandt is when your continuum of reference has Pollock at one end.  I'm 
fairly sure that the person being quoted has no equivalent of Pollock to go 
bym however.

--Bob 




From marcus at designerglass.com  Wed Sep 29 08:41:04 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 08:41:04 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <20040929120326.36282.qmail@web40407.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <4157EAF9.8878.B15CA9@localhost>
Message-ID: <415A7520.30957.626707@localhost>

On 29 Sep 2004 at 5:03, Paul Murphy wrote:
> science itself is merely a metaphor for successful magic. cars, 
> cookers, vacuums, rockets are all magical our ancestors believed in 
> magic but much of it was unsuccessful magic. only successful magic 
> survives and is then called science. it is up to the rulers of a 
> country to subvert and seize the successful magic and then pass
> some  of it along to their underlings, at a grossly distorted
> price. What they can't get by payment they achieve by force. If
> the people get hold of revolutionary science then there will be
> a revolution and the old order is booted out....<<

Magic is a metaphor for unsuccessful science: "the people", "the 
rulers", "grossly distorted price", "old order" are all unsuccessful-
magic, pseudo-science incantations. What you elide above by "subvert 
and seize" is the essence of the thing. New ideas and techniques are 
almost universally feared and rejected, not subverted and seized, 
especially by the conservatives who tend to be in positions to be 
able to subvert or seize. The notions you've presented are simply 
wrong where they're not merely incantatory instead of analytical.

Marcus


 
> --- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 27 Sep 2004 at 4:28, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > > I think that you are repeating the classic fallacy
> > of Western
> > > Liberals, that the West is the Best and the others
> > fell outside the
> > > path of Enlightenment. Enlightenment is not
> > intrinsically a
> > > European thing nor, if one looks at European or
> > more specifically
> > > Western European history, did the European ruling
> > classes or even
> > > the philosophes, initiate it and this is the heart
> > of the paradox. 
> > > Enlightenment originated among non-Europeans,
> > specifically the
> > > Medieval Arabs of Spain,<
> > 
> > It has nothing to do with the West; it has to do
> > with a particular 
> > sort of intellectual integrity which is commonly
> > called the 
> > scientific method. Any human can use the scientific
> > method, and where 
> > it first arose, or who first used it best, or most
> > often, or 
> > whatever, is of considerably less moment than
> > whether it is used and 
> > used properly.
> > 
> > In human history there have been all sorts of looney
> > ideas, but the 
> > most common of them may be fairly called examples of
> > "sympathetic 
> > magic", for example, sticking pins in dolls to try
> > to hurt other 
> > people, or dancing and shouting to scare demons out
> > of sick peoples? 
> > bodies. The notion of testing to see if the idea
> > worked, and if it 
> > didn?t work, to try something else, seemed more
> > honored in the breach 
> > than in the observance, if it was thought of at all.
> > 
> > But gradually, through a concatenation of
> > circumstances the origins 
> > of which are really irrelevant, since it is the
> > results of the thing 
> > that are important, enough people accepted the idea
> > that observing 
> > the world, making hypotheses about it, controlling
> > for variables, and 
> > then testing those hypotheses, and modifying those
> > hypotheses and 
> > testing again that it became a practice generally
> > accepted as worth 
> > the time and materials that went into it.
> > 
> > Even today, most people in what purports to be our
> > scientific society 
> > believe an enormous number of things that science
> > holds to be 
> > nonsense. It?s hard to believe how much junk belief
> > there is out 
> > there, and how much of it is based on junk science,
> > and why.
> > 
> > Why is easy: it?s difficult and expensive to do good
> > science, to 
> > hypothesize, control for variables, and design tests
> > that test for 
> > the thing one is testing for.  But junk science is
> > easy: it?s almost 
> > as easy as sympathetic magic -- in fact, some of it
> > is no better. 
> > 
> > After World War II, the enormous amounts of cargo,
> > clothing, food, 
> > weapons, tents, radios, and the like, that were
> > air-dropped or air-
> > lifted into New Guinea and the Melanesian islands
> > during the US 
> > Pacific campaign against Japan created a vast
> > lifestyle change for 
> > the islanders. But when the war moved on, and
> > ultimately when it 
> > ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new cargo
> > arrived. 
> > Naturally, the islanders made attempts to get cargo
> > to fall by 
> > parachute or land in planes or ships again,
> > islanders did same things 
> > they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen do.
> > They didn?t have 
> > radios, of course, so they carved headphones from
> > wood, and wore them 
> > while sitting in control towers they built. They
> > waved the landing 
> > signals while standing on the runways. They lit
> > signal fires and 
> > torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The
> > islanders had 
> > concluded that the foreigners had some special
> > connection to the 
> > powers that be, and by mimicking the foreigners,
> > they hoped to 
> > achieve the same effect.
> > 
> > They were doing everything right, of course, except
> > for one thing: 
> > they were pursuing the form without the substance,
> > like writers who 
> > think that by employing meter, or by avoiding meter,
> > they are writing 
> > poetry. 
> > 
> > What were they missing?  They were missing the
> > essence, the guts of 
> > the thing: they had the earphones and the antennae,
> > but they weren?t 
> > hooked up to a radio. The notion of a radio was only
> > distantly 
> > emulated in the notion of prayer to the ancestors --
> > but before the 
> > foreigners came, prayers to the ancestors weren?t
> > answered with a 
> > wealth of cargo from the sky. 
> > 
> > What they were missing was the scientific method --
> > they didn't have 
> > it, and they weren't taught it. And since, as Arthur
> > C. Clarke 
> > famously said, "any sufficiently advanced technology
> > is 
> > indistinguishable from magic", they thought it was
> > the same old 
> > magic. They couldn't understand why it didn't work
> > for them, though, 
> > and they finally, to their credit, gave it up.
> > 
> > The difference between magic and science is that
> > science demands that 
> > you should report everything about your test of your
> > hypothesis that 
> > you think might make it wrong -- not only what you
> > think is right 
> > about it. You must search for, and present as part
> > of your 
> > conclusions, other causes that could possibly
> > explain your results, 
> > including the things you thought that you've
> > eliminated by controls, 
> > or by some other experiment, and how they worked --
> > to make sure 
> > people who are following your work can tell that
> > variables have been 
> > eliminated, or at least controlled or accounted for.
> > 
> > You have to go into the details that could cast
> > doubt upon your 
> > conclusions. It?s of the essence, it?s the guts of
> > the thing, that 
> > you do the best you can to explain why things didn?t
> > turn out the way 
> > you thought they would, if they didn?t -- even if
> > the variance is 
> > pretty small. Not only that, but when you
> > hypothesize, it?s not 
> > enough to hypothesize within a small ambit; you have
> > not only to 
> > explain how your hypothesis and test explains one
> > thing, you have to 
> > show how it fits in with other larger hypotheses,
> > and how it throws 
> > some light on how those things work, too.
> > 
> > The notion of science is to make sure that everyone
> > who may look at 
> > your work has every chance to judge your work fairly
> > and justly -- 
> > that they have no doubt that your work is designed
> > to investigate 
> > what really happens, and not merely argue
> > self-interestedly for a 
> > particular result.
> > 
> > Contrast this idea with salesmanship. There?s a
> > famous example of a 
> > salmon-canner who was canning perfectly good salmon,
> > but the flesh of 
> > that fish was white instead of the traditional pink.
> > Consumers were 
> > not buying it in droves, because they expected
> > canned salmon to be 
> > pink. So the white-salmon canner changed the label
> > on his can to 
> > include the phrase "Guaranteed not to turn pink in
> > the can", and pink 
> > salmon turned into a drug on the market. The
> > pink-salmon canners 
> > sued. The white-salmon canner claimed he was telling
> > the truth -- and 
> > 
> === message truncated ===
> 
> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Wed Sep 29 08:45:45 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 08:45:45 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: What Are You Reading?
References: <BD7F8A8B.BAD7%grahamd@ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <00bb01c4a622$41ca4390$9fb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

It strikes me that I don't really read books, anymore.  Don't watch tv, either, except for a football game every once in a while, or some other sporting event.

Right, now, though, am seriously reading KC Stead's Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement.  Interesting in many ways, one of which is how closely what Pound and Eliot during the Wasteland years thought they were up to and what they were saying has been and is being repeated by my crowd--to the echoes of the rejoinders of the same traditionalists.

Reading what Stead says about their aims is what got me thinking about "envirative."  I more and more think that one of the big differences in kinds of poetry in that between the envirative and the narrative--which I think the English Romantics got most decisively begun.

I'm reading several other books in a manner of speaking.  I say that because I read twenty or thirty pages of lots of books but never get any further, so don't really think I can properly say I've been reading them.  Two I expect to finish are The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, by Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman and The Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Marc Smith, an anthology of slam, hip hop and related poetry and essays about them.  The accessible otherstream as scorned by MacYorkers as my kind of otherstream poetry is.

My normal reading is best-selling thriller/detective novels but I'm not reading any just now.  I only read two or three a year.  I don't read that many poetry or poetry-related books; my kind of poets publish mainly on the Internet now, or in the micro-press.  I review collections, though, and recently did one for American Book Review (albeit it hasn't been formally accepted yet) that beings:
I'm not big on the Wesleyan University Press, which tends to favor poets who have been published in such venues as The New Yorker and The Kenyon Review--who are, that is, fifty or more years behind the times. Its edition of Andrew Zawacki's Anabranch is also blurbed by John Ashbery and C. D. Wright on its back cover, and contains poems given awards by the Poetry Society of America.

Yep, my standard boilerplate.  But I went on the praise the collection fairly lavishly.  I immediately liked fragments of his poems but thought them insufficiently unified.  After a few re-readings, though, I found them much more coherent in totum than I had.

Note that CD Wright came up--as a representative of the Poetry Establishment.

Say, now that I've made this post irredeemably scattered, a question.  Anyone know a word that means informally knowledgeable the way I feel "erudite" means formally knowledgeable (more or less)?  I consider myself the first but not the second.

--Bob


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From mandolin at mac.com  Wed Sep 29 09:51:39 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 09:51:39 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <20040929120326.36282.qmail@web40407.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040929120326.36282.qmail@web40407.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <8333741.1096465899758.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>

 
On Wednesday, September 29, 2004, at 08:03AM, Paul Murphy <clitophon at yahoo.com> wrote:

>science itself is merely a metaphor for successful
>magic
>cars, cookers, vacuums, rockets are all magical
>our ancestors believed in magic but much of it was
>unsuccessful magic.
>only successful magic survives and is then called
>science.


Except in the limited sense of having deluded someone (possibly the practitioner) as to its efficacy, there is no such thing as successful magic. 

Magic and science have nothing to do with one another but the historical accident of some early scientists having also been alchmemists or the like. Science is an astonishingly successful method for enlarging our knowledge of the world; magic is an utterly ineffective method for manipulating the world.

-----
Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the Sonnetarium


From clitophon at yahoo.com  Wed Sep 29 10:17:23 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 07:17:23 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <8333741.1096465899758.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
Message-ID: <20040929141723.7177.qmail@web40404.mail.yahoo.com>

I agree but the origins of science are the same as
magic, ie unknown and unknowable
who can know the mind of Newton or Einstein, who can
say where they gained their inspiration from?
God?  creative reflection? LSD?
--- Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:

>  
> On Wednesday, September 29, 2004, at 08:03AM, Paul
> Murphy <clitophon at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> >science itself is merely a metaphor for successful
> >magic
> >cars, cookers, vacuums, rockets are all magical
> >our ancestors believed in magic but much of it was
> >unsuccessful magic.
> >only successful magic survives and is then called
> >science.
> 
> 
> Except in the limited sense of having deluded
> someone (possibly the practitioner) as to its
> efficacy, there is no such thing as successful
> magic. 
> 
> Magic and science have nothing to do with one
> another but the historical accident of some early
> scientists having also been alchmemists or the like.
> Science is an astonishingly successful method for
> enlarging our knowledge of the world; magic is an
> utterly ineffective method for manipulating the
> world.
> 
> -----
> Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
> http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the
> Sonnetarium
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



		
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From clitophon at yahoo.com  Wed Sep 29 10:25:04 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 07:25:04 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <415A7520.30957.626707@localhost>
Message-ID: <20040929142504.2012.qmail@web40409.mail.yahoo.com>

if its simply wrong why have you bothered to comment
on it at all?  Of course its simply wrong, it is only
a comment for you to refute.  But the source of
science, what is it?  Why don't we all just go out and
kill each other and make the human race extinct?  Why
is their not constant genocide?  Why do men love one
another and create and not kill each other and
engender utter nihilism as right-wingers and other
reactionaries say that we do?  Why do we have
capitalism - a failed system based on notions of genes
and heredity and not a society built on principles of
love, co-operation and constant creativity?  Why do we
have war, which is futile and why do we in this
'civilised' country, promote war and enact it?  (well
I don't but people like Blair and Bush, 2 failed
magicians do)  If science isn't magic, then warfare is
which is the opposite of science although it does
utilise science in everyway possible.  Although it
takes utter brainlessness to kill how then can a
brainless thug utilise advanced science to kill? 
Surely there is a contradiction in there somewhere?   

thanks for your comments
--- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:

> On 29 Sep 2004 at 5:03, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > science itself is merely a metaphor for successful
> magic. cars, 
> > cookers, vacuums, rockets are all magical our
> ancestors believed in 
> > magic but much of it was unsuccessful magic. only
> successful magic 
> > survives and is then called science. it is up to
> the rulers of a 
> > country to subvert and seize the successful magic
> and then pass
> > some  of it along to their underlings, at a
> grossly distorted
> > price. What they can't get by payment they achieve
> by force. If
> > the people get hold of revolutionary science then
> there will be
> > a revolution and the old order is booted out....<<
> 
> Magic is a metaphor for unsuccessful science: "the
> people", "the 
> rulers", "grossly distorted price", "old order" are
> all unsuccessful-
> magic, pseudo-science incantations. What you elide
> above by "subvert 
> and seize" is the essence of the thing. New ideas
> and techniques are 
> almost universally feared and rejected, not
> subverted and seized, 
> especially by the conservatives who tend to be in
> positions to be 
> able to subvert or seize. The notions you've
> presented are simply 
> wrong where they're not merely incantatory instead
> of analytical.
> 
> Marcus
> 
> 
>  
> > --- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > On 27 Sep 2004 at 4:28, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > > > I think that you are repeating the classic
> fallacy
> > > of Western
> > > > Liberals, that the West is the Best and the
> others
> > > fell outside the
> > > > path of Enlightenment. Enlightenment is not
> > > intrinsically a
> > > > European thing nor, if one looks at European
> or
> > > more specifically
> > > > Western European history, did the European
> ruling
> > > classes or even
> > > > the philosophes, initiate it and this is the
> heart
> > > of the paradox. 
> > > > Enlightenment originated among non-Europeans,
> > > specifically the
> > > > Medieval Arabs of Spain,<
> > > 
> > > It has nothing to do with the West; it has to do
> > > with a particular 
> > > sort of intellectual integrity which is commonly
> > > called the 
> > > scientific method. Any human can use the
> scientific
> > > method, and where 
> > > it first arose, or who first used it best, or
> most
> > > often, or 
> > > whatever, is of considerably less moment than
> > > whether it is used and 
> > > used properly.
> > > 
> > > In human history there have been all sorts of
> looney
> > > ideas, but the 
> > > most common of them may be fairly called
> examples of
> > > "sympathetic 
> > > magic", for example, sticking pins in dolls to
> try
> > > to hurt other 
> > > people, or dancing and shouting to scare demons
> out
> > > of sick peoples? 
> > > bodies. The notion of testing to see if the idea
> > > worked, and if it 
> > > didn?t work, to try something else, seemed more
> > > honored in the breach 
> > > than in the observance, if it was thought of at
> all.
> > > 
> > > But gradually, through a concatenation of
> > > circumstances the origins 
> > > of which are really irrelevant, since it is the
> > > results of the thing 
> > > that are important, enough people accepted the
> idea
> > > that observing 
> > > the world, making hypotheses about it,
> controlling
> > > for variables, and 
> > > then testing those hypotheses, and modifying
> those
> > > hypotheses and 
> > > testing again that it became a practice
> generally
> > > accepted as worth 
> > > the time and materials that went into it.
> > > 
> > > Even today, most people in what purports to be
> our
> > > scientific society 
> > > believe an enormous number of things that
> science
> > > holds to be 
> > > nonsense. It?s hard to believe how much junk
> belief
> > > there is out 
> > > there, and how much of it is based on junk
> science,
> > > and why.
> > > 
> > > Why is easy: it?s difficult and expensive to do
> good
> > > science, to 
> > > hypothesize, control for variables, and design
> tests
> > > that test for 
> > > the thing one is testing for.  But junk science
> is
> > > easy: it?s almost 
> > > as easy as sympathetic magic -- in fact, some of
> it
> > > is no better. 
> > > 
> > > After World War II, the enormous amounts of
> cargo,
> > > clothing, food, 
> > > weapons, tents, radios, and the like, that were
> > > air-dropped or air-
> > > lifted into New Guinea and the Melanesian
> islands
> > > during the US 
> > > Pacific campaign against Japan created a vast
> > > lifestyle change for 
> > > the islanders. But when the war moved on, and
> > > ultimately when it 
> > > ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new
> cargo
> > > arrived. 
> > > Naturally, the islanders made attempts to get
> cargo
> > > to fall by 
> > > parachute or land in planes or ships again,
> > > islanders did same things 
> > > they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen
> do.
> > > They didn?t have 
> > > radios, of course, so they carved headphones
> from
> > > wood, and wore them 
> > > while sitting in control towers they built. They
> > > waved the landing 
> > > signals while standing on the runways. They lit
> > > signal fires and 
> > > torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The
> > > islanders had 
> > > concluded that the foreigners had some special
> > > connection to the 
> > > powers that be, and by mimicking the foreigners,
> > > they hoped to 
> > > achieve the same effect.
> > > 
> > > They were doing everything right, of course,
> except
> > > for one thing: 
> > > they were pursuing the form without the
> substance,
> > > like writers who 
> > > think that by employing meter, or by avoiding
> meter,
> > > they are writing 
> > > poetry. 
> > > 
> > > What were they missing?  They were missing the
> > > essence, the guts of 
> > > the thing: they had the earphones and the
> antennae,
> > > but they weren?t 
> > > hooked up to a radio. The notion of a radio was
> only
> > > distantly 
> > > emulated in the notion of prayer to the
> ancestors --
> > > but before the 
> 
=== message truncated ===



		
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From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Wed Sep 29 10:32:03 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 15:32:03 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <8333741.1096465899758.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
References: <20040929120326.36282.qmail@web40407.mail.yahoo.com>
	<8333741.1096465899758.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
Message-ID: <1096468323.415ac7632266e@webmail.ukonline.net>

Quoting Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com>:


> Except in the limited sense of having deluded someone (possibly the
> practitioner) as to its efficacy, there is no such thing as successful magic.
> 
> 
> Magic and science have nothing to do with one another but the historical
> accident of some early scientists having also been alchmemists or the like.
> Science is an astonishingly successful method for enlarging our knowledge of
> the world; magic is an utterly ineffective method for manipulating the
> world.
>



"Magic" is clearly in need of some definition before we can pursue this 
debate. The best place to look would probably be the sixteenth century - 
Florentine Platonists maybe. I don't know if their magic included alchemy but 
it pointedly excluded astrology. 

Anyhow, it seems there are two general senses that are at war here. 

1. Magic = a practice of professionals or pretended professionals, which may 
or may not be credited by its practitioners. 

