Ruminate

A quote from Bud Freeman that is equally apt for poets and some recent debates here as it is for musicians:

“Everybody plays something over again because you see, there are phrases that you develop… they become dear to you. This is the thing the critic doesn’t understand. He wants you to play differently all the time…. the greatness of Louis [Armstrong] was that the phrases he played were dear to him, and yet he didn’t play them mechanically. He felt them.”

Chris Murray (Chris, you can call me Chris… I hope it’s ok that I call you Chris) has a very interesting take on my recent exchange with Ron Silliman.

I’m really short of time this week and I want to mull over the idea of “traditions” quite a bit more. But there is one aspect that I feel compelled to note quickly here… the idea of poetic “stasis.” It seems like a common bit of knowledge among proponents of the post-avant (or should I say opponents of the School of Quietude?) to argue that the quiet poets exist in a kind of stasis.

I question that assertion. It seems to me that this presumes value in only one kind of change– and the most obvious and least subtle one at that– the aspect of form. There has to be more to it than that. I suppose some part of the post-avant eschews all ideas of forms as well, but the obvious example to contradict this is looking at work that is done in forms. Does the use of a form that another has used automatically qualify a poem as static? Can no poetry be of interest unless it is breaking new ground in an obvious way such as its physical layout on the page? And what does this say for all the cummings-esque post-avant poets?

To continue using my battered music analogy, does this mean that there can’t be any interesting music using the 12-bar blues form or the pentatonic scale?

The concept of stasis is important, because all the rest of the debate about tradition hinges upon some presuppositions about the continuity of schools of poetry, reliance upon received ideas, etc. I maintain that the stasis of many poets of the School of Quietude is mythical– just as I am convinced (so far) that much of the post-avant group of poets who assert a claim to newness are really only writing like their compatriots. I am reminded of the scores of similar looking teenagers, each having adopted their style under the mistaken impression that they are being different. But in their repeated attempts at difference lies a startling sameness.

I think the “facts” of the matter are both much more mundane than we are allowing, but at the same time more complicated. There is just a lot of shitty poetry out there, and we all find our own way to sift through it. One convenient way to make the job easier is to slough off a whole kind of poetry, writing it all off as something we aren’t interested in. But to do so is necessarily to make a choice that results in loss. This isn’t a big deal as long as we don’t delude ourselves that we are doing something different.

From my perspective, this is like going into a museum and bypassing entire wings based on the assumption that nothing of period X can be any good and everything of type Y is the same, despite vast differences within any given group (I find it hard to fathom any conception of a “school” that can bind tightly together poets as diverse as Charles Simic and Galway Kinnell, for example), and many subtle differences even within poetry that appears the same (anyone who can’t see the wide range of execution over the life of James Wright, for example, or who thinks that superficially similar poets such as Adrian Louis and Sherman Alexie are anywhere near the same, is in dire need of a major upgrade in their critical faculties).

In short, the idea of stasis is a myth, or at least no more true for the School of Quietude than for the post-avant, though there is certainly more than a little truth to the fact that being obviously new is of much more importance to one school than another. I find it amusing that Silliman takes it as gospel that the only way to better poetry is to do something new and different, as if there is some cosmic checklist that informs this mandate, only one possible worthwhile sonnet and only one possible worthwhile Mathemaku– or that this is the only KIND of difference that matters. It appears to me to be an argument remarkable only for being startlingly superficial.

I will be online sporadically this week– my entire office is moving to a new building, my Mom is coming to visit, and both kids have a big soccer tournament. So, all the usual excuses in advance if I am slow in responding to mail or comments, or getting the web reports out.

I should be taking today off for Bloomsday anyway!

If you’ve listened to Mingus (and you should!), then you have most likely heard the great trombonist Jimmy Knepper. Or maybe you heard of the altercation where Mingus punched Knepper and knocked out one of his teeth, earning an assault conviction. And later Knepper returned to perform with him again! He was a good one. Jimmy Knepper, 1927-2003.

Dan Tessitore writes:

‘To Chris’ assertion that it is possible to muster equal enjoyment for a wide “spectrum” of poets and poetry - I really would love to agree, and “in theory” I suppose I do, but it hasn’t been my experience.’

Really, my analogy is about one’s affections, not about poetry. Does poetry lie along a spectrum? Well, I think that is one way to look at it. There is a presumption there that everything that is being called poetry in these discussions really does belong to the same set. I’m not sure this is necessarily a shared assumption when I read some comments, but since those commenting continue to talk about poets, poetry, and poetics, I will assume that all of the items being talked about are fairly labelled poetry, and with that assumption I think a spectrum is a fair analogy.

At issue is how the different schools of poetry are aligned to one another. Are they akin to the range of music within a particular type, like varieties of jazz, or are they much further apart than that but still part of the same general group (the John Zorn to Dolly Parton range, which was not meant to denigrate Parton, incidentally, just to posit two musicians with radically different projects)? I personally think that a proper parallel between the post-avant and the School of Quietude would be that of the contemporary jazz avant-garde and contemporary straight-ahead. Some musicians and listeners are divided, finding their loyalties solely encompassed within one camp or another, but many listeners find appealing examples of both. However, I’m not aware of any musical arguments that these schools of music do not actually derive from the same sources in the way that Silliman posits schools of poetry do.

But my own hobby horse is about our affection for poetry, which is an overlay on that spectrum like the lines of absorption spectra that identify a chemical element. There may be clusters where we have a heavy emphasis, but I think our aesthetic appreciation is almost necessarily discontinous.

Of course this is convenient because it lets me pick and choose what I like– but I submit that is exactly what we are all doing anyway.

