Massive thanks, endless thanks, unbelievable thanks to Lynn Behrendt for updating the entire blogroll! It’s up-to-date for the first time in a couple of years. In addition to being the
If you should see a “gotcha” or want to add, drop or change yours, please let me know via email. Thanks!
Some thoughts looking back on a busy time –
I got to hear live music twice in one week, a rarity at this point in my life. And the two events really do represent the range of what I like: James Fei playing solo sax at the CUE Art Foundation last Friday, then Joe Ely & Joel Guzman at the World Café in Philly on Sunday. Fei I’ve written about here. His solo performance was every bit as magical as the work of his quartet at the Rotunda in Philly earlier in the month. Again his work was the closest thing I’d seen / heard to a cerebral minimalism applied to free jazz. The combination is exhilarating.
Ely, on the other hand, is the Lubbock-raised country / folk / rockabilly veteran who’s a key part of the legendary Flatlanders (alongside Jimmie Dale Gilmore & Butch Hancock), a recurring member of Los Super Seven, & who’s played over the years with such folk as Bruce Springsteen & The Clash. He & accordion-wizard Guzman performed an hour & 45 minutes of mostly up-tempo pieces that included all of the above influences, a touch of mariachi, the requisite Townes Van Zandt song (“
I came away from Lights” at the New Museum (that strikethrough is part of the title). I have to sit with my reaction to the New Museum itself – I immediately liked the light inside, and the galleries felt appropriately sized, but I’m not at all sure about the wildly fluctuating “maximum occupancy” limitations from floor to floor. Also the fact that an eight-story building only proves capable of having three active galleries suggests that the whizbang architecture will have a long-term impact compromising curatorial impulses.
One show that I found somewhat disappointing, mostly because it was so Spartan, was the exhibition of Joe Brainard’s “Nancy” works (mostly, I think, from the volume If) at Tibor de Nagy, which was crowded into the gallery’s smaller alcove in order to leave the larger one to Ben Aronson’s lumbering & unwatchable urban ‘scapes. This is one of those cases where the book, which the
But the real train wreck was the Whitney & its lingering Biennale, even tho there were works there by people I like such as John Baldessari. Baldessari, who provided the cover for the first edition of my book Tjanting, has many virtues, but when he comes across looking like the master craftsperson in the building, something’s amiss. The theme appears to have been rubble (which would explain why the show includes Spike Lee’s magnificent HBO miniseries on
I missed the Poetry Society of America’s 98th annual awards ceremony earlier last week, due almost entirely to my pneumonia (which hangs on as I write) and its impact on my day job, plus my desire to be at the CUE opening. In addition to Aram Saroyan winning the William Carlos Williams Award, with Roberta Beary & Eileen Myles a finalists, the other winners (and judges) include:
Michael S. Harper, The Frost Medal (presumably given by the PSA board of governors)
Ed Roberson, The Shelley Memorial Award (judged by Lyn Hejinian & C.D. Wright)
Joanie Mackowski, The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award (judged by Donald Revell)
Brian Henry, Cecil Hemley Memorial Award (judged by Norma Cole)
Wayne Miller, Lyric Poetry Award (judged by Elizabeth Macklin)
Christina Pugh, Lucille Medwick Memorial Award (judged by Timothy Donnelly); finalist Sally Ball
Natasha Sajé, Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award (judged by Dean Young); finalists Kevin Prufer & James Richardson
Carey Powers, Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award (judged by David Roderick); finalists Willa Granger & Philip Sparks
Theresa Sotto, George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Prageeta Sharma)
Jocelyn Emerson, Robert Winner Memorial Award (judged by Annie Finch); finalists Rachel Conrad & Marsha Pomerantz
Catherine Imbriglio for Parts of the Mass, published by Burning Deck, Norma Farber First Book Award (judged by Thylias Moss); finalist Alena Hairston for The Logan Topographies, published by Persea.
What one notices first, or at least what I notice first, is the diversity. From Annie Finch & Dean Young to myself, C.D Wright, Norma Cole & Prageeta Sharma among the judges – that’s the broadest range I’ve seen for a set of awards. Last year’s judges (Thomas Sayers Ellis, Matthea Harvey, Tony Hoagland, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Srikanth Reddy, Eleni Sikelianos, Tracy K. Smith, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Eleanor Wilner) weren’t bad either. Whatever one thinks about awards, or these award winners, the fact that the PSA is making a concerted effort to reach a broader range of what poetry actually is can only be commended.
Which is not to say that it’s perfect. I made a point of recommending a specific work for inclusion in the program for the evening:
What I actually find in the program, which just arrived in the mail, is the following:
a man stands
on his
head one
minute –
then he
sit
down all
different
My original suggestion stresses what is unique about Saroyan’s volume. The poem actually used stresses the ways in which his writing in the 1960s might be seen as continuous with the lyric tradition. Both aspects, as I noted here, are present in Saroyan’s writing. But, especially given the ongoing ghettoization of vispo, which do you think is the more important message?