This seems to be what you're attacking, and obviously such successes as 
medieval herbalism, surgery, optics, etc, would not class as examples of magic 
in this sense. 

But 

2. Magic = a description of things that have wonderful properties that we 
don't know the reason for. That would cover most people's sense of herbs five 
hundred years ago, and in fact most people's understanding today of miracle 
pills and other modern phenomena, some of them with a sound scientific basis.

Which definition someone prefers, I suspect, depends very much on sociological 
factors - the extent to which they identify themselves as inward with 
professional, technological and scientific material. 





  






 



 

----------------------------------------------
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From halvard at earthlink.net  Wed Sep 29 10:42:16 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 10:42:16 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems by others:  William Carlos Williams, "These"
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEKEIGIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


These

are the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.

The year plunges into night
and the heart plunges
lower than night

to an empty, windswept place
without sun, stars or moon
but a peculiar light as of thought

that spins a dark fire--
whirling upon itself until,
in the cold, it kindles

to make a man aware of nothing
that he knows, not loneliness
itself--Not a ghost but

would be embraced--emptiness,
despair--(They
whine and whistle) among

the flashes and booms of war;
houses of whose rooms
the cold is greater than can be thought,

the people gone that we loved,
the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused--

Hide it away somewhere
out of the mind, let it get roots
and grow, unrelated to jealous

ears and eyes--for itself.
In this mine they come to dig--all.
Is this the counterfoil to sweetest

music? The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped

that ticked yesterday so well?
and hears the sound of lakewater
splashing--that is now stone. 

--William Carlos Williams

fr. *The Collected Earlier Poems*
[New York: New Directions, 1951]

with thanks to F.L., who sent it to me


Hal     

Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/




From m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk  Wed Sep 29 10:51:45 2004
From: m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk (m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 15:51:45 +0100
Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
In-Reply-To: <017701c4a5dd$7f5e2bd0$56001118@D6T95L21>
References: <s159fdfa.036@gwise.louisville.edu>
	<017701c4a5dd$7f5e2bd0$56001118@D6T95L21>
Message-ID: <1096469505.415acc01c8e97@webmail.ukonline.net>

Zola L'Assommoir
Proust Guermantes
Jesus Fernandez Santos "Los Bravos"
Edm Spenser Shepheard's Calendar
Chaucer Knight's Tale
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - How I became a Holy Mother etc
Wolfram von Eschenbach - Parzival
Ashbery Three Poems
W Scott Tales of a Grandfather
Windows 2000 Network Design Exam Prep
Monk/Byrum/Halsey Ahadada Reader 1 (for review)
Collins Gem Butterflies and Moths (after seeing hummingbird hawkmoth tackling 
impatiens in a hanging basket) 

----------------------------------------------
This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net


From clitophon at yahoo.com  Wed Sep 29 10:52:34 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 07:52:34 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <1096468323.415ac7632266e@webmail.ukonline.net>
Message-ID: <20040929145234.37592.qmail@web40410.mail.yahoo.com>

I think that what we're debating is the gap between
charlatans, mystics and real practitioners of science
and that division isn't always easy to see.  Freud
followed Charcot, a hypnotist whom he went to see
working in Paris but Charcot, we know, was a fraud. 
Science is a historically defined thing and what we
call science at one point is magic at another.  For
the ancients thunder and lightning was magic ascribed
to the anger of the gods but science explains it as
modulations or disturbances of the upper atmosphere. 
Therefore a magical understanding was displaced but it
still doesn't account for our fear of nature, which as
we have seen recently in Haiti, is sometimes
omnipotent and more powerful than we.  Fear of the
unknown is the domain of magic, enlightenment and
science removes that fear and offers us understanding
instead.  
Charcot succeeded in helping to open up a branch of
science, although he was a fraud and that branch of
science, namely psychoanalysis, is still seemingly
fraudulent or magical because we know so little about
the workings of the human mind, about ourselves.  Thus
creation and the creation of science and technology
still have a magical, ie undefinable occurence and
origin.  By insisting or rationalism and logic and
order you miss the point.  The magical, ie irrational
source of inspiration cannot be explained and thus
science is merely successful magic.
--- m.peverett at ukonline.co.uk wrote:

> Quoting Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com>:
> 
> 
> > Except in the limited sense of having deluded
> someone (possibly the
> > practitioner) as to its efficacy, there is no such
> thing as successful magic.
> > 
> > 
> > Magic and science have nothing to do with one
> another but the historical
> > accident of some early scientists having also been
> alchmemists or the like.
> > Science is an astonishingly successful method for
> enlarging our knowledge of
> > the world; magic is an utterly ineffective method
> for manipulating the
> > world.
> >
> 
> 
> 
> "Magic" is clearly in need of some definition before
> we can pursue this 
> debate. The best place to look would probably be the
> sixteenth century - 
> Florentine Platonists maybe. I don't know if their
> magic included alchemy but 
> it pointedly excluded astrology. 
> 
> Anyhow, it seems there are two general senses that
> are at war here. 
> 
> 1. Magic = a practice of professionals or pretended
> professionals, which may 
> or may not be credited by its practitioners. 
> 
> This seems to be what you're attacking, and
> obviously such successes as 
> medieval herbalism, surgery, optics, etc, would not
> class as examples of magic 
> in this sense. 
> 
> But 
> 
> 2. Magic = a description of things that have
> wonderful properties that we 
> don't know the reason for. That would cover most
> people's sense of herbs five 
> hundred years ago, and in fact most people's
> understanding today of miracle 
> pills and other modern phenomena, some of them with
> a sound scientific basis.
> 
> Which definition someone prefers, I suspect, depends
> very much on sociological 
> factors - the extent to which they identify
> themselves as inward with 
> professional, technological and scientific material.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
> This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



		
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Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Wed Sep 29 11:33:09 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:33:09 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <20040929145234.37592.qmail@web40410.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <1096468323.415ac7632266e@webmail.ukonline.net>
Message-ID: <415A9D75.17424.FFF275@localhost>

On 29 Sep 2004 at 7:52, Paul Murphy wrote:
> I think that what we're debating is the gap between
> charlatans, mystics and real practitioners of science
> and that division isn't always easy to see.

But it >is< pretty easy to see, if you're willing to look, if you're 
not already blinded by the notion that science and magic are the same 
thing. The point of science, after all, is to observe, make 
hypotheses, design experiments that control for variables, and then 
test the hypothesis, observe again, re-design the experiment, and 
test again. 

There are errors characterstic of poor science, but we know what they 
are, and we can watch for them. The errors of magic are systemic. 

An example of error characteristic of poor science: A student told 
her psych prof she wanted to do an experiment. It had been found by 
other experimenters that under conditions C, rats did something, S. 
She was curious as to whether, if she changed the conditions to C-1, 
they would still do S. So her proposal was to do the experiment under 
conditions C-1 and see if they still did S. 

An experimenter friend explained to her that it was necessary first 
to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person -- to 
do it under condition C to see if she could also get result S, and 
then change to C-1 and see if S changed. Then she would know the the 
real difference was the thing she thought she had under control. 

Her professor, though, nixed that good science idea; he said you 
cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you 
would be wasting time. 

There had been many experiments running rats through all kinds of 
conditions, and so on -- with little clear result until 1937 when a 
man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor 
with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along 
the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train 
the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started 
them off. But he couldn't -- the rats went immediately to the door 
where the food had been the time before. 

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so 
beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as 
before? Obviously there was something about the door that was 
different from the other doors -- what could it be? He painted the 
doors very carefully, making the colors and textures on the faces of 
the doors exactly the same, but still the rats could tell. He 
speculated that perhaps the rats were smelling the food, so he used 
chemicals to change the smell after each run, but still the rats 
could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing 
the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory above them through 
the top of the maze, like any commonsense person. So he covered the 
corridor, and still the rats could tell. Finally he figured out that 
they might be able to tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran 
over it, so he covered his corridor in sand. And that did it.

So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was 
able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third 
door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. 

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one 
experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments 
sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using 
-- not what YOU think it's using. And that is the experiment that 
tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful 
and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. 

I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next 
experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They 
never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or 
being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the 
same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. 
Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover 
anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you 
have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention 
to experiments like that is a characteristic example of junk science -
- and of magic.

The problem with science is that it's very very difficult. It's easy 
to say "We're going to test this hypothesis" but it's very very hard 
to make sure you're actually testing the hypothesis you think you're 
testing. 

Marcus




From marcus at designerglass.com  Wed Sep 29 11:49:37 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:49:37 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <20040929142504.2012.qmail@web40409.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <415A7520.30957.626707@localhost>
Message-ID: <415AA151.12169.10F0720@localhost>

On 29 Sep 2004 at 7:25, Paul Murphy wrote:
> if its simply wrong why have you bothered to comment
> on it at all?<

Because we all have an obligation to point out the simply wrong when 
others espouse it for at least two reasons: first, so that others who 
don't have enough information or education, or who are simply not 
paying much attention, don't get misinformed by that simple wrong; 
and second, to try to persuade those who hold something that is 
simply wrong to change their minds. 

> ... But the source of science, what is it?<

The source of science is the notion that the universe around us is 
predictable and that conditions are largely the same throughout that 
universe, and, thus, that there is cause and effect.

> Why don't we all just go out and
> kill each other and make the human race extinct?<

We've tried and we've tried.

> Why
> is their not constant genocide?  Why do men love one
> another and create and not kill each other and
> engender utter nihilism as right-wingers and other
> reactionaries say that we do?<

We do do that whenever the social controls collapse for whatever 
reason. People are socialized by parents and teachers to obey the 
social strictures of their time and culture; where that socialization 
breaks down, or where the society itself breaks down, you'll see that 
people do try to kill one another. That right-wingers and 
reactionaries think this is a good thing is a good reason to vote 
against them in our society.

> Why do we have
> capitalism - a failed system based on notions of genes
> and heredity and not a society built on principles of
> love, co-operation and constant creativity?<

We no longer have any sort of pure capitalism. It is, and has been, 
hedged around with rules and laws and regulations. The right wingers 
and reactionaries, of course, are trying to whack down some of those 
hedges. I think there should be even better rules and laws and 
regulations (not necessarily more, but better); perhaps you do, too.

> ... If science isn't magic, then warfare is
> which is the opposite of science although it does
> utilise science in everyway possible.<

Warfare isn't magic, either. 

> Although it
> takes utter brainlessness to kill how then can a
> brainless thug utilise advanced science to kill? 
> Surely there is a contradiction in there somewhere? <

It doesn't take utter brainlessness to kill; in fact, most people 
have to be rigorously trained and their sense of their enemies as 
human beings propagandized and demonized before most people are 
willing to kill. There are all kinds of studies that show that most 
combat soldiers not only do not kill people, but that it is difficult 
to induce them to kill people, and the psychological effect of 
killing people is an extreme stress on almost all human beings if 
they're forced to it by circumstances.

But most people can be trained to use the weapons even if they can't 
be induced to actually knowingly kill. The propaganda and the 
demonization of the enemy is a necessary condition of that 
inducement, and a moral justification that the killing is justified 
by appeal to a greater good is also necessary.

Marcus






From cstroffo at earthlink.net  Wed Sep 29 13:14:40 2004
From: cstroffo at earthlink.net (Chris Stroffolino )
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 09:14:40 -0800
Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
Message-ID: <200409291555.i8TFtbxQ283626@pimout2-ext.prodigy.net>

on the floor beside the mattress---

eleni mandell, country for true lovers
the essential kris kristofferson
joanna newsom, the milk eyed mender
(smog), supper
kinks, village green preservation society
continuous peasant, intentional grounding
kelley stoltz, antique glow
jolie holland, escondida
jonathan richman, i, jonathan


----------
>From: "Joe Safdie" <jsafdie at comcast.net>
>To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
>Date: Tue, Sep 28, 2004, 8:33 PM
>

> Boy, Alan . . . Ten Years After . . . thanks for that. Haven't heard that
> particular term (or thought of that group) in many more than ten years . . .
> but to leap to the assignment, gladly, since it presupposes that the
> definition thread might finally be over, I'll quote one of the books on my
> nightstand, Charles Olson's *Collected Prose* . . .
>
>     It's as though you were hearing it for the first time--who knows what a
> poem ought to sound like?   until it's that?   And how do you get it that
> except as you do--you, and nobody else (who's a poet?
>     What's,
> a poem?
>     It ain't dreamt until it walks.   It talks.   It spreads its green
> barrazza
>
> Exactly right. Anyway, the other books on my three-shelved nightstand are:
>
> *A Natural History of the Senses* (Diane Ackerman)
> *Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life* (Karl Kerenyi)
> *Empire* (Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri)
> *Nightmare in Pink* (John D. MacDonald)
> *The Iliad* (Homer, translated by Robert Fagles)
> *The Medium is the Massage* (Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore)
>
> Kent, Chris -- are you gonna play this game?
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alan C Golding" <acgold01 at louisville.edu>
> To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 9:12 PM
> Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
>
>
>> BTW, on the CD player is a Ten Years After anthology, Miles Davis, the
>> video of Hello, Dolly, the live half of Cream's Wheels of Fire, and
>> Debbie Friedman.  Go figure.
>>
>> Alan
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry


From mandolin at mac.com  Wed Sep 29 12:11:07 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 12:11:07 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
In-Reply-To: <200409291555.i8TFtbxQ283626@pimout2-ext.prodigy.net>
References: <200409291555.i8TFtbxQ283626@pimout2-ext.prodigy.net>
Message-ID: <15765633.1096474267493.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>

 

Connie Willis, Uncharted Territory
George Starbuck, The Works
Don Paterson, The White Lie
Fitzgerald's tr. of the Aeneid
Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground
16th Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Stories
Gibbon, Vol II of Decline and Fall (going very very slow)
Bernd Heinrich, The Raven in Winter & The Tree in My Forest
Mark Turner & Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think
Antonio Damasio, Searching For Spinoza
Laurie King, Jerusalem


All of which was interrupted over last weekend by the first 3 Anita Blake novels by Laurel K. Hamilton.

-----
Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the Sonnetarium


From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Wed Sep 29 12:51:18 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:51:18 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Ghazals in English
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A3AD@ariel.ripon.edu>

I'm putting together an exercise for a poetry writing course, and am in
search of good English ghazals.  I'd be grateful to be pointed toward some
of your favorites; and if anyone cared to post some good examples, I'd be
downright giddy with pleasure.

Before everyone sends me to Agha Shahid Ali's work, I've got that base
covered.  

Interested in a range of poems, from strict (Ali) to loosey goosey (Robert
Bly).

Thanking you in advance. . . .

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================



From wwmorgan at ilstu.edu  Wed Sep 29 13:20:09 2004
From: wwmorgan at ilstu.edu (Bill Morgan)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 12:20:09 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Ghazals in English
In-Reply-To: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A3AD@ariel.ripon.edu>
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A3AD@ariel.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <6.0.2.0.2.20040929121922.01b37eb0@mail.ilstu.edu>

David, I suppose you know about Adrienne Rich's ghazals, right?

                                                 Bill Morgan

At 11:51 AM 9/29/2004, you wrote:
>I'm putting together an exercise for a poetry writing course, and am in
>search of good English ghazals.  I'd be grateful to be pointed toward some
>of your favorites; and if anyone cared to post some good examples, I'd be
>downright giddy with pleasure.
>
>Before everyone sends me to Agha Shahid Ali's work, I've got that base
>covered.
>
>Interested in a range of poems, from strict (Ali) to loosey goosey (Robert
>Bly).
>
>Thanking you in advance. . . .
>
>============================================
>David Graham
>Department of English, Ripon College
>grahamd at ripon.edu
>      Home Page:
>http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>      My Poetry Library:
>http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
>
>Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
>============================================
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry





From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Wed Sep 29 13:29:40 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 12:29:40 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
Message-ID: <s15aaad2.009@mail.highland.edu>

Alias Shakespeare, by Joseph Sobran
Rules for Writers (5th Edition), by Diana Hacker
A Modern Dry-Fly Code, by Vincent Marinaro
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, tr. Kenneth Rexroth (always on
nightstand, the book that proves that anti-narrative as program is the
equivalent to binding your feet as poet)
How Poetry Ruined My Life, by me (manuscript)
Epigramititis: 111 Living American Poets, by me (manuscript)
Print outs of all posts by the 20 year old poet Michelle Reeves from
Lucipo listserve (She was killed by an alligator while swimming the
other night. I had heard this on CNN, but didn't realize until later who
they were talking about)
The Bible
The Best of American Poetry 2004




From halvard at earthlink.net  Wed Sep 29 15:18:43 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 15:18:43 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] =?windows-1252?q?What_poetry_is=3A_Gunnar_Ekel=F6f?=
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEKEJBIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


"I placed one word beside another and finally with a great deal
of effort managed to create a whole sentence--naturally not one
that 'meant something' but one that was composed of word-
nuances. It was the hidden meaning that I was seeking--a kind
of *Alchimie du Verbe*. One word has its meaning and another
has its own, but when they are brought together something
strange happens to them: they have an in-between connotation
at the same time as they retain their original individual meanings . . .
Poetry is this very tension-filled relationship between the words,
between the lines, between meanings."

--Gunnar Ekel?f, tr. Auden & Sj?berg

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/~halvard
blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/




From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Wed Sep 29 15:54:47 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 21:54:47 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] transporting
Message-ID: <008501c4a65e$2cdfaf10$5f8d3052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Transportation futuristics

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/news_events/exhibits/futuristics/index.html

trans porting port trans sport t
ran Ort an 

transport
the sport of trans

Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com 
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky

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From clitophon at yahoo.com  Wed Sep 29 17:02:28 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 14:02:28 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <415AA151.12169.10F0720@localhost>
Message-ID: <20040929210228.44425.qmail@web40428.mail.yahoo.com>

Newton was also an alchemist.
I think the origins of science in magical thinking are
palpable but I;ll talk more tomorrow.
--- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:

> On 29 Sep 2004 at 7:25, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > if its simply wrong why have you bothered to
> comment
> > on it at all?<
> 
> Because we all have an obligation to point out the
> simply wrong when 
> others espouse it for at least two reasons: first,
> so that others who 
> don't have enough information or education, or who
> are simply not 
> paying much attention, don't get misinformed by that
> simple wrong; 
> and second, to try to persuade those who hold
> something that is 
> simply wrong to change their minds. 
> 
> > ... But the source of science, what is it?<
> 
> The source of science is the notion that the
> universe around us is 
> predictable and that conditions are largely the same
> throughout that 
> universe, and, thus, that there is cause and effect.
> 
> > Why don't we all just go out and
> > kill each other and make the human race extinct?<
> 
> We've tried and we've tried.
> 
> > Why
> > is their not constant genocide?  Why do men love
> one
> > another and create and not kill each other and
> > engender utter nihilism as right-wingers and other
> > reactionaries say that we do?<
> 
> We do do that whenever the social controls collapse
> for whatever 
> reason. People are socialized by parents and
> teachers to obey the 
> social strictures of their time and culture; where
> that socialization 
> breaks down, or where the society itself breaks
> down, you'll see that 
> people do try to kill one another. That
> right-wingers and 
> reactionaries think this is a good thing is a good
> reason to vote 
> against them in our society.
> 
> > Why do we have
> > capitalism - a failed system based on notions of
> genes
> > and heredity and not a society built on principles
> of
> > love, co-operation and constant creativity?<
> 
> We no longer have any sort of pure capitalism. It
> is, and has been, 
> hedged around with rules and laws and regulations.
> The right wingers 
> and reactionaries, of course, are trying to whack
> down some of those 
> hedges. I think there should be even better rules
> and laws and 
> regulations (not necessarily more, but better);
> perhaps you do, too.
> 
> > ... If science isn't magic, then warfare is
> > which is the opposite of science although it does
> > utilise science in everyway possible.<
> 
> Warfare isn't magic, either. 
> 
> > Although it
> > takes utter brainlessness to kill how then can a
> > brainless thug utilise advanced science to kill? 
> > Surely there is a contradiction in there
> somewhere? <
> 
> It doesn't take utter brainlessness to kill; in
> fact, most people 
> have to be rigorously trained and their sense of
> their enemies as 
> human beings propagandized and demonized before most
> people are 
> willing to kill. There are all kinds of studies that
> show that most 
> combat soldiers not only do not kill people, but
> that it is difficult 
> to induce them to kill people, and the psychological
> effect of 
> killing people is an extreme stress on almost all
> human beings if 
> they're forced to it by circumstances.
> 
> But most people can be trained to use the weapons
> even if they can't 
> be induced to actually knowingly kill. The
> propaganda and the 
> demonization of the enemy is a necessary condition
> of that 
> inducement, and a moral justification that the
> killing is justified 
> by appeal to a greater good is also necessary.
> 
> Marcus
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



		
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Do you Yahoo!?
Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone.
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From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Wed Sep 29 17:24:51 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 16:24:51 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Ghazals in English
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A3AE@ariel.ripon.edu>

> David, I suppose you know about Adrienne Rich's ghazals, right?
> 
>                                                  Bill Morgan
> 
Yes, they were the first ones I read, I think, back in the Pleistocene.
There was a very nifty anthology of versions by contemporary American poets,
including Rich, Jim Harrison, and William Stafford.  This must have been
late-1960s, I'm thinking.

