My immediate neighbor and ex-girlfriend's
Poetry for March landed in my mailbox, and I looked it over.
It looks about the same as I remember it from a couple of decades ago, then a cleaned-up, graphically disciplined retread of Arts-and-Crafts minimalism if you know what I mean. Were the text set in sans serif, especially if someone had chosen Helvetica, we could pretend that
Poetry is modernist, at least in appearance (and I am sticking with appearances for now). Nope, those curling Cadmus Communication r's and bottom-anchored p's, g's, y's keep reminding me what time zone we're transmuting to, 1912 Central. The Big Pharma (Lilly) loot just adds a marbled thought-structure to my incredulous experience: these rats will never stop eating.
It might be bloodless and reassuring were the practical world bifurcated along the mild divide perpetuated by Ron Silliman. Coastal cognoscenti, on the non side of mainstream, beyond received opinion, beyond semantics, beyond mere discontinuity and formal experiment. Then there would only be Iowa and its shadow people in and of the quiet stream, paddling and plugging away at their narratives, burnishing personae and everything else that's un-beyond.
Poetry reminds us there are other forces who in aggregate are more destructive than anything intimated within Ron's order of the mainstream and non. I'm going to lump these forces together in a category I'll call the unquiet Ugly Betties. You'll find them with blood on their hands in
Poetry, shout-down simpletons, such as Clive James who reasons: "The Olson fragment I quoted...strikes me as easier to do than it looks, like almost all bad poetry written since the first modern generation of poets whose ambition outstripped their talent learned that they could get by with a show of advanced technique." Or the Welsh critic and -- I'm going to reinforce the Ugly Betty theme -- crone Anne Stevenson who, with all the lack of grace a half-century can muster, recollects an early acquaintance with Frank O'Hara. "I remember a wiry, very animanted, red-faced young man in his twenties around whom other poets buzzed like bees...but...either ignored me or looked upon me rather as a professional boxer..." Which is it, Stevenson? Here's the destructive part. "I have to say," she continues, "when the English poet, Lee Harwood, sent me a copy of 'Personism' last summer, I was alarmed to discover that it read like a freshman essay." Gosh, Anne Stevenson has to say this, alarmed, and only after 50 years or so of not having read it, filled as it is with "terrible prose" but a text -- oh, Stevenson thinks it's a genuine "manifesto" -- which "more or less laid the foundations of the now fashionable New York School."
It seems so Arts-and-Crafts of American editors to turn to retired British critics for a blurred, overgeneralized view of current events in New York. These same editors, Christian Wiman, Helen Lothrop Klaviter, Fred Sasaki, Danielle Chapman turn to another Brit, Geoffrey Hill, to lead the poetry section, five starchy pieces fortified with incomparably dipshit vocabulary: "omega, fossilized"; "ill-neighboured"; "Cloven, we are incorporate..."
The thread running through poems and criticism in
Poetry is thin, dour-shaded difficulty, "I can't believe it was very hard to do," Clive James again chimes in with respect to Olson's work. D.H. Tracy is skeptical of a poet who 'ornaments truth,' offering the late Robert Penn Warren as a "model" who approaches poetry "with the mind rather than the temperament." That "rather" pinpoints more than a bifurcation in poetics; it stipulates a Maginot Line -- itself a kind of Arts-and-Crafts contraption -- elevating and quasi-protecting prosodic intellect against the bloody hordes of everything else.
Writers of letters to the editor provide bathos-entertainment, re-activists functioning as a nah-nah chorus of the unwilling. Marion Shore of Belmont, MA decries Peter Campion who, among other things, reduces Louis Zukofsky's opus to "copy-work." Shore writes that Campion's "diatribe" demonstrates "lack of understanding, a desire to preach, or a tin ear. Perhaps all of the above." Dan Corrigan from Baltimore praises Zukofsky's "calculated musicality" vs. Campion's dismissal of Zukofsky as "cold fomalist." Blogger and poet Henry Gould highlights Campion's "persnickety judgments" and "nostrums of verbal economy," such dicta often "responsible for...the drabbest, dullest, most inert poetry." Noble as they first appear, it's hard to figure why these readers care to re-fight the old war of almost a century ago. The way to overrun the Maginot, after all, was to two-step around it, and then will to carry on.
