Arts & Society

In their second conversation, Mark Halliday and Allen Grossman attempt to answer the question “Where are we now in the history of poetry?” I figured I’d highlight a few of the most interesting takes on poets of the last hundred years. I want to then use it as the basis of a discussion on the relation of past poetry (and other art) and its relation to the present situation of poetry. Overall, there is a rather nice arc that Grossman paints… On the “high moderns” (Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and I think he later includes Crane): [They] used up the idea of greatness or implicated that idea in complex ways with aspects of civilization…that produced the Second World War….Poetry was not helping us learn how to live because the High Moderns…set poetry against life. They seemed to have established the outcome of poetic enterprise outside of life in unreachable transcendentalisms [...]

Today I thought I should add my secret voice to your evaluations. Your intelligence may be genius, but remember as my mother said also always be nice. A seventh grade teacher consoled me when I was teased: You can always tell the genius by the enemies who surround him. Try, though it’s impossible. See JA. Make no enemies. Well, you’ll always have aesthetic enemies just by liking something “they don’t.” But I’ve noticed even one personal enemy is too much in the tiny circle of Prospero’s Kabbalah. You impress me and you’re so young, so you have I think one task: Go on! Keep working, and keep your opinions growing widening and changing. One day love Chatterton. The next day read Villon. One month give up to Proust, one year give up to Kafka. Pound’s big canon is correct: Be curious like a physical scientist (Aggazis for Pound). Keep your [...]

Sometimes when I happy get I turn on my television set and disappear into its glow like a pixelated crow I flap my wings so pure and black and feel like there’s no going back inside the tube I’ll stay forever consider thrown the simulacrum lever if my mother comes home and turns it off at her love I’ll scoff happy on my own terms you see like a Titleist balanced on a tee waiting for the coming thwack to send me into orbit’s knack for spinning guests in skyward order free I am a floating boarder everywhere I go I smile I see my reflection in bathroom tile my grin it gleams with the purity of creams freshly descended from the cow of bacon from the virgin sow who snorts and oinks as I come close we are friends the farmer knows and so he waves as I walk [...]

PROFESSOR: Mary Ann, would you mind reading your poem aloud so that we can hear it in your own voice? MARY ANN: Absolutely. Ahem. Who’s the black private dick That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? SHAFT! Ya damn right! Who is the man that would risk his neck For his brother man? SHAFT! Can you dig it? Who’s the cat that won’t cop out When there’s danger all about? SHAFT! Right On! They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother SHUT YOUR MOUTH! I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft. THEN WE CAN DIG IT! He’s a complicated man But no one understands him but his woman JOHN SHAFT! PROFESSOR: Thank you, Mary Ann. Ok, class, let’s start with the things we like. Then we’ll move on to the things we think could be improved. [Long pause.] AMERICAN STUDIES MAJOR [pensively]: I really appreciate how the poem argues with itself, [...]

On fourth of July, alone in my kitchen and the sound of distant fireworks. I drink cheap Merlot, watch the dark break and enter through the windows. I am all over the Internet, but would rather be all over someone else: a tangent. A tanager. Today, by the river I saw a scarlet tanager. Had only seen them in bird books before, and for a minute all doom lifted. my mood is so easily healed, and then so easily thrashed back against the shoal of its wounding: rocks, jetties. If there were a sea I would calm it with the palm of my hand, and walk across the waves. But there is no sea only its sound inside me. Part the red Merlot! Open the wounds! Every Easter we would watch Moses and the Ten Commandments, and the sea was jello I heard. They did that effect with jello. Oh [...]

I’m don’t consider myself a comfortable elegist (is anyone?), but reading of Alexander McQueen’s death this morning forces me to take up the mantle. I’m not a huge fashion-buff, but I made the walk past the McQueen store on 14th Street a highlight of my daily commute when I worked in Chelsea. His clothes seemed to me wild and well-tailored in the English way. His suits would have fit beautifully in show at the V&A in London a few years back; he’s one of the only contemporary designers who would have fit, I think; and I mean fit while also doing his own, completely contemporary thing. That show, by the way, was a revelation. So, Mr McQueen, we are sad that you are not with us anymore. Here is a tribute, from the inimitable Stevie Nicks as she gets done up for a Rolling Stone photo shoot. Godspeed.

My Dear Theo, I am writing to you rather reluctantly because, for a good many reasons, I have kept silent for such a long time. To some extent you have become a stranger to me, and I to you perhaps more than you think. It is probably better for us not to go on like that. It is probable that I would not have written to you even now, were it not that I feel obliged, compelled, to do so – because, be it noted, you yourself have compelled me to. I heard in Etten that you had sent 50 francs for me. Well, I have accepted them. With reluctance, of course, with a feeling of some despondency, of course, but I have reached a sort of impasse, am in trouble, what else can I do? And so I am writing to thank you. As you may know, I am [...]

I worry about graduate students. When intention, and goals, and focus outstrip the accidental, the possibility of falling into exactly what you need to trip over, you ought to take stock: what do you just allow to happen? Some students will say, “Easy for you. You have a job.” They’re right. But I never planned my lifeever, and I think anyone who knows me, knows this is true. I’m not advocating that any one be as accidental as I am, but there needs to be some carelessness. The true power of money, or fame or talent is that it gives wiggle room for carelessness. I’ve been poor most of my life—sometimes dangerously so, and what I felt most deprived of was the right not to give a rat’s ass. A writer needs carelessness to a certain degree. They need to write just for the hell of it—without the pressure of [...]

We all have fantasy careers. I’ve always thought it would be great to be an Off-Broadway actor. I would invite my cohorts over to my Hell’s Kitchen apartment after a weeknight show, and we would drink Powers whisky and smoke cigarettes until the wee hours; mornings would be slow, slightly hazy, and then during the afternoons the energy would return, the big emotional build-up to the next show. Lights, applause, repeat. In lieu of this, and given the opportunity to contribute here at The The, I thought I would try my hand at fashion correspondent for a second week. No jet-setting, alas, but rather a comfortable seat at my L.A. desk, from which I look through the phantasmagoric looking glass (i.e. internets) at my neighbors, the Rodarte sisters, showing their Fall 2010 collection back in New York. In case you haven’t heard of these young phenoms, have a look at [...]