Most of them, as I recall, were on the looser end of the formal spectrum.
Lately Robert Bly has written some quite wonderful poems in his own (highly
loose) adaptation of the form--collected in *The Night Abraham Called to the
Stars*.  

Others?  I guess I'm particularly looking for poems that get a bit more
strict with the form without seeming awkward.  

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================




From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Wed Sep 29 17:35:30 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 23:35:30 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] from the Buffalo list
Message-ID: <017501c4a66c$3eb4c690$5f8d3052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

      Aldon Nielsen   <aln10 at psu.edu> 
     


all you researchers and just excitable readers should check out the story
in today's NY TIMES about the huge collection of English language poetry
that has been donated to Emory University -- since a complete catalogue is
not yet available, we'll just have to rely on our Atlanta contingent to
read all the books and report back to us --

ALSO -- check it out -- Ornette Coleman has won the $250,000 Gish award --
Wynton Marsalis will deliver a tribute -- any of you who recall Ornette's
treatment in the Ken Burns jazz saga will find this amusing --

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

"It don't sound so terrible -- "
                --Emily Dickinson

Aldon Lynn Nielsen
George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature
Department of English
The Pennsylvania State University
116 Burrowes
University Park, PA   16802-6200

(814) 865-0091
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Wed Sep 29 18:46:29 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 18:46:29 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] what poetry is
References: <BD7D87CE.B975%grahamd@ripon.edu><012201c4a49f$7703ce70$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc><1096302086.41583e0666e35@webmail.ukonline.net><029101c4a4ec$0385e440$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
	<1096369700.41594624415f2@webmail.ukonline.net>
Message-ID: <005701c4a676$2d4c1890$9bb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

>>I forgot about "descriptive poetry."  I cling to "envirate/envirative," 
> though because (1) it's mine; (2) "envirative" specifies something significant 
> as no term related to "describe" does; and (3) "describe" is too broad a term 
> and so will confuse (since, for one reason, all poetry describes--that is, one 
> can describe without envirating).
> 
> Yes, that's true, I suppose. 

> I was thinking that "please describe the story" would invite some such 
> response as "It is very weird and haunting" - as opposed to kicking straight 
> in with "This guy has been living out in the sticks since his mother died 
> and ...". 
> 
> But then, a detective might well say: "Please describe the events leading up 
> to your meeting"
> 
> Alternatively, you might consider "depiction" or "evocation" . As you may 
> gather, I feel an irrational aversion to introducing new terms, even though I 
> would be the first to admit that those we have (e.g. regarding meter) are 
> grossly inadequate.

I more and more prefer new words to escape the contamination of old words.  For however short a time.  On continuing reading CK Stead on Eliot, Pound and Yeats, I decided that what he (in effect) calls the incoherence of The Waste Land is narrative incoherence.  I'd say it was enviratively coherent, which to me seems much more exact than "depictively coherent" or "descriptively coherent."  So I'll use the even if I'm the only one to do so.
 
> **************
> 
>> Another question strikes me: why not call all the texts in Transtromer's 
> collection prose because half are prose?
> 
> That wouldn't cause me too much of a problem, though I admit I certainly do 
> not think of them as what a collection of prose normally connotes (e.g. like a 
> collection of reviews or articles). But what I'd wish to say is that, whatever 
> Transtromer's pieces are, they are all endeavours of the same kind, united by 
> the same concentration, searching, the same goal. I mentioned this 
> collection because traditionally there's many a poet who has thrown the odd 
> sprinkle of prose poems into a collection of otherwise short-lined stuff, just 
> as they might throw in the occasional translation or the odd bit of light 
> verse or a poem entitled "Song" - all those subtle indications that these 
> makeweights have been put in to add a bit of variety but are somehow not the 
> real meat - but this Transtromer's collection seemed a good example of someone 
> putting prose poems in what one thinks of as key positions, e.g. 
> the last poem in the book. It is true that using your definitions one could 
> still spell it out and say something like "Transtromer obstinately pursues his 
> goal using a mixture of verse and prose.." but for my taste this tends to 
> suggest mixed sequences in which poems are "embedded" in prose, e.g. Menippean 
> satire, La Vita Nuova, Narrow Road to the Deep North...
 
I follow you, but I've read collections in which poets have included letters and essays with their poems--prose texts that also share much with the poems they're with.  How about a collection of drawings and poems?   

--Bob
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From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Wed Sep 29 18:51:36 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 17:51:36 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
Message-ID: <s15af644.062@mail.highland.edu>

I decided, around 4PM today, after much reflection, to give up writing
poetry.

(I will lean my happiness on two or three maples and go away.) 

Forever.

(my hair is falling fast; O pretty soon it will be too sparse for a
hatpin!)

It is an incredibly liberating feeling.

(I remember when we fled north from the rebels, we came into a field
and in the field there was a single peach tree, a flowering peach tree,
and in our exhaustion we wept for a long time.)

I highly recommend it.

(I traded everything I knew to a gorgeous boy on horseback in the
southeast quarter.)

Whether you know what it is all about, like Bob Grumman or Ron
Silliman, or don't have the slightest idea what it's about, like me or
those two geese out the window...

(so many deaths have come from this fighting!)

I'll still read it, though, I think.

(I think of him, long ago, who starved and froze, instead of bothering
rescuers, with their heavy packs of propane tanks and blankets and
morphine.) 

Whatever IT is, that is.

(something like a flag pretending not to be a flag, and the expense of
spirit in a waste of shame.)


From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Wed Sep 29 18:55:33 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 18:55:33 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] On the nightstand
References: <s15aaad2.009@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <009001c4a677$70ba19a0$9bb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

> Alias Shakespeare, by Joseph Sobran

I've read that one.  Do you think it as badly reasoned as I do, Kent?  In 
particular, what is your literary opinion of the preface by Oxford that 
Sobran quotes?

I'm a fanatic believer that Shakespeare was Shakespeare but am not trying to 
start a debate, just curious.  In fact, if anyone jumps in to argue, be 
aware I won't argue back.

--Bob 




From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Wed Sep 29 19:44:31 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 18:44:31 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
In-Reply-To: <s15af644.062@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s15af644.062@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040929182313.02bd5f80@mail.ilstu.edu>

"This is indeed a strong fetter, say the wise. It seems soft but it drags a 
man down, and it is hard to undo. Therefore some men cut their fetters, 
renounce the life of the world and start to walk on the path, leaving 
pleasures behind." (Dhammapada, line 346)

"When desires go, joy comes."
-- The Dhammapada, line 187, trans Juan Mascaro

I love you, Kent.



From mandolin at mac.com  Wed Sep 29 20:04:15 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 20:04:15 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <20040929210228.44425.qmail@web40428.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040929210228.44425.qmail@web40428.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <444A482B-1274-11D9-BCEE-000393C29586@mac.com>


On Sep 29, 2004, at 5:02 PM, Paul Murphy wrote:

> Newton was also an alchemist.
> I think the origins of science in magical thinking are
> palpable but I;ll talk more tomorrow.

When Newton did alchemy he was no more doing science than I am 
programming when I play the mandolin.  A scientific idea must be 
falsifiable--that is, it must be possible to imagine a set of 
conditions, in principle reproducible by anyone who makes the effort, 
in which certain possible outcomes would demonstrate the idea was 
incorrect or incomplete. It's hard to state an idea in such a testable 
way, as Marcus illustrated with his rat-maze story.

Alchemists and other magicians are more like engineers than like 
scientists. Instead of asking "How do we design a situation which might 
prove our ideas wrong?" magicians start with some desired change in the 
world (lead into gold, or perfect understanding, or that jackass down 
the road getting his) and look for a technique which has been claimed 
to produce that result. Unlike engineers, when the change doesn't 
happen ("unsuccessful" magic) they don't fault the theory behind the 
technique but blame their weakness of will or the intervention of 
opposing magicians or the spot they didn't notice on the 
maybe-not-really virgin goat. When the change does happen ("successful" 
magic) they take it as "proof" the technique works -- but like the 
researchers who didn't control for vibrations in the floors of their 
mazes, they haven't proved a thing.

Michael Peverett  suggested upthread that there was a useful 
distinction between magic as "a practice of professionals or pretended 
professionals, which may
or may not be credited by its practitioners" and magic as "a 
description of things that have wonderful properties that we don't know 
the reason for."  I think that's mostly true: Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd 
law is "Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from 
magic," and when asked how the least-squares optimizer called from my 
code works, I'm likely to answer "fine magic."  But science is not 
technology, and though it produces the ideas upon which reliably 
successful advanced technologies are built, that's only one of the 
reasons people do science.



From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep 30 08:00:13 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:00:13 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
References: <s15af644.062@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <005601c4a6e5$0bc7edb0$a52bb750@yourpk9x5fuc06>

I don't think you will ever give up poetry, but I got your message at 11.30
when I finally stepped out of school which sort of keeps a tight helmet on
my head and does not let foreign-to-the-school-thoughts enter. And I saw
thousands of people fighting for a word, for a page, for a line, for a
title, and I thought that you were right, and then asked myself what I was
doing there in the midst, and had no answers, I simply knew I had to cycle
fast to get to my next appointment. It might mean that I am not really that
stuck in that crowd - somehow,

the fact of going away does not mean you gave up wishes
but that you have a different wish

annyburuli balishata ballabarata

take care,

Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather
admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kent Johnson" <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu>
To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 12:51 AM
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry


> I decided, around 4PM today, after much reflection, to give up writing
> poetry.
>
> (I will lean my happiness on two or three maples and go away.)
>
> Forever.
>
> (my hair is falling fast; O pretty soon it will be too sparse for a
> hatpin!)
>
> It is an incredibly liberating feeling.
>
> (I remember when we fled north from the rebels, we came into a field
> and in the field there was a single peach tree, a flowering peach tree,
> and in our exhaustion we wept for a long time.)
>
> I highly recommend it.
>
> (I traded everything I knew to a gorgeous boy on horseback in the
> southeast quarter.)
>
> Whether you know what it is all about, like Bob Grumman or Ron
> Silliman, or don't have the slightest idea what it's about, like me or
> those two geese out the window...
>
> (so many deaths have come from this fighting!)
>
> I'll still read it, though, I think.
>
> (I think of him, long ago, who starved and froze, instead of bothering
> rescuers, with their heavy packs of propane tanks and blankets and
> morphine.)
>
> Whatever IT is, that is.
>
> (something like a flag pretending not to be a flag, and the expense of
> spirit in a waste of shame.)
> _______________________________________________
> 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 Sep 30 08:06:06 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 08:06:06 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
In-Reply-To: <005601c4a6e5$0bc7edb0$a52bb750@yourpk9x5fuc06>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEOEKDIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


Giving up poetry is easy. I give it up twenty or thirty
times a day.

Hal                Serving the tri-state area.

Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/
 
{    I don't think you will ever give up poetry, but I got your message at 11.30
{    when I finally stepped out of school which sort of keeps a tight helmet on
{    my head and does not let foreign-to-the-school-thoughts enter. And I saw
{    thousands of people fighting for a word, for a page, for a line, for a
{    title, and I thought that you were right, and then asked myself what I was
{    doing there in the midst, and had no answers, I simply knew I had to cycle
{    fast to get to my next appointment. It might mean that I am not really that
{    stuck in that crowd - somehow,
{    
{    the fact of going away does not mean you gave up wishes
{    but that you have a different wish
{    
{    annyburuli balishata ballabarata
{    
{    take care,
{    
{    Anny Ballardini
{    http://annyballardini.blogspot.com
{    http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
{    The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather
{    admirers.
{    Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky
{    
{    
{    ----- Original Message ----- 
{    From: "Kent Johnson" <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu>
{    To: <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
{    Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 12:51 AM
{    Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
{    
{    
{    > I decided, around 4PM today, after much reflection, to give up writing
{    > poetry.
{    >
{    > (I will lean my happiness on two or three maples and go away.)
{    >
{    > Forever.
{    >
{    > (my hair is falling fast; O pretty soon it will be too sparse for a
{    > hatpin!)
{    >
{    > It is an incredibly liberating feeling.
{    >
{    > (I remember when we fled north from the rebels, we came into a field
{    > and in the field there was a single peach tree, a flowering peach tree,
{    > and in our exhaustion we wept for a long time.)
{    >
{    > I highly recommend it.
{    >
{    > (I traded everything I knew to a gorgeous boy on horseback in the
{    > southeast quarter.)
{    >
{    > Whether you know what it is all about, like Bob Grumman or Ron
{    > Silliman, or don't have the slightest idea what it's about, like me or
{    > those two geese out the window...
{    >
{    > (so many deaths have come from this fighting!)
{    >
{    > I'll still read it, though, I think.
{    >
{    > (I think of him, long ago, who starved and froze, instead of bothering
{    > rescuers, with their heavy packs of propane tanks and blankets and
{    > morphine.)
{    >
{    > Whatever IT is, that is.
{    >
{    > (something like a flag pretending not to be a flag, and the expense of
{    > spirit in a waste of shame.)
{    > _______________________________________________
{    > 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  Thu Sep 30 09:11:07 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:11:07 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Dodge Festival convenes
Message-ID: <75EF84F5.4D899772.02538291@aol.com>

http://www.courierpostonline.com/news/living/f093004a.htm

`Poetry heaven'
TINA MARKOE KINSLOW/Courier-Post 
Willingboro poet Bettye T. Spinner says the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival gives attendees a chance to hear leading poetic voices.

Thursday, September 30, 2004

The annual Dodge festival attracts top poets for four days of readings and more
By JUDITH W. WINNE 
Courier-Post Staff 

In Whispers of Generations, poet Bettye T. Spinner of Willingboro hears a "rich purple song rising from a Georgia field where heads wrapped in bright rage are bowed low among rows of cotton."

With vivid economy, haunting rhythms and tangy phrases, poets put emotion to paper.

Beginning today, poets and their admirers will gather for a four-day weekend of words at Duke Farms in Hillsborough, Somerset County. Spinner will be among them.

Featured poets at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival include Joyce Carol Oates, Stanley Kunitz, Billy Collins, Galway Kinnell, Stephen Dunn, Philip Levine, Donald Hall, Rita Dove and Sandra Cisneros. The lineup boasts eight Pulitzer Prize winners, as well as former United States poet laureates.





From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 09:23:38 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 06:23:38 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
Message-ID: <20040930132338.75987.qmail@web52605.mail.yahoo.com>

This W.S. Merwin poem showed up on the Writer's
Almanac today.  Can anyone think of other poems about
poets?  I'm thinking 20th century here.

Jeff Newberry

Berryman

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and
invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 


From halvard at earthlink.net  Thu Sep 30 09:33:00 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:33:00 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
In-Reply-To: <20040930132338.75987.qmail@web52605.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEAEKGIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>


Well, for starters, there's Ginsberg's "A Supermarket
in California."

Hal                Serving the tri-state area.

Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/
  
{    This W.S. Merwin poem showed up on the Writer's
{    Almanac today.  Can anyone think of other poems about
{    poets?  I'm thinking 20th century here.
{    
{    Jeff Newberry
{    
{    Berryman
{    
{    I will tell you what he told me
{    in the years just after the war
{    as we then called
{    the second world war
{    
{    don't lose your arrogance yet he said
{    you can do that when you're older
{    lose it too soon and you may
{    merely replace it with vanity
{    
{    just one time he suggested
{    changing the usual order
{    of the same words in a line of verse
{    why point out a thing twice
{    
{    he suggested I pray to the Muse
{    get down on my knees and pray
{    right there in the corner and he
{    said he meant it literally
{    
{    it was in the days before the beard
{    and the drink but he was deep
{    in tides of his own through which he sailed
{    chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
{    
{    he was far older than the dates allowed for
{    much older than I was he was in his thirties
{    he snapped down his nose with an accent
{    I think he had affected in England
{    
{    as for publishing he advised me
{    to paper my wall with rejection slips
{    his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
{    with the vehemence of his views about poetry
{    
{    he said the great presence
{    that permitted everything and transmuted it
{    in poetry was passion
{    passion was genius and he praised movement and
{    invention
{    
{    I had hardly begun to read
{    I asked how can you ever be sure
{    that what you write is really
{    any good at all and he said you can't
{    
{    you can't you can never be sure
{    you die without knowing
{    whether anything you wrote was any good
{    if you have to be sure don't write
{    
{    =====
{    Jeff Newberry
{     
{    "Sometimes it's not so easy,
{    especially when your only friend
{    talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
{    and you do just the same as him."
{    --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
{    
{    __________________________________________________
{    Do You Yahoo!?
{    Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
{    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 bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Thu Sep 30 09:39:01 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:39:01 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
References: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEOEKDIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <008501c4a6f2$dbe1eed0$58b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

> Giving up poetry is easy. I give it up twenty or thirty
> times a day.
>
> Hal                Serving the tri-state area.

How can you give up something you never had?

(I don't mean that.  You got poetry, Hal, you just don't have a brain. 
Still joking, James, honest!)

--Bob 




From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Thu Sep 30 09:43:41 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:43:41 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] What is Poetry.
References: <20040930132338.75987.qmail@web52605.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <009001c4a6f3$826be7b0$58b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

To give Hal something new to use against me, here's a new word: "poextry," 
pronounced, POH ix tree.

I note that our discussion of what poetry is didn't get very far, even 
though I didn't insult anyone too badly, I don't think.  People like to 
announce a single thought on subjects like this, then drop out--or maybe 
express disagreement or disagreement, and then drop out.  Not just here. 
And not just discussions I pollute.

--Bob 




From lshinn at sas.upenn.edu  Thu Sep 30 09:45:51 2004
From: lshinn at sas.upenn.edu (Leslie Shinn)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:45:51 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
In-Reply-To: <20040930132338.75987.qmail@web52605.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040930132338.75987.qmail@web52605.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <p05210601bd81bc33e474@[130.91.64.42]>

Thank you, Jeff, for posting that wonderful poem about Berryman. 
Here is one about a friend of his.