One final note: readers of this blog clicked on over 5,000 links on Monday, a first.
It took this blog two years & five months – from August 2002 until the end of January 2005 – to receive its first 250,000 visits. But it took only three years & two months – just nine more months – to receive the next quarter million and hit the half-million threshold. That ramp upward got steeper still as it took just 16 months to receive the next 500,000 and hit the million visit mark. That was February of last year – sometime Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, the 1,500,000th visitor will click on through.
These are not the sort of numbers I normally associate with poetry. That is three Woodstocks, or the current population of Philadelphia.
One thing this tally doesn’t represent is anything like 1.5 million separate individuals. There are a few hundred people who show up here daily and a few thousand more who come by with some regularity – once or twice a week perhaps. And a third, larger cluster that is far less regular, some of whom may do so only while taking a class that requires it. My guess is that those three groups combined add up to six or eight thousand people. That’s less than the number of poets who write in English, but still a sizeable fraction of the number of folks who care about poetry. And it’s more than the thirty a day I had hoped for when I first started this project.
There are all kinds of interesting ways that a marketer would want to cut such numbers, demographics being the default in that mode of thinking. What percentage of my readers are men and how does that relate to the percentage of people interested in poetry who happen to be male? What are the age breakdowns? Race? Religion – how many Lutheran are there here (how many Lutheran Surrealists)? How many readings do we attend each month & do we go out for a meal before or after? How much do we each spend on books? Etc. I know that among my comrades in the Grand Piano project, there are some who appear never to read this blog, and two or three who seem always to do so. I would suggest that this is probably to be expected from a cohort that ranges in age from late 50s to mid 60s – all of us are what we call “digital immigrants” where I work, people who came to the technology a little late in life, unlike my children who are digital natives, having used PCs since they were toddlers & Richard Scary’s Busytown was the software package of choice. Except that my Grand Piano co-authors are all people who have known me for at least 30 years, so I think that may boost the numbers artificially. After all, I do know poets from my age group who still avoid PCs pretty much altogether. They’re the last of a dying breed, and I think they know it.
I try to imagine what it must be like to be a poet today, particularly in the U.S., who is entirely off-line and still working with a typewriter. If I were that poet, I think I would find it strange, as if the social domain that is poetry were somehow getting away from me & becoming more & more ethereal. Where I used to see all the “important” literary magazines, say, in Cody’s or Moe’s in Berkeley or in City Lights in San Francisco, there are now many important journals that seem locked up out of sight, because they don’t exist in the print world – How(2), Jacket, mark(s), Big Bridge & so many more. I remember being a teenager & not being able to get hold of a copy of Locus Solus or Art & Literature & feeling totally frustrated by that. Try to envision this same phenomenon many times over for the poet who is not wired.
I can’t say that I’ve met any younger poets who consciously disengage from poetry’s existence on the net, tho I suspect some must exist. We are moving, faster than I think any of us (or me anyway) are conscious of, toward a day on which poetry is something that exists primarily on the web, having made the migration away from print & bookstores to a degree that right now seems unfathomable. Those older poets who currently refuse to publish on the web – they do exist – will discover soon enough that they have painted themselves into the proverbial corner. Far from being a “debased” terrain where works commingle without being presorted by “value,” the web simply is becoming the commons for such work.
I have been fortunate, especially being an old paradigm guy, to have had some success with this new medium. I don’t think what I’m doing here is in any way unique. I think I’m more consistent & dogged, and that I’ve thought through my positions whether or not anyone agrees with them. When people who do generally disagree with me sit around and argue over a concept I first threw out here – like post-avant or school of quietude – I have to admit feeling pleased. Even rejecting one of these ideas, if done thoughtfully, furthers the discourse, and that is the point really.
Do I have the capacity to stick this out another five years & six months? I have no idea. I do know that this process functions as the most powerful crucible for new ideas, for me, that I’ve found since the very earliest days of poets’ talks in the late 1970s. And that’s a powerful motivation. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
After Verizon escalated my connectivity problems to “the central office” which was supposed to get back to me “within 24 to 48 hours,” but who were still “working on a solution” this morning when the 48-hour threshold passed, I finally escalated to real help – my 16-year-old son. It took him about 40 minutes to get back online, but the problem has been resolved. I never did hear back from Verizon.
My own note from last January 1st still seems to me the best possible advice:
My resolution for this year remains essentially the same one I’ve had for two years now:
Blog better, blog less.
