Krishna is home & doing well. Give or take 10 inches of snow & the fact that the new PC for my job "died" the minute I tried to load the DSL program, life is beginning to return to "normal." Thanks to everyone who sent notes this past week -- I do appreciate them all.

Curtis Faville is on my case for my footnoted critique of No.

 

Dear Ron:

 

Re: Your crit of a new magazine striving for a little format sparkle.

 

This is going to sound really off the wall and irrelevant, but I can still remember the day over 40 years ago when I picked up my first The New Yorker on a magazine stand in Napa. I was only 13, but fairly precocious and well-read. The format in those days was identical to what it had been since about 1928 — "Goings On About Town" in very fine print detailed virtually every cultural event in the New York City area, and then the lead masthead "Talk Of The Town" ran about 2-4 pages of paragraphs, crucially UNCREDITED. Then came two, sometimes three fiction pieces, and then usually a longer piece, either a "Profile" piece on a person, or a subject essay, followed further back in the pages by regular columns on travel, sports, books, etc., all interspersed with snappy cartoons and a couple of poems. The fascinating thing was that the stories, essays, and poems all had the authors' names discreetly at the end of their piece(s), and the magazine had NO contents page. In effect, the editors wanted you to read a piece first, without regard to its authorship, then "discover" who the author was at the end. Of course one could skip and look, but it wasn't the point. For the Town pieces, you could only guess who had written them, since they had no by-line at all. Later, of course, Tina Brown changed all that. But to get to my point — there was a certain sotto voce modesty built in, which was stylish, and not constructed around personality, reputation or publicity. The WORDS sold themselves, not the fame or glitz of the contributors. I've always felt that was a kind of ideal. A table of contents isn't irrelevant, but it's often done for the wrong reasons. I always liked the feel of the first 50 issues of the Paris Review, the texture of the paper, and so on. The style of Black Mountain Review was nice, but the paper stock was too stiff, making the binding crack. Now that Poetry (Chicago) has its millions, one hopes they'll redesign the old galloping warhorse — if anyone still reads that rag anymore. A poetry mag that had the old New Yorker attitude towards CONTENT might get my attention.

 

Curtis

 

One approach that I have seen several little magazines take over the years has been the “anonymous” issue – publishing an entire edition either with no identification of the authors, or only with their names listed collectively, usually at the end. The point seems to be to demonstrate the value of a text sans the “prestige” (or lack thereof) of a given author’s name. This has never made much (any?) sense to me simply because context is always already a part of the content of the poem. The absence of context is rather like watching Gone With the Wind on a black & white TV. It’s one of those “yes, but . . .” phenomena. What does, in such context, make of the writing of a younger poet who has cloned or otherwise channeled the style of an elder, the way, say, Antler does Allen Ginsberg. What if one was to publish a newly found Ginsberg poem alongside one by Antler in such an issue? Would readers be able to detect whose was whose?

 

This is where I think the indoctrination of the well-wrought urn leads readers (and writers at times as well) astray. The history of poetry is not – and never has been – a history of the most finely crafted poems. It is rather, the history of poetic change – formal change, the transformation of literary devices. Precisely because this is the point where literature engages the history of society. So the perfect historical recreation of an Allen Ginsberg poem fails to connect with literary history in a way that that a discarded, decidedly imperfect text by Allen himself engages it. And that, I would argue, is a fuller definition of content than the New Yorker has ever offered.

Growing up on the edge of Berkeley in a house with very few books – and most of them Readers Digest condensed novels – I was what in college town parlance is known as a “townie.” But because Berkeley was part of a thriving metropolitan region, I don’t think it ever quite had the same sense of that phenomenon that one gets in true college towns – small cities in which the school is the only real rationale for urbanization, such as Davis, California, or State College, Pennsylvania. Still, I had a great uncle – his most visible public function was as a member of the utility crew that put up the Christmas decorations on Berkeley’s commercial streets each year – who couldn’t even mention the university without breaking into profanities. Another cousin was a realtor in neighboring Albany who made a modest political career – he became the mayor & was a founding member of the Berkeley board of realtors – out of making neighboring Albany the anti-Berkeley of the region in the 1950s & ‘60s. Economically, my cousin was a member of an elite cohort, while my great uncle – who would have stood out as a loser at a Klan rally – was not. In both instances, they felt threatened by the presence of an educated, multicultural & functionally transnational class in their midst.

