The Brooklyn Rail - Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door: Bob Dylan and the Adolescent Sublime … charles bernstein on dylan’s Chronicles 1 … via silliman

From the first, Dylan hitched his star to a practice of nonconformity; but along the way he began to take nonconformity as something literal rather than metaphoric; the parodic lost its joissance and became (in his own perception) a shell game. The problem is not that Dylan ever betrayed his listeners or his genres, quite the contrary, but that he came to feel, like Lon Chaney in The Man of a Thousand Faces, that he couldn’t shake them off.

today from amazon arrived three books …

sure i’ve ordered & received BAP2006 … there’s nothing to be said of that … except that i usually find some things to like in it … though what i’ve read quickly of the billy collins intro seems kind of obnoxious … not at all the generous tone i heard in person some years ago … maybe he’s been listening lopsidedly to his critics & grown a shell …

the next is a book i’m not sure i should own up to owning or even being interested in because i am a brother in the rcc after all … and well we brothers are sposed to have our eyes set on the Disembodied Transcendent Truths … (but to tell the truth … lacking the willy wonka elevator it seems to require … i’ve never quite ever been there … not such a fan of Disembodied Truth, if you must know) … and certainly any text touching sex as mere mortals know it is suspect on the shelf of a - you know - brother in the (scandal-ridden) rcc … but CAConrad’s Deviant Propulsion goes some way toward wrinkling up the proprieties of the BAP … and the voice of most of the poems i’ve read is enthusiastic toward the liberation of human spirit from … o … the usual suspects … well… i could mumble some stuff about secular sacramentality … but that would sound as patronizing and blinkered as it is, in fact … CAConrad is another country … & i’m happy to have his book on my shelf … and in my head … period

and the next is one of the time-to-time picture books i collect … james warhola’s Uncle Andy’s … just because i can …

if i were a few years younger & feeling just a bit zippier than i do right now, i’d jump in my car & head south to 830 N. Milwaukee Ave … 2nd Floor … where k. silem mohammad and Anne Boyer are reading … if i left right now, i’d be late … but perhaps not catastrophically … but it’s a friday night after a thursday night on which we greeted the parents in our classrooms until 9 p.m. or so … it’s friday night after a friday afternoon on which i had to perform some pedagogical tooth-pulling … its friday night just past the full moon and the world feels kind of shakey … so i wish the poets well & will re-read a bit of their stuff towards that end tonight

just read Bemsha Swing’s masterly compendium of (what i take to be jonathan mayhew’s sense of) po-blogger complaints about the state of current poetry/literary discourse … it’s extensive & barbed & funny as hell because accurate as hell … or so i thinks … good stuff

joshua corey …

I’m generally convinced that words are smarter than I am, and if I let them have their way, they’ll discover and interrogate and express things that my ordinary instrumental mind just doesn’t have access to.

hg poetics reminds me to look at {lime tree} … and this piece by k. silem mohammad … Notes on (Dis)quietude and the “Post-Avant” … on what i take to be the longstanding effort to find the best term(s) for the kind(s) of poetry writing that’s been going on for the last (what?) quarter century … and a dissatisfaction with the terms set by ron silliman ( “School of Quietude” (SoQ) and “Post-Avant”) … if yr interested in such stuff, read the whole brief essay … i don’t much like ripping key sentences away from their carefully posed context, but here are some bits by kasey that i’d like to keep in easy reach for a little while …

a question: What kinds of conceptual violence have to be committed in order to make, say, Adrienne Rich fit into a quietudist pigeonhole, or in order to think of Jorie Graham as post-avant in Ron’s sense?

on SoQ: The trait shared by these writers is a generally conservative attitude toward versification and language in general as it is manifested in poetry.

[I]t is undeniable that some poems favor an aesthetic of tranquility while others favor more confrontational and discordant effects. One way of conceiving this distinction is as between a poetics of palliation and a poetics of catharsis.

Poetry must at a rudimentary level comprehend the demand of the human senses for a composed stillness, just as it must also comprehend their demand for derangement.

