This entry is part of a series, mUutations» Warning: mUutations are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. See for more info. The conflict between eternity and time is deeply embedded in the consciousness of human persons. I believe it gives rise to most impulses that define us as human: the impulse of language and literature, cults and philosophy. When I look at the Anastasis in the Chora Church or hear the words Handel chose from the book of Job (parts of which probably predate Judaism itself)–”and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God”–these seem to express profound human hopes that exist in one form or another, even in prehistory. Almost all cultures have some way of venerating the dead. The very notion of tradition is, as Chesterton called it, “the democracy of dead.” (And [...]
This entry is part of a series, Rhetorical Devices» , Rhetorical Devices» , Rhetorical Devices» PHOTO by . I’m going to put the next few terms under the larger sweep of synecdoche, a word that is dangerous to delve into since theorists and language experts, in their mania to confine, have proven themselves enemies of it: synecdoche, in its Greek form, is an amazingly useful and valuable term. It pretty much means: “It’s understood.” And we can break “it’s understood” down into three or four classes: 1. It’s understood that the part means the whole: “The arm of the state.” 2. It’s understood that the whole means the part: “The state called today and said I owe them my first child.” 3. It’s understood that it’s not to be taken in a hyperbolic way, although said in a hyperbolic way: “She’s a wreck.” This third one is so close to [...]
I figured I’d post these. Many poets employ them without ever knowing their names, and that seems to work, but I like knowing the names of things. There’s something thrilling and wise ass to me about going through the world, saying: “Oh look! A Eurasian tree sparrow!” At age six, I fell in love with a girl because she would say things like “isn’t the planet Venus lovely tonight? Look, Joseph, it is rising over the Chivas Regal billboard sign across the street!” Who wouldn’t love a girl who talked like that? I guess a lot of people might find her a trifle pedantic, but the pedantry of never being allowed to know anything gets on my nerves. It’s as if everyone were being stingy and saving it up for a test or waiting for me to make a mistake so that they could hammer me over the head with [...]
This entry is part of a series, Conformity and Obedience» When I was ten or so, a large flock of starlings, and assorted brown-headed cowbirds used to come visit a deserted lot near my house every fall. I liked nothing better than to run among them, and listen to the collective soughing swoop of their wings as they lit out for the trees. It was best if the sky was full of brooding cumuli. It was best if the wind was trying to rip the brown leaves from the pin oaks. I don’t know why this made me feel so happy. When those birds no longer showed up the next year, it was a short but real grief that overcame me, and I would go to the lot in order to feel my grief more keenly. Since the birds were no longer present, my grief over their absence sufficed. Wildness–to [...]
There are many poets who enjoy disliking William Carlos Williams. He wrote poems that seem distinguished only by their adherence to the tossed off. They make no major claims. They seem jotted off. So why study the man at all? First, it is hard to see Williams because he is everywhere, in all the schools of American poetry. He took the English conversational lyric as invented by Coleridge and developed by Wordsworth and turned it toward American speech patterns: OK, sure–the sense of a self consciously casual utterance, language that was wrought from a busy life and ranged between the phatic, the cranky, the ecstatic, the overt, and the obvious. But we must pause at the word obvious. Stating the obvious is not easy. Human beings tend to mistake mystification for intelligence. Abstractions appeal to us. We forget that even “chicken” is an abstraction. It is a word for an [...]
IMAGE: It is hard to have fun in graduate school or in workshops, but if you were sitting on a dock in Arkansas and watching bass boats speed by and the sun was setting in the west (since it does not usually set anywhere else) and you had a decent knowledge of iambic pentameter–or a few hundred poems memorized–you could have fun. I once spent a whole day speaking in blank verse. It was fun for me. It was not fun for those poor souls around me, but what the hell? On another occasion, I had a conversation with someone else who spoke in blank verse and we drove others crazy. We were in the liquor store: This rum is coconut, not to my taste but being broke and vulgar you might try? Fie thee, mere peasant in the guise of Lord let’s make the most of what we can [...]
My first and last love are songs. I was all over the place. Late at night, my dad would listen either to country music or the BBC (guess he was all over the place, too). He and my mom would go to sleep with the radio on. I remember lying in bed and hearing the young Dolly Parton sing “Jolene,” and thinking I had never heard a voice or song like that except when someone would sing a snippet of an Irish ballad (not the tin pan alley Irish songs). Even then, to hear Parton without all the hair and make up was to hear a great singer/song writer. I thought she had raven hair down to her butt, and looked like the actress Barbara Hershey, so I was shocked when I first saw her. I heard her long before I saw her, and I would put faces to all [...]
This entry is part of a series, Poetry Scenes» When I’m asked about poetry in Chicago, I’m inclined to reply with the old Quaker response: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But, all I really mean is that Chicago is distinct in its poetics because there is no system, no unifying center that explains its existence. Chaos is the key to understanding how Chicago’s poets function. We don’t have a school here, nor a consistent, essential aesthetic. As a geographical center of the country, Chicago inevitably absorbs everything outside and assimilates the characteristics of visitors and the new locals. Some are produced by MFA programs and the academy. Others still listen for Spicer-ian Martians are trying to communicate through us. And still, there are those who radiate in between. Either way, poetry is occurring here. Whether at Danny’s Pub, Myopic Books, an obscure performance space in Humboldt Park, or [...]