 

If there is a divide between town & gown, there’s a second, smaller – but still very real & palpable – gap between any school’s graduate students & the undergrads. It’s not merely that the former are paid slave wages to teach the latter, a circumstance that both groups resent, but that grad students have made a conscious choice & considerable effort to be in this school & this department at this point in its institutional history, while the majority of any undergraduate class at anything less than one of the top schools happens to be there through a combination of chance & inertia.

 

Every once in awhile, an undergraduate, occasionally even a townie, enrolled in a school with a poetics or writing program turns out to be in exactly the right place. David Gitin has spoken of his good fortune at finding Charles Olson among his teachers at SUNY Buffalo, back before it was even a SUNY campus I think. More recently, another Buffalo townie, Lisa Jarnot went through the undergraduate program there. Indeed, I believe that Jarnot grew up in a household with even fewer books than mine. Almost exactly one year ago, I praised her work here extravagantly –

 

Jarnot may have the best ear of any poet under 40 – Lee Ann Brown is really the only other poet who comes close

 

 – but reading Black Dog Songs, Jarnot’s newest collection from Flood Editions, I think the reality is that I was underestimating her poetry. A century from now, I suspect readers may think of SUNY Buffalo as “that place Lisa Jarnot went to study.” She has a straight shot at being one of the half dozen best poets of the 21^st century. She’s so damn good it’s spooky.

 

Part of what makes Jarnot not just a fine poet but a great one is, in fact, her ear –

 

Idle land in Israel
and snails are in a sea,

a real deal in a diner sails
as salads in a sea,

asides aside, aside asides
in salads in a sea,

aside in rinds in lines in lines
as diners in a sea,

a din in dine is in a deal,
ideal as red a sea,

as in in dins asides aside,
and and and land and sea.

 

It’s the first line of that third stanza that really clinches this poem for me – it takes enormous courage to write that simply, precisely because to do so risks being misunderstood as simple in ways that are socially coded. That’s the kind of courage in writing I associate with Kathy Acker’s self-published early novels or with Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

 

As “Land and Sea” also demonstrates, part of what makes Jarnot a great poet is this fearlessness as a writer that I don’t think can be taught – it’s an open question as to whether or not it can be learned willfully. Part of it is also Jarnot’s ability to look at writing in the broadest possible terms. I thought at first to write “outside of history,” but that’s not it exactly. Rather, I think that Jarnot shows a willingness to take the whole of history on in even the simplest lyric. My guess is that this is what she has taken from her lengthy & in-depth study of Robert Duncan, whose biography she has written (the University of California Press will publish it in 2005).

 

The Flood Editions press release announcing the book calls it “Decidedly lyrical,” which is partly right. But it’s a dark lyricism, one that has more in common with Blake or Helen Adam than any of the usual suspects. The title poem, like many in this book, hovers between nursery rhyme – maybe in Jack Spicer’s daycare center, tho – and a pomo gothic gloom as “road kill” becomes an active agent & not only chickens, but cats end up on the griddle.

 

An exception to this dark side right in the middle of this book is a series of mostly prose poems entitled ”They,” which uses the verb love more sharply than it’s been employed since, say, the very earliest lyrics of Robert Creeley. Here is “They Loved Paperclips”:

 

They loved harmony they loved ant hills they loved food and cookies and harpoons they loved the sound of laces of the shoes and snow they loved the snow on Thursdays in the rain and when they met they loved that too and igloos and the trees and things to mail and chlorine and they loved the towels for the beach and hot dogs and the pool and also when the wind rose up they loved the ceiling and the tide and then they loved the sky.