Poetry can never be only about beauty, nor can it be only about the absence of beauty.

just now i see that over at p l a i n e r i’ve got a link to “all of my books” … and some innocent visitor might click it expecting to find a catalogue of books i’ve written, books in which my poems exist on actual pages between covers, books of my dreams, books of incisive literary & cultural analysis … but no … they are just my books … books that i have bought & can claim as “mine” because i have plopped down money for them … other people’s books … only mine in this limited sense of possession … not production

sometimes when i see the beautiful book-objects that are made by/for poets i wish i could see my pomes on that certain paper sewn just so with the inked shapes of letters of words leaning into that certain surface … something actual … not just electrical

that i’ve been happier than i’ve a right to be with what i put down over at p l a i n e r … i don’t know what i’m doing but i’m doing it and liking it well enough for now to keep doing it … but don’t feel well able to explain myself … what are these things & to what degree are they of me … expressions … they’re expressions but not directly of me … but of language in me … as if i’m the bus that carries these happy boys back from a football victory … they like to shout out into the night to nobody in particular … and to everything in particular … and what they shout’s less the point than the joy

apply to one of my pomes the questions posed by teacher dawn hogue in What is a poem made of?

is it possible or desirable to do this with pomes of my ilk?

are there other questions that might be posed for pomes of my ilk?

does the degree of resistance to these questions by my pomes validate or invalidate them as poems? mark them as “good” poems or “bad” poems?

i suppose this all comes under the query: “Are these poems workshopable?”

(preliminary reply: well, they would be if the workshop shared certain (the same) poetic principles/methods with the poet)

what are those principles/methods?

suddenly wondering in between finding & editing handouts for class tomorrow … (where did i put that nabokov piece?) … wondering if the poems i make are posing or are in some way real things … wondering if they’re exercises or actualities … how could i know or anyone know?

this has always been part of my difficulty in reading poetry, too … i stand puzzled & curious before anyone who’s able to make an evaluative comment about any poem … (on which kind of thing the poetry blogs do thrive, of course) … but i do it sometimes … at least in my silence … i say i like that one or that one is not so good, in fact, it’s stupid it stinks (no, that’s some real bad sewer gas seeping up & out through the unused bathroom down the hall) … i do say these things to myself … so there must be some unspoken, unconsidered aesthetic criteria at work in me …

and of course i make choices when i write … i put down one thing then take it out because something is not right … but not right according to what part of my brain … where’s that file?

this would maybe be worth pushing a bit harder in my ap class?

jason nelson’s poemcube

…. forgot the name of this durable insect …

… in his second car turning into verbs …

… making frozen golden rules and stumbling …

… then another and so on into painters …

time to get yr john ashbery on …

we like this creepy opening to the long “And the Stars Were Shining” …

It was the solstice, and it was jumping on you like a friendly dog.
The stars were still out in the field,
and the child prostitutes plied their trade,
the only happy ones, having learned how unhappiness sticks
and will not risk being traded in for a song or a balloon.
Christmas decorations were getting crumpled in offices
by staffers slumped at their video terminals,
and dismay articulated otherness in orphan asylums
where the coffee percolates eternally, and God is not light
but God, as mysterious to Himself as we are to Him.

if i were using this in class i’d point out the obvious … and wait for my students to notice the not-so-obvious …

it’s the obvious-to-me echo of eliot’s/prufrock’s opening … to shift from pretty poetic innocence to jaded (poetic?) experience … ironic pastoral? … subversion of the pastoral? … wanting both there in the poem? from “solstice” “friendly dog” “stars” & “field” to “child prostitutes” “crumpled” “staffers slumped” “video terminals” “orphan asylums” to “God” … and honoring (?) acknowledging (?) mocking (?) the sacred with the traditional caps on “Himself” and “Him” …

in ap english circles we push students to identify the tone … the voice … of/in the work … as a way to “reach” the “truth” of the poem … or the poet … but i wonder how helpful that is with much of ashbery … who ducks & dodges … tone&voice are just other tools to serve whichever purpose of the poem at that moment … & some would (but i don’t) have a problem with that

so i’m stuck with this textbook … and here are five poems by mainstream white guy poets (is this a fair distinction? i don’t know … they are grouped here not by me but by the editors of this book i’m stuck with … it’s robert lowell, robert penn warren, william stafford, and theodore roethke … you decide)

and then about eighty pages later … here come the asian, hispanic, native american, and female poets (lorna dee cervantes, martin espada, diana chang, simon ortiz, garret hongo) … they get five poems, too … so we’re ethnically (if not aesthetically) diverse in this textbook …

but what if i want these poets & poems to talk to each other? which i do.

then i pair them up & assign them to students to read and think about and talk about … and that’s what will happen in the coming period … moving toward a fishbowl discussion.

i pose three questions …

1. what is the situation of the poem?

2. what does each poem reveal about what poetry can do?

3. what happens when you set these two poems next to each other and think about them?