There is, I think, a direct relationship between the two halves of this equation. But it is going to mean overcoming my own anxieties about blank space & silence. And maybe yours too.
There is, to my mind, no particular reason to revisit the same issues endlessly, tho I know I do have my own hobby horses. And there is no reason to write a five-page essay when a message this short can serve the same purpose.
I have an additional goal this year, which would be to get the blogroll into order. It’s wildly out of date and takes far too much energy to try to keep track of. I wonder if anyone uses it anymore as a stepping stone to other blogs?
One problem is that the fastest growing category of blogs other than new blogs is dead blogs. There is, so to speak, a lot of “churn” over the course of any given year. Further, as blogs have evolved, there are new kinds of them, for example for magazines, for events. Some people on this blogroll have as many as four separate blogs – my rule has always been to list the one I felt was most relevant to this list.
But it may be that it would be a much stronger list if in fact it was much shorter. One thing I’ve been doing has been seeing what percentage of poets seem to have a blog – with just under 1,000 poetry-relevant blogs in the roll to the left, a one-in-ten ratio leads me to my number of publishing poets in English of 10,000.
My goal in blogging, back in the dark dinosaur days of 2002, was to get other poets going in the process of thinking out loud in public, creating a public discourse. On that point, I’ve been successful beyond my imagination. A secondary goal was to talk about the books that mattered to me – if I haven’t had any success with that, I have only myself to blame. A third was to share my sense of where we were & are in the history of poetry, particularly in the
Perhaps the best result, for me personally, of doing a blog has been the almost instant education I’ve gotten as to what’s going on in poetry that I wasn’t especially aware of before I began this project. It’s changed my sense of who’s writing, why, where & even how. It’s really really really hard not to want the poetry of tomorrow to look just like what one is most comfortable with about the poetry of today (or yesterday, for that matter). But you and I know that won’t work. The poetry of tomorrow will have to be fully engaged with the world of that time, and the most we can do is to midwive it into being.
So this seems like a good point to acknowledge everybody who’s taught me something through this process, whether through a note in the comments stream, an email, a comment on a blog elsewhere or through sending me books, magazines, manuscripts, CDs & DVDs, hand-drawn envelopes, newspaper clippings or “excerpts” from package wrapping. Thank you for your generosity.
A quick note to acknowledge that, in the two weeks since I’ve switched my policy on the comments stream, I’ve only rejected two comments, considerably fewer than I had in the 24 hours prior to the change. Overall the average number of comments per blognote has gone up, both genders have been commenting, and the quality of discussion overall has risen markedly. All good things. The stream no longer has the feel of, as one correspondent put it, “a middle school boy’s locker room.” I don’t mind if people are critical of one another so long as it doesn’t descend to name calling, and I don’t mind if you take verbal shots at me.
For what it’s worth, comments and emails about the change have been overwhelmingly positive. Male correspondents favor the change by roughly a two-to-one ratio, female correspondents favor it by a nine-to-one ratio. And that divergence pretty much says it all.
So I’m going to continue with the current regime – the presumption is that any note that doesn’t contribute usefully to the discussion will be rejected. That seems to be enough to keep people on their best behavior, which is something we should strive for always.
Two completely separate topics:
First, I’ve been going slowly through Geoffrey Gatza’s Thanksgiving poem for me (PDF), enjoying it more and more with each reading. It’s actually easier to see & read in the PDF format than in the two large packages it arrived in via the mail. It’s elegant in a way that would please both Oulipo and the finest French restaurants I’ve encountered & filled at the same time, with remarkably close fitting wit plus some happy surprises (e.g., an email chain in which David Shaddock suddenly turns up!). Today, I’m in awe of the suite of six dishes that go into The Baking Parchment Scroll – which arrived in a long tube the same day as the box – and which just happens to translate a significant portion of The Chinese Notebook – Gatza’s choice as his favorite poem of mine – into the discourse of cuisine. But yesterday it was the Cornucopia of World Cheeses, Spiced Cashews and Port in the form of a cartoon in which the
§
Second, I’ve been contemplating what to do with/about the comments stream here. It’s gradually (or maybe not so gradually) descended into such a playground of pathology that I hear quite regularly from people who either cite it as the reason their weblogs don’t have comments streams, or who write me personal notes (always welcome!) because they don’t want their words subjected to the “debased discourse” that has become the norm there. I’m certainly aware of more than a few times of late when I wanted to wash my hands (or more) just from having to go through the moderation process. I’ve thought seriously about turning the comments stream off entirely. And if what I’m about to try doesn’t improve matters much, that probably is what I will do. But I do think there is a place for response here, at least potentially. And it pains me to see the posturing that absorbs and cancels out that possibility for far too many readers.