 

The first of this series is entitled “On the Sublime.” Indeed.

 

Jarnot hasn’t been a prolific writer, or at least not a prolific publisher of her writings. In addition to the Duncan biography, it appears that there is a novel forthcoming entitled Promise X. Hopefully, 30 years from now – when Jarnot will be ten years or so older than I am now – we won’t think of her as only someone who also writes poetry. For she has the set the bar as high as any writer I know today. And one of the great joys of this often troubling new century is going to be in seeing just how Jarnot follows through.

You may have noticed that this blog won another award the other day – Blogger Forum listed it as a Top Ten Weekly weblog for Thanksgiving week. What that means in practice is that this was one of the top ten Blogspot sites identified as a search item by Google during the week. In practice, I get to post the mini-banner you will find beneath my copyright notice on the left-hand column.

 

It’s third award of this sort this blog has received in 15 months – it was the Blog of the Day back in December 2002 & was listed among Technorati’s “Top 50 interesting recent blogs” earlier this year. Given that Technorati tracks, as of today, 1,282,605 weblogs, all of this strikes me as reasonably improbable. This is, after all, not just a Silliman among the poets or post-avants vs. the quietude kind of thing, but really poetry amidst all of the other possible topics out in the universe. &, as Spicer admonishes, No one listens to poetry. And, has been noted elsewhere, “Silliman’s Blog” is perhaps the most uncool title one could conceivably give to a weblog.

 

All of this had me thinking about prizes & awards when the November/December issue of Poets & Writers crested at the top of the upstairs bathroom reading pile which, in addition to Kevin Larimer’s great article on literary correspondences – there are new volumes of letters forthcoming between William Carlos Williams & Kenneth Burke; between Williams & Zukofsky (with LZ critiquing WCW’s poems, rather than other way around); & between Robert Duncan & Denise Levertov – has a series of articles on contests & prizes by Matthew Zapruder, Diana Wagman & Ian Pounds. Zapruder’s in particular is worth reading.

 

But it was the statistics that dotted these articles as editorial “call-outs” that caught my imagination even more deeply. Here are a few. As best I can tell, the numbers apply just to the United States & the source for all is Poets & Writers Magazine, which has been publishing grant, contest & award data for 31 years.

 

·         Amount of money awarded by sponsors of literary contests (2003): $8,896,857

·         Amount of money awarded by sponsors of literary contests (2002): $6,757,101

 

 

·         Number of creative writers who won literary contests in 2003: 1,019

·         Number of those who are poets: 506

·         Number of those who are translators: 21

 

 

·         Number of literary magazines, small presses, and other organizations that sponsored contests (2003): 349

·         Number of literary magazines, small presses, and other organizations that sponsored contests (2002): 256

 

 

·         Number of books published as a result of literary contests in 2003: 121

·         Number of those published as a result of “first-book” contests: 29

·         Number of those first books that are collections of poetry: 22

 

 

·         Percentage of 1,000 readers who believe the judge of a literary contest should be allowed to give an award to a former student: 41

·         Highest amount of money most readers would pay to enter a literary contest that awards a $1,000 prize and publication of a book: $10

·         When deciding which first-book contest to enter, the most important consideration for 35 percent of 1,000 readers polled: Publisher

·         Percentage of 1,000 readers who consider the judge to be the most important factor: 9

 

With nearly $9 million on the table – the average award for the more than 1,000 winning creative writers last year was $8,731 – literary prizes are themselves a nice little cottage industry these days. Given the flat-to-negative state of the economy since Bush took office, the fact that the amount of prize money awarded rose by 31 percent in 2003, while the number of small presses, literary mags & sundry arts organizations sponsoring them increased by 36 percent, it’s worth thinking the implications of this out a little further.

