People keep asking me “what did you do with all that literature education & poem stuff” … well, I wrote a bunch of poems. I still write them now and then, but haven’t been terribly focused on it for a good while. I used to have some of the ones I’ve published up on the blog, and in the move from one blog host to the next, they ended up lost in the shuffle. Here are a few of them, again, for posterity’s sake.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a glowing paean over on AlterNet (via Common Ground) on ‘Howl’ at Fifty, about Allen Ginsberg’s first public reading of his seminal poem.

The article says he “brought American poetry back to life,” but I’d have to disagree. The Beats certainly helped things along, but American poetry was doing quite well already, thank you. The Modernists had kicked plenty of ass before WWII, as had the Fugitives (who, if you count the critics who were born of their numbers, were unbelievably influential) and then after WWII (and somewhat before) the Black Mountain School was powerfully influential, setting the stage for a lot of what the Beats celebrated.

Evidently what he means is that the Beats “… brought poetry down from the sacrosanct halls of the academy. It took poetry off the musty printed page into the lives of listeners.”

It engaged more regular folks on the street? That would seem like an odd way to define “back to life” — we don’t hold other art forms to that standard. Charlie Parker injected new life into American music, but only people who loved Jazz “got it” at the time.

This is terribly ignorant … poetry was far from sacrosanct and academic. It was thriving in America, in journals and small magazines and readings, correspondence and publishing. There’s something about the Beat-to-Hippie cultural event that allows people to glom onto it and not think any more about anything else. Because everything else is “musty” or “academic.” Hey, maybe I sound like a curmudgeon here, but that’s just lazy thinking. And it’s the sort of thing for which Ginsberg would’ve cuffed you about the ears.

I met Allen Ginsberg, and had the blessing of spending a couple of days in his company, about 12 years ago. He was downright spry, and in constant search of macrobiotic food (“for the diabeetus”), and furtively snapping pictures with his Leica. He wore a suit the whole time.

He ran a poetry workshop on campus one day (yeah, a campus, one of those musty academic ones) in which he drilled everyone on basic poetics and referred to some very old examples of poetry as models. In fact, he mentioned none of his contemporaries when discussing the best influences for poetry, that I remember. And when he performed his poems, he took about 15 minutes of the reading to sing some of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” with his little squeezebox for accompaniment.

I love the Beats. I just don’t worship them as the one great thing to happen in literature in the last 60 years. And I don’t think any of them would welcome the sort simplistic sanctimony in which so many little beatlings hold them.

So, when I find myself hearing a lot of “populist” poetry — say, for example, the stuff on HBO’s “Def Poetry” — I realize that the most successful poems, the ones people respond to the best, still hold to the same practices that all those musty poets used in their best work: specific, arresting imagery; effective rhythm; original and provocative insight. Yeah, this happens in many forms and styles, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, whether the writers/performers and audience know it or not.

All that said … “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” is still pretty dang cool.

I’d like to point out this first-rate publication: Stirring : A Literary Collection

My endorsement may or may not have anything to do with anything published in this month’s edition.

(The poem is from about 9 years ago, but I’d never sent it anywhere. It’s really strange to see it in print now, in different life circumstances.)

Louise Gluck is our new poet laureate in the US… I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her a couple of times. Intense, deep woman. Amazing amazing poet. Louise Gl¸ck – The Academy of American Poets

I haven’t sent out any work in years. Even though during grad school I managed to publish in a number of decent journals, I grew weary of the process, and too anxious about writing to write.

I ended up with a backlog of work that I’d never sent anywhere, and here I am six years later, finally trying out a few submissions.

I ran across this very cool online journal, with a fabulous name, and an unexpectedly elegant layout and look. It’s an online journal of dark-fabulist work, both poetry and fiction, called The Harrow. I sent them a little imagistic thing I wrote long ago, but that I’ve often though of when it rains, or when I have to kill more of the freaking little black ants that infest our house and yard. Anyway, it’s not really about those things. It’s short, and kinda haiku-ish, kinda macabre: Four Pauses.

I never post anything about poetry, even though it was at one time my career, of a sort. So, since April is “National Poetry Month” (which is funny as hell, since TS Eliot dissed it so bad by calling it the ‘cruellest’), I figure I’ll reiterate the loveliness of Poetry Daily, a new poem every day. There’s some powerful stuff there. I don’t get to it as often as I should, but whenever I do I feel like I’ve had a good meal. Tasty, every calorie a good one.