Thanks, but I'll stick with today. Ninety-five, and will the thieves of poetry know what this is regarding? Thanks to Big Pharma,
Poetry is still here, dispenser of yesteryear's bitter pills, more harmful than placebos, more likely to turn Betty's casual interest in poetry clueless and ugly.
It's well-known that East and West mix it up somewhere. Like in Bolinas or Boulder. Boulder's is a mixology ethos easily mistaken for the smart neighborliness of Bolinas if not San Francisco. Every year a couple of classes or more at Naropa U. attract and launch the latest great. And there are innumerable presses and zines in or around Boulder that package the buzz of the good and the new visiting Colorado from either coast and elsewhere, studying, teaching, and/or performing at the university. (At Naropa, performance is teaching and learning.) This season a portion of the packaging rights go to Vanitas editor Vincent Katz, who's not based in Boulder, exactly, who nonetheless looks as if he's been gathering choice work as he's knocking back whiskeys with Jack Collom, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, et al. So that's the first thing to keep in mind, he's got Boulder covered, and he's got the ethos down, younger and more established, famous and not-so (more, below). 
Now that's an outline. Haven't gotten to the surprises. There are scores. Here are three. 1) I don't know who Morgan Russell is but I would love to read more from him. He's already in three places in Vanitas 2; notably he leads the issue off in the format of his e-mail to Vincent: "had a dream some time back after discovering that person holding my family photos had died...the object of any search uncertain... // so the dream: // I ascend...everything thought lost is there." 2) Might anyone else agree John Latta and Kasey Mohammad deploy contracted diction to produce comparably neo-baroque vocals? Check their pieces in Vanitas 2 to see. 3) And finally, Ed Sanders shoots to the top addressing his readers, "O revs of the Morrow / Work in extra dimensions / Think 100 years ahead..." Yay! Then in the poem "Live Free Or Die" he lays down this stripped down narrative cum litany connected to Allen Ginsberg's first experience with LSD in Cambridge:
Reading all new pieces, blade-sharp Sean Cole strips the bark off the way abstinence or at the very least contraception works in a poem. "Somebody has to be a mugger. Possibly / my son. Therefore I won't make one. / It could keep a world of handbags safe." In the poem "Populism" (nice word play!) Sean is totally fragging, but the pathetic fate of the moment, our moment of the $20,000 Gucci clutch, is signed and sealed. Look, the socioeconomics are such I've been mugged, it's in the delivery, Sean implies, so let me throttle the kid in advance of his fetal reality, thank you, and you know what, the muggers have us surrounded, fool: "I don't want / to swell the community who ends your life, / mine. We'll all fail." In "Postcard to December" Sean puns to suggest, less venomously, it's been "one hill of a year." This is twister Sean, still, poet-with-knife-in-hand, letting us know -- and sounding it out, too! -- he's not abiding conventional ways to drip oil into the pan, "sistering. / Sistering? Yes, All I can think / of, when it hits, is my / sister." He spots a Quebequois with hair that's "fire-engine red, wears outfit to match." Then adds parenthetically "Get it? Match?" It's as if he's not meaning to say, "Thug in vermillion doo-rag grouses the world" but it can't be helped (fate, again): "boobs are painted...in clear varnish...penises stapled...At last we're cast / to thing our thong, they say, this is great, I can't believe it."
What's a lyrical water balloonist? A rubber-suited acrobat who gains leverage within the system she twists to burst. I know. I know it's a mixed bag of metaphors that I invoke in response to Sue Landers's set. She chose a few pieces from 248 mgs. (O Books) that remind us how trans-categorical and unnumberedly-dimensional the recollection of tranquility in delerium can be:
