Responses to Wieners's romance.
...I hadn't ever thought about the connections between Wieners and, say, Mallarmé but it makes complete sense. Especially what you say about his work in Behind the State Capitol & later seems so true. His work really seems unusual to me in that he got more interesting and experimental as he got older. And he understood the uses of silence, or of waiting. What I've read of Behind the State Capitol in his Selected Poems and fragments I've come across of later work seems miles ahead, or beyond, anyone in his generation or subsequent ones. And all done in his humble and earnest way [...]
I keep thinking of the time I saw him read at Waterstone's Bookstore (I think it was in 1997 or early '98) and though I suspect some audience members were impatient or perplexed with his reading style, I found it astonishing and refreshing. How he took his poem "Ode on a Common Fountain" and "remixed" it with interruptions & asides, creating a marvelous expansion of that text, updating it...
-- Guillermo Parra
he told me something once that I’ve never forgotten. I mentiond a poet (who I have forgotten) expecting some evaluative response. "I'm a friend but not a fan" he sd. & I've been waiting decades to use his line.
-- Alex Gildzen
2/27/07
Sometimes I'm asked about my itty fixation on John Wieners, and in particular, what's the deal beyond a Boston accent and all those fiercely lovelorn markers? Well, there is that twang along with bucketsful of paradigms in heartache. That might be enough. But to sum up his worth, to me, in temporal terms, I am pulled apart by his backward and forward movements. Like Clark Coolidge, Wieners's formality is prominent. His, that is, Wieners's distills several romantic regimens, symbolists Mallarmé, Redon, Wagner, Verdi, connecting to Thomas Malory and a more secular lyricism of jongleurs and trouvères, partaking of an impure tradition, if you will, stretching as far back as Ovid and Propertius. Then, Wieners's forward movement from the mid-1970s on (Behind the State Capitol and after) is predictive of language behavior today. He understood spam decades before the rest of us. This could be Wieners: Those are names. Rudy trade bow rotten. Soon I am old self miss relation. Douce composed turn farther, her rose. It's yesterday's spam. Without a spam blocker my new e-mail site shows all the junk streaming thru my addresses, maybe 200-300 texts on an average weekday. Now without a monitor I see what I've been missing. So Wieners-Coolidge-like are a few of these, I'm starting a collection of the best, beginning with Heya, this it or no. The best? Ones in which John is talking to us now.
2/26/07
Boston beat: Lost chance to hear Nathaniel Tarn & Janet Rodney and then Jim Dunn & Jen Tynes. Jen read here a few weeks ago, but missing her second reading is still a loss, and I wanted to hear the others as well. Looking forward, then, to the rescheduling of Sean Cole who pairs up with Susan Landers on Sunday for Demolicious, 206 Prospect, Central Square, 2 p.m. Moving to the right a few hours later, David Rivard & Ralph Angel at the Plough and Stars, 912 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, 7 p.m.
2/23/07
Another reader writes.
I'm afraid I don't follow what you are trying to say about America and all its poets of varying persuasions. (Get it right, Jack, variety, a lot of terrific writers is a good thing, but not for a miniscule elite that you don't belong to anyway.) I know that you were just adding commentary to the (tedious) discussion ongoing about the avant garde, whether there is one, or many of them, Jack, but when you drag in the old codes like "refinement" and "guardians and arbiters" it's pretty clear whose side you are actually on, landlord. It's just that any of your claims of innocence have always bugged me for that reason. I mean, yes, it was the old timers like Hugh Kenner and Robert Lowell and the whole science = progress = "I hate speech" act that was practically an article of faith among the beats-to-language poets, and the idea of being used for EEEVILL wasn't on anyone's radar screen, but come on, a poetry elite seems like such an obvious next step. Anyway, I honestly wonder if the possibility crossed your mind at all that your writing about fast lanes in poetry could be used to justify oppression. I don't see how it couldn't have either but, who knows?