So I’ve decided to reverse the dynamics, at least for the time being. Henceforth, the presumption is going to be that comments don’t get approved unless they make useful and intelligent contributions to the discourse. My gut feel being the decider. The simply snide, the put down, the sexually and racially inappropriate, the whole repertoire of dysfunction, will have to build its own blogs or find other comment streams to inhabit. That should mean that it will get a lot quieter here right away, but hopefully over time this will lead to a rational and more human discourse that will be of greater value to everyone. This begins now.
It’s worth thinking about this, five years later:
I have never thought of myself as an experimental writer, but this project is clearly a step into un- (or at least under-)charted territory. My idea is to write briefly from time to time mostly about my writing and whatever I might be thinking about poetry at the moment. Other subjects (music, politics, etc.) may enter in, as they do in life.
Blogs have been around for awhile now, but to date I haven't seen a genuinely good one devoted to contemporary poetry, so it may prove that there is no audience for such an endeavor. But this project isn't about audience. The fact that the blog has the potential to carry forward the best elements of a journal and seems inherently prone to digressive, if not absolutely plotless, prose gives me hope that this form might prove amenable to critical thinking.
Ron
That was my first blog,
Five years hence, the audience question appears to have been answered – by the size of my blogroll more than the number of visits I’ve had here. It’s no longer even remotely possible for me to keep my list of other blogs up-to-date. My presumptions – that this format was conducive for critical thought and (not clearly stated above, I see now) that there was a hunger among poets for the ability to discuss craft, books, trends, politics, whatever, outside of the funneling framework that is the academy – were correct.
Another unstated presumption – that I would be able to do what I wanted in notes no longer than the one above – has proven shakier, to say the least. I had during the previous year tried a few such notes, modeled after Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a book that’s haunted me for 25 years, but my sense of the “finished” essay had me polishing single paragraphs for weeks. Few were ever completed & I never published any of them, even here. The looser, more ad hoc template of blogging proved far readier to get across what I was after.
My world in 2002 was very different. My twins were just ten years old, for example, and we could vacation in a two-room cabin, a considerable change from the five-bedroom manse we had last week in North Carolina. Gil Ott, Robert Creeley & Jackson Mac Low were all around. All were poets whose wisdom I looked to as a guide for my own actions. The Iraq War referred to something that happened during Bush I. Bush II was saying bellicose things about the government of
Blogging, it turns out, has changed the world of poetry in ways that I don’t think we fully realize just yet. There are poets who have begun their careers through blogging, at least one literary genre – flarf – that has its roots there, more than a few collections of physical books that have grown out of blogs. Blogging embodies, more than any other phenomenon I know, the web’s ability to erase or otherwise transform the limits of geography. Poets are linking up on the basis of mutual interests, which is a great thing, especially if you live somewhere other than
Of the various concepts and phrases I’ve come up with here over the past five years, none has generated more wrath than the School of Quietude. Perhaps the two most common complaints are that the idea is too simplistic and that it describes poetry as it existed at some moment in the past, but not now. Both criticisms are largely correct. There is a project – one for which I have no stomach, personally – filling in a far more adequate mapping of the conservative tradition(s) of poetry, first in the
I will, of course, continue to note the depredations of the School of Quietude where they seem apparent – every single American poet laureate, with the sole exception of William Carlos Williams in 1952 (who was appointed but never served, largely for reasons of health), has been a member of this same small coterie dating back to its creation as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1937, endowed by Archer Huntington, the semi-legitimate heir to Collis Huntington, one of the railroad barons of the 19th century. That sort of institutional oligarchy may not be as prevalent as it was, say, in the 1950s, but it has hardly disappeared. On the other hand,
¹ With the sole exception of 2001, the year he hit 73 home runs, Bonds’ numbers from 1993 through 2004 are absolutely consistent. The idea that Bonds suddenly “got powerful” outside of that one year is a fiction.
² Some other guides suggest a value as high as $5 million.
ж
When I got back home late Wednesday, there were literally hundreds of emails waiting, one of which, from Kent Johnson, informed me of Dmitri Prigov’s death. There is something completely unsettling in the death of someone whom you think of as being “your own age,” as I do Prigov. In typing up that minuscule note for the blog below, I saved the file to the wrong name & thereby wiped out about three pages of links I’d plan to run today. If I had one that was important to you, please remind me & I’ll try to fit it in over the weekend.
My little informal poll on Friday looked like the sort of election Fidel Castro would love – the Ayes got over 97 percent of the vote, including nearly as many emails as there were remarks in the comments stream. So I guess that answers that.
I should note, since a couple of people drew the wrong conclusion, that there’s no fixed correlation between what I eventually review and the Recently Received list other than that I don’t see the point of putting something on the list if I’ve just actually reviewed it. I decide what I’m going to write about based on whatever I’m thinking about, pondering, at the time. The Gil Ott book I reviewed last Monday is 11 years old. It can take awhile.
