Ruminate

Walt Whitman was born today in 1819. One of America’s most innovative (and I say one of our best) poets, Whitman was a major influence on me as a young college student. There is a wealth of material on the web about this fascinating and still mysterious poet. The Walt Whitman Archive is a good starting place for biographical material and even an audio file of Whitman reading a few lines (from a wax cylinder recording). The Long Island Eye has a pleasing site with a good selection of Whitman’s poems. Then head over to the Academy of American Poets Whitman exhibit, which has links to a number of other sites that should keep you busy for a while.

Whitman is an easy poet to mock, especially in today’s climate where elliptical, synactically complex poetry that often only vaguely alludes to emotion is the happening style. Whitman was not afraid fo take big risks tackling big ideas. It is an amazing fact that many readers today will find Whitman a bit quaint. But there is turbulent emotion and complexity in his poems.

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”– to give just one example–will never cease to have an effect on me, despite being longer than my usual taste allows. With Whitman, length is not about self-indulgence, it is about trying to write a new kind of expansive poetry, about trying to take it all in until it is almost too much, like coming in on a hot day and drinking straight from the pitcher until the cold water runs down your face and soaks your shirt front, and still you keep drinking.

Not that Whitman couldn’t work in shorter forms as well. Another favorite of mine is much shorter, but no less moving, even now:

“When I Heard the Learned Astronomer”

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
   and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
   much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I only hope that in the future Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” continues to be heard over the roofs of the world, however thick and artless they may be.

I’ve started moving forward on my “secret project.” Got the business license (not that it will ever make money) and the mailbox, made contact with some printing press partners, procured the web space, and started working on preliminary designs. Tomorrow I will get the checking account setup. More details to come as things become solid enough to open a few windows and, eventually, the front door.

I’ve been thinking more about the article on ideas, cliques, and innovation that I mentioned a few days ago. Do the tactics of innovation in business apply to the arts? It’s a truism in technology that if you want something new done you should find a new person to do it, in apparent recognition of Ruef’s thesis that people are more innovative when they are new to a particular environment. At the same time, long-term employees can enhance an organization in many other vitally important ways, making it strong enough for the new breed to succeed in their “out of the box” endeavors. It is clearly the case in business that many members of each group do not value members of the opposite. These two simplistic categories are, in the real world, represented by a spectrum with many clusters of folks along the way.

This strikes me as an apt comparison to the “business” of poetic invention.

At one end of the spectrum we have the unchanging mass of those who have come before, as synthesized by a somewhat fluid canon. In the middle are the “conventional” poets of various stripes who are pretty directly tied to tradition (even in non-traditional forms, such as free verse), many of whom are producing good, great, and even stellar work, but not work that is particularly new. On the other end are the avant-garde, the folks thinking outside the box, the poets on the bleeding edge for whom doing something new and different has an intrinsic value. As William Wallace would rather die on his feet than live on his knees, these are the poets who would rather try something that has never been done and fail than succeed on more traditional terms.

Too much groupthink– which usually occurs courtesy of being too comfortable in one group or another– can be fatal for a creative effort, just as it can be fatal to a business’ bottom line. I see little of value, whatever that value might be, coming from the traditionalists in their bow ties for whom poetry died with the rise of Eliot. But I see equally little coming from the select group of worshipping the new for whom lyrical force, sustained ideas, and intelligible syntax are vestiges of a system of communication they believe oppressive to their exciting ideas.

Where things are interesting is on the fringes of the groups, where there is communication and exchange back and forth. Traditional forms are reworked, conventional narratives twisted– but not so far that their shapes become lost. Poets bounce between poetry slams and poetry lists, they expand their circle beyond their comfortable coterie of like-minded friends to the benefit of both groups: the avant-garde becomes a little more intelligible while the comfortably modern lyric poets become a little less predictable. That’s where the good stuff is happening.

The issue of groupthink is important to the creative arts because so much of the lifeforce that drives them is derived from academia, where resistance to change is often the norm (for reasons both good and bad). As a student, I both loved and hated the artificial community that was spontaneously generated by the English students. I liked it because every artist needs a peer group. But much of that need stems from a desire to be comfortable– a desire that is understandable, but can be anathema to being creative. The same thing happens online with mailing lists, forums, and weblogs. They can be wonderful places to hang out and interact with others, but too often it is others who are like you (and when they aren’t, the inevitable and exciting friction too often turns to– or is interpreted as– hostility). This environment becomes like a played out mine where there is just enough gold to keep the sluice-boxes shaking, but no one holds out any real hope that big nuggets are going to turn up, or that a tangible seam of gold will be discovered.

Breaking free of this stasis is hard. Struggling too much can even be counter-productive. We should be free to observe that someone posted some drivel to a mailing list just as we should be free to express our praise for a great weblog entry. The first action shouldn’t preclude camraderie and the second shouldn’t ensure friendship. And trying to change the medium where we congregate is a fool’s errand– the frustration of trying to make a group stay “on topic” will rob you of any creative impulse… and make for a pretty boring place anyway.