PHOTOGRAPH OF DELMORE SCHWARTZ

A young king,
oak, painted and gilded, writing

no one should be so unhappy,
holding his hands out,

but his arms are missing from the shoulders down,
his right side's gone, his mouth's

flaking like a mirror, still
photograph of your childhood,

your son.  No one
should be so unhappy, should lie

still in that bending room
where all the atoms fly

off their hooks, animals and children
and friends kill, it was a delusion,

we were not living, the hotel floor
wasn't coming and going and coming

at that great head hurled radiant, flat
at the new world.

--Jean Valentine




>This W.S. Merwin poem showed up on the Writer's
>Almanac today.  Can anyone think of other poems about
>poets?  I'm thinking 20th century here.
>
>Jeff Newberry
>
>Berryman
>
>I will tell you what he told me
>in the years just after the war
>as we then called
>the second world war
>
>don't lose your arrogance yet he said
>you can do that when you're older
>lose it too soon and you may
>merely replace it with vanity
>
>just one time he suggested
>changing the usual order
>of the same words in a line of verse
>why point out a thing twice
>
>he suggested I pray to the Muse
>get down on my knees and pray
>right there in the corner and he
>said he meant it literally
>
>it was in the days before the beard
>and the drink but he was deep
>in tides of his own through which he sailed
>chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
>
>he was far older than the dates allowed for
>much older than I was he was in his thirties
>he snapped down his nose with an accent
>I think he had affected in England
>
>as for publishing he advised me
>to paper my wall with rejection slips
>his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
>with the vehemence of his views about poetry
>
>he said the great presence
>that permitted everything and transmuted it
>in poetry was passion
>passion was genius and he praised movement and
>invention
>
>I had hardly begun to read
>I asked how can you ever be sure
>that what you write is really
>any good at all and he said you can't
>
>you can't you can never be sure
>you die without knowing
>whether anything you wrote was any good
>if you have to be sure don't write
>
>=====
>Jeff Newberry
>
>"Sometimes it's not so easy,
>especially when your only friend
>talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
>and you do just the same as him."
>--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
>http://mail.yahoo.com
>_______________________________________________
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From clitophon at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 10:27:03 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 07:27:03 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <415AA151.12169.10F0720@localhost>
Message-ID: <20040930142703.93409.qmail@web40411.mail.yahoo.com>

warfare has a magical origin in the mind of failed
'leaders' and fuhrers
it has a mystique, the 'necessary struggle', the
fatherland, the avatar/leader who is
saviour/messiah/prophet
if you tell people this over and over again, the
irrational origins of our society are palpably
pseudo-magic
Hitler himself was a member of magical groups as the
Thule Society.
It has to be pointed out that the Nazis were the first
to have jet propelled aircraft, advanced rocket
technology and almost via Heisenberg and others, the
atom bomb but that wasn't magic, that was science.
Fuhrers need magic to enslave people and science to
win wars, that is the paradox that ultimately destroys
them.

--- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:

> On 29 Sep 2004 at 7:25, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > if its simply wrong why have you bothered to
> comment
> > on it at all?<
> 
> Because we all have an obligation to point out the
> simply wrong when 
> others espouse it for at least two reasons: first,
> so that others who 
> don't have enough information or education, or who
> are simply not 
> paying much attention, don't get misinformed by that
> simple wrong; 
> and second, to try to persuade those who hold
> something that is 
> simply wrong to change their minds. 
> 
> > ... But the source of science, what is it?<
> 
> The source of science is the notion that the
> universe around us is 
> predictable and that conditions are largely the same
> throughout that 
> universe, and, thus, that there is cause and effect.
> 
> > Why don't we all just go out and
> > kill each other and make the human race extinct?<
> 
> We've tried and we've tried.
> 
> > Why
> > is their not constant genocide?  Why do men love
> one
> > another and create and not kill each other and
> > engender utter nihilism as right-wingers and other
> > reactionaries say that we do?<
> 
> We do do that whenever the social controls collapse
> for whatever 
> reason. People are socialized by parents and
> teachers to obey the 
> social strictures of their time and culture; where
> that socialization 
> breaks down, or where the society itself breaks
> down, you'll see that 
> people do try to kill one another. That
> right-wingers and 
> reactionaries think this is a good thing is a good
> reason to vote 
> against them in our society.
> 
> > Why do we have
> > capitalism - a failed system based on notions of
> genes
> > and heredity and not a society built on principles
> of
> > love, co-operation and constant creativity?<
> 
> We no longer have any sort of pure capitalism. It
> is, and has been, 
> hedged around with rules and laws and regulations.
> The right wingers 
> and reactionaries, of course, are trying to whack
> down some of those 
> hedges. I think there should be even better rules
> and laws and 
> regulations (not necessarily more, but better);
> perhaps you do, too.
> 
> > ... If science isn't magic, then warfare is
> > which is the opposite of science although it does
> > utilise science in everyway possible.<
> 
> Warfare isn't magic, either. 
> 
> > Although it
> > takes utter brainlessness to kill how then can a
> > brainless thug utilise advanced science to kill? 
> > Surely there is a contradiction in there
> somewhere? <
> 
> It doesn't take utter brainlessness to kill; in
> fact, most people 
> have to be rigorously trained and their sense of
> their enemies as 
> human beings propagandized and demonized before most
> people are 
> willing to kill. There are all kinds of studies that
> show that most 
> combat soldiers not only do not kill people, but
> that it is difficult 
> to induce them to kill people, and the psychological
> effect of 
> killing people is an extreme stress on almost all
> human beings if 
> they're forced to it by circumstances.
> 
> But most people can be trained to use the weapons
> even if they can't 
> be induced to actually knowingly kill. The
> propaganda and the 
> demonization of the enemy is a necessary condition
> of that 
> inducement, and a moral justification that the
> killing is justified 
> by appeal to a greater good is also necessary.
> 
> Marcus
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



		
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Thu Sep 30 10:31:44 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:31:44 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <444A482B-1274-11D9-BCEE-000393C29586@mac.com>
References: <20040929210228.44425.qmail@web40428.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <415BE090.14946.AC9F97@localhost>

> On Sep 29, 2004, at 5:02 PM, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > Newton was also an alchemist.
> > I think the origins of science in magical thinking are
> > palpable but I;ll talk more tomorrow.
 
The notion that science is anything a Famous Scientist does, as you 
claim when you say "Newton was also an alchemist" to support your 
thesis that science and magic are the same thing, is simply 
fallacious. It is the fallacy of "Appeal to Authority". Michael 
Snider's reply is excellent:

On 29 Sep 2004 at 20:04, Michael Snider wrote:
> When Newton did alchemy he was no more doing science than I am 
> programming when I play the mandolin.<

It's not enough to say "Ancient Famous Scientist Mistaken!" -- 
because science is all about making mistakes. The underlying 
principle of science is what Karl Popper famously called 
"falsification". But the notion that you have to be as transparently 
honest about how experiments were done, and as rigorously honest 
about what else besides your findings might have falsified or 
verified your hypothesis, that is, what might have made your 
experiment go right or go wrong, is the the central idea of science: 
the idea is to rigorously control for variables until you're really 
testing for what you want to test for.

Marcus




From marcus at designerglass.com  Thu Sep 30 10:41:27 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:41:27 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <20040930142703.93409.qmail@web40411.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <415AA151.12169.10F0720@localhost>
Message-ID: <415BE2D7.30708.B58692@localhost>

On 30 Sep 2004 at 7:27, Paul Murphy wrote:
> warfare has a magical origin in the mind of failed
> 'leaders' and fuhrers ...<

Warfare itself is not magical, not even if we accept the view that 
the reasons to go to war are mystical magical stuff. This is a 
confusion of the origins of a thing with a thing -- as if drinking 
water made from waste water must necessarily be bad, or as if a poem 
with a "bad word" in it must itself be bad. It's bad thinking.

> if you tell people this over and over again, the
> irrational origins of our society are palpably
> pseudo-magic<

No, that's just lying to people and controlling their access to other 
information. People will, certainly, accept the lie if they're told 
it often enough and there is no credible other information. But 
that's not magic. That's lying.

> It has to be pointed out that the Nazis were the first
> to have jet propelled aircraft, advanced rocket
> technology and almost via Heisenberg and others, the
> atom bomb <

But they didn't get that stuff by magic; they got that stuff by 
applied science. What, are you tired of arguing your own points and 
decided to argue on my side for a bit?

Marcus




From mandolin at mac.com  Thu Sep 30 10:43:38 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:43:38 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Science, Magic, and Poetry
Message-ID: <3745328.1096555418533.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>

It took 350 years for falsifiability to be recognized as a core value of scientific work, and even when Newton was doing science, he probably didn't conceptualize it in the way I described yesterday. After all, alchemists did experiments, and their work was crucial in developing the chemical knowledge used by early chemists (who often wore alchemists robes, just as astronomers were often astrologers) in their very different experiments. But an alchemical experiment was a "What happens if I do this?" kind of thing, not a systematic attempt to eliminate possible explanations for observed results. Astrologers carefully noted the motions of heavenly bodies not in order to help decide whether some hypothesis was correct but so that they could more produce more detailed charts for their noble clients. Both were liable to work in secret and share their information only with trusted apprentices and (to some extent) with their patrons -- they sought power, and sharing information diluted any power they might gain.

It's interesting that so many people, and so many governments, still think of science in the same way: an esoteric activity done for the sake of power which loses its value when shared.

It's also interesting that so many artists still think of an experiment as "What if I do this?" and think that they are approaching their art in a scientific manner by doing so. But can we do an experiment to prove L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory wrong? If not, why call it theory and not just a personal preference? If yes, what does that look like? What would be the predicted reults? What would be controls? Can we do double-blind? And what on earth is gained by pretending a scientific approach to poetry? Better marketing?


-----
Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the Sonnetarium



From clitophon at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 10:49:53 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 07:49:53 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Playing with madness
In-Reply-To: <415BE2D7.30708.B58692@localhost>
Message-ID: <20040930144953.5524.qmail@web40410.mail.yahoo.com>

I think that you are really foaming at the mouth, why?
 I'm trying to argue a bit against a materialist or
rationalist Englightenment view which you subsume
immediately into fascism and mysticism.  My only
original point is that the origins of creative genius
are largely mysterious.  
Newton was an alchemist therefore alchemy is science
is not a syllogism (or whatever the term is in logic)
that I support.  But I'm glad you had some palpable
fun with some of my erroneous thoughts.
--- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:

> On 30 Sep 2004 at 7:27, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > warfare has a magical origin in the mind of failed
> > 'leaders' and fuhrers ...<
> 
> Warfare itself is not magical, not even if we accept
> the view that 
> the reasons to go to war are mystical magical stuff.
> This is a 
> confusion of the origins of a thing with a thing --
> as if drinking 
> water made from waste water must necessarily be bad,
> or as if a poem 
> with a "bad word" in it must itself be bad. It's bad
> thinking.
> 
> > if you tell people this over and over again, the
> > irrational origins of our society are palpably
> > pseudo-magic<
> 
> No, that's just lying to people and controlling
> their access to other 
> information. People will, certainly, accept the lie
> if they're told 
> it often enough and there is no credible other
> information. But 
> that's not magic. That's lying.
> 
> > It has to be pointed out that the Nazis were the
> first
> > to have jet propelled aircraft, advanced rocket
> > technology and almost via Heisenberg and others,
> the
> > atom bomb <
> 
> But they didn't get that stuff by magic; they got
> that stuff by 
> applied science. What, are you tired of arguing your
> own points and 
> decided to argue on my side for a bit?
> 
> Marcus
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



		
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From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Thu Sep 30 10:50:09 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:50:09 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A3B1@ariel.ripon.edu>

Oh, lots and lots.  

Kinnell's got a lovely one about Robert Frost at Kennedy's inauguration.
Bly has a series on Wallace Stevens, and a nice elegy for William Stafford.
Adrienne Rich on Anne Bradstreet, not to mention Berryman on same.  Levine's
fantasia on Hart Crane & Garcia Lorca.  Berryman on Schwartz, and Lowell on
Berryman.  Walcott & Heaney & Bishop on Lowell. . . .

And I will unblushingly mention my own "Old Poet Enduring Praise", available
at *Cortland Review* if you scroll down a bit on this page:

http://www.cortlandreview.com/issuefive/graham5.htm

The poet in question is unnamed in the poem, but was my old teacher Richard
Eberhart, who is still alive, by the way, in the last stages of dementia.


============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	Jeff Newberry
> Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> Sent: 	Thursday, September 30, 2004 8:23 AM
> To: 	Poetry News and Reviews
> Subject: 	[New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
> 
> This W.S. Merwin poem showed up on the Writer's
> Almanac today.  Can anyone think of other poems about
> poets?  I'm thinking 20th century here.
> 
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> 


From tad at opus40.org  Thu Sep 30 10:51:21 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:51:21 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
References: <20040930132338.75987.qmail@web52605.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <003401c4a6fc$f3b28970$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>

Pound -- I will make a pact with you, Walt Whitman...

but that's addressed to a poet, not about a poet. And do we count elegies 
like Adonais? I'd think leave them out, too.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
To: "Poetry News and Reviews" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 9:23 AM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets


> This W.S. Merwin poem showed up on the Writer's
> Almanac today.  Can anyone think of other poems about
> poets?  I'm thinking 20th century here.
>
> Jeff Newberry
>
> Berryman
>
> I will tell you what he told me
> in the years just after the war
> as we then called
> the second world war
>
> don't lose your arrogance yet he said
> you can do that when you're older
> lose it too soon and you may
> merely replace it with vanity
>
> just one time he suggested
> changing the usual order
> of the same words in a line of verse
> why point out a thing twice
>
> he suggested I pray to the Muse
> get down on my knees and pray
> right there in the corner and he
> said he meant it literally
>
> it was in the days before the beard
> and the drink but he was deep
> in tides of his own through which he sailed
> chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
>
> he was far older than the dates allowed for
> much older than I was he was in his thirties
> he snapped down his nose with an accent
> I think he had affected in England
>
> as for publishing he advised me
> to paper my wall with rejection slips
> his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
> with the vehemence of his views about poetry
>
> he said the great presence
> that permitted everything and transmuted it
> in poetry was passion
> passion was genius and he praised movement and
> invention
>
> I had hardly begun to read
> I asked how can you ever be sure
> that what you write is really
> any good at all and he said you can't
>
> you can't you can never be sure
> you die without knowing
> whether anything you wrote was any good
> if you have to be sure don't write
>
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
>
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> 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 GrahamD at ripon.edu  Thu Sep 30 10:54:13 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:54:13 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A3B2@ariel.ripon.edu>

Another really sweet one:  Rachel Loden's "My Night with Philip Larkin."

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================


> ----------
> From: 	Graham, David
> Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> Sent: 	Thursday, September 30, 2004 9:50 AM
> To: 	'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views'
> Subject: 	[New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
> 
> Oh, lots and lots.  
> 
> Kinnell's got a lovely one about Robert Frost at Kennedy's inauguration.
> Bly has a series on Wallace Stevens, and a nice elegy for William
> Stafford.
> Adrienne Rich on Anne Bradstreet, not to mention Berryman on same.
> Levine's
> fantasia on Hart Crane & Garcia Lorca.  Berryman on Schwartz, and Lowell
> on
> Berryman.  Walcott & Heaney & Bishop on Lowell. . . .
> 
> And I will unblushingly mention my own "Old Poet Enduring Praise",
> available
> at *Cortland Review* if you scroll down a bit on this page:
> 
> http://www.cortlandreview.com/issuefive/graham5.htm
> 
> The poet in question is unnamed in the poem, but was my old teacher
> Richard
> Eberhart, who is still alive, by the way, in the last stages of dementia.
> 
> 
> ============================================
> David Graham
> Department of English, Ripon College
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>      Home Page:  
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>      My Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> 
> Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
> ============================================
> 
> 
> > ----------
> > From: 	Jeff Newberry
> > Reply To: 	NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views
> > Sent: 	Thursday, September 30, 2004 8:23 AM
> > To: 	Poetry News and Reviews
> > Subject: 	[New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
> > 
> > This W.S. Merwin poem showed up on the Writer's
> > Almanac today.  Can anyone think of other poems about
> > poets?  I'm thinking 20th century here.
> > 
> > Jeff Newberry
> > 
> > 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 
> 


From clitophon at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 10:58:38 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 07:58:38 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <4157EAF9.8878.B15CA9@localhost>
Message-ID: <20040930145838.73950.qmail@web40427.mail.yahoo.com>

what do you do with all of those people who believe
things that fall outside the gamut of science, people
who refuse in the face of it, to believe what evidence
and proof says and follow, instead, pseudo-mystical
claptrap?  Surely people are free to believe those
things they wish to believe in but I hardly think this
will result in doing no harm to others which is where
Christianity, for instance, becomes fascism.  (it
always does because Christianity is simply built on
one massive pseudo - psychological premise - hatred of
Jews, the people who killed Christ - who was also,
incidentally, a Jew.)  Christianity so obviously
echoes the development of Capitalism from its
progressive aspect to its monopolistic one that we can
clearly see that the 2 things fade and dissolve into
the other, ie when Capitalism ceases to be
progressive, logical and scientific and takes on the
aspects of those things - atavism, irrationalism,
tribalism - that it sets out to oppose.
--- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:

