Ruminate

In this dream I’m holding an infant. A boy with solemn, slate grey eyes like my own. I cradle him like I used to hold my children, spine pressing into my forearm, steadying his head and neck with my hand. My palm forms a cradle, fingers reaching both ears. But with my other hand I am covering his mouth and nose. He doesn’t blink, but his feet kick my biceps. I can’t stop. I’m committed. His heart beats faster and faster, a hummingbird in my slowly closing fist.

I’m struck by creative paralysis. I curl up with coffee and a notebook and nothing. At all. I am suddenly consumed with what I’m doing and frozen by the impossibility of it all. Right now I’m the cartoon character who has run a long way past the edge of the cliff only to suddenly realize what is happening and fall like a stone.

Poetry blogland, the post-avants, the SOQs and the SONs, the Atlanteans– it’s all got me down. I’m pretty open-minded (if I might say so myself). I don’t look down on my friends who love Thomas Kinkade, for instance. But deep inside I know what good art is, and Thomas Kinkade isn’t it. When I talk about art and someone else talks abouot Kinkade, It makes about as much sense as giving a lengthy discourse on engine repair when asked what my favorite jazz standard is. They are different projects entirely.

Tonight, today, yesterday– as of Friday late in the afternoon I don’t even know what poetry is anymore, much less how to write any of it. I’ve started paying too much attention to the mechanics of my swing and now I’d be lucky to connect with one of Jim Behrle’s whiffle-balls.

Am I the Kinkade-lover of the weblog circuit? The visitor from the stix wearing tennis shoes to the symphony and clapping at every quiet interval? My time, passion and enjoyment is for naught if I just don’t get the simple things about the work I have loved up until now. What does it mean if I don’t see the fundamental dishonesty in Levine, if I don’t recognize Merwin’s complacency or Pinsky’s smugness… if I continue to be deeply moved by William Matthews and Raymond Carver?

Deep down inside I feel just a little bit sorry for someone who doesn’t (or doesn’t want to) get “literature”. Not because I begrudge them Grisham or whoever else (more power to them and their enjoyment… I enjoy the hell out of cheesy sci-fi and the occasional spy thriller), but because that’s all they have. I enjoy candy bars and bacon cheese burgers too, but I’m glad I’m not afraid of Thai food or a good