Caffeinated Dog: Extraordinarily Terse and Informal Thoughts on Poetry and Poetics

The Silliman Brouhaha

2010-08-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

Much has been made recently over Ron Silliman's decision to turn off the comments stream on his blog. He himself has posted numerous emails he has received on the matter, and there are a bunch of links to the reaction of others. What the hell, here's my shot.

I was pretty pissed at Silliman when I first read about this. I know, that is anger that is very misplaced, and it was a position not well thought through. He does the whole thing without pay and with a presumably large investment of time. He is under no obligation to provide a platform for anyone else, be they thoughtful commenter or yahoo dickhead. Nevertheless, whatever the cost to the rest of the virtual world, the decision distresses me greatly.

I may as well say up front that I have a problem with authority. Gee, what a ballsy badass that makes me. Not really. You see, my problem is that I submit to it too easily. I have always believed that there is someone out there who is smarter than me, that someone knows the answer to whatever question I might have. This made me an easy mark for Silliman's brand of grand pronouncements. His every word was so confident and self-assured that I felt like a complete moron, and was filled with self-doubt if I ever disagreed. I understand of course that this is my issue, not his. However, once I began reading the comment stream on a regular basis, this proved to be the corrective I needed. Suddenly, I no longer wondered what was wrong with me when I thought Ron was completely full of shit; a lot of other people felt so as well. These days, I think the vast majority of what Ron has to say is rather suspect. I still like the vast sweep of his interests, both in poetry and other things, as well as the (sometimes overly lengthy) lists of links. Again, related to my authority problem, I tend to look to my poetic elders for enjoyment and inspiration; Silliman is nothing if not on top of the contemporary. However, I will certainly go to his blog with much less enthusiasm, knowing that I will no longer be able to amuse myself by reading his more astute readers let some of the hot air out of his over the top generalizations.

2010-07-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

Best blog on the Web: http://hdt.typepad.com/henrys_blog/

2009-11-01T13:35:00.000-08:00

Exploration is the moral obligation of the poet. Sincerity in the expression of his vision is the only means by which this can be accomplished. I very much admire that quality in other poets because I feel it is so often lacking in my own work. One such poet was the late Lenore Kandel, whose uncompromising approach to her craft should be a standard for us all. The world is a smaller place with her loss, and it is up to the rest of us to stretch it back out again.

2009-10-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

Here is a long overdo piece of self promotion, and some for the publisher as well. My page on Amazon, and the site for WordTechs Press. There may be a few copies of Laughter floating around, I'm not sure; never did hear whatever happened to Good SAMARitan.

Just a quick note here on a poet I've been reading lately, Joanne Kyger. I will admit right up front, I don't get it. She strikes me as prosy in a Welch/Whalen kind of way, but whereas I find something to take away from almost anything they write, I just don't get much out of her. The language strikes me as lax for the most part, and I don't find much of substantive value in most of her stuff. It's as if when she has something to say, she says it loosely and inexactly; when her language tightens up, she does too little with it. Obviously a journal/notebook poet, like Whalen or late Blackburn, she doesn't seem to have the interesting way of putting things together like Whalen, or the feel for language rhythms like Blackburn. Which isn't to say she has nothing of value, or isn't a possible resource for other poets. As I make my way through As Ever, I find that unlike a lot of poets, her later work is an improvement on what came before. Whatever my initial impressions may be, so many poets for whom I have a great deal of respect see great things in her, so I'm sure I will be going back again and again over time.

2009-08-28T10:31:00.000-07:00

Reading aloud,
how do I sound
these structures,
do I do
the Shatner pause at the
end of
each line?

2009-07-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

I have read and written poetry for a long time now, but it always confounds me when someone asks, "What is poetry? Why read it? What do you get out of [insert author's name here]?" I guess I have always been thin on theory, and it is difficult to explain just what I get out of what I think of as more difficult or experimental writers in particular. I have no idea what is going on in a Philip Whalen or Robert Creeley poem most of the time. And they are the easy ones. Being raised on poetry as formal statements in need of some sort of debriefing, I am continually challenged by those poems that do not mean but be, as MacLeish put it. What does the poem mean? Exactly what it says. Why bother reading it in the first place? Because I suppose poetry is the revelation, through language, of what is essential. The "through language" part is what is of real import here. Language is the tool, and sometimes we just stop and examine our tools, to see how they have worn, if they are shiny or in need of sharpening. This is where the poem turns back in on itself, and can at times become merely self-referential and nothing more. It is the poems that balance themselves on that tipping point that I admire. "Red Wheelbarrow" comes to mind immediately; it has content, yet the statement is intimately welded to the way of saying. No ideas but in things, content is an extension (or revelation, per Levertov) of form.

