Joe Weil

I am excited about the prospect of teaching a course in which students will be given an opportunity to dismantle certain suppositions, while at the same time studying the mechanisms of dismantling which we call literary movements, and literary greatness. First, what is a gatekeeper? What gate does he keep? And what is the literary greatness he upholds? What verbal strategies and “values” are employed to maintain a standard or rebel against a standard? Is there any real difference between the strategies of obeying a structure or dismantling it? If there is no standard, and anything is great if you say it is, then why do certain works persist? Does this mean they are truly great, or that the argument for their greatness, the strategies and rigor of those arguments, or the simple fact that one feels compelled to continue the argument make them so? What are the advantages of [...]

A poem can be utterly concrete in all its details, yet abstract as to its meaning. This abstraction has better words to define it: vague, illusive, non-cognitive, gibberish, wide open to interpretation, etc. I’m sorry they used the word abstract to name such a poem, since, elsewhere, abstraction means to deal with the principle of the thing rather than the thing. Example: “man is prone to evil” rather than “Freddy is prone to evil.” Here’s an example of a form called an “abstract” poem. Personally, I’d prefer “non-representational poem” to the extent that the poem is made out of words which may not refer to any idea, emotion, or agreed upon meaning outside the sequence of words. This is by Roy Campbell, supposedly the foremost practitioner of the “abstract poem”: Of seven hues in white elision, the radii of your silver gyre, are the seven swords of vision that spoked [...]

This entry is part of a series, Towards a Different Kind of Workshop» For beginning writers, rules of thumb are important. My goals are simple: 1. Get them to avoid cliches–not of thought (almost all thoughts are cliche), but of language and image. 2. Get them to play with cliche so that they master them rather than being mastered by them. 3. Teach them to vary sentence length against the line. 4. Teach them to be aware of word choice. 5. Teach them to know the difference between the concrete and the abstract, and all the hues and shades in between (a big mistake we make is teaching them to show, not tell without letting them know that the showing must tell–that an image must work for the poem. 6. Re-orient their sense of the “poetic” to include ordinary experience rendered in an extraordinary way, rather than extraordinary experience rendered [...]

Musicians, jazz musicians, keep fake books–at least they used to–with all the chord changes as well as written-down alternatives they may want to try. Why don’t poets keep fake books? I know Thomas Lux has his own personal anthology of poems he likes or is interested in. It’s a great idea. To make a good fake book, 1. Leave plenty of room in the margins to write notes. 2. Leave doodle space. 3. Keep the backs of the paper blank so you can write the poem out in your own hand, or write an answer to it, or a variation on it. When you write someone else’s poem out by hand, you get an entirely different relationship to the language–the line, word choice, etc. Here’s another strange practice, but one that appeals to me as a sort of loopy scientist: Read a poem once silently. Close the book, take a [...]

This entry is part of a series, Joe Weil on Metaphor» In my next several posts, I am going to talk about metaphors and the invisible neutrino of “and” that lies beneath them. I will make the following contentions: 1. Metaphors are as much about disassociation as association 2. Metaphors generate subtexts. 3. Consciousness and metaphor are inseparable. 4. To present two unlike objects is to create the implicit arc of metaphor. 5. All language is relational. In a sense, language is innately metaphorical because no word is the thing or state of being it describes. We can call a person “Big Ben” or “tree” if he is tall, “bean pole” if he is skinny, or we can call an obese person “slim” or “bean pole.” This is ironic, sarcastic, incongruous. An obese person is certainly not “Slim,” but to say to an obese friend, “Hey Slim,” can carry far [...]

This entry is part of a series, Joe Weil on Metaphor» I am reading Rosanna Warren’s book, Departures, and liking it a great deal, and, since I find her poems especially keen on using the entire spectrum of poetic concreteness between representational abstraction and non-representational abstraction. I’ll use her “Portrait: Marriage” as a grounding for what I am trying to get at here as we continue . Prior to the modernist “revolution” (it was more of an evolution with certain revolutionary slants) poets used a rich and heavily Greek/Latin-influenced sense of occasion and rhetoric to formulate their poems. There were the small lyrics, and the very free madrigals and airs but even these were homages to the small lyrical poems of the Greeks and Romans. Here are some of the more common rhetorical devices. 1. Apostrophic address: speaking directly to the dead, to roses, to nation states, to states of [...]

Break up into groups, something they love to do now-a-days, and assign the following roles among yourselves: Line and space coach, image and word choice coach, rhythm and syntax coach, and meaning/subtext coach. This last coach will look at the poem in terms of its meaning, try to figure out what the poet’s intentions are for this and that, and edit wherever those intentions seem to be going off. Now I will model how I might look at a poem when I first receive it and give a brief primer for each of my other coaches. Line and Space Coach 1. Long Line Poems Usually, these do not leave much white space, and are either narratives, contain catalogues, lists, enumerations, effect a voice of import (or mock import) and sometimes imitate the gravitas of scripture, but not always. C.K. Williams is known for long lines. Suffice it to say, these [...]