I'm afraid I don't follow what you are trying to say about America and all its poets of varying persuasions. (Get it right, Jack, variety, a lot of terrific writers is a good thing, but not for a miniscule elite that you don't belong to anyway.) I know that you were just adding commentary to the (tedious) discussion ongoing about the avant garde, whether there is one, or many of them, Jack, but when you drag in the old codes like "refinement" and "guardians and arbiters" it's pretty clear whose side you are actually on, landlord. It's just that any of your claims of innocence have always bugged me for that reason. I mean, yes, it was the old timers like Hugh Kenner and Robert Lowell and the whole science = progress = "I hate speech" act that was practically an article of faith among the beats-to-language poets, and the idea of being used for EEEVILL wasn't on anyone's radar screen, but come on, a poetry elite seems like such an obvious next step. Anyway, I honestly wonder if the possibility crossed your mind at all that your writing about fast lanes in poetry could be used to justify oppression. I don't see how it couldn't have either but, who knows?
2/22/07
In avant poetry nobody drives in the slow lane, colloquially called the lane of the lame. So it’s somewhat of a mystery why the chic-prone avant poetics industry, one of the primary engines of the culture economy, continues to putter along year after year doing 50 while counterparts in France, Eastern Europe and even the UK go whizzing past.
Nowadays more aspirant than exemplar when it comes to patrician elegance, in terms of volume of production, U.S. poetics remains a force, one illustration of this being the sheer scope of poets' numbers here. No fewer than 1,200 so-called poet's web sites are noted in the rolls of the most definitive bloggers. Yet to be honest, there are no more than a handful of blogs that anyone cares about or that the ever-expanding posse of international poetics press and poetry readers is eager to visit or peruse, much less read.
Among the handful of most important online sites, at this point there is Diane Middlebrook's acclaimed Pangrimmeron, based in distant Denmark. Some say Middlebrook's lack of proximity to the American elite of poetry hardly limits her ability to generate the prerequisite line of abstruse, philosophy-laden questions and observations addressing American verse that readers expect from top-tier poetics blogging. There is Molly Peacock's aptly-monikered Blind Poetics, which, unblinkered, monitors bacchanalian verse occasions nationwide, with a special emphasis on the piped-in and pumped-up from California wine country. There is Pack Bringley. There is Lance Phillips. (That neither Bringley nor Phillips has posted for months does not lessen readership one whit.)
Truth be known, American elites are as ambivalent about blogging as they are about national identity. Beginning last year, Chris Funkhouser made even clearer the shakiness of his allegiance to what’s termed the American poetics system when he packed up his electro-poetics ethos and started restaging it in southeast Asia.
What happened? Poets like Siri Hustvedt, Ray DiPalma, and Weldon Kees, whose brands are now global behemoths, once also dominated the aesthetic side of the poetry business. Why does the U.S. seem like it was run off the road? "American poetry has a big, big problem, which is that everyone has lost his nervy edge, there is no residual pretense, only constant change,” said Ted Kooser, the perpetrator of Poetry National, a respected but largely commercial enterprise that is, in typical un-avant fashion, commemorating its 21st anniversary this year. “Designwise, factorywise, in terms of the bureaucracy, we’re behind.”
It is not just, as many suggest, that the U.S., long renowned for its rebels, its misfits and its high aesthetic standards, has lost large hunks of its poetry market to Europe. Plenty of people here will tell you that the Euro-avant experiment has not necessarily worked out. Cheap foreign copies of American poetics are fine, but not fine enough, apparently, to satisfy the trained eyes and ears of readers spoiled by the access they’ve always had to the best poetry around.
You don’t hear the word used explicitly, but the quality missing from poetry here now is what a few of us refer to as refinement. This is not a small detail in a country historically defined almost entirely by its poetry culture. What has replaced it in part is imported tackiness and vulgarity of which America once claimed the dominant market share. American pop culture at this point is largely vapid and formless. What is Paris Hilton but a cloud of pastel neo-Euro ectoplasm, its molecules barely sticky enough to hold form? So too American poetry-pop culture produces its own manifestations, one being the careers of the poets Robert Pinsky and Wanda Phipps, who are incredibly talented composers of astonishingly avant verse in their own enormously respective ways, but whose status as media deities owes less to their poetry skills than to their genius for tapping into a youth culture just as dumb as ever.