Some of the foregoing ideas are at the heart of why I continue to value WC Williams and poems like "Red Wheelbarrow." Before I knew that Language Poetry was supposed to be capitalized, before I realized that it was a movement that critiqued said language from the outside, and in terms political and social instead of merely linguistic, I thought of Williams as a language poet. How to get what must be said seemed his concern. Perhaps even moreso than "Red Wheelbarrow," the poem that comes to mind in this context is "An Old-Fashioned German Christmas Card":

Armed with
a bass-violin
horn

clarinet and
fiddle
go four

poor musicians
trudging
the snow

between
villages in
the cold

What gets me here is the way he breaks up the phrases in such a way as to make us confront the speech rhythms we would normally use. For example, in the last three lines, I would contend that most of us see "between villages" and "in the snow" as natural groupings, since they are complete prepositional phrases. By breaking them up, Williams focuses our attention on how the language works, how we often put things together without thinking about it. Here, with no punctuation and broken phrases, we have to think about how things go together, thus trudging through the poem the way the musicians soldier on to the next village.

2009-02-13T04:08:00.000-08:00

Sign
p
o
s
t

Note: The above is a fairly obvious bit of concrete poetry, the shape of the words mimicking what they represent. But there is perhaps a less obvious feature as well. The use of font size and boldface lettering is used to stress function as well as appearance. When we look at a sign, it is the sign, with its attendant message that we focus on, not the post. So the poem gets at this more abstract notion as well as the more overt visual imitation of what it represents. On a completely different note, it always occurs to me when making something as simple as this, that someone else has probably already done it. But what if the visual presentation is altered, for example by using boldface lettering and different font sizes? The text would be the same, but its appearance, which encapsulates much of its "meaning" as a poem, would be different. Would it be considered plagiarism? An original work? Something in between?

The Middleweight Curse

2008-11-18T08:04:00.000-08:00

The Michigan Assassin: murdered.
His father: murdered.
His mother: murdered.
His murderer: murdered.
The femme fatale
for whom the murderer
murdered: murdered.
That's murder.

I can't put my finger on it exactly, but there's always been something interesting to me about repetition. I used to think about how if you said the word 'trout' over and over so many times, it really sounds absurd and meaningless. But that's not exactly what's going on in the example above, especially with the final line that puts a twist on the meaning. Also the meaning rhymes of murder/assassin/fatale add a density to how the word is heard and interpreted. Maybe it is somehow about making the word strange and opaque, to borrow an idea I first got from Lew Welch. The word still has meaning, still functions in some way that is related to its conventional use, but it also takes on a separate life of its own. It works not only in the everyday sense it has, but simply as a structure, somewhat like a bunch of not exactly identical bricks makes a wall.

Gertrude Stein: an incompleted portrait

2008-10-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

We know now no
substitution was made.

If
a noun is a noun is a noun is a noun
the rose is
no longer red.
Or read.
Or a reed
by any other name.

[By the way, as for Language Poetry, Stein had already done the same bit sixty years earlier. All the fuzzy headed, Socialist criticism of lyric voice and accepted narrative structure is anticipated by Stein in everything she writes, and, it would appear, without having to think about it to the point of absurdity, as in Michael Davidson's assertion that language is a system "that exists in service to ideological interests of the dominant culture." That might be a useful idea to a poet, but as a statement about language is almost certainly ridiculous. But hey, I'm no linguist.]

2008-10-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

The previous post was inspired by the September 30 post on Ron Silliman's blog. The subject at hand was the Reality Street Book of Sonnets. First off, let me say I have never seen the book in question, most likely never will. I am unacquainted with most of the contributors, and those with which I am familiar are not so because of their work in the sonnet form, Berrigan included. That should pretty well shoot to hell any street cred I may try to put across as a postmodern sort, but so be it. The point here is, what the deuce constitutes a sonnet anymore?

First, I do not pretend to know the history of the form, nor how it has been exploited by the experimentalists in the aforementioned anthology. Silliman seems smitten by the more oblique examples, those that seem to indicate that anything 14 lines long can go by the name sonnet. And in a sense this is true; as soon as a reader realizes that any poem is fourteen lines long, at the very least it is seen as some kind of 'echo'. And of course if one labels one's work a sonnet, then it forces the reader to consider why exactly it should not be so considered. And Berrigan, for his part, not only titles the work in that way, but uses the device of the sonnet cycle as well. There is a narrative arc, of a kind, and direct (and indirect) appropriations from the Bard. The result of these kinds of experiments is a kind of dialogue with established literary tradition and forbears that can be both entertaining and fruitful for future ventures into formal explorations. The problem is that suddenly any idiot can throw out some random fourteen "lines" and claim the title of "sonneteer". It suddenly begins to resemble current "outlaw" country music or the NFL rebel of today. When Willie Nelson and Joe Namath were doing their own thing, there was something at stake; Terrell Owens and Toby Keith risk nothing with their posturing.