 

The cover of the current Poets & Writers lists its contests feature with the following teaser – “Does the Best Writer Always Win?” With over 1,000 different winners this past year – I’m included as a recipient of an NEA fellowship – that word “best” transcends being merely problematic & becomes something genuinely ludicrous. Best at what, for what, for whom, etc.? As Zapruder takes pains to note, the economics of fee-charging contests are such that many (tho not all) are actually fund-raisers for their respective sponsors. If you are giving away, say, $2,000 in prizes ($1,000 for first, $500 for second, etc.) and maybe paying a judge another $1,000 for his or her efforts at picking a winner, you can do okay if you receive 500 applications each with $10 attached. And some prizes receive well over 1,000 applications. At one level, literary contests that charge an entry fee are not terribly different from the numerous School o’ Quietude summer writing workshops that are a social realm unto themselves, offering false hopes for a little cash.

 

I like social validation as much as the next person, maybe more. Yet I have to wonder what it means when more than 500 poets are winning prizes in any given year. Maybe I would think differently about this if a reasonable percentage of these writers were from the various post-avant traditions, but the reality remains that the School o’ Quietude controls a percentage of those funds quite disproportionate to the amount of poetry it produces, let alone poetry that will last, say, one decade beyond the life of the poet (which is when the School of Quietude tends to gets real quiet). But even if this disparity were not the case, the rationale underlying the process & proliferation of awards would warrant some skeptical scrutiny.

 

One principle reason to give an award is bring attention to its winner, to alert the wider community to a standard of excellence. But the ability to do this is increasingly impaired simply by the clutter of awards. Some awards, for reasons that have less to do with quality than longevity or social positioning, manage to stand out – the Pulitzers, for example, offer little money & a list of winners that is for the most part laughable, but get covered by every newspaper in the country, precisely because the awards are centered on newspaper journalism. Now the National Book Critics Circle Award is attempting the same process – but what they really represent are the advertising dollars publishers spend with newspapers. The National Book Award is not much different. The politics of the Nobel Prize may be somewhat different, but that doesn’t make it any less political. And just as there have been any number of genuinely bad movies to have the Oscar for best picture (Rocky? Out of Africa? Chicago? Shakespeare in Love?), every poetry prize list you can think of has its cringers, awards that just make one shudder. Zapruder makes some excellent points about the decline of the Yale Younger Poets award, trapped amidst this proliferating clutter & its own increasingly reactionary choices. It has been the Poets You Never Need to Read award for far too many decades to recover now. One can only imagine what the aspirants to the Alberta Prize, the James Dickey Prize or the Lyric Recovery Award anticipate they will receive beyond the modest sums of cash each offers.

 

Beyond the politics & clutter of it all, many literary competitions suffer from at least two additional fatal problems, both institutional in nature. The first is the definition of qualifying genre, which has nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening in literature, but which is perceived by some groups (almost always groups) as needed in order to know which category to consider a work. I’ve sometimes thought it would be fun to submit Tjanting to a contest calling for works “under 30 lines.” It certainly is that, even if it is over 100 pages long. The second problem is the nature of the screening process – most judges aren’t asked to view all submissions to a given contest, but only a set of predetermined “finalists.” Zapruder recounts the story of W.H. Auden, John Ashbery & Frank O’Hara that led to the publication of Some Trees in the Yale series as an instance of this problem. One could spin that story as an instance of a judge awarding a prize to a friend & abrogating the selection process altogether, yet what that story points out is that the knowledge of someone’s work that comes with a literary friendship is often – always? – a better indicator of lasting value than what can be seen from a stack of “blind” manuscripts. In such circumstances, the judging process can never be better than the screening process itself, yet very few organizations – the Pew is an exception worth noting – put much energy into assuring that the screeners are as qualified as the judges themselves.