The only real answer I can come up with is to not be afraid of conflict, but at the same time not get too angry or jealous at the cliquishness. Express opinion but value usefulness. And if it gets too easy, recognize that I’m probably in the wrong place.

On NewPoetry-L, David Graham points out an interesting essay by Tony Hoagland on edge poetry, which is characterized by the “rigor of an intellect seriously in pursuit of something” as opposed to the lyric collage, which may offer many beauties, but remains “diffused.”

This may not be a definition you want use in any kind of final manner, but it is an interesting little piece. I like poets who would fit both categories, but I lean heavily towards discursive, edge poets. The lack of continuity in many of the collage style poems often throws me out of the piece, and like the abstract art skeptic, I often can’t help but wonder if the artist really knows what he or she is doing, or if the style is a result of their own lack of ability, lack of effort, or simply stems from a desire to appear as if they are on the cutting edge of things.

That was fast. Apparently Gabriel Gudding is a victim of Obsessive Self-Searching Disorder, else how could he so quickly find my comment about him using Google?

But he has made some amends for the weak post that drove me to distraction by posting an interesting snippet on “weak ties” and group innovation. Maybe the beginnings of a cogent argument in favor of all the back-scratching amongst poetry blogs. Check out the full article and then ponder how effectively, as Gudding suggests, the term entrepeneur might be replaced with poet. And how does the first paragraph function if you replace water cooler with poetry mailing list or poetry blog community?

Of course, I only noticed that Gabe had found his way here because I am a victim of Obsessive Referral Scrutinizing Disorder…

Incidentally, Gabe (doesn’t the familiar reference make it appear that I am part of the sinister poetry blog cabal I profess to despise?), you need to learn how to link references within your text so they are quicker to jump to. That way I could have more quickly searched Josh Corey’s weblog (in vain,as it turns out) for more info on the (half)-scathing exchange they had. And working archive links would be neato too.

Well, it sure looked like Saruman when I was scrolling through…

As in “What’s the haps?”

I’m working my way through (depending on which massive volume is closest) two books right now.

First, Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets– in which the author attempts to cover the entire history of poetry in the English language from the 14th century on. The initial chapters, covering the machinations that ensured the survival of English are fascinating.

Second, Our Oriental Heritage the inital volume (of 11!) in Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. Like Schmidt, Durant writes with an easy familiarity about a vast topic, and similarly seems unafraid to put forward his own theories on a subject about which he is obviously passionate. Good stuff.

I’m also at work on my Latin and putting together materials for my next “big idea.” Everyone has to have a big idea…

from Time traveller’s guide to Medieval Britain: ‘Shivarees’ are the sexy sounds played to newly-weds to encourage consummation of the marriage. Popular instruments are the harp, with up to 25 sheep-gut strings, the fiddle, the lute, the bagpipes and the timbre (an early tambourine).

You know something is wrong when newly-weds need encouragement. But things have gone seriously awry when a bagpipe and a primitive version of the tambourine can– together– serve as an inducement.

Today my daughter Althea graduated from 6th grade. Hard to believe she is already going into middle school! Harder to believe there is so much road left to go.

Proud Dad and Daughter

Reporting from deep in the web:

• An interesting review of James Wright’s last interview and some cogent insight into the work of one of my favorite poets.

• The new Salt River Review is up, including work by a former prof of mine, John Morgan (I’ve gone spear-fishing on the Chatanika too– one of my best memories of being with my father) and Helen Frost on a recent collection from another former prof, John Haines.

• Pat Fargnoli, who I “know” from a mailing list I’ve been on (and off) for a long time, makes Poetry Daily (bravo).

The prose poem, a genre of which I am inordinately fond, is getting some attention of late with a new anthology, Great American Prose Poems edited by David Lehman (check out the Table of Contents). I am anxiously awaiting my copy. I have been looking for a long time now for a few other titles in this area which I hear are stellar: Models of the Universe edited by Stuart Friebert, and an even older anthology edited by Michael Benedickt The Prose Poem: An International Anthology. The former I have seen online, but it is very expensive. The latter I never see anywhere.

Finally, still on a prose poem kick, there is a new anthology appearing soon (which I also have on order) called No Boundaries : Prose Poems by 24 American Poets which looks much more limited in scope, but with a great list of authors: Mary Koncel, Robert Bly, John Bradley, Killarney Clary, Jon Davis, Linda Dyer, Russell Edson, Amy Gerstler, Ray Gonzalez, Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Juan Felipe Herrera, Louis Jenkins, Peter Johnson, George Kalamaras, Christine Boyka Kluge, Nin Andrews, Morton Marcus, Harryette Mullen, Naomi Shahib Nye, Liz Waldner, Gary Young, Karen Volkman, Campbell McGrath, Charles Simic.