So I’m left to wonder, given Dan’s comments and the vociferousness with which some argue for the post-avant, if I am really that unique in my appreciation for authors from both schools. Or perhaps my standards just aren’t high enough. Or maybe I need to let feelings about the political stranglehold of academia influence my aesthetic decision-making. Or maybe the deepest divisions really are ideological in nature, as I most suspect.

There is actually much more to the parallels of poetry and jazz to be explored. And I don’t mean in the sense of artistic execution, but in the larger “meta” issues. The politics of the old school, the progress of the avant-garde, the divided audience, the place of jazz in the constellation of musical styles, the declining audience, the plague of smooth jazz (if I carry this too far I might become a post-avant spokesman myself), etc.

I discovered that Greg Osby has some great MP3 downloads on his site. Legit, and good quality.

There is also a good stockpile of M-Base mp3 downloads. I was a bit concerned that the music would sound as academic as the idea– but it is actually quite good.

The problem with the rest of Ron Silliman’s response is that it doesn’t actually make an argument other than by confirming his own agenda with which he approached the issue in the first place.

I find it amazing that he read my parenthetical as “inserting clarity and precision as though they were the opposites of new and experimental.” I did no such thing, and reading my message in that manner is a gross misreading that just confirms that Ron Silliman is dedicated not to poetry, but to the gospel of Ron Silliman. My parenthetical was clearly referring to the fact that I didn’t have a clear name that referred to the broad range of schools that is varyingly called Avant-Garde, Post-Avant, etc.

What is really sad (and I mean that literally) is that Ron actually believes that what his favored poets are doing is as different from the project of the school of poetry as, say, John Zorn and Dolly Parton. He would like to be that different– I know this is a chip by which Ron Silliman measures his and everyone else’s worth (the cult of the new)– but it dosn’t hold water. A more apt analogy would be questioning whether one can move between listening to The Hot Fives and Sevens and Bonehouse, or Armstrong and late Coltrane. And of course we can, and it is exactly this diversity that makes it a wondrous experience to be open enough to allow it, and it is exactly the kind of blinders that allow someone intelligent like Ron to maintain bullshit like the fiction that liking Pavelich’s work will make Carver’s poetry “bloated and full of posturing.”

This exposes that Ron is really an exemplar of the navel-gazing that drives me crazy when it comes from either side, and that he is no better than those which he decries in perpetrating an ideology in the guise of an aesthetic. This part of his response is rife with bad faith. Note how he uses the word “seamlessly” as if aesthetic appreciation must make for seamless transitions, certainly not a position I or anyone with any kind of functioning brain stem would propose, and in fact is contradicted by my own metaphor at the close of my first letter. Or how he implies that I must either be lying about liking diverse poets such as Pavelich and Levine, or misguided simply because it doesn’t fit within his tiny, circumscribed view of the way poetry works.

The only argument that makes any sense is the part of his argument that I have already proposed and thus clearly agree with, and that is that the sour grapes that so many post-avant poets waste their energy carping about comes primarily not from the poetry, but from the academy that is preventing them from getting into the magazines and receiving the prizes that they claim they aren’t interested in anyway. If Ron Silliman’s transparent lie (that the types of poetry are as different as Domingo and Parton) were true, then it would be the equivalent of being angry that Scientific American doesn’t publish my fiction, or that Jazz Times won’t run a profile of Dwight Yoakam, right?

But of course that isn’t true, is it Ron? The truth is that Ron’s project and the project of, say, Galway Kinnell aren’t actually as different as he would like them to be. He can’t have it both ways (well, he is clearly trying, but it is exposing how driven he is by a simple and misfit ideology)– but it is expected that he might be a bit dizzy turning back and forth in the tiny little hole that his circumscribed spinning has dug for himself, and which he now exposes clearly.

It is only sad that he seems to have so many disciples that are willing to follow him right into the same dank place. Not in their work, which has ceased to be at issue here, but in closing their eyes to the possibilities that lie outside a reactionary agenda. I’m glad Jim Behrle’s got Ron’s back fighting the establishment, even if that fight is self-contradictory and destructive.

But you know what? I’m much happier that Behrle continues to write poetry, and I will continue to enjoy it, and the many others in the weblogs I link to and the small presses I purchase from, even if it doesn’t fit into Ron’s carefully schematized poetics of divisiveness.

After being away for a few months, I’ve started frequenting the jazz discussion boards again (I have to take periodic steps back from my addictions). There have been some welcome and not-so-welcome changes.

The Blue Note Bulletin Boards have been disbanded. Although they will probably come back, given the nature of the changes and the length of the downtime, it is unlikely they will ever be the same. Blue Note seems to be going the way of Verve.

But Organissimo, a band with at least one member that frequented the BNBB, has filled the gap with a new forum on their site. Many of the BNBB folks are there, and it is greazzzzy, as one frequent poster would say.

Also, in a happy development, the great Jazz Corner Speakeasy finally dumped their crappy forum software in favor of something better. I always liked the discussions there, but the interface was so poor I tended not to stick around.

All About Jazz also has a thriving discussion board. Lots of places for jazz fans of all kinds to hang out, learn more, and empty their wallets in search of those elusive titles.

Happy Birthday to W. B. Yeats:

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and sigh.

• What do you do to promote poetry, whatever kind it may be that you love? And do you think it is enough? Not including weblogs. What do you think people who love poetry should be doing in the face of the common enemy: short attention spans, media saturation, and the MTV generation’s conception of art?
• I don’t know Laurable, but her weblog is quite cool. I hadn’t seen her site before I started doing web reports. I’ll try not to duplicate too much. You should go there.
• It seems the trickster action of the moment is sending sparrow poems to the New Yorker. I hear there is a deeper story there, but I find it amusing nonetheless.