 

Finally, the most serious problem that such awards pose are the ways in which they seduce younger authors in particular to produce “award-winning” manuscripts, be these of single poems or book-length collections. I certainly went through a stage in college of trying to figure out what it would take to win a prize, say, at UC Berkeley. Indeed, after friends counseled me to submit only my shortest poems to one contest there, I won the Joan Lee Yang Award. The judge was somebody I’d never heard of before – Robert Grenier – and it turned out to be one way to start a lifelong friendship. But what kind of poet would I have become had I spent my time & energy instead trying to figure out how to win the Yale Younger Poets Award, which still had some vestige of credibility back in the late 1960s? I shudder to imagine that fate.

Some time back, I had a day in which my mailbox was filled almost entirely with poetry & other work from Boston. This past week, I had a parallel event happen, only this time from Milwaukee.

 

The reality was that I got two packages, both filled with riches. The first was from Bob Harrison, sending along “Counter Daemons,” the first section of a new long poem, WYSIWYG. I’ve been a fan of Harrison, both as poet & editor, for quite some time now, so this is the first installment of what I take to be a great gift to us all. My first quick read-thru tells me it’s full of energy, wit & pizzazz. Harrison is one of those essential “glue” people who give poetry communities literal substance, not unlike Gil Ott in Philadelphia, or Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy in San Francisco. Or Anne Kingsbury & Karl Gartung, also from Milwaukee. Karl Young, tho he doesn’t get out much, isn’t so far away, or at least wasn’t last time I was there. With such people & an institution like Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee is considerably more well endowed vis-à-vis contemporary poetry than, say, Chicago, which only has the University thereof, Northwestern, the heavily funded but always underachieving Poetry & the Art Institute. Poor Chicago, just 90 miles from all those riches.

 

The other package, the first issue of a journal called Gam – the reference is not slang for a lady’s leg, but rather a “social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising ground” – is an all-Milwaukee affair, edited (the whaling reference is a dead give-away) by Stacy Szymaszek, herself the literary program manager of Woodland Pattern. Most of its poets, other than Harrison – you can find some of “Counter Daemons” here – and Szymaszek, are either new to me, with the notable exception of Steve Nelson-Raney, whom I think of first of all as a great saxophone player. (Indeed, much of this is being written to the literal tune of Nelson-Raney’s Summer 1994 CD.)

 

Gam’s poetry is not unlike Szymaszek’s own: well-crafted, mostly spare, alive to the ear. Given the presence of Nelson-Raney, Harrison & david baptiste chirot, the issue comes across as a whole as less experimental, say, than one might expect. In part, this may be an illusion – Harrison’s excerpt from “Counter Daemons” can be read as referring to computer processes (among much else) & may derive from an unidentified process – still, it’s impossible to imagine

 

a rose petal follows
the scarring inside

 

being derived from any process other than the human imagination & heart. Conversely, chirot’s “TO ABSORB DARKNESS UNTIL ALL THAT REMAINS IS LIGHT” – I guess he saves his caps for poem titles – looks experimental until one realizes that what the sections in caps are kin to a chorus, not exactly the newest thing in poetry (& executed very much in the same spirit as chirot demonstrates here by that old hound of convention, T.S. Eliot, once upon a time).

 

Readers of this blog will know that nothing quite makes me feel more optimistic than reading first rate work from poets whose writing is new to me. John Tyson & Drew Kunz both fit that description. And I could teach a class on Nelson-Raney’s “Badges”:

 

Ice stars some
early badges of beauty
affixed to glass
storm door’s
insert tiny singers
in cold morning
silence

 

First we would discuss the career of the i, around which this poem is built, then the narrative line found in the o – its first three appearances are so soft one barely notices them, yet it dominates the latter half of the poem. That’s an overstatement, really – rather, the o is so strong in the fourth & sixth lines precisely to set up the i in the final three lines – the three phonemes it represents in the fifth line each echo one more time in the poem’s last lines. Then we would talk about the double b sounds in the second line, the role of s throughout, followed finally by the poem’s last line (noting along the way that every phoneme in the first word Ice shows up here as well). It’s a simple enough text at one level, but its formal resonances just go on & on. What a gift a good ear is.