A couple of quick questions today.
First, I’m curious as to whether or not anybody finds it useful when I post a list of what’s been recently received. I first put this together at the request of a couple of publishers, but I want to make sure that it’s not something that only publishers find interesting. The comments streams have received a couple of “Holy cow, a new Carla Harryman book” type responses, but thus far that’s all I’ve heard. Use today’s comments stream to let me know what you think.
Second, I’m going to be reading at Mills in
You will note that I’ve finally begun revising the blogroll in the lefthand column for the first time since a virus ate the underlying Word file. I’ve begun checking every link and will be discarding those that have either gone dark or had no activity since the beginning of the year. I will also be revising the links for those, like Jim Behrle’s, that hop around on the net like a kid with ADHD. You will note that as I get through a section, the color of the names will change to black. I also hope to go back through my emails and pick as many requests for links as I can find. If you’ve made a request and I’ve failed to add it once I’ve gone through your part of the alphabet, drop me a quick note with the link and I’ll do so.
I should note also, I suppose, that I’ve had requests from sites that have nothing to do with poetry – “viral” ad fake blog sites for cigarettes & alcohol mostly, companies that have also requested the opportunity to advertise here – and will not be adding those.
For what it’s worth, this blog received 36,845 visits in March as readers accessed 63,788 page views, both records for the site. That translates into one visit every 72 seconds, one page view every 42. This is the third straight year that March has set record figures for this site. The current numbers are more than double those of two years ago.
This blog will receive its one millionth visit sometime later this week. I may very well miss it since I’m on the road on a business trip & don’t have regular access to the web. You can find the current number in the Site Meter box on the left column, just below the big Poets in Need button amidst all the link icons that separate out the blog archives from the blogroll.
It has been just short of four and one-half years since I started this project. At the end of the first full year, the blog had received some 50,000 visits, a number that today shows up in less than two months. Obviously, tho, those weren’t 50,000 different visitors any more than last year’s 350,000 visits represented that many distinct individuals. Rather, as best I can tell there is a core readership of maybe 1,500 people, folks who stop by somewhere between daily – a handful more often than that – and once a fortnight. These are people who never need to explore beyond this top page unless they’re working on some project and need to get archival.
Around this core is a somewhat larger number of individuals who stop by for a time – perhaps they’re taking a class & have been told by a professor to check it out – but who don’t develop the habit. These readers tend to look at a number of pages when they visit, but they may not last as readers more than a month or term.
These days, the average number of pages read per visit is fairly high – around 1.8 – suggesting that classes are actively using the site. Toward the end of summer, that number might drop as low as 1.1 or 1.2. Even the latter means that one out of every five readers is going beyond just the top page.
When I started this blog, my goal, as I’ve noted before, was to have maybe 30 readers a day, 30 being the audience size of what I take to be a completely successful reading. And I still think that any blog that gets 30 readers a day deserves to be called successful – indeed, I think you can have a successful blog with considerably less, since the point of the blog is not numbers but rather the quality of thinking that the form helps to bring out in you. But my model was obviously wrong, in that what goes on here is not a public reading – this is not a podcast, tho Didi Menendez has been trying to persuade me that it should be – but actual eye-mind-brain reading, if not exactly the way it’s done with books & hardcopy magazines, then the way it’s evolving online. Right now, my average visitor spends exactly three minutes each time they come by. That’s roughly three times the length it takes to read the words in this note up to here silently, but less perhaps than it would take to read these same words aloud.
What this suggests to me is that the web is more than simply a new distribution medium for the same modes of writing with which we’re all familiar. The idea that Jacket is a magazine is probably a very useful metaphor for its editors, but ultimately that’s what it is – a metaphor. I can’t say what will come next exactly, tho I don’t think flash poetry is it, precisely (tho it might be for concretists & visual poets). In fact, I think we’re about to see several different & somewhat contradictory trends occur simultaneously. One is that blogging has gone from being a new medium to an old one in just five or six years, tho to date nothing has shown up yet that suggests to me anything better. I tend to agree with my son who argues that social networking sites all suck. But that might not be true three to five years from now.
I also think we’re seeing something of a backlash to online content, as such. One history department has already banned the use of Wikipedia as a citable source for papers & there are certain to be others. Similarly, we’re already familiar with the model of the brilliant grad school poet-blogger who suddenly goes silent (or at least dampens down the activity markedly) the instant he or she gets a tenure track job, suggesting that there is a conflict (real or imagined) between community & career. As least such poets are being clear as to which value they’re going to pursue.