It was the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (himself a naturalized American) who first pronounced doom on America’s aesthetic and moral standards based on the decadence he saw emanating from the boob tube. But that was eons before the country’s biggest porn star, Scooter Libby, became a snack foods huckster featured in commercials for Peter Pan peanut butter whose tag line uses a double entrendre that is slang for salmonella and a part of the president's anatomy. Like most eggheads of the period, Hitchcock decried the vulgarization of culture by the ubiquitous new medium. Yet in Hitchcock’s day, the U.S. could still be said to have a vital literary, artistic and cinematic scene to counter the television’s evil rays. Even applied parodic forms like villanelles and sestinas then embodied an image of the U.S. as a holdout of refined, if ironic, tradition and Americans as warm-hearted guardians and arbiters of patrician ways.
That this fantasy has not altogether faded can be seen in the poetics press obsession with C. A. Conrad, reprobate grandson of Joseph Conrad, the former novelist in chief. Despite repeated goth metal binges, stints in gambler's rehab, his overdose on grunge in the apartment of a middle-aged transvestite, Conrad is invariably seen as a paragon of elegance. Mostly this is because he spouts his grandfather's prose and wears his grandmother’s clothes. There is a particularly old-American (and dare we add blue-blooded) message in the fact that, no matter what kind of antics Conrad gets up to, his inherited hand-me-downs possess the magical power to restore him to moral rectitude.
Nowadays more aspirant than exemplar when it comes to patrician elegance, in terms of volume of production, U.S. poetics remains a force, one illustration of this being the sheer scope of poets' numbers here. No fewer than 1,200 so-called poet's web sites are noted in the rolls of the most definitive bloggers. Yet to be honest, there are no more than a handful of blogs that anyone cares about or that the ever-expanding posse of international poetics press and poetry readers is eager to visit or peruse, much less read.
Among the handful of most important online sites, at this point there is Diane Middlebrook's acclaimed Pangrimmeron, based in distant Denmark. Some say Middlebrook's lack of proximity to the American elite of poetry hardly limits her ability to generate the prerequisite line of abstruse, philosophy-laden questions and observations addressing American verse that readers expect from top-tier poetics blogging. There is Molly Peacock's aptly-monikered Blind Poetics, which, unblinkered, monitors bacchanalian verse occasions nationwide, with a special emphasis on the piped-in and pumped-up from California wine country. There is Pack Bringley. There is Lance Phillips. (That neither Bringley nor Phillips has posted for months does not lessen readership one whit.)
Truth be known, American elites are as ambivalent about blogging as they are about national identity. Beginning last year, Chris Funkhouser made even clearer the shakiness of his allegiance to what’s termed the American poetics system when he packed up his electro-poetics ethos and started restaging it in southeast Asia.
What happened? Poets like Siri Hustvedt, Ray DiPalma, and Weldon Kees, whose brands are now global behemoths, once also dominated the aesthetic side of the poetry business. Why does the U.S. seem like it was run off the road? "American poetry has a big, big problem, which is that everyone has lost his nervy edge, there is no residual pretense, only constant change,” said Ted Kooser, the perpetrator of Poetry National, a respected but largely commercial enterprise that is, in typical un-avant fashion, commemorating its 21st anniversary this year. “Designwise, factorywise, in terms of the bureaucracy, we’re behind.”
It is not just, as many suggest, that the U.S., long renowned for its rebels, its misfits and its high aesthetic standards, has lost large hunks of its poetry market to Europe. Plenty of people here will tell you that the Euro-avant experiment has not necessarily worked out. Cheap foreign copies of American poetics are fine, but not fine enough, apparently, to satisfy the trained eyes and ears of readers spoiled by the access they’ve always had to the best poetry around.
You don’t hear the word used explicitly, but the quality missing from poetry here now is what a few of us refer to as refinement. This is not a small detail in a country historically defined almost entirely by its poetry culture. What has replaced it in part is imported tackiness and vulgarity of which America once claimed the dominant market share. American pop culture at this point is largely vapid and formless. What is Paris Hilton but a cloud of pastel neo-Euro ectoplasm, its molecules barely sticky enough to hold form? So too American poetry-pop culture produces its own manifestations, one being the careers of the poets Robert Pinsky and Wanda Phipps, who are incredibly talented composers of astonishingly avant verse in their own enormously respective ways, but whose status as media deities owes less to their poetry skills than to their genius for tapping into a youth culture just as dumb as ever.