One of the first readings I ever did was in 1982 at the Baron Art center in Woodbridge. This was a good seven years before I became a host there, and Edie Eustace, one of the best friends poets ever had, booked me as “Poetic whimsy at the piano.” I did my own small version of a vaudeville show–what I had been doing all my life when my family was still alive: some funny songs, some straight free verse poems, a couple of raunchy rhymed poems, and a couple of neo-classical bits on the piano, instrumentals that I’d composed–everything but ballet and a dog show. In between numbers I spoke some anecdotes, talked to the crowd. It was my natural way of performing. This approach considered the presence of the audience and myself as an entertainer as sacred–not the individual poems, not the piano pieces that ranged from classical to [...]
This entry is part of a series, mUutations» Warning: mUutations are a project from my other site, . They are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. Here’s George Hitchcock’s “Dawn,” from his collection, A Ship of Bells: Clouds rise from their nests with flapping wings, they whisper of worn leather, bracken, long horizons, and the manes of dark horses. In the waking stream the stones lie like chestnuts in a glass bowl. I pass the bones of an old harrow thrown on its side in the ditch. ______________Now the sun appears. It is a fish wrapped in straw. Its scales fall on the sleeping town with its eyeless granaries and necklace of boxcars. Soon the blue wind will flatten the roads with a metallic palm, the glitter of granite will blind the eyes. But not yet. The beetle still stares [...]
In part one, I tried to enforce the idea that folk art is not necessarily superior to commodified art, and most art that we know and is brought to public consciousness, and endures is a combination, a dance so to speak between the genuine and the packaged, You have to cut the hog up to transport it, and a cut up hog can never be a free ranging pig, but it can give you the full flavor of what people in those parts love and have grown up on concerning the pig that ranged. You need to package the genuine in order to carry it to a new audience. One could make a case that the entire folk music scene from which Dylan, country rock, and long, often self indulgent singer-song writer songs emerged was far more in the category of commodity than folk–even as sacred a character as Woody [...]
On a recent gloriously sunny afternoon, I had the privilege of sitting down to talk over lunch with the poet Anne Winters, author of two critically acclaimed volumes of poetry and several translations. I was introduced to Ms. Winters’ work in graduate school and, ever since, have been an ardent admirer of her lushly orchestrated, yet intimate and searingly honest poems about the “big issues” that so many contemporary poets seem to shy away from: race, class, poverty, and gender. Or, more to the point, the intersection of these forces playing out in individual lived experiences, including those of the poet. Fittingly for a poet raised in New York City and for whom that city serves as muse, subject and mise en scéne, Ms. Winters chose to meet at Saul’s, a Jewish delicatessen incongruously nestled in the heart of Berkeley, CA, where she now resides. Over outsized latkes and steaming [...]
We can simplify imagery by saying it is that aspect of writing which appeals to the five senses; but that would be incorrect without the qualifier “sensual.” If we want to be more expansive, but not make the term entirely meaningless (and definitions that insist imagery is anything evoked by words are meaningless) we can use the following qualifiers: 1. Sensual imagery: any evocation of the senses–tactile, auditory, visual, aural, and olfactory in their strict sense as descriptive 2. Intuitive imagery: images that seem scattered and incongruous, non-linear, and perhaps surreal that travel somewhere between concrete detail and abstractions or fantastical combinations of things, places, concepts, things 3. Kinetic imagery: any word or group of words evoking action 4. Abstract or conceptual imagery: forms of synecdoche, metonymy, figurative speech, sensual imagery used to evoke ideas to which one of the five senses or kinesis still clings in ghostly form 5. [...]
Certain sections of broca’s area of the brain are involved both in how words are given syntactical order and how gestures, physical movements are interpreted as flow, as arc, as coherent actions. We know that broca lights up like a pin ball machine when shadow puppets are introduced before the eye. My theory of narrative is that it is arc, gesture, syntactical force the most common of which is what we call a story, but not exclusive to story. We have difficulty seeing narrative as lyrical because it seems more “rule” bound than what we consider lyrical–thus, my students tendency to resist turning their gerunds and participles into active verbs, as if adding “ing” to the verb kept the language safe from being overdetermined and definite. This use of gerunds and participles creates a lot of syntactic ambiguity and I think the brain recognizes this as somehow more “lyrical” because [...]
What should we make of Plato’s old quarrel between philosophy and poetry? Does poetry think with philosophy? Or might we re-pose the question: does poetry rely on philosophy to think? For Plato, the poem is dangerous for philosophy as it forbids access to the supreme truth, the truth that provides unity with the ultimate principle that allows the Republic to maintain its transparency. The problem of poetry for Plato is deeper than that though. It rests on the fact that mimesis is always tied to discursive thought, and this blocks reason and teleology in grounding the truth. For Plato, the poem is opposed to the ideal of a perfect means for the transmission of knowledge, and hence is dangerous for philosophy. Wallace Stevens declared the modern poet a “metaphysician in the dark, who must give sounds passing through sudden rightness, wholly / containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, [...]
Secrets of the Garden of a Vacant House Seen in a Dream (translated by Hiroaki Sato) Things planted in the garden of a vacant house are _______pine trees and such loquat trees___peach trees___black pine trees___sasanquas _______cherries___and such prosperous leafy trees___branches of leafy trees that _______spread around as well under the leaves of those swarming branches _______the plants that luxuriate continuously all in all___ferns___bracken___fiddleheads___sundews___and _______such all over the ground they pile up and crawl the life of these blue things the garden of the vacant house is always in the plants’ _______shadows and dim only what faintly flows is a streak of rivulet water the sound of the running water soughing sadly and _______low day and night as well somewhere neat the soggy fence I see the uncanny muculent forms of slugs___snakes _______frogs___lizards___and such. And above this secluded world pale moonlight illuminates the night moonlight flows in mostly through the planted [...]