Similarly, I think there’s going to be – already is, I suspect – some clashing over whether it’s possible to do serious critical writing in this form. One of the most interesting things about last December’s MLA convention in Philadelphia was listening to one fifteen-minute paper after another & realizing that two-thirds had less in the way of ideas than the average blog note. And this was, by all standards, an excellent MLA convention. Try writing 200 MLA presentations in one year, tho, and your whole idea of what constitutes a critical piece of thinking is going to change. In this sense, the real promise of blogging is the one that it holds for changing what constitutes critical thought, literally marginalizing the academy as a site for such about poetry, returning critical writing instead to the poets themselves, most of whom do not teach, or do so only under the most abject of adjunct circumstances. Perhaps marginalizing is too strong a term – there are, after all, good people in the academy who do serious work – but at least “de-authorizing,” de-legitimating academic critical writing as such, forcing it to compete on an equal basis with the “deep gossip” of poets writing about their own work & that of others. Nothing could be healthier than that.
But mostly I want to say what I’ve said before when I’ve come across these little milestones in the history of this blog, which is thank you for stopping by, whether you agree with anything I write or not, or simply love to watch a train wreck in slow motion.
My resolution for this year remains essentially the same one I’ve had for two years now:
Blog better, blog less.
There is, I think, a direct relationship between the two halves of this equation. But it is going to mean overcoming my own anxieties about blank space & silence. And maybe yours too.
There is, to my mind, no particular reason to revisit the same issues endlessly, tho I know I do have my own hobby horses. And there is no reason to write a five-page essay when a message this short can serve the same purpose.
Eleanor Anne Porden (1797-1825)
Silliman’s Blurb
This past week has not been an easy one – I’m paying the piper, so to speak, for having taken some time off this summer & find myself in the midst of multiple major reports, all with deadlines, all more or less simultaneously. On top of which my sons are both starting high school, but at different schools in different counties (long story) – not even adjoining counties at that – and the gauntlet of orientations, open houses & curriculum nights has gobbled up what little other time I’ve got. Then Anne Boyer & Ian Keenan were kind enough to steer me in the direction of Elizabeth Treadwell’s blog, which has a note about my blurb for Pattie McCarthy’s Verso that interprets what I had written in ways I’d never imagined possible – my first thought, on reading Treadwell’s angry & dismissive comments, was that it was strange indeed for anyone to be reading another person’s blurb as being a statement about herself. I still think that may be a primary dynamic here, but at the same time there is another level on which I can see Treadwell’s argument as being completely reasonable. And some of what she writes points to important fissures in writing at the present moment.
Obviously, I brought this on myself. In writing a blurb sufficiently modular for Apogee publisher Alice Jones to edit it down to what she & Pattie wanted to use, I’d left myself open to one on the inherent dangers of any critical endeavor, even as simple as a blurb – I’d written something that could be taken out of context where its meaning comes across fairly differently (to my eye & ear, at least) than it does if one runs just the final four sentences. Here is the actual blurb as it appears on the cover of the book. I’ve italicized the portion that Treadwell quotes.
What if Frank O'Hara had been, literally, a court jester? Or, at the very least, tutor of the King's children? Those are questions that linger in the imagination as one reads Pattie McCarthy's Verso. McCarthy strikes a new tone in & for her poetry. At the same time, however, all of the concerns — with history, naming, gender, etymology & referentiality — that have always animated her work rage on unabated… She makes the membrane between the visible and its opposite her focal point… Pattie McCarthy has been one of our most intellectually ambitious poets— a tradition she shares with Rachel Blau DuPlessis & with H.D. And indeed with the likes of Pound & Olson. We can still count the number of women who attempt writing on such a scale on the fingers of our hands. So it is worth noting & celebrating this addition to that roster.
Any strategic hyperbole in the comparisons of the final four sentences comes across as simply unjustified blanket assertions absent the earlier text. With the full statement, tho, I might be wrong, but I’m not without my reasons.
The objectionable points, as I understand Treadwell’s remarks, as well as those made in its comments stream and in subsequent blog notes by Kasey Mohammad, Shanna Compton, Anne Boyer & Jessica Smith, in the comments streams thereto (see, for example, Jonathan Mayhew’s comments in Kasey’s blog, as well as those made to more than one blog by Ian Keenan & in Treadwell’s stream by Jim Behrle) as well as to the pussipo listserv, are functionally three: the use of superlatives, as such; a comparison with other writers, especially male other writers; and my “fingers of our hands” remark, which can be interpreted apparently as meaning that there would be as few as 10 such writers (tho that is not how I read the plural our). Beyond these surface issues, there is a question of a tradition that would include high modernists like Pound & H.D. with one of the early coiners of the term postmodern in Olson with a contemporary feminist poet like DuPlessis. And, if I read Jessica Smith’s blog – and several emails I’ve received from other people – a general irritation that “the language poets” and/or possibly just myself have far too much “power” on the poetry scene today. Lets take a look at each of these.