Sonnot

2008-10-16T17:44:00.000-07:00

T
h
i i
s s
n
o
t
a
s
o
n
n
e
t.

A few words from a starry eyed fan

2008-10-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

I know I invoked the name of Roky Erickson at the outset of this blog, and so am moved at this point to make a few notes concerning his work. The immediate reason is that in preparation for an upcoming show of his, I was rereading the book of lyrics, Openers II. I came across this line:

"Modern science turned down reality for industry."

Not exactly your standard pop-rock lyric. For some reason that really hit me; think about the pharmaceutical industry, or Cold War military-industrial complex with its store of nuclear physicists to make it go. For me, that line is just one of those slam-bang moments that make language worth all the hassle. And puts the lie to the claim of science to any kind of absolute truth concerning the world. Everyone, even or especially a research scientist, has an ax to grind or a Boss to answer to.

I have been dreaming for years of writing a big essay (maybe even book) on Erickson's work. Alas, I do not yet have my critical ducks in a row yet to bring it off; someday perhaps. Anyway, I think what got me started on that thought was when I noticed just how much the lyrics on the page appear to be right out of a Jerome Rothenberg anthology. In Technicians of the Sacred, Rothenberg writes that "the translations themselves may create new forms & shapes-of-poems with their own energies and interests..." Erickson's lyrics, translations from song to writing themselves, read just like some of these decontextualized works. There also is a noticeable similarity to several more modern branches of poetry, many of which are themselves a response to some newly discovered primitive forerunner, such as are found in the Poems for the Millennium anthologies, albeit devoid of all the surrounding theory. Erickson accomplishes without self-consciousness or pretense what many poets do only after explaining away the magic with a protective shell of ass-covering conceptualism. To close:

"God horrors fills me I can't write
my hair turns white
but only I know the things that go bump in the night are alright."

A Ditty of Sorts

2008-09-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

Read Marlowe's Faustus last night and this morning. The result is this:

Poor Kit Marlowe
Dined with a spy;
Poor Kit Marlowe
Stabbed in the eye;
Poor Kit Marlowe
Made not a cry;
Poor Kit Marlowe
Time for you to die.

Pure doggerel, I know. But that is sort of the point. It totally trivializes a man's life and untimely death. It is also the polar opposite of Marlowe's line ("thunderous" I believe was Ben Johnson's term for it). I believe it has some sort of use as ironic commentary. If poetry is news that stays news, then here is news that became legend that becomes something I think kids could jump rope to. Not sure if this means anything or not; I don't have time to get into it at the moment.

Also, in looking over all these little entries I make, I understand that most are nothing more than bits and pieces of lost wholes. They are there I suppose as examples of how language is making meaning at the moment of some sort of incipient creation. Obviously not the stuff of canonical lit.

HWat can happen when your fingers are too big for the keyboard

2008-09-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

Type-o
No
twenty7

RE: Contractions

2008-09-12T14:01:00.001-07:00

At a certain pt.
the line
orally speaking
between
'I want a drink'
and
'I want to drink'
dis
appears
i.e. I
wanna drink.

2008-09-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of visuals that came to me. I would imagine it is a safe bet that a Geoff Huth type has probably done the same or similar; they seem so obvious. If so, I do not claim them as my work, although they were new to me. Anyway:

a
sp ce

Double Talk

ssaayy

2008-09-03T16:51:00.000-07:00

Oh, what a secular world!

Get thee behind me,
Stan.

2008-09-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

I have struggled with the idea of this blog for quite awhile now. I mean, how many more poetry blogs does the world need? I guess I'm just another narcissistic prick who wants his private rants and broodings put on public display. My consolation here is that I have faith that no one will actually read any of this. So why make it public in the first place? I suppose my final answer to that was "why the hell not?" I have largely eschewed more conventional outlets for publication for the last year or more, so this is one way of getting work out there. I see the web as one huge poetry editor: if the work is good, I'll hear about it eventually, if it sucks, no one will read it. It's the perfect market when you think about it. Anyone can write anything they want and just post away to their heart's content. Maybe someone reads it, maybe no one does. Somewhere down the line, the cream will rise to the top.

At any rate, the whole idea behind this was to throw out a few poems here and there, talk about what I do and how I do it. I find myself fascinating (narcissistic prick!), maybe someone else will find the ideas presented useful or interesting. At any rate, I find discussions of poetics of great value, both as an influence on my own work and as an approach to understanding that of others. Along with my own stuff, I'm sure I'll talk about the work of anyone else I might happen to be into at the moment. I mean, are there ever enough mentions of Robert Creeley or Roky Erickson on the Web? I think not.