> On 27 Sep 2004 at 4:28, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > I think that you are repeating the classic fallacy
> of Western
> > Liberals, that the West is the Best and the others
> fell outside the
> > path of Enlightenment. Enlightenment is not
> intrinsically a
> > European thing nor, if one looks at European or
> more specifically
> > Western European history, did the European ruling
> classes or even
> > the philosophes, initiate it and this is the heart
> of the paradox. 
> > Enlightenment originated among non-Europeans,
> specifically the
> > Medieval Arabs of Spain,<
> 
> It has nothing to do with the West; it has to do
> with a particular 
> sort of intellectual integrity which is commonly
> called the 
> scientific method. Any human can use the scientific
> method, and where 
> it first arose, or who first used it best, or most
> often, or 
> whatever, is of considerably less moment than
> whether it is used and 
> used properly.
> 
> In human history there have been all sorts of looney
> ideas, but the 
> most common of them may be fairly called examples of
> "sympathetic 
> magic", for example, sticking pins in dolls to try
> to hurt other 
> people, or dancing and shouting to scare demons out
> of sick peoples? 
> bodies. The notion of testing to see if the idea
> worked, and if it 
> didn?t work, to try something else, seemed more
> honored in the breach 
> than in the observance, if it was thought of at all.
> 
> But gradually, through a concatenation of
> circumstances the origins 
> of which are really irrelevant, since it is the
> results of the thing 
> that are important, enough people accepted the idea
> that observing 
> the world, making hypotheses about it, controlling
> for variables, and 
> then testing those hypotheses, and modifying those
> hypotheses and 
> testing again that it became a practice generally
> accepted as worth 
> the time and materials that went into it.
> 
> Even today, most people in what purports to be our
> scientific society 
> believe an enormous number of things that science
> holds to be 
> nonsense. It?s hard to believe how much junk belief
> there is out 
> there, and how much of it is based on junk science,
> and why.
> 
> Why is easy: it?s difficult and expensive to do good
> science, to 
> hypothesize, control for variables, and design tests
> that test for 
> the thing one is testing for.  But junk science is
> easy: it?s almost 
> as easy as sympathetic magic -- in fact, some of it
> is no better. 
> 
> After World War II, the enormous amounts of cargo,
> clothing, food, 
> weapons, tents, radios, and the like, that were
> air-dropped or air-
> lifted into New Guinea and the Melanesian islands
> during the US 
> Pacific campaign against Japan created a vast
> lifestyle change for 
> the islanders. But when the war moved on, and
> ultimately when it 
> ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new cargo
> arrived. 
> Naturally, the islanders made attempts to get cargo
> to fall by 
> parachute or land in planes or ships again,
> islanders did same things 
> they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen do.
> They didn?t have 
> radios, of course, so they carved headphones from
> wood, and wore them 
> while sitting in control towers they built. They
> waved the landing 
> signals while standing on the runways. They lit
> signal fires and 
> torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The
> islanders had 
> concluded that the foreigners had some special
> connection to the 
> powers that be, and by mimicking the foreigners,
> they hoped to 
> achieve the same effect.
> 
> They were doing everything right, of course, except
> for one thing: 
> they were pursuing the form without the substance,
> like writers who 
> think that by employing meter, or by avoiding meter,
> they are writing 
> poetry. 
> 
> What were they missing?  They were missing the
> essence, the guts of 
> the thing: they had the earphones and the antennae,
> but they weren?t 
> hooked up to a radio. The notion of a radio was only
> distantly 
> emulated in the notion of prayer to the ancestors --
> but before the 
> foreigners came, prayers to the ancestors weren?t
> answered with a 
> wealth of cargo from the sky. 
> 
> What they were missing was the scientific method --
> they didn't have 
> it, and they weren't taught it. And since, as Arthur
> C. Clarke 
> famously said, "any sufficiently advanced technology
> is 
> indistinguishable from magic", they thought it was
> the same old 
> magic. They couldn't understand why it didn't work
> for them, though, 
> and they finally, to their credit, gave it up.
> 
> The difference between magic and science is that
> science demands that 
> you should report everything about your test of your
> hypothesis that 
> you think might make it wrong -- not only what you
> think is right 
> about it. You must search for, and present as part
> of your 
> conclusions, other causes that could possibly
> explain your results, 
> including the things you thought that you've
> eliminated by controls, 
> or by some other experiment, and how they worked --
> to make sure 
> people who are following your work can tell that
> variables have been 
> eliminated, or at least controlled or accounted for.
> 
> You have to go into the details that could cast
> doubt upon your 
> conclusions. It?s of the essence, it?s the guts of
> the thing, that 
> you do the best you can to explain why things didn?t
> turn out the way 
> you thought they would, if they didn?t -- even if
> the variance is 
> pretty small. Not only that, but when you
> hypothesize, it?s not 
> enough to hypothesize within a small ambit; you have
> not only to 
> explain how your hypothesis and test explains one
> thing, you have to 
> show how it fits in with other larger hypotheses,
> and how it throws 
> some light on how those things work, too.
> 
> The notion of science is to make sure that everyone
> who may look at 
> your work has every chance to judge your work fairly
> and justly -- 
> that they have no doubt that your work is designed
> to investigate 
> what really happens, and not merely argue
> self-interestedly for a 
> particular result.
> 
> Contrast this idea with salesmanship. There?s a
> famous example of a 
> salmon-canner who was canning perfectly good salmon,
> but the flesh of 
> that fish was white instead of the traditional pink.
> Consumers were 
> not buying it in droves, because they expected
> canned salmon to be 
> pink. So the white-salmon canner changed the label
> on his can to 
> include the phrase "Guaranteed not to turn pink in
> the can", and pink 
> salmon turned into a drug on the market. The
> pink-salmon canners 
> sued. The white-salmon canner claimed he was telling
> the truth -- and 
> 
=== message truncated ===



		
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From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Thu Sep 30 10:58:40 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:58:40 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
Message-ID: <s15bd8d7.073@mail.highland.edu>

Jeff Newberry asked:

>Can anyone think of other poems about poets?  I'm thinking 20th
century here.

Jeff, my Epigramititis: 111 Living American Poets, will be out in early
2005, from BlazeVox editions. The book will be approxiamtely 250 pages,
an epigram for each poet (some of the epigrams are brief, others
unconventionally long; some are quite insulting, others are more like
odes) and a "relevant" image for each poet. The book will carry a
Praefatio by the epigramatist, an Introductio by Dale Smith, and an
Aprobatio by the late Ed Dorn (a letter from him to me, responding to
some of the earliest epigrams). There will be a special limited run of
the book in hardcover, with color images.

So if nothing else, I guess this would qualify as an instance of "poems
about other poets," albeit including the 21st century! I believe it is a
shame we have so lost that fine classical spirit, the spirit of that
golden age when poets so honorably and erotically pilloried each others'
characters, bodies, and reputations. Alas, we live now in an age when
Poetry has become so business-like that its highest offices carry
complete insurance, including dental, and its representatives shoot like
Mercury across the sky, borne by sleek metal tubes toward the far
provinces. Oh, the implications of it all are legion, and in all
quarters, from dying Late-Workshop coves to earnest Post-Language
groves. 

Give me those Romans with their rotten teeth anyday, I say.

Kent



From halvard at earthlink.net  Thu Sep 30 10:53:55 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:53:55 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
In-Reply-To: <008501c4a6f2$dbe1eed0$58b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <KOECIOJIGMDEJAEGDFJEEEKKIOAA.halvard@earthlink.net>

  
{    > Giving up poetry is easy. I give it up twenty or thirty
{    > times a day.
{    >
{    > Hal                Serving the tri-state area.
{    
{    How can you give up something you never had?
{    
{    (I don't mean that.  You got poetry, Hal, you just don't have a brain. 
{    Still joking, James, honest!)
{    
{    --Bob 

Hmm, I had a brain once (I think), now where did I put it? Hmm.

Hal           "We are the zanies of sorrow." 
                               --Oscar Wilde

Halvard Johnson
============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/



From clitophon at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 11:09:38 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 08:09:38 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
In-Reply-To: <s15bd8d7.073@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <20040930150938.79326.qmail@web40404.mail.yahoo.com>

Kent, can I ask you which American poetry journals you
admire and value and those you don't?
--- Kent Johnson <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu> wrote:

> Jeff Newberry asked:
> 
> >Can anyone think of other poems about poets?  I'm
> thinking 20th
> century here.
> 
> Jeff, my Epigramititis: 111 Living American Poets,
> will be out in early
> 2005, from BlazeVox editions. The book will be
> approxiamtely 250 pages,
> an epigram for each poet (some of the epigrams are
> brief, others
> unconventionally long; some are quite insulting,
> others are more like
> odes) and a "relevant" image for each poet. The book
> will carry a
> Praefatio by the epigramatist, an Introductio by
> Dale Smith, and an
> Aprobatio by the late Ed Dorn (a letter from him to
> me, responding to
> some of the earliest epigrams). There will be a
> special limited run of
> the book in hardcover, with color images.
> 
> So if nothing else, I guess this would qualify as an
> instance of "poems
> about other poets," albeit including the 21st
> century! I believe it is a
> shame we have so lost that fine classical spirit,
> the spirit of that
> golden age when poets so honorably and erotically
> pilloried each others'
> characters, bodies, and reputations. Alas, we live
> now in an age when
> Poetry has become so business-like that its highest
> offices carry
> complete insurance, including dental, and its
> representatives shoot like
> Mercury across the sky, borne by sleek metal tubes
> toward the far
> provinces. Oh, the implications of it all are
> legion, and in all
> quarters, from dying Late-Workshop coves to earnest
> Post-Language
> groves. 
> 
> Give me those Romans with their rotten teeth anyday,
> I say.
> 
> Kent
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



		
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From clitophon at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 11:13:18 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 08:13:18 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] comment
In-Reply-To: <20040930145838.73950.qmail@web40427.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20040930151318.76411.qmail@web40427.mail.yahoo.com>

one other thing
when I said that my website was banned - in public
libraries in NI - someone mentioned immoral not
illegal possible reasons for this.
If my website is banned, then why isn't the website of
dangerous thugs like Combat 18 or mad idiots like
David icke or David Irving?  Perhap if one clearly
conforms to the State religion of anti-semitism then
speech is free if not then ludicrous and sinister
rules like their rule 011 that bans my site prevents
children everywhere from reading my thoughts but gives
them access to the lucid formulations of Icke, a man
who believes himself to be the Son of God and the
rulers of the world to be reptilians without an iota
of evidence.
--- Paul Murphy <clitophon at yahoo.com> wrote:

> what do you do with all of those people who believe
> things that fall outside the gamut of science,
> people
> who refuse in the face of it, to believe what
> evidence
> and proof says and follow, instead, pseudo-mystical
> claptrap?  Surely people are free to believe those
> things they wish to believe in but I hardly think
> this
> will result in doing no harm to others which is
> where
> Christianity, for instance, becomes fascism.  (it
> always does because Christianity is simply built on
> one massive pseudo - psychological premise - hatred
> of
> Jews, the people who killed Christ - who was also,
> incidentally, a Jew.)  Christianity so obviously
> echoes the development of Capitalism from its
> progressive aspect to its monopolistic one that we
> can
> clearly see that the 2 things fade and dissolve into
> the other, ie when Capitalism ceases to be
> progressive, logical and scientific and takes on the
> aspects of those things - atavism, irrationalism,
> tribalism - that it sets out to oppose.
> --- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 27 Sep 2004 at 4:28, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > > I think that you are repeating the classic
> fallacy
> > of Western
> > > Liberals, that the West is the Best and the
> others
> > fell outside the
> > > path of Enlightenment. Enlightenment is not
> > intrinsically a
> > > European thing nor, if one looks at European or
> > more specifically
> > > Western European history, did the European
> ruling
> > classes or even
> > > the philosophes, initiate it and this is the
> heart
> > of the paradox. 
> > > Enlightenment originated among non-Europeans,
> > specifically the
> > > Medieval Arabs of Spain,<
> > 
> > It has nothing to do with the West; it has to do
> > with a particular 
> > sort of intellectual integrity which is commonly
> > called the 
> > scientific method. Any human can use the
> scientific
> > method, and where 
> > it first arose, or who first used it best, or most
> > often, or 
> > whatever, is of considerably less moment than
> > whether it is used and 
> > used properly.
> > 
> > In human history there have been all sorts of
> looney
> > ideas, but the 
> > most common of them may be fairly called examples
> of
> > "sympathetic 
> > magic", for example, sticking pins in dolls to try
> > to hurt other 
> > people, or dancing and shouting to scare demons
> out
> > of sick peoples? 
> > bodies. The notion of testing to see if the idea
> > worked, and if it 
> > didn?t work, to try something else, seemed more
> > honored in the breach 
> > than in the observance, if it was thought of at
> all.
> > 
> > But gradually, through a concatenation of
> > circumstances the origins 
> > of which are really irrelevant, since it is the
> > results of the thing 
> > that are important, enough people accepted the
> idea
> > that observing 
> > the world, making hypotheses about it, controlling
> > for variables, and 
> > then testing those hypotheses, and modifying those
> > hypotheses and 
> > testing again that it became a practice generally
> > accepted as worth 
> > the time and materials that went into it.
> > 
> > Even today, most people in what purports to be our
> > scientific society 
> > believe an enormous number of things that science
> > holds to be 
> > nonsense. It?s hard to believe how much junk
> belief
> > there is out 
> > there, and how much of it is based on junk
> science,
> > and why.
> > 
> > Why is easy: it?s difficult and expensive to do
> good
> > science, to 
> > hypothesize, control for variables, and design
> tests
> > that test for 
> > the thing one is testing for.  But junk science is
> > easy: it?s almost 
> > as easy as sympathetic magic -- in fact, some of
> it
> > is no better. 
> > 
> > After World War II, the enormous amounts of cargo,
> > clothing, food, 
> > weapons, tents, radios, and the like, that were
> > air-dropped or air-
> > lifted into New Guinea and the Melanesian islands
> > during the US 
> > Pacific campaign against Japan created a vast
> > lifestyle change for 
> > the islanders. But when the war moved on, and
> > ultimately when it 
> > ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new
> cargo
> > arrived. 
> > Naturally, the islanders made attempts to get
> cargo
> > to fall by 
> > parachute or land in planes or ships again,
> > islanders did same things 
> > they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen do.
> > They didn?t have 
> > radios, of course, so they carved headphones from
> > wood, and wore them 
> > while sitting in control towers they built. They
> > waved the landing 
> > signals while standing on the runways. They lit
> > signal fires and 
> > torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The
> > islanders had 
> > concluded that the foreigners had some special
> > connection to the 
> > powers that be, and by mimicking the foreigners,
> > they hoped to 
> > achieve the same effect.
> > 
> > They were doing everything right, of course,
> except
> > for one thing: 
> > they were pursuing the form without the substance,
> > like writers who 
> > think that by employing meter, or by avoiding
> meter,
> > they are writing 
> > poetry. 
> > 
> > What were they missing?  They were missing the
> > essence, the guts of 
> > the thing: they had the earphones and the
> antennae,
> > but they weren?t 
> > hooked up to a radio. The notion of a radio was
> only
> > distantly 
> > emulated in the notion of prayer to the ancestors
> --
> > but before the 
> > foreigners came, prayers to the ancestors weren?t
> > answered with a 
> > wealth of cargo from the sky. 
> > 
> > What they were missing was the scientific method
> --
> > they didn't have 
> > it, and they weren't taught it. And since, as
> Arthur
> > C. Clarke 
> > famously said, "any sufficiently advanced
> technology
> > is 
> > indistinguishable from magic", they thought it was
> > the same old 
> > magic. They couldn't understand why it didn't work
> > for them, though, 
> > and they finally, to their credit, gave it up.
> > 
> > The difference between magic and science is that
> > science demands that 
> > you should report everything about your test of
> your
> > hypothesis that 
> > you think might make it wrong -- not only what you
> > think is right 
> > about it. You must search for, and present as part
> > of your 
> > conclusions, other causes that could possibly
> 
=== message truncated ===



		
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From halvard at earthlink.net  Thu Sep 30 11:09:12 2004
From: halvard at earthlink.net (Halvard Johnson)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:09:12 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] FW: Collateral reading: John Palattella,
	"Difficult Loves"
Message-ID: <005601c4a6ff$71adbfa0$546fec04@computer>


Difficult Loves
	by John Palattella

It wasn't until 1996, when President Bill Clinton declared April to be National
Poetry Month, that the eminent translator and poet Richard Howard truly grasped
the significance of the opening words of T.S. Eliot's *The Waste Land*, "April is the
cruelest month." "At last we have succeeded in wreaking on poetry what the worst
excesses of Progressive Education and the Palmer Method were helpless to effect:
We have ghettoized a millennial human expression previously conceived as a pervasive
part of conscious life," Howard declared at a PEN awards ceremony that May. "If
we are to save poetry," he insisted, we must restore it "to that status of seclusion and
even secrecy that characterizes only our authentic pleasures and identifies only our
intimately valued actions." Robert Pinsky, then the poet laureate of the United States,
disagreed. "Poetry is part of our shared communal life, as surely as is the Internet,"
Pinsky wrote in a defense of National Poetry Month published in the *New York Times*.
Pinsky's observation is true, although with the adjective "shared" he seemed to want to
draw a veil over some pesky questions. If poetry is integral to communal life, why must
we be reminded of that fact every April, with all the labored cheerleading and hectic
marketing of a big church holiday? Is poetry meaningfully involved in cultural life only
if it preoccupies us in the same way as the Internet? Pinsky's genial tone of
accommodation softened Howard's abrasiveness, but not the force of Howard's point.

Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), has pitched
his tent in Pinsky's camp. In *Disappearing Ink*, Gioia laments that no American poet
today has achieved the kind of fame and influence with a popular audience that Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow enjoyed in the nineteenth century. The work of most contemporary
poets is culturally marginal, and for Gioia marginality is an artistic dead end. But poets
can return to public prominence and revitalize their art, Gioia claims in his book's title essay,
if they follow the lead of rappers, cowboy poets and poetry slammers. The emergence of
electronic media like television and the Internet, he says, borrowing heavily from Marshall
McLuhan's theories about media, has "slightly readjust[ed] the contemporary sensibility in
favor of sound and orality." Rappers and slammers embody this readjusted sensibility
because they compose for the ear and transmit their verse through performance. Roland
Barthes reveled in the death of the author; Gioia rejoices in the death of the text. "American
culture conditioned by electronic media and a celebrity culture based on personalities has
given birth to a new kind of author," he proclaims: "the amplified bard."

In July the NEA released "Reading at Risk," a report lamenting the precipitate decline of
literary reading in the face of electronic media over the past two decades. Why, then, in
*Disappearing Ink* would its chairman extol poets and audiences who forgo the book for
the amp? Equally perplexing is Gioia's claim that the popularity of poetry readings among
"literary" poets who still compose for the page signals the emergence of a vibrant oral culture.
There's a more persuasive claim to be made about such literary readings: They are less an
oral alternative to print culture than a commercial adjunct of it, a way for poets to promote
new books in a marketplace where reviews and advertisements of poetry are rare. Nor is
there a lock-and-key fit between the Internet and orality, as Gioia implies. For the past few
years some poets have approached Google as a *d?tournement* machine, using the search
function as a phrase generator and assembling the results into cut-up poems. (In some circles
the method and poems go by the name of "flarf.") As bewildering or irritating as spam, this
work is defiantly typographic and can be downright impossible to read aloud, amplified or
not.

But what do I know? I'm the kind of critic who Gioia complains is ill equipped to assess
innovations in contemporary poetry because my tastes are based in part on the "antiquarian
assumptions" of Modernism, which "reflect a culture without radio, talking films, television,
videocassettes, computers, cell phones, satellite dishes, and the Internet." If media harmony
between a critic's era and that of his subject is the basis of critical judgment, then Gioia's
enthusiasm in *Disappearing Ink* for Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Jack Spicer, all of
whom made do with pens or typewriters, is peculiar indeed.

Such contradictions pile up in Gioia's essays because Gioia is a critic who needs antagonisms
to justify his enthusiasms. His preferred approach is the American *Kulturkampf* of the people
clashing with a treacherous elite. In *Disappearing Ink*, Gioia worries that because of the
lingering influence of literary poetry's elite and antiquated conventions, which favor composition
the page instead of the stage, poetry risks being crushed by more popular media like the Internet.
Similarly, more than ten years ago in the title piece of *Can Poetry Matter?* Gioia claimed that
poetry was no longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, a state of affairs he
attributed to the elitism of creative writing programs. In that same book, however, he recycled
the argument of Edmund Wilson's 1934 essay "Is Verse a Dying Technique?," in which Wilson
contends that since the late eighteenth century the refinement of the lyric has led poets to forsake
history and satire as suitable subjects, thereby diminishing poetry's popular appeal. If that's true,
then those elite creative writing programs are not the cause but merely the most recent symptom
of a rot that set in more than two centuries ago. In both *Can Poetry Matter?* and *Disappearing
Ink*, a tendency to offer foregone conclusions instead of genuine arguments makes it easier for
Gioia to reassure readers that poetry can regain its cultural prominence if it escapes the clutches
of writing programs or absorbs the oral characteristics of electronic media. This style of
argumentation is aided by Gioia's polite but pushy essayistic style, one that, for all its apparent
specificity, is essentially general and vague.

Such are the tricks critics contrive when they try to exaggerate poetry's cultural prominence. In his
intelligent, elegant and valuable defense of poetry, James Longenbach emphasizes what poets gain
by not being subject to the pressures of a high-stakes market or mediascape. "It's difficult to
complain about poetry's expanding audience," Longenbach says, taking up Richard Howard's
argument without his caustic tone, "but it's more difficult to ask what a culture that wants poetry to
be popular wants poetry to be. The audience has by and large been purchased at the cost of poetry's
inwardness: its strangeness, its propensity to defeat its own expectations." In Gioia's eyes, a poet
who avoids a mass audience is almost by definition arrogant, but for Longenbach such avoidance
"could also be liberating--the creation of a space in which a poem may be pushed to extremes the
culture wouldn't know how to purchase or ignore." After all, it is because Emily Dickinson refused
to cleanse her poems of their unorthodox rhythms and rhymes, thereby preserving a "status of
seclusion and secrecy," that she and her poems are now so well-known. Poems claim our
attention, Longenbach argues, inasmuch as they effectively resist it.

In nine lucid chapters written in a style often as supple as the poems discussed, Longenbach
examines what he calls techniques of poetic self-resistance: the formal tool kit (line, syntax, metaphor,
voice, disjunction) that poets use to question their own convictions, working by glimmers and glints
instead of tidy sums. Longenbach's approach is deceptively simple. He scrutinizes poetry's formal
qualities, but he is not a formalist in the conventional sense of being ahistorical. Discussing a wide
range of work but focusing mostly on modern poems, Longenbach is careful to explain how a
poem's omission of historical content is not necessarily a repression of historical knowledge. The
historical texture of a poem may be measured by its formal dynamics more than the weight
of its content, as in Michael Palmer's "Seven Poems Within a Matrix of War," a sequence of poems
concerning the first Gulf War, or Wallace Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," written
during the early years of the Second World War.

Equally provocative is Longenbach's defense of poetic language. In order to promote poetry in an
indifferent culture, champions of poetry often try to define the mystical difference of poetic language
from ordinary language. Longenbach does the opposite, stressing what the two languages have in
common. Poems exploit rather than suppress the slippages of ordinary language, he explains,
and what demands our attention is how a poet makes the ineradicable ambiguities of ordinary
language uniquely adequate to the subject a poem must express. Or, to borrow a notion from Peter
Gizzi's "Ding Repair," what demands our attention is how poetic language unfolds into meaning,
ordinary and rare each time:

			A hummingbird at the scarlet bell works the vine.
			Even as adults we hope to witness ordinary spectacle
			evolve into meaning, ordinary and rare each time
			the ribbon, the wave--all bent.
			For if those memos, phone calls, holidays
			were to accrue then where would we be?

Longenbach says that the resistance to poetry is the wonder of poetry, "the reinvention of humility,"
a formulation that calls to mind the romantic poet John Keats's description of negative capability as
the ability of a poet to be "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
& reason." But Longenbach's wonder more closely resembles Adam Zagajewski's notion of ardor.
The fourth essay collection by Zagajewski to be translated into English, *A Defense of Ardor* contains
appreciations of and quarrels with writers, painters and philosophers. Written with his characteristic
delicacy, gravity and wit, the book is notable for the acute, thoughtful way that the Polish poet frames
and examines literary and intellectual issues. Zagajewski craves ardor after reading Tzvetan Todorov's
essay on Dutch still-life painting, "In Praise of the Quotidian," which Zagajewski attacks for suggesting
that artists must become "deft miniaturists" immune to moments of experience that are "incomprehensible
and piercing, both extravagant and absolutely fundamental." Yet Zagajewski also craves ardor after
reading E.M. Cioran's *Notebooks*, an "uncommonly irritating" work in which Cioran's extreme
narcissism fuels scabrous rants against quotidian life. Zagajewski finds the residue of ardor in Plato's
concept of metaxu, the state of being "incurably en route," and he finds ardor flourishing in the climate
of thought cultivated by the painter Jozef Czapski and the poets Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert,
who "answered history's menace in universal, not provincial ways. And they touched profound hopes
while shunning easy consolations."

Longenbach also thinks wonder arises from shunning easy consolations, but the roots of his notion of
wonder stretch deeply into a uniquely American and pragmatic source, one running from Emily
Dickinson ("In insecurity to lie/is Joy's insuring quality") through Wallace Stevens and George Oppen to
John Ashbery. These are poets who love flux, who build elaborate metaphors while simultaneously
warning of their collapse, whose poems ride on linguistic sliding, whose voices speak because they are
shattered. They are playfully serious poets who work hard to foreground the infinitely repeatable work
of interpretation and knowing. And their work isn't without hazards. "If the resistance to poetry is the
wonder of poetry," Longenbach asks, "how do we prevent resistance from becoming a fetish, something
with which we are merely fascinated?" By reminding ourselves constantly that "the power of a poem
inheres in the realization that we cannot count on it." No matter how graceful its language, no matter how
resourcefully it mines the ambiguities of ordinary language, a poem can never obviate the pressures of the
ordinary world because a poem's consolation, knitted from figurative language, will unravel and slip away.
Or not.

Early in his book Longenbach invokes the example of Callimachus, the ancient Greek poet who refused
the Homeric challenge of writing an epic, preferring instead to write love poems and elegies. Callimachus
was scorned by his peers for ignoring his civic duties and thereby diminishing the possibilities for poetry.
Longenbach draws a different lesson from Callimachus's choice: It was only because Callimachus was
acutely suspicious about the nature of poetic ambition that he could force his best discoveries against the
walls of his own ambition's limitations. That example informs the most incisive essays of Carl Phillips's
*Coin of the Realm* as well, although the straw men that shamble through the book sometimes elbow
Callimachus aside. Phillips has a tendency to carp about younger poets' suspicions about exercising
authority without explaining exactly what he means, and his single-mindedness about this issue cuts
deeply against the poetics he elaborates in his book.

The ghost of Callimachus enters the picture when Phillips discusses the poetry of the seventeenth-century
Protestant pastor George Herbert, who chose to wrestle with an epic subject, the perplexing ways of
God to man ("why affliction?--why, inevitably, our suffering?"), in the narrow confines of the intricate
lyric poems of *The Temple*. "Herbert persuades by the very thing with which his poems are so
frequently ill at ease: his flawed self," Phillips claims. "It is not so much that he admits to flaw...but that he
brings flaw into view as instructive example." Phillips is a poet with seven books to his name, and the
relentless deliberation he finds in Herbert's lyrics quickens his own work too. "Phillips is not discouraged
but enthralled by this state of perpetually suspended rediscovery," Longenbach writes in *The Resistance
to Poetry*. "He wants the world to be difficult to see because our understanding leaps too quickly from
the *choice* to the *chosen*, from what is *findable* to what is *found*." But what's different about
Phillips's portrait of Herbert's deliberation is its spiritual hue. Without relentless deliberation, Phillips
implies, there can be no desire and surrender; without desire and surrender there can be no faith; and
without faith there can be no relentless deliberation.

The poems of Herbert's that Phillips discusses were composed as a private confession of the desire for
an incomprehensible and piercing kind of knowledge. That gesture of inwardness is about as far as one can
get from the very public arena of the Internet--or, to use Gioia's lingo, from today's auditory avant-garde.
Not unlike Herbert's poems, Longenbach's and Zagajewski's defenses of poetry, along with Phillips's best
essays, are rich and rewarding proof that the will to believe passionately in the fictions of poetry is not
always hostage to the salvation schemes of the overchurched and the intellectually na?ve.

fr. *The Nation*, 10/4/04

Hal                Serving the tri-state area.

Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard at earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/












From marcus at designerglass.com  Thu Sep 30 11:31:37 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:31:37 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Playing with madness
In-Reply-To: <20040930144953.5524.qmail@web40410.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <415BE2D7.30708.B58692@localhost>
Message-ID: <415BEE99.8000.E37135@localhost>

On 30 Sep 2004 at 7:49, Paul Murphy wrote:
> I think that you are really foaming at the mouth ...<

Thank you for your opinion. I think your understanding of the words 
you use, such as "science", "magic", "christianity" and "capitalism" 
are so wrong that it's not going to be productive to continue this 
conversation. Thanks for playing. Better luck next time.

Marcus





From Kent.Johnson at highland.edu  Thu Sep 30 11:35:28 2004
From: Kent.Johnson at highland.edu (Kent Johnson)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:35:28 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poets on Poetry
Message-ID: <s15be17d.004@mail.highland.edu>

Hola Paul,

I don't very much agree with your recent sweeping condemnations of
Christianity, but nevertheless... Como esta todo en Barcelona?

Of course, the journals I admire most are the ones that publish work I
am associated with in one way or another. So my favor is always
evolving. I used to favor Ironwood, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Aerial,
American Poetry Review, Stand (UK), Poetry Review (UK), Il Nuovo
Giornale dei Poeti (Italy),Vuelta (Mexico), the Denver Quarterly,
Pushkin (Russia), and others. More recently I have come to favor No: A
Journal of the Arts, TriQuarterly, Mandorla, Octopus, Typo, Skanky
Possum, Jacket, Fence, Combo, BlazeVox, The Canary, The New Review of
Literature, The Chicago Review, Coyote (Brazil), The East Village,
Untitled: A Journal of Prose Poetry, The Transcendental Friend, Rascuhno
(Brazil), The Cambridge Conference for Contemporary Poetry Review (UK),
The Spoon River Review, Antennae, Cipher Journal, The Poetry Project
Newsletter, the new Backwards City Review, and others I am not thinking
of presently. 

All of these journals are peopled by Poetry thugs and careerists, and I
slum amongst them, giving liberally of the charms my sluttish form
provides.

Kent


From clitophon at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 12:32:16 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:32:16 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poets on Poetry
In-Reply-To: <s15be17d.004@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <20040930163216.51819.qmail@web40412.mail.yahoo.com>

I condemn them, I know.  The Virgin Birth, for
instance, or miracles.  They all seem so,
so...spurious or fallacious.  But then who am I to say
what is and what is not?
Do you like Orbis or Envoi.  Because of the
multi-cultural fascism of the UK I don't tend to get
published in the fashionable London mags but some of
the smaller and less fashionable ones but really in
the fashionable mags of Brum and Liverpool, ie the
Midlands where being a paddy or a navvy isn't so bad
or a Fenian, Tinker, Teague or get.  (Do you remember
the Liver Birds, a very famous UK sitcom?)
No, I went to Muenchen to be with Frau Schwienimaus,
einen sehr romantisch Frau mit drei Grossen Hunds
(kein Umlaut).  I fell in love, yes I'm capable of it
among a people I can only describe as resembling 19th
century Amish or Lutherans or..well you know the
obscurities of Bayerisch.  Servus!
Also a schizophrenic artist, Alexander Roth, a very
noble and tragic person with wonderful paintings and a
drug induced (anti-psychotics) drawl.  And a one-armed
joiner called Mick Hueffner.  Together we stormed
heaven!  Didn't meet Patrick Suskind though, he
doesn't hang out nr Marienplatz but in some plush but
sedated home in Neuhausen nr the Olympia zentrum
sitting with a dose of doxies rding his latest
plethora of oozings and smellings.
I had problems, I was a street artist.  Really a worm
eaten, lice ridden verminous one, painting
conventional paintings in a previous style (who does
this remind you of?) who failed to get into the
academy, who was elected Fuhrer the next yr, who
conquered & conquered & co.

--- Kent Johnson <Kent.Johnson at highland.edu> wrote:

> Hola Paul,
> 
> I don't very much agree with your recent sweeping
> condemnations of
> Christianity, but nevertheless... Como esta todo en
> Barcelona?
> 
> Of course, the journals I admire most are the ones
> that publish work I
> am associated with in one way or another. So my
> favor is always
> evolving. I used to favor Ironwood, Grand Street,
> Conjunctions, Aerial,
> American Poetry Review, Stand (UK), Poetry Review
> (UK), Il Nuovo
> Giornale dei Poeti (Italy),Vuelta (Mexico), the
> Denver Quarterly,
> Pushkin (Russia), and others. More recently I have
> come to favor No: A
> Journal of the Arts, TriQuarterly, Mandorla,
> Octopus, Typo, Skanky
> Possum, Jacket, Fence, Combo, BlazeVox, The Canary,
> The New Review of
> Literature, The Chicago Review, Coyote (Brazil), The
> East Village,
> Untitled: A Journal of Prose Poetry, The
> Transcendental Friend, Rascuhno
> (Brazil), The Cambridge Conference for Contemporary
> Poetry Review (UK),
> The Spoon River Review, Antennae, Cipher Journal,
> The Poetry Project
> Newsletter, the new Backwards City Review, and
> others I am not thinking
> of presently. 
> 
> All of these journals are peopled by Poetry thugs
> and careerists, and I
> slum amongst them, giving liberally of the charms my
> sluttish form
> provides.
> 
> Kent
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



		
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From clitophon at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 12:33:17 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:33:17 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Playing with madness
In-Reply-To: <415BEE99.8000.E37135@localhost>
Message-ID: <20040930163318.98334.qmail@web40423.mail.yahoo.com>

I think that you take it all far too seriously.
--- Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:

> On 30 Sep 2004 at 7:49, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > I think that you are really foaming at the mouth
> ...<
> 
> Thank you for your opinion. I think your
> understanding of the words 
> you use, such as "science", "magic", "christianity"
> and "capitalism" 
> are so wrong that it's not going to be productive to
> continue this 
> conversation. Thanks for playing. Better luck next
> time.
> 
> Marcus
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



		
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Thu Sep 30 12:46:12 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 12:46:12 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Comment
In-Reply-To: <415BEE99.8000.E37135@localhost>
References: <20040930144953.5524.qmail@web40410.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <415C0014.31882.127BA34@localhost>

On 30 Sep 2004 at 9:22, Paul Murphy wrote:
> the Jews did kill Christ, Marcus - it's true, they
> did.<

The Romans killed Christ, Paul. The Roman governor, in a disingenuous 

and transparent attempt to avoid any political backlash that might 
occur, arranged a kangaroo court the outcome of which was not in 
doubt. But in the end the sandals on the ground that killed Christ 
were Roman, not Jewish. Besides, the whole point of the Bible story 
is to point out that humanity killed Christ, and he died willingly 
for humanity's sins, individual and collective, in order that those 
sins be forgiven. It is scarcely a Christian act to try to blame 
Christ's death on anyone since it's clear that Christ himself meant 
to absolve and forgive the sin of killing him along with all other 
sins. The miasma of confusion in which the claim that the Jews killed 

Christ is sunk is truly astounding in the face of what Christians 
claim to believe about Christ and Christ's love.

> Capitalism doesn't seek to profit from atavism or
> tribalism, it is something it either superceded
> historically or eradicated in the course of its
> historical/imperialist path.<

This is simply wrong on the face of it. You seem to have some false 
notion of economics that holds that only one kind of transaction can 
be done in any historical period or geographical location or legal 
jurisdiction, or something like that. 

 > ...  Agressive
> pan-nationalism/tribalism/atavism/the Fuhrer prinzip
> evolves under the pre-conditions of capitalism in
> crisis but has a dynamic entirely alien to capitalism
> namely national expansion, aggression, militarism,
> autarky as opposed to free trade and internationalism
> of the classic Adam Smithian, laissez faire, classic
> Liberal 'hidden hand' kind. <

Jargonesque nonsense. Make an argument, support it with references; 
abjure the notion that by bandying words you're persuading anyone 
that you know what the terms mean. If you do know, which I doubt, 
then take the time to lay out your views and support them with 
evidence and references. If you don't know, which I believe, then why 

reveal the extent of your ignorance by throwing around words the 
meanings of which are obscure to you?

Marcus






From mandolin at mac.com  Thu Sep 30 12:55:09 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 12:55:09 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Science, Magic, and Poetry
In-Reply-To: <3745328.1096555418533.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
References: <3745328.1096555418533.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
Message-ID: <5603606.1096563309198.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>

 
On Thursday, September 30, 2004, at 10:45AM, Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:


>It's also interesting that so many artists still think of an experiment as "What if I do this?" and think that they are approaching their art in a scientific manner by doing so. But can we do an experiment to prove L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory wrong? If not, why call it theory and not just a personal preference? If yes, what does that look like? What would be the predicted reults? What would be controls? Can we do double-blind? And what on earth is gained by pretending a scientific approach to poetry? Better marketing?
>
>


Sorry for replying to myself, but I actually think recent cognitive research demonstrates pretty conclusively that the theory behind langpo, deconstruction, amd most of the pomo schtick is flat wrong. But that doesn't say anything about whether the poetry is any good (I don't like it, but so what?), any more than the fact that alchemical theory could not explain or predict the results of alchemical "experiments" had anything to do with whether a certain reaction occurred or not.

-----
Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the Sonnetarium


From clitophon at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 12:55:41 2004
From: clitophon at yahoo.com (Paul Murphy)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:55:41 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Comment
In-Reply-To: <415C0014.31882.127BA34@localhost>
Message-ID: <20040930165541.25114.qmail@web40408.mail.yahoo.com>

> This is simply wrong on the face of it. You seem to
> have some false 
> notion of economics that holds that only one kind of
> transaction can 
> be done in any historical period or geographical
> location or legal 
> jurisdiction, or something like that. 

Where do I say this?  I wasn't writing a history of
the world, Marcus, merely some glib comments on an
internet chatline.  The sort of discourse you want is
better reserved for an academic journal.  I suggest
you go there and find an audience of people for that
kind of discourse.



		
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From mandolin at mac.com  Thu Sep 30 12:59:15 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 12:59:15 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Comment
In-Reply-To: <415C0014.31882.127BA34@localhost>
References: <20040930144953.5524.qmail@web40410.mail.yahoo.com>
	<415C0014.31882.127BA34@localhost>
Message-ID: <1641464.1096563555240.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>

 
On Thursday, September 30, 2004, at 12:46PM, Marcus Bales <marcus at designerglass.com> wrote:

>On 30 Sep 2004 at 9:22, Paul Murphy wrote:
>> the Jews did kill Christ, Marcus - it's true, they
>> did.<
>
>The Romans killed Christ, Paul. The Roman governor, in a disingenuous 
>
>and transparent attempt to avoid any political backlash that might 
>occur, arranged a kangaroo court the outcome of which was not in 
>doubt. But in the end the sandals on the ground that killed Christ 
>were Roman, not Jewish. Besides, the whole point of the Bible story 
>is to point out that humanity killed Christ, and he died willingly 
>for humanity's sins, individual and collective, in order that those 
>sins be forgiven. It is scarcely a Christian act to try to blame 
>Christ's death on anyone since it's clear that Christ himself meant 
>to absolve and forgive the sin of killing him along with all other 
>sins. The miasma of confusion in which the claim that the Jews killed 
>
>Christ is sunk is truly astounding in the face of what Christians 
>claim to believe about Christ and Christ's love.
>

Elaine Pagels, in The Origins of Satan, does what seems to me a good job of explaining how the changing political situation of the early Christians led them from considering themselves Jews to considering Jews as the enemy.

-----
Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the Sonnetarium


From marcus at designerglass.com  Thu Sep 30 13:08:45 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:08:45 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Comment
In-Reply-To: <20040930165541.25114.qmail@web40408.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <415C0014.31882.127BA34@localhost>
Message-ID: <415C055D.27795.13C61E2@localhost>

> > This is simply wrong on the face of it. You seem to
> > have some false 
> > notion of economics that holds that only one kind of
> > transaction can 
> > be done in any historical period or geographical
> > location or legal 
> > jurisdiction, or something like that. 
 
On 30 Sep 2004 at 9:55, Paul Murphy wrote:
> Where do I say this?  I wasn't writing a history of
> the world, Marcus, merely some glib comments on an
> internet chatline.<

Splendid -- I'll hold you to that.

Marcus




From mandolin at mac.com  Thu Sep 30 13:14:56 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:14:56 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Comment
In-Reply-To: <20040930165541.25114.qmail@web40408.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040930165541.25114.qmail@web40408.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <3743385.1096564496680.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>

 
On Thursday, September 30, 2004, at 12:56PM, Paul Murphy <clitophon at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> This is simply wrong on the face of it. You seem to
>> have some false 
>> notion of economics that holds that only one kind of
>> transaction can 
>> be done in any historical period or geographical
>> location or legal 
>> jurisdiction, or something like that. 
>
>Where do I say this?  I wasn't writing a history of
>the world, Marcus, merely some glib comments on an
>internet chatline.  The sort of discourse you want is
>better reserved for an academic journal.  I suggest
>you go there and find an audience of people for that
>kind of discourse.
>


Geez, Paul, there are a hell of lot of academics on this list, and many of us who, like me, aren't currently in academia have spent a fair amount of time there. And even if we were all roofers (I was, for 2 years not long ago), would you expect us not to respond to one another except when we agree? Maybe when you don't want us to think about something you've written you could put "glib comment" in the subject line and we'd know not to bother.

-----
Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the Sonnetarium


From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep 30 13:21:28 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:21:28 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
Message-ID: <df.28a94d4.2e8d9a98@cs.com>

Lowell has poems about Schwartz, Pound, Frost, and Jarrell, among others.
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From marcus at designerglass.com  Thu Sep 30 13:32:09 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:32:09 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Comment
In-Reply-To: <3743385.1096564496680.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
References: <20040930165541.25114.qmail@web40408.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <415C0AD9.10723.151CB66@localhost>

On 30 Sep 2004 at 9:53, Paul Murphy wrote:
> It could also be argued that [glib comment, glib comment, glib
> comment] ...<

Well, since you're only spewing glib comments, it's safe to say that 
your glib comments require no reply except to note that they're glib 
comments.

> Your (sic) just being [glib comment, glib comment, glib
> comment] ...<

Well, since you're only spewing glib comments, it's safe to say that 
your glib comments require no reply except to note that they're glib 
comments.

Marcus






From mandolin at mac.com  Thu Sep 30 13:45:41 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:45:41 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
In-Reply-To: <s15bd8d7.073@mail.highland.edu>
References: <s15bd8d7.073@mail.highland.edu>
Message-ID: <12195949.1096566341763.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>

 
>Jeff Newberry asked:
>
>>Can anyone think of other poems about poets?  I'm thinking 20th
>century here.
>


I don't think Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters have ben mentioned yet.



-----
Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the Sonnetarium


From anna_beth_young at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 14:06:27 2004
From: anna_beth_young at yahoo.com (Anna Young)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:06:27 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
In-Reply-To: <12195949.1096566341763.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
Message-ID: <20040930180627.88526.qmail@web51309.mail.yahoo.com>

Ilya Kaminsky has a great poem, "musica humana" about Osip Mandelshtam. 
also poems about Celan, Tsvetaeva and Brodsky and prose writer Isaak Babel in his book, "Dancing in Odessa" 
 
Heaney has an elegy for Brodsky in his new book.
 
Ed Hirsch has a lot of poems about other writers in On Love
 
Richard Howard writes a lot of poems about other writers too.
 
Among famous ones: Auden's Elegy for Yeats. Brodsky's elegy for Eliot, Walcott's elegy for Auden, Pound's pact with Whitman, etc.



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From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 14:03:24 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:03:24 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
In-Reply-To: <12195949.1096566341763.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
Message-ID: <20040930180324.66327.qmail@web52610.mail.yahoo.com>

Thanks everyone for all the great replies.  I thought
about "Supermarket in California" after I sent out the
original email, Hal.  

Kent makes some astute comments regarding this
tradition.  After I read the Merwin piece this
morning, I sat for a bit thinking about poems about
poets.  I came up with "Adonais" and a Keats poem
about Leigh Hunt.  But, with  my limited knowledge,
that was about it.

The funny thing is, the more I thought about writing
about my own mentor, the more an odd part of me
resisted doing so.  I'm still not sure why . . .

Right now, in my composition course, my students are
doing a lot of process writing, that is, writing about
their writing, trying to capture empirically (if
that's possible) the actual process in action:  how
many times they worked on a piece or any strange or
not-so-strange rituals they do before writing.  I
wonder if I'm resisting writing about my mentor
because of some hard-wired prejudice that I'm not even
aware of . . .

Again--great commentary.  Oh, and thanks for playing
the "What are you reading?" game, as well.  

Yours,

Jeff Newberry

--- Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:

>  
> >Jeff Newberry asked:
> >
> >>Can anyone think of other poems about poets?  I'm
> thinking 20th
> >century here.
> >
> 
> 
> I don't think Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters have ben
> mentioned yet.
> 
> 
> 
> -----
> Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
> http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the
> Sonnetarium
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
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From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep 30 14:11:40 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:11:40 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
Message-ID: <1d6.2c38a18a.2e8da65c@aol.com>

I decided, around 4PM today, after much reflection, to give up writing
> poetry.
Here are some things I pulled out of a little book called, George Oppen-A 
Radical Practice by Susan Thackrey, O Books, 2001?
 
?George Oppen ceased to write poetry from this point [1935, the year he 
joined the Communist Party] until 1958, for many reasons, not the least being that 
he did not want to write propaganda, to describe what was ?already determined 
before the verse.? (SL, p.
22) He also said that ?he didn?t know what the world was,? and couldn?t 
find it in the poetry then being written.? (Hatlen & Mandel, ?Poetry & Politics: 
A Conversation with George and Mary Oppen,? George Oppen: Man and Poet, 
National Poetry Foundation, 1981)
 
?In 1958 Oppen, after dreaming that he did not want to rust, began to write 
poetry again.?
 
& some Oppen quotes from her book?
 
??suppose, instead of an ?instant archeology? that imagines a 
personification of things already known, one imagines the first objects to become object to 
living consciousness?their force is that among sensations they emerged as 
objects?can we suppose, in the history of the Sacred, a greater moment   ? this 
is the ground the poem?s meant to stand on.? ?George Oppen,  Selected Letters, 
p. 248
 
?I think that poetry?must be made out of the clarity of the perceptions, of 
emotion as the ability to perceive.? ?George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 40, 
1960 to Cid Corman 
 
?there are things we believe or think we believe or want to believe which 
will not substantiate themselves in the concrete material of the poem.??George 
Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 287, to John Taggart
 
?Words cannot be wholly transparent?in despair, so many turn to ?the machine 
of words? and arrive, if anywhere, at the Hermetic?the ?machine of words? 
which resolves everything?until one steps out the door.? ?George Oppen, 
Selected Letter, pp. 144-145

?I think that poetry which is of any value is always revelatory. Not that it 
reveals or could reveal Everything, but it must reveal something?and for the 
first time?it is a knowledge which is hard to hold, it is held in the poem, a 
meaning grasped again on 
re-reading. ??George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 133
 
"I don't mean?that I'm trying to elaborate a philosophy in a poem: I mean 
that that these thoughts are part of one's feeling about everything--it can't 
just be kept out, except by the purest artiness." George Oppen, Selected Letters, 
pp. 18-19
 
Just don't rust,
Finnegan
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From anny.ballardini at tin.it  Thu Sep 30 14:22:20 2004
From: anny.ballardini at tin.it (Anny Ballardini)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:22:20 +0200
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
References: <1d6.2c38a18a.2e8da65c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <00d801c4a71a$6cf72120$3cdf3052@yourpk9x5fuc06>

Thank you for this post,

Anny

  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 8:11 PM


    I decided, around 4PM today, after much reflection, to give up writing
    > poetry.
  Here are some things I pulled out of a little book called, George Oppen-A Radical Practice by Susan Thackrey, O Books, 2001?

   

  ?George Oppen ceased to write poetry from this point [1935, the year he joined the Communist Party] until 1958, for many reasons, not the least being that he did not want to write propaganda, to describe what was ?already determined before the verse.? (SL, p.

  22) He also said that ?he didn?t know what the world was,? and couldn?t find it in the poetry then being written.? (Hatlen & Mandel, ?Poetry & Politics: A Conversation with George and Mary Oppen,? George Oppen: Man and Poet, National Poetry Foundation, 1981)

   

  ?In 1958 Oppen, after dreaming that he did not want to rust, began to write poetry again.?

   

  & some Oppen quotes from her book?

   

  ??suppose, instead of an ?instant archeology? that imagines a personification of things already known, one imagines the first objects to become object to living consciousness?their force is that among sensations they emerged as objects?can we suppose, in the history of the Sacred, a greater moment   ? this is the ground the poem?s meant to stand on.? ?George Oppen,  Selected Letters, p. 248

   

  ?I think that poetry?must be made out of the clarity of the perceptions, of emotion as the ability to perceive.? ?George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 40, 1960 to Cid Corman 

   

  ?there are things we believe or think we believe or want to believe which will not substantiate themselves in the concrete material of the poem.??George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 287, to John Taggart

   

  ?Words cannot be wholly transparent?in despair, so many turn to ?the machine of words? and arrive, if anywhere, at the Hermetic?the ?machine of words? which resolves everything?until one steps out the door.? ?George Oppen, Selected Letter, pp. 144-145


  ?I think that poetry which is of any value is always revelatory. Not that it reveals or could reveal Everything, but it must reveal something?and for the first time?it is a knowledge which is hard to hold, it is held in the poem, a meaning grasped again on 

  re-reading. ??George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 133

   

  "I don't mean?that I'm trying to elaborate a philosophy in a poem: I mean that that these thoughts are part of one's feeling about everything--it can't just be kept out, except by the purest artiness." George Oppen, Selected Letters, pp. 18-19

   

  Just don't rust,

  Finnegan



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
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From gmguddi at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep 30 14:23:27 2004
From: gmguddi at ilstu.edu (Gabriel Gudding)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:23:27 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] I give up Poetry
In-Reply-To: <1d6.2c38a18a.2e8da65c@aol.com>
References: <1d6.2c38a18a.2e8da65c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20040930132245.02dfc348@mail.ilstu.edu>

Oppen's fellow Objectivist Carl Rakosi also gave up poetry writing -- for 
30 years. 



From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 14:23:44 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:23:44 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] National Book Critics Circles Nominees
Message-ID: <20040930182344.14057.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>

Poetry, but the page links to others:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0224/p17s01-bogn.html

Jeff

=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
_______________________________
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From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 14:22:27 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:22:27 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
In-Reply-To: <20040930180627.88526.qmail@web51309.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20040930182227.77220.qmail@web52610.mail.yahoo.com>

Crud.  I'm looking dumber and dumber every time that I
post to this list.  How could I forget Auden's elegy
to Yeats?

Exposing myself for the hayseed I must be,

Jeff Newberry


--- Anna Young <anna_beth_young at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Ilya Kaminsky has a great poem, "musica humana"
> about Osip Mandelshtam. 
> also poems about Celan, Tsvetaeva and Brodsky and
> prose writer Isaak Babel in his book, "Dancing in
> Odessa" 
>  
> Heaney has an elegy for Brodsky in his new book.
>  
> Ed Hirsch has a lot of poems about other writers in
> On Love
>  
> Richard Howard writes a lot of poems about other
> writers too.
>  
> Among famous ones: Auden's Elegy for Yeats.
> Brodsky's elegy for Eliot, Walcott's elegy for
> Auden, Pound's pact with Whitman, etc.
> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
> protection around 
> http://mail.yahoo.com >
_______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


From wwmorgan at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep 30 14:36:14 2004
From: wwmorgan at ilstu.edu (Bill Morgan)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:36:14 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
In-Reply-To: <20040930182227.77220.qmail@web52610.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040930180627.88526.qmail@web51309.mail.yahoo.com>
	<20040930182227.77220.qmail@web52610.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.2.0.2.20040930133317.01b21eb0@mail.ilstu.edu>

	If you're willing to move back a bit in history, Hardy has memorial poems 
on Swinburne, Barnes, Meredith, Keats, Shelley, Gibbon, & Shakespeare--all 
of them written in the 20c.

							Bill Morgan





From maxpaul at sfsu.edu  Thu Sep 30 14:36:40 2004
From: maxpaul at sfsu.edu (MAXINE CHERNOFF)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:36:40 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
In-Reply-To: <20040930180627.88526.qmail@web51309.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040930180627.88526.qmail@web51309.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.44.0409301136150.1622-100000@apollo.sfsu.edu>

There's an entire book of poems about Whitman from the U of Iowa Press. MC




From wwmorgan at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep 30 14:40:11 2004
From: wwmorgan at ilstu.edu (Bill Morgan)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:40:11 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
In-Reply-To: <6.0.2.0.2.20040930133317.01b21eb0@mail.ilstu.edu>
References: <20040930180627.88526.qmail@web51309.mail.yahoo.com>
	<20040930182227.77220.qmail@web52610.mail.yahoo.com>
	<6.0.2.0.2.20040930133317.01b21eb0@mail.ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <6.0.2.0.2.20040930133653.01b1b400@mail.ilstu.edu>

         No, sorry, I'm wrong: the Barnes and Gibbon poems and one of the 
Keats poems are undated but probably 19c.

At 01:36 PM 9/30/2004, you wrote:
>         If you're willing to move back a bit in history, Hardy has 
> memorial poems on Swinburne, Barnes, Meredith, Keats, Shelley, Gibbon, & 
> Shakespeare--all of them written in the 20c.
>
>                                                         Bill Morgan
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry





From mandolin at mac.com  Thu Sep 30 14:40:58 2004
From: mandolin at mac.com (Michael Snider)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:40:58 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Science, Magic, and Poetry
In-Reply-To: <5603606.1096563309198.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
References: <3745328.1096555418533.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
	<5603606.1096563309198.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>
Message-ID: <6307973.1096569658731.JavaMail.mandolin@mac.com>

 
On Thursday, September 30, 2004, at 12:55PM, Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:

> 
>On Thursday, September 30, 2004, at 10:45AM, Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:
>

>Sorry for replying to myself,  AGAIN

There's a beautiful example of scientific work in this post ( http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/a_scientific_model_of_segmentation/ ) at PZ Meyers' bioblog Pharyngula.

-----
Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the Sonnetarium


From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Thu Sep 30 14:59:44 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:59:44 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A3B4@ariel.ripon.edu>

I begin to wonder how many poets *haven't* written poems about or to other
poets, past or present.  

Even Frost, who kept such a wary distance from any rival, elegized his
friend Edward Thomas, and, in a much better poem, wrote "The Road Not Taken"
as an oblique mockery of Thomas.  

E. A. Robinson, a name that doesn't seem to come up much these days, wrote a
number of poems in tribute to poets of the past.  

And here's August Kleinzahaler in a recent poem.  Don't know if the dying
poet here is someone real or not.  Anyone have an idea on that?


The Old Poet, Dying

He looks eerily young, 
what's left of him, 
purged, somehow, back into boyhood. 
It is difficult not to watch 
the movie on TV at the foot of his bed, 
40" color screen, 
a jailhouse dolly psychodrama: 
truncheons and dirty shower scenes. 
I recognize one of the actresses, 
now a famous lesbian, 
clearly an early B-movie role. 
The black nurse says "Oh dear" 
during the beatings.
--*TV in this town is crap*, he says. 
His voice is very faint. 
He leans toward me, 
sliding further and further, 
until the nurse has to straighten him out, 
scolding him gently.
He reaches out for my hand. 
The sudden intimacy rattles me. 
He is telling a story.
Two, actually, 
and at some point they blend together. 
There are rivers and trains, 
Oxford and a town near Hamburg. 
Also, the night train to Milan 
and a lovely Italian breakfast. 
The river in Oxford--
he can't remember the name; 
but the birds and fritillaria in bloom ... 
He remembers the purple flowers 
and a plate of gingerbread cookies 
set out at one of the colleges. 
He gasps to remember those cookies. 
How surprised he must have been 
by the largesse, 
and hungry, too.
--*He's drifting in and out*: 
I can hear the nurse 
on the phone from the other room. 
He has been remembering Europe for me. 
Exhausted, he lies quiet for a time. 
--*There's nothing better than a good pee*, 
he says and begins to fade. 
He seems very close to death. 
Perhaps in a moment, perhaps a week. 
Then awakes.
Every patch of story, no matter how fuddled, 
resolves into a drollery.
He will perish, I imagine, 
en route to a drollery.

Although his poems, 
little kinetic snapshots of trees and light, 
so denuded of personality 
and delicately made 
that irony of any sort 
would stand out 
like a pile of steaming cow flop 
on a parquet floor.
We are in a great metropolis 
that rises heroically from the American prairie: 
a baronial home, 
the finest of neighborhoods, 
its broad streets nearly empty 
on a Saturday afternoon, 
here and there a redbud in bloom. 
Even in health, 
a man so modest and soft-spoken 
as to be invisible 
among others, in a room of almost any size. 
It was, I think, a kind of hardship. 
--*Have you met what's-his-name yet?*
he asks.
*You know who I mean, 
the big shot*.
               --*Yes*, I tell him, *I have*.
--*You know that poem of his? 
Everyone knows that poem 
where he's sitting indoors by the fire 
and it's snowing outside 
and he suddenly feels a snowflake 
on his wrist?*
He pauses and begins to nod off. 
I remember now the name of the river 
he was after, the Cherwell, 
with its naked dons, The Parson's Pleasure. 
There's a fiercesome catfight 
on the TV, with blondie catching hell 
from the chicana.
He comes round again and turns to me, 
leaning close, 
                          --*Well, of course*, he says, 
taking my hand, 
his eyes narrowing with malice and delight: 
--*That's not going to be just any old snowflake, 
now, is it?*

--August Kleinzahler.  *The Strange Hours Travelers Keep*.  Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 2003.



============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================



From ron.silliman at verizon.net  Thu Sep 30 15:03:06 2004
From: ron.silliman at verizon.net (Ron)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 15:03:06 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Silliman's Blog
Message-ID: <000801c4a720$1efcc2d0$6501a8c0@Dell>

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

RECENT TOPICS:

"Santa Cruz Propositions" -
Robert Duncan as topical poet

Hats off to C.D. Wright!