The use of strategic superlatives – Shanna Compton & Jonathan Mayhew are largely correct in their assessments of this – is one of the inherent risks of blurbing. One important reality – and part of what motivates Treadwell’s initial reaction, I think – is that there are, in fact, more good writers today than ever before. When you go from a few hundred publishing poets, the situation in this country a half century ago when the New Americans first came onto the scene, to the more than ten thousand who are now publishing, not just writing, there is going to be a major dispersal of the landscape. Blurbs are endorsements – unlike at least a couple of the New Americans, I won’t blurb a book I don’t like (just as, in my blog, I very rarely bother to write about a book I don’t like) – and superlatives are a foregrounding device.
Given that I could write “this is a terrific book” about at least 100 books in any given year, I use comparisons as a means of giving a better sense of shape to my experience of this landscape. Literature is not without its history & a little reading allows any reader to begin mapping out what matters to them – it is the primary device for making sense of the cornucopia of data points that 4,000+ books per year constitutes. As the alternate modes offered by Jack Spicer in his application for the Magic Workshop nearly 50 years ago underscores, there’s no one right way to see things, no Mercator projection that will always identify Gertrude Stein as having a value of X, e.e. cummings a value of Y. I know a number of mostly younger poets who chafe at being so pigeon-holed, but that is an act of denial I always reject. A work that stands truly outside of any plausible mapping of the landscape, not just of the present but going back at least to the start of the 19th century, can only be described in a few ways. One is the category of “things that don’t fit” or at least don’t fit yet. Another is works ignorant of history. A third is works with a lack of self-knowledge. Some really good writing can fall into these interstices – consider Bern Porter as an example – but the one sad certainty is that all these categories are paths to neglect.
A second plausible objection to my use of comparisons here is that I overhyped Pattie McCarthy’s work, placing it alongside canonical poets like Pound, Olson, H.D. & DuPlessis. This is where I think Treadwell’s quoting out of context distorts what I actually wrote. All four poets – regardless of how much one does (or doesn’t) think of them – were involved in larger literary projects that usually gets described as the composition of the “contemporary epic,” or “long poems containing history” (tho one can make a case that H.D.’s Trilogy at least is concerned more with mythology). Verso, like McCarthy’s earlier bk of (h)rs, strikes me very much as preparation for a project on the scale of The Cantos or Drafts. This doesn’t mean that such is the only path a serious poet can take – I would number Emily Dickinson, Larry Eigner, Rae Armantrout & Robert Creeley as four of my favorite poets of all time, not one of whom used that approach. Nor does my statement even mean that Verso itself is such a work – as a project in its own right, Verso’s scale is closer to that of Mauberly or The Waste Land or “Poem Beginning ‘The.’” But it is hard – for me impossible – to read McCarthy’s work and not be taken with the sense of intellectual horizon that is everywhere implicit in her poetry.
There is, at some point, a good piece that needs to be written on what actually constitutes a longpoem. From my perspective, there are questions of the scale of the text, time of composition (a different scale altogether) & scope of the project & its internal structures that all come into play. It is perfectly possible to write large books that are not so much long poems as they are fast ones – which is how I read Anne Waldman’s Iovis or John Ashbery’s Flow Chart or some of A.R. Ammons’ work – just as there are works that seem long in the literal sense of the number of pages, but which are deliberately narrow, a type of poem that Ted Enslin & Frank Samperi have elaborated & explored. These poems are long in much the same way that a block of clay can always be rolled into an ever thinner string thereof. There are also booklength poems that use different scales altogether, such as verse novels, Jack Spicer’s serial poems, Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets, most of Leslie Scalapino’s work. McCarthy’s first two books fall into this last category for me, but do so clearly invoking the tradition toward which I think she’s working. If we look at the actual tradition, it’s fair to ask how many poets of all kinds are attempting projects that engage that scale I implicit in McCarthy’s writing – not one of the poets listed in Treadwell’s blog seems to fit that definition, tho that doesn’t mean that several of them aren’t tremendous poets. But they are doing different things. Treadwell’s argument is akin to complaining that I haven’t included the likes of Susan Bee or Francie Shaw among a roster of great sculptors simply because they make paintings.
There is also a history yet to be written of the longpoem and its relationship to women, one that would include, for example, Eleanor Anne Porden – a woman with a complicated relationship to my own family tree¹ – as well as Frances Boldereff, Charles Olson’s mistress & unacknowledged collaborator, not to mention Celia Zukofsky, Hilda Doolittle, Beverly Dahlen & Rachel Blau DuPlessis. But while this history would need to look at the work of writers like Gertrude Stein or Susan Howe or a project like Diane Wakoski’s George Washington poems, it would be for the purpose of contextualizing the project within its actually existing history, not because they are doing the same thing. A history like this is nothing but comparisons. And a history that failed to be able to distinguish between Stein’s The Making of Americans & Doolittle’s Trilogy would frankly be a failure.