It was the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (himself a naturalized American) who first pronounced doom on America’s aesthetic and moral standards based on the decadence he saw emanating from the boob tube. But that was eons before the country’s biggest porn star, Scooter Libby, became a snack foods huckster featured in commercials for Peter Pan peanut butter whose tag line uses a double entrendre that is slang for salmonella and a part of the president's anatomy. Like most eggheads of the period, Hitchcock decried the vulgarization of culture by the ubiquitous new medium. Yet in Hitchcock’s day, the U.S. could still be said to have a vital literary, artistic and cinematic scene to counter the television’s evil rays. Even applied parodic forms like villanelles and sestinas then embodied an image of the U.S. as a holdout of refined, if ironic, tradition and Americans as warm-hearted guardians and arbiters of patrician ways.
That this fantasy has not altogether faded can be seen in the poetics press obsession with C. A. Conrad, reprobate grandson of Joseph Conrad, the former novelist in chief. Despite repeated goth metal binges, stints in gambler's rehab, his overdose on grunge in the apartment of a middle-aged transvestite, Conrad is invariably seen as a paragon of elegance. Mostly this is because he spouts his grandfather's prose and wears his grandmother’s clothes. There is a particularly old-American (and dare we add blue-blooded) message in the fact that, no matter what kind of antics Conrad gets up to, his inherited hand-me-downs possess the magical power to restore him to moral rectitude.
Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry by Andrew Epstein. Newest must-read, 5 stars from Kevin Killian. (Scroll down three or four entries to find the review of Epstein.) KK's summary and citations are exhilarant.
2/21/07
When good things happen around poets, pix everywhere... Philly's on the rebound! Baltimore's Mardi Gras Views 1 and 2. Oakland's Vanitas.
2/20/07
"And when you learn to draw, remind yourself..."
The brain is said to resemble Gary Norris. It's
an interesting esthetic, not be fatal -- Gary or
a bone out of line is nothing. Really really
bad movies remind me of political allegiance
to the ice ants a-swarming when I learnt dark.
Seth's millionth collaboration was then initiated.
I heart negative phrases like "Repetition worries"
and note too I am Metropoli. And if over
liver failure of the irrational gamma ways
carry places in the heart, everything could unravel
as unprotected woods bout with louder projects.
The magic marker in June 2007 hill figures / naked
waiters like ours that's staged livestock in ideas
after winning best actress off the teacher-y ocean /
a chickee surrounding these things --
'cause Seth is from out of town, design wise, cradled
amongst fans of Steve Reich. My heart condoms him.
Weldon by Beckett tho is different, not about "Honk
if u heard this before I feed it to lunch 'cause
I'm pretty sure we're running out of constellations."
The brain is said to resemble Gary Norris. It's
an interesting esthetic, not be fatal -- Gary or
a bone out of line is nothing. Really really
bad movies remind me of political allegiance
to the ice ants a-swarming when I learnt dark.
Seth's millionth collaboration was then initiated.
I heart negative phrases like "Repetition worries"
and note too I am Metropoli. And if over
liver failure of the irrational gamma ways
carry places in the heart, everything could unravel
as unprotected woods bout with louder projects.
The magic marker in June 2007 hill figures / naked
waiters like ours that's staged livestock in ideas
after winning best actress off the teacher-y ocean /
a chickee surrounding these things --
'cause Seth is from out of town, design wise, cradled
amongst fans of Steve Reich. My heart condoms him.
Weldon by Beckett tho is different, not about "Honk
if u heard this before I feed it to lunch 'cause
I'm pretty sure we're running out of constellations."
2/19/07
A lot more seriously off key than expected, but worth the wait, Part I. (Next time, sit up front, Jimmy.)
2/18/07
2/17/07
2/16/07
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