 

Indeed, Nelson-Raney’s ear, along with that of Tyson, Harrison, Kunz &, in “Seblon after Querelle,” Szymaszek, has the effect of rendering Robert J. Baumann’s

 

quackery,
cane,
not able.
the walk of cobble:
crack
quick
heart beat.
nimble.

 

or

dark,
lark:

bird in,
December out.
bone.
alone.

 

far too clumsy & unsubtle for my liking. In another setting, I might not have felt that way, but whether it’s the Milwaukee scene or Szymaszek’s editing, the role of the ear is central to Gam. It’s absence as a dynamic element of the writing is noticeable in Jennifer Montgomery’s work for somewhat the same reason – that absence underscores the sentimentality at the heart of her narratives, surreal & otherwise. And I’m not at all sure that a poet who invokes Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz (whose last name she misspells) wants to be viewed as a sentimentalist.

 

Gam therefore is a mixed bag, but its high points are so terrific that I would encourage everyone to get it. Although, be warned, the issue I received notes a publication run of just 100, not nearly enough for this quality of writing. My one other kvetch is the clips with which this first issue is bound. Staples would work much better. Gam is available, if at all, from 142 E. Concordia, Milwaukee, WI 53212.

Krishna is in the hospital – at Hahnemann in Philadelphia – for a five-day treatment program for reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD). The procedure was planned, but it has been extremely hectic – at one point yesterday, it was even cancelled for about 40 minutes because a key doctor became ill.

 

Neither my wife nor I handle hospitals with equanimity. Back in 1989 when I was still editing the Socialist Review, we went down the California coast to celebrate our first pregnancy, only to have Krishna suffer an ectopic in the middle of the night, followed by ambulances to our B&B in the forest and a hurried procedure to halt the bleeding & save her life. In the process of trying to rescue a fallopian tube, the surgeon failed to halt internal bleeding, but didn’t realize it. I asked for a second opinion when – literally – the surgeon & anesthesiologist got into a shoving, shouting match outside of her recovery room. A second surgeon redid the first one’s work & Krishna was saved, although the event set in process the long path that would lead to our finally having high-tech twins three years later. Even that was a close call – Krishna came down with an extremely rare disorder right at the end of the pregnancy that kills 70 percent of the women & 80 percent of the babies, and we got through that only by the skin of our teeth. Thanks to a computerized contraction monitor that is no longer covered by most insurance plans.

 

So we’re both as nervous as cats (or worse) at anything to do with hospitals. At different moments yesterday, each of us relived some of that first trauma from almost 15 years ago and the whole event left me exhausted beyond imagination by the time I got to bed at 11 last night (which is to say, two hours early). If I seem more distracted & flaky this week, you’ll know why.

The new No is now. Which is to say that the second issue of this exceptionally intelligent – but bafflingly designed* – journal has arrived. As with its first issue, there are several features that entirely warrant the $12 cover price. Three that immediately come to mind are:

 

·         In Denmark: Poems 1973-1974, by Kenneth Irby – a 66-page book (bound on gray matte pages to distinguish it from the glossy white of the main No), by the writer whom I’ve argued in these pages before may have the best ear of any American poet of my time.

 

·         An American Primitive in Paris, a sizeable portfolio of the paintings of Enrique Chagoya, whose artwork used to grace the page of Socialist Review back when I had the fortune to be its editor.

 

·         The American Rhythm, by Mary Austin, with an intro by C.D. Wright, returning to print this 1930 document** arguing for an American poetic measure predicated upon what Austin calls Amerindian languages.

 

On top of which there is a piece by Marjorie Perloff attempting to prove William Butler Yeats to be Steve McCaffery before Steve was. And very healthy selections of poets well-known (Palmer, Will Alexander, Barbara Guest, Cole Swenson, Peter Gizzi, Elizabeth Robinson) and new at least to me (Molly Dorozenski, H.L. Hix, Kristin P. Bradshaw among them).