Superlatives & comparisons both make distinctions, which, complains Treadwell, “are divisive. “ But that is precisely what distinctions do. They are the fundamental device of organization: not this, not this. Not only do distinctions enable us in daily life to separate out the wolf from the dog, but the romaine from the hydrangea, which, however beautiful, is quite toxic. Any mycologist had better be able to distinguish which mushrooms are edible & which lead directly to liver & kidney failure & ultimately death. Distinctions are not inherently pernicious – they are, in fact, the primary function of culture itself.
Treadwell’s blog is itself an attempt at distinction, at dividing. She seems clearly to want to set in a motion – or at least to proclaim critical mass – a paradigm shift in American writing. Where Bob Grenier once wrote, all in caps, “I HATE SPEECH,” Treadwell’s argument in her blog, her choice of a strident tone as well as some of her comments to the pussipo list, all suggest that functionally – not personally, I hope – Treadwell proposes to substitute my name for Grenier’s noun.
Treadwell’s thesis as I read it is that women have sufficiently arrived as poets to enable them to constitute a literature without the help or examples or history of male writers. Fair enough. As I read it, this is different from the separatism of certain feminists in the early 1970s – Judy Grahn has characterized separatism as it rose up then in the lesbian community as a tool, not a program – tho its motivation may be similar. It is certainly true that with the thousands of interesting poets writing now & the enormous increase in the number of female poets since the early 1950s that a poet could easily read only women poets & still never find the time to read even all the good or great ones. So what Treadwell is suggesting is not at all implausible as a next stage in the evolution of writing in the
I will admit to a certain ambivalence to being proposed as the icon of all that is old. It’s an index of how far from what I experience as “the old world,” i.e., the institutions of what Charles Bernstein still calls Official Verse Culture, the world of poetry has come that Treadwell would think to pick a blogger with no academic affiliation, someone who has never once had a book from a trade press. Why me, rather than, say, Ed Hirsch over at the Guggenheim Foundation, Dana Gioia at the NEA, Harold Bloom, Christian Wimen at Poetry or Jonathan Galassi at FSG? In going after me, Treadwell is saying a great deal about just how much those institutions actually matter.
It is also, however grudgingly & ironically, a deep compliment. And, ever since Elizabeth Treadwell posted her blog note and the ancillary discussion began on pussipo, my blog has experienced a 33 percent increase in the number of pages read by each visitor – a sea change, given that that figure has been stable at 1.2 pages per visit for perhaps two years. This includes two days in which more than 1,900 pages were visited. Those numbers will surely go down again as the new readers Treadwell has brought either move on or focus instead just on what has been said recently. But I have to recognize & acknowledge that Elizabeth Treadwell has done more to bring people here than anyone in a long time. And for that I can only say thank you.
¹ Porden was the first wife of British explorer Sir John Franklin who my maternal great grandfather’s family was taught had been a direct ancestor. It has only been in the last couple of years that my cousin Richard Tansley has been able to prove conclusively that the John Franklin in the family tree in the first half of the 19th century was an illiterate fish monger, not the former Tasmanian prison master & naval captain. Porden wrote several longpoems – large booklength works in the epic mode, even if they were written fairly quickly, given just how young she was when she died, just 28. It was Porden’s longpoem on arctic exploration that led her to meet
Thanks to the efforts of Joseph Mosconi, the Gmail mail-abuse team & several friends who actually forwarded old emails to prove I had been using the i.d., I’ve finally gotten my email address back! Now all I have to do is wade through 1200 emails . . . .
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The September issue of Brooklyn Rail – that name always makes me think of the bird, not the train – is online with lots of goodies well worth reading. From Charles Bernstein telling Bob Dylan to grow up to Bill Corbett reviewing the collected poems of Anne Porter, to Ionesco to Sylvere Lotringer to poetry by Ravi Shankar (the poet, not Norah Jones’ daddy).
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The impact of the web on poetry, as seen from down under.
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First Cody’s closed its
I have had to sing this song before, alas. Somebody has captured my Gmail account, changed the password and the security question. Until I can get someone at Gmail or at Google security to rectify this situation, my email address is rsillima AT yahoo DOT com. And if you have sent me an email in the past week, please resend it to that address. If you have any outstanding business with me, please send me a tickler at that address, just so I don't lose an important thread.
And if you work at Google or one of its divisions - some of my readers seem to do so - please let me know if you can help with this.
Thanks!
RON SILLIMAN has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