NOTE: This is the 2nd part in Joe”s series about poetry workshops. The first part can be found here. Some days in a writing workshop should be like rainy days with a coloring book. In that case, I might let my students just talk and read, or sketch. At arts high, when I thought a student was tired—really tired—I encouraged them to lay down and take a nap. If I had my way, every writing work shop would have the following: 1. Some plants the students can take care of. The plants could be taken home each week by a different student and cared for until returned when the next class happened. 2. A fish aquarium (I love fish). 3. A workshop dog or cat if no one was allergic. Dogs and cats relieve stress, especially dogs raised to be around sick people (writing has all the outward signs of [...]

Can a good poem be so intellectual that most readers don’t get it, and is not “getting it” an impediment to enjoying the poem? Hell, I sure hope not.One of my favorite poets is Wallace Stevens. I will admit I do not get Wally. As a young man, I fell in love with his verbal confidence. He “conjured” me (alluding here to a slightly better poet than Wally). I hate snobbery, but not if it can earn its lofty perch, and sneer at the masses because it is truly beautiful. The snobbery of gate keepers and young poets trying to make a name for themselves makes me ill. It is sad because it is fearful snobbery (I must own the gates) or premature snobbery (I have been published in the Paris Review; I am destined to be a professor who is tenured and on anti-depressants). In terms of Stevens, I [...]

The other day, I posted a poem of Pablo Medina’s which I published in my second issue of Black Swan back in 1989. I put the magazine out with money from income tax returns. It was an act of love, an act of madness, and four issues went forth into the world before money prohibited my doing anything out of love. Many of the poets were friends of mine, others friends of friends. In 1990, I published a language poetry issue—probably the only poetry mag in Jersey that did so back in 1990. was my guest editor for that one, and layout and design went to the , then under . Aljira later came into a shit load of grant money. Back then, they were fairly new. For that issue gave us a poem. I look back now and realize I published some good poets and fiction writers who later [...]

I was looking at an old copy of the Black Swan Review, which I founded and published many years ago (1989), and came across a poem by the Cuban American poet/novelist, Pablo Medina. It’s short, written a bit in one of the three types of lyricism that were prevalent back then (call it minimalist deep imagism). In deep imagism, you expect certain tag words such as wind, dark, bones, shadow, stones, sky, etc. This is also true of Spanish surrealism, a form of surrealism as influential on deep imagists (and later, Larry Levis) as French surrealism and dada are on the New York school. At any rate, in this poem, we have wind, darkness, snow, bones, shadow…pretty much all the basic ingredients for minimalist deep imagism ( or Spanish surreal lyricism) with the exception of angels, ashes, and blood. Let’s have a look-see: Cadwalader Park, Late Fall Pablo Medina The [...]

When I first saw , I looked at the boy’s picture. I was in my office here at Binghamton, and I could not stop crying. It brought back my own brutal mocking when I was in high school at St. Mary of the Assumption High. I once had 100 students in an assembly sing the “Scruvy Joe” song while I sat, defenseless. No teacher ever told them to stop mocking me. They were told simply to stop making noise. I was not gay. I was clumsy, and depressed, and different than others, and I was an easy target for kids who, under other circumstances, would be considered really nice. We are not much different than chickens. We see a bleeding chicken and peck it to death. I did not kill myself, but I also did not survive. No one survives the irrational contempt and disdain, and meanness of a mob, [...]

Whatever people might say in the world about Newark is wrong. Newark, like Queens and Jersey City, is ethnic, race, and class diverse beyond anywhere else I know on the planet, with a wider variety of socio-economic classes freely intermingling, especially among its artists. This latter fact cheers me. As a working class white guy from Elizabeth, I often feel uncomfortable on art scenes. The food is in the not-much-spice, brown rice, wok, pita wrap, veggie, hummus spectrum where I do not flourish. Food is not made important among the white artistic class, no matter how much they insist they know about food. It all tastes too bland to me. I know they are right. I know their food is healthier and allows them to be thin and to have smaller, more shapely asses, but it makes me sad. It makes me think of psychotic men and women milling about [...]

There is an inwardness so vast, so total, that it has a true integrity—not the pretentiousness of artistic temper, not the vanity of professional mysticism, not the neurosis of social anxiety disorder, but a forthrightness, an honorable, hourly withdrawal from the world that seems, for lack of a better word—ecstatic. Emily Dickinson’s passes this test fro me so that, beyond her artistic temper, and beyond her neurotic social anxiety, and beyond her “Bride of calvary” routine, her retreat seems legitimate, necessary, vital. It shames me. It makes me want to be a better man, though not enough to change my life. Dickinson’s gate keepers make me vomit. Her worshipers make me want to kick them in the shins. Her poems have the same effect upon me as the transports of saints. Before them I want to droop my head, and surrender like the unicorn, and let the little tough guys [...]

Poem In Which Spring Returns (or French peasants who are really from Cobble Hill) Melissa Sheppard Spring comes or maybe it doesn’t, or I come—a sort of spring, painful shoots sticking out of the ground— a woman of shoots, and each one painful. This is the tulip song I sing to my daughter. I say daughter: tulips must break soil. Twiggy stuff pokes the ground from below, while sun spikes the ground from above: it’s all a spiky operation— just as you drew in your first grade class! A world of piercings! things piercing and being pierced— that is as good a theory as any other— out of being: a sort of ongoing power point demonstration: Poke the pertinent facts! Say: grass! tree! Woman bending over in imitation of a peasant in France. She is not in France. She is in Cobble Hill. She is not a peasant. She is [...]