 

What is most interesting to me about Austin’s piece is not necessarily her argument per se, which depends on a racial fantasy of Native Americans, but rather its underlying premise, that the measure – I mean this in the metrical sense – of American writing, simply by virtue of not being European, would be different. It’s the same argument that has bedeviled American letters from the break between the Young Americans & the School of Quietude in the 1840s right up to today. One can, of course, mount a pseudo-linguistic argument – it’s been done more than once – claiming that iambic in particular is implicit in the English language, though to do so is simply to ignore the vast range of regional variations that occur even now after some 50 years of the influence of television and job mobility has tended to flatten out local differences.

 

In some ways, Austin’s sense of the prairie in the measure anticipates Olson’s own sense of space (or, as Olson puts it, SPACE). Implicit in both is a sense that elements other than language impinge up on it, speak through it, are in some sense themselves articulate. Olson of course returns measure to the body, literally, of the poet – meter becomes a kind of pulse, as if one’s blood pumped differently according to who & where we might be. Within 20 years of Olson’s essay on Projective Verse we find a poetics that in practice emphasizes enjambment centered in New England (Olson, Creeley), one that favors the long flat lines of the prairie (Paul Carroll most clearly, tho Lew Welch played with this possibility as well) & a verse mode that tends to be more relaxed and open, generally associated with the American West (Whalen, Snyder, Kyger, etc.). It’s this poetic atlas that Spicer appears to scoff at & what, one wonders, were we to make of the likes of Kenneth Irby & Ronald Johnson, both of whom spent substantial parts of their lives in Kansas, both of whom pay extraordinary attention to the ear, neither of whom remotely approach the aural aesthetics of the other?

 

Langpo to some degree sidestepped the issue in good part by turning to prose, but the issue lingers on even more acutely I think for younger poets. The failure to create an adequate response is partly to blame for the resurrection of patterned poetics in the guise of a New Formalism (that was – & for the most part still is – terrified of form), always already guilty premodernists that they are. And it’s what enables Thomas Fink to call me on my analysis of Brenda Iijima’s “Georgic”: I have, in his view, identified all the ways she is not like X, Y, or Z, without really being able to describe what, in fact, her line break is about. What motivates it? What is the positive principle that determines that broken word stam- / pede? But as I confessed then,

 

this is what most mystifies me – because given those words, I just couldn’t do it on my own.

 

And I’m not aware of anyone who has stepped up to attempt such a project, either with regards to this text of Iijima’s, or for that matter any other contemporary younger poet. And I sense, as I think Tom Fink must also, my own frustration here, that we find ourselves at the end of 2003 with so few choices available as to the line – either the metrically closed verse of premodernism, ranging from the hokey to the merely embarrassing, or the untheorized (& too often too slack, tho not certainly in Iijima’s work) “free verse” marriage of convenience, with maybe theories along the line of Austin’s or Olson’s to haunt us with their inadequate alternatives.*** Indeed, the absence of a good answer here sometimes has been used by critics to argue that poetry is, if not, certainly on the wane as a medium.

 

I do intuit at some level that the assumption that underwrites both Austin & Olson – that the measures of verse are contextually dependent – makes sense. But I don’t, even after writing & thinking about poetry for 40 years, feel anywhere near ready to say why or how. I would love to hear what readers of this blog think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* The only excuse for starting the first piece, an elegy by Michael Palmer for the novelist W.G. Sebald, on the left-hand page is lack of space in the issue . . . yet there are blank pages at the end. And there is no excuse for the muddle that is the table of contents qua contributors’ notes pages. If these are attempts to innovate or protest conventional design elements, they succeed only in confirming the superiority of the convention.

 

** A second edition was published posthumously in 1970.

 

*** So I read Irby’s work in this issue, written nearly 30 years ago, right at the height of the “my linebreak / my zipcode” fever, yet written in a wholly different context, having moved at that point to Denmark. And these are curiously the flattest lines of his that I know, as if that Scandinavian sound were bleeding into the English.