"Ideas of the Meaning of Form" -
Robert Duncan's major statement of poetics

Combining theosophy & psychology -
Robert Duncan's turn to theory

1-Year-Plan:
Barrett Watten's metacritical blog

The line in the title -
Zukofsky's Test of Poetry's dark brow

Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Alan Golding
on Zukofsky's Test of Poetry

Gender & Zukofsky

60 hours in New York

Tom Pickard's Dark Months of May

The Elder Poem -
Robert Duncan's concept of the late epic

The Day Book as Ur-Blog:
Robert Duncan's plotless prose

Forthcoming readings & talks by Ron Silliman:
NYC, Philly, Lawrence, KS & SF
(& that's just the next three weeks)

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/




From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep 30 15:14:20 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 15:14:20 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
Message-ID: <54.342251ee.2e8db50c@cs.com>

In a message dated 9/30/2004 2:01:54 PM Central Daylight Time, 
GrahamD at ripon.edu writes: 
> 
> E. A. Robinson, a name that doesn't seem to come up much these days, wrote a
> number of poems in tribute to poets of the past.  
The best is certainly the sonnet on Crabbe.
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From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 16:09:15 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:09:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Fwd: Re: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
Message-ID: <20040930200915.36943.qmail@web52603.mail.yahoo.com>


--- Jeff Newberry <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:22:27 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Jeff Newberry <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
> To: 
>     "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp,
> Views" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> 
> Crud.  I'm looking dumber and dumber every time that
> I
> post to this list.  How could I forget Auden's elegy
> to Yeats?
> 
> Exposing myself for the hayseed I must be,
> 
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> 
> --- Anna Young <anna_beth_young at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > Ilya Kaminsky has a great poem, "musica humana"
> > about Osip Mandelshtam. 
> > also poems about Celan, Tsvetaeva and Brodsky and
> > prose writer Isaak Babel in his book, "Dancing in
> > Odessa" 
> >  
> > Heaney has an elegy for Brodsky in his new book.
> >  
> > Ed Hirsch has a lot of poems about other writers
> in
> > On Love
> >  
> > Richard Howard writes a lot of poems about other
> > writers too.
> >  
> > Among famous ones: Auden's Elegy for Yeats.
> > Brodsky's elegy for Eliot, Walcott's elegy for
> > Auden, Pound's pact with Whitman, etc.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do You Yahoo!?
> > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
> > protection around 
> > http://mail.yahoo.com >
> _______________________________________________
> > New-Poetry mailing list
> > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> > 
> 
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
>  
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> 
> 
> 		
> _______________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
> http://vote.yahoo.com
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
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From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 16:09:42 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:09:42 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Fwd: Re: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
Message-ID: <20040930200942.34581.qmail@web52610.mail.yahoo.com>


--- Jeff Newberry <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:03:24 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Jeff Newberry <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
> To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views"
> <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
> 
> Thanks everyone for all the great replies.  I
> thought
> about "Supermarket in California" after I sent out
> the
> original email, Hal.  
> 
> Kent makes some astute comments regarding this
> tradition.  After I read the Merwin piece this
> morning, I sat for a bit thinking about poems about
> poets.  I came up with "Adonais" and a Keats poem
> about Leigh Hunt.  But, with  my limited knowledge,
> that was about it.
> 
> The funny thing is, the more I thought about writing
> about my own mentor, the more an odd part of me
> resisted doing so.  I'm still not sure why . . .
> 
> Right now, in my composition course, my students are
> doing a lot of process writing, that is, writing
> about
> their writing, trying to capture empirically (if
> that's possible) the actual process in action:  how
> many times they worked on a piece or any strange or
> not-so-strange rituals they do before writing.  I
> wonder if I'm resisting writing about my mentor
> because of some hard-wired prejudice that I'm not
> even
> aware of . . .
> 
> Again--great commentary.  Oh, and thanks for playing
> the "What are you reading?" game, as well.  
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> --- Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> >  
> > >Jeff Newberry asked:
> > >
> > >>Can anyone think of other poems about poets? 
> I'm
> > thinking 20th
> > >century here.
> > >
> > 
> > 
> > I don't think Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters have
> ben
> > mentioned yet.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > -----
> > Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer. 
> > http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the
> > Sonnetarium
> > _______________________________________________
> > New-Poetry mailing list
> > New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> > http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> > 
> 
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
>  
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> 
> 
> 		
> _______________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
> http://vote.yahoo.com
> 


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 


From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 16:16:08 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:16:08 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems by Others: Catherine Tufariello "Feast of
	Tabernacles"
Message-ID: <20040930201608.38143.qmail@web52604.mail.yahoo.com>

The Feast of Tabernacles 

After the final meal hurriedly eaten
Behind doors spattered with lambsblood, sandals and
staff
Ready for flight, the rising dough in bowls
Brought on the journey unbaked, the wailing children
Snatched from sleep and huddled into clothes;
After the keeping grief when the Egyptians
Found their own children smothered in their beds
Too suddenly for sound, and then the chase
Across the desert to the Sea of Reeds;
After plunging, panicked, through the corridor
Of water impossibly sundered like a chasm
On either side, then seeing the chariots
Of Pharoah's army roll and disappear,
Shrieking horses and soldiers drowned alike
Under the crumpling walls: after all that,
They must have thought they saw the land of Canaan
Lushly shimmering in the middle distance
Just beyond the column of white smoke?
Never that the high drama of departure
Would be followed by forty years of tedium,
More than fourteen thousand evening meals cooked
And eaten, pots scoured and clothing scrubbed
With never enough water, by stooping women,
While dust and sand got into everything.
Manna, glazing the ground the first morning
Of exile like flakes of hoarfrost, celestial food
Tasting of honey and coriander seed,
Soon grew monotonous as a steady diet.
For Moses, the exclusive interviews
On Sinai punctuated weary years
Of settling quarrels, hearing footsore stragglers
Ask again if they were almost there,
Or grumble resentfully that even bondage
Was better than a life of wandering.
Think how long it must have been before
The death of bitter nostalgia, then of desire
For a promised land that none would ever see;
Longer still before they welcomed joy
To the temporary shelter of the way, 
Stars shining through the scattered branches. 


Catherine Tufariello 
from *Keeping My Name* 
Texas Tech University Press 




=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


From marcus at designerglass.com  Thu Sep 30 16:23:07 2004
From: marcus at designerglass.com (Marcus Bales)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 16:23:07 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems by Others: Catherine Tufariello "Feast
	of	Tabernacles"
In-Reply-To: <20040930201608.38143.qmail@web52604.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <415C32EB.14854.1EE540F@localhost>

Don't you just hate it when the doors are spattered
with lambsblood, sandals and staff? That staff stain is really hard 
to get out!

Marcus

On 30 Sep 2004 at 13:16, Jeff Newberry wrote:

> The Feast of Tabernacles 
> 
> After the final meal hurriedly eaten
> Behind doors spattered with lambsblood, sandals and
> staff
> Ready for flight, the rising dough in bowls
> Brought on the journey unbaked, the wailing children
> Snatched from sleep and huddled into clothes;
> After the keeping grief when the Egyptians
> Found their own children smothered in their beds
> Too suddenly for sound, and then the chase
> Across the desert to the Sea of Reeds;
> After plunging, panicked, through the corridor
> Of water impossibly sundered like a chasm
> On either side, then seeing the chariots
> Of Pharoah's army roll and disappear,
> Shrieking horses and soldiers drowned alike
> Under the crumpling walls: after all that,
> They must have thought they saw the land of Canaan
> Lushly shimmering in the middle distance
> Just beyond the column of white smoke?
> Never that the high drama of departure
> Would be followed by forty years of tedium,
> More than fourteen thousand evening meals cooked
> And eaten, pots scoured and clothing scrubbed
> With never enough water, by stooping women,
> While dust and sand got into everything.
> Manna, glazing the ground the first morning
> Of exile like flakes of hoarfrost, celestial food
> Tasting of honey and coriander seed,
> Soon grew monotonous as a steady diet.
> For Moses, the exclusive interviews
> On Sinai punctuated weary years
> Of settling quarrels, hearing footsore stragglers
> Ask again if they were almost there,
> Or grumble resentfully that even bondage
> Was better than a life of wandering.
> Think how long it must have been before
> The death of bitter nostalgia, then of desire
> For a promised land that none would ever see;
> Longer still before they welcomed joy
> To the temporary shelter of the way, 
> Stars shining through the scattered branches. 
> 
> 
> Catherine Tufariello 
> from *Keeping My Name* 
> Texas Tech University Press 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
> http://vote.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 






From GrahamD at ripon.edu  Thu Sep 30 17:00:15 2004
From: GrahamD at ripon.edu (Graham, David)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 16:00:15 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
Message-ID: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A3B7@ariel.ripon.edu>



> 	E. A. Robinson, a name that doesn't seem to come up much these days,
> wrote a
> 	number of poems in tribute to poets of the past.  
> 
> 
> The best is certainly the sonnet on Crabbe.
--------------------------------------

George Crabbe

Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will, -
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.
In spite of all fine science disavows,
Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill
There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,
Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.
Whether or not we read him, we can feel
>From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.

E. A. Robinson

============================================
David Graham
Department of English, Ripon College
grahamd at ripon.edu
     Home Page:  
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
     My Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

Experience Ripon at http://www.ripon.edu
============================================



From jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com  Thu Sep 30 17:28:35 2004
From: jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com (Jeff Newberry)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:28:35 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
Message-ID: <20040930212835.8611.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>

Hey, I found another.  

Jeff Newberry

George Herbert
by Mark Jarman, from *To the Green Man* (Sarabande,
2004)

Who is wise enough today to be George Herbert,
  Who though he lost his temper could remain
Tractable to a loving, patient voice?
  Washing his parishioners' feet, as the collar chafed
And softened. Writing his fastidious verses,
  Like the coffin-shaped stones of his century,
Decked with skulls and propped in churchyard corners.
  Death, a puddle of dust, drew under his door,
Like talcum powder, clinging to his shoes.
  And love, whose board he hammered with his fist,
Drew him in and offered him its meat,
  That ambiguous unambiguous word. George Herbert
Was wise enough to sit and clean his plate.


=====
Jeff Newberry
 
"Sometimes it's not so easy,
especially when your only friend
talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
and you do just the same as him."
--Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 


From Rsgwynn1 at cs.com  Thu Sep 30 17:36:21 2004
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com (Rsgwynn1 at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 17:36:21 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
Message-ID: <ff.3182a0a.2e8dd655@cs.com>

I just published a poem about Izaak Walton and John Donne fishing.  It's in 
the spring issue of the Sewanee Review.
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From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep 30 17:56:20 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 17:56:20 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
Message-ID: <141.3507a52b.2e8ddb04@aol.com>

Or the other bigshot poet 
the Old Dying Poet is talking about, you know,
'the snowflake on the wrist poem guy',
that guy. I'm stumped.
Finnegan
In a message dated 9/30/2004 3:01:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
GrahamD at ripon.edu writes:
Don't know if the dying
poet here is someone real or not.  Anyone have an idea on that?



--*Have you met what's-his-name yet?*
he asks.
*You know who I mean, 
the big shot*.
               --*Yes*, I tell him, *I have*.
--*You know that poem of his? 
Everyone knows that poem 
where he's sitting indoors by the fire 
and it's snowing outside 
and he suddenly feels a snowflake 
on his wrist?*
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From MillB at aol.com  Thu Sep 30 18:31:11 2004
From: MillB at aol.com (MillB at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 18:31:11 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
Message-ID: <65.34bf09d8.2e8de32f@aol.com>

Jeff,
 
I love that Merwin poem about Berryman and have used it a number of times  to 
open the semester in my writing classes.  It is a great poem to use in a  
parody exercise as well.
 
Mill

I'm all  in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start  with typewriters.

Frank Lloyd  Wright
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Thu Sep 30 19:55:04 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:55:04 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
References: <4BBBE1EC8182D511BF9800508BBD75990547A3B4@ariel.ripon.edu>
Message-ID: <00ba01c4a748$ebc078c0$6eb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



>I begin to wonder how many poets *haven't* written poems about or to other
> poets, past or present.

I thought I hadn't, but just remembered I did a visual poem about Richard 
Kostelanetz intended for a Festshrift collection now four years overdue. 
People don't tend to get into my kind of poetry.

--Bob 




From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Thu Sep 30 20:06:37 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:06:37 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] CD Wright Poems
References: <BD7D87CE.B975%grahamd@ripon.edu><012201c4a49f$7703ce70$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc><1096302086.41583e0666e35@webmail.ukonline.net><029101c4a4ec$0385e440$23b831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc><1096369700.41594624415f2@webmail.ukonline.net>
	<005701c4a676$2d4c1890$9bb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>
Message-ID: <00c901c4a74a$88c3fa60$6eb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/cdwright/online_poems.htm 

I just used the link about to read some CD Wright.  The Wright I think a good poet, I now see, is Charles.  

--Bob G.
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From bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net  Thu Sep 30 20:08:51 2004
From: bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net (Bob Grumman)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:08:51 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
References: <54.342251ee.2e8db50c@cs.com>
Message-ID: <00dd01c4a74a$d8f8a990$6eb831d0@youro0kwkw9jwc>



E. A. Robinson, a name that doesn't seem to come up much these days, wrote a number of poems in tribute to poets of the past.  

  The best is certainly the sonnet on Crabbe. 

  I'm partial to the poem on Shakespeare via Jonson.

  --Bob
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From tad at opus40.org  Thu Sep 30 20:27:32 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:27:32 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
References: <20040930180324.66327.qmail@web52610.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <003401c4a74d$724aed90$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>

I do have a mentor poem. I've written one about Donald Justice.

Tad


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets


> Thanks everyone for all the great replies.  I thought
> about "Supermarket in California" after I sent out the
> original email, Hal.
>
> Kent makes some astute comments regarding this
> tradition.  After I read the Merwin piece this
> morning, I sat for a bit thinking about poems about
> poets.  I came up with "Adonais" and a Keats poem
> about Leigh Hunt.  But, with  my limited knowledge,
> that was about it.
>
> The funny thing is, the more I thought about writing
> about my own mentor, the more an odd part of me
> resisted doing so.  I'm still not sure why . . .
>
> Right now, in my composition course, my students are
> doing a lot of process writing, that is, writing about
> their writing, trying to capture empirically (if
> that's possible) the actual process in action:  how
> many times they worked on a piece or any strange or
> not-so-strange rituals they do before writing.  I
> wonder if I'm resisting writing about my mentor
> because of some hard-wired prejudice that I'm not even
> aware of . . .
>
> Again--great commentary.  Oh, and thanks for playing
> the "What are you reading?" game, as well.
>
> Yours,
>
> Jeff Newberry
>
> --- Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> >Jeff Newberry asked:
>> >
>> >>Can anyone think of other poems about poets?  I'm
>> thinking 20th
>> >century here.
>> >
>>
>>
>> I don't think Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters have ben
>> mentioned yet.
>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer.
>> http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the
>> Sonnetarium
>> _______________________________________________
>> New-Poetry mailing list
>> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>>
>
>
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
>
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
>
>
>
> _______________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
> http://vote.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



From tad at opus40.org  Thu Sep 30 20:28:56 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:28:56 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
References: <20040930180324.66327.qmail@web52610.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <003701c4a74d$a330eef0$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>

And a second one, come to think of it. I have a poem in which Donald Finkel 
is a character. And David Clewell, though he wasn't a mentor.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets


> Thanks everyone for all the great replies.  I thought
> about "Supermarket in California" after I sent out the
> original email, Hal.
>
> Kent makes some astute comments regarding this
> tradition.  After I read the Merwin piece this
> morning, I sat for a bit thinking about poems about
> poets.  I came up with "Adonais" and a Keats poem
> about Leigh Hunt.  But, with  my limited knowledge,
> that was about it.
>
> The funny thing is, the more I thought about writing
> about my own mentor, the more an odd part of me
> resisted doing so.  I'm still not sure why . . .
>
> Right now, in my composition course, my students are
> doing a lot of process writing, that is, writing about
> their writing, trying to capture empirically (if
> that's possible) the actual process in action:  how
> many times they worked on a piece or any strange or
> not-so-strange rituals they do before writing.  I
> wonder if I'm resisting writing about my mentor
> because of some hard-wired prejudice that I'm not even
> aware of . . .
>
> Again--great commentary.  Oh, and thanks for playing
> the "What are you reading?" game, as well.
>
> Yours,
>
> Jeff Newberry
>
> --- Michael Snider <mandolin at mac.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> >Jeff Newberry asked:
>> >
>> >>Can anyone think of other poems about poets?  I'm
>> thinking 20th
>> >century here.
>> >
>>
>>
>> I don't think Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters have ben
>> mentioned yet.
>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer.
>> http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/ for the
>> Sonnetarium
>> _______________________________________________
>> New-Poetry mailing list
>> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>>
>
>
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
>
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
>
>
>
> _______________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
> http://vote.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
> 



From tad at opus40.org  Thu Sep 30 20:31:26 2004
From: tad at opus40.org (The Old Mole)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:31:26 -0400
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
References: <20040930212835.8611.qmail@web52607.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <009201c4a74d$fd0685c0$6501a8c0@MoleHQ>

Starbuck - "On First Looking into Keats' Chapman's Homer"


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Newberry" <jnewberry1974 at yahoo.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Poetry News and Reviews" <new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 5:28 PM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets


> Hey, I found another.  
> 
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> George Herbert
> by Mark Jarman, from *To the Green Man* (Sarabande,
> 2004)
> 
> Who is wise enough today to be George Herbert,
>  Who though he lost his temper could remain
> Tractable to a loving, patient voice?
>  Washing his parishioners' feet, as the collar chafed
> And softened. Writing his fastidious verses,
>  Like the coffin-shaped stones of his century,
> Decked with skulls and propped in churchyard corners.
>  Death, a puddle of dust, drew under his door,
> Like talcum powder, clinging to his shoes.
>  And love, whose board he hammered with his fist,
> Drew him in and offered him its meat,
>  That ambiguous unambiguous word. George Herbert
> Was wise enough to sit and clean his plate.
> 
> 
> =====
> Jeff Newberry
> 
> "Sometimes it's not so easy,
> especially when your only friend
> talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
> and you do just the same as him."
> --Jimi Hendrix, "My Friend"
> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 
> _______________________________________________
> 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 Sep 30 20:47:57 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:47:57 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems about Poets
Message-ID: <65.34c316dc.2e8e033d@aol.com>

Edgar Lee Masters

They came to my office as clients
And told me their secrets,
Where they had gotten money
Or how their women were faithless
Or their daughters and sons became liars.
I made them into a book
And the Manchester Guardian
Credits me with tremendous imagination.

I should have put myself in the book.
A head full of suspicions 
Breeding prolific as rats in a garret
Where winter corn is stored.
How shall a man be a reputable lawyer
And not turn to a creature of suspicions?
Being suspicious of the moon
Being something else than the astronomer's proclaim.
I must write of the moon and how it is like
The people in The Spoon River Anthology,
Either a hypocrite eaten with dark secrets,
Or a woman with sex unsatisfied,
Or a man with a phallus for a god,
Or a thief or a pimp
Or a shivering puppet of fate.
As a lawyer I know the moon must be a fake
Like all the rest of us.

It is not easy to be a great man.
There are always thieves lurking about
Trying to steal the sunlight
Shining through your halo.
All great men are lonely
Because their greatness is a load
And fills their veins with the spirochete
And sometimes they feel like vomiting
On the whole human race
Because it does not properly acknowledge
Their greatness.

It is hell to be a great man
As it is also hell to be almost great,
Not quite great enough for greatness,
Alone among the brass cuspidors of a lawyer's office.


--Carl Sandburg, from Carl Sandburg--Billy Sunday and Other Poems, Harcourt
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From JforJames at aol.com  Thu Sep 30 20:50:19 2004
From: JforJames at aol.com (JforJames at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:50:19 EDT
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poems on Poets
Message-ID: <1db.2c0c965c.2e8e03cb@aol.com>

Arms

(for Wallace Stevens)

Renoir goes on painting.
A man from south France tells me it is so.
One picture a day, good or bad, the old man goes on.
And a little work every day on one big picture for God
    and children and remembered women.
So Renoir, his right are no good anymore
And the left half gone,
So Renoir goes on.

And when you come again
We will go to the Edelweiss for jazz
Or to Hester's dirty place on the river
Or to some other Chicago dump where they bring what you want
    and no questions asked,
And I will ask you why Renoir does it
And I believe you will tell me.


--Carl Sandburg, from Carl Sandburg--Billy Sunday and Other Poems, Harcourt
Brace & Co., 1983
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From grahamd at ripon.edu  Thu Sep 30 22:07:54 2004
From: grahamd at ripon.edu (David Graham)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 21:07:54 -0500
Subject: [New-Poetry] Regionalism Redux
Message-ID: <BD82262A.BBBC%grahamd@ripon.edu>

Speaking of "regionalism", Poetry Daily's current prose feature is a lengthy
essay by R. T. Smith on poetry from the Appalachians.

(That rhymes with "fashions", y'all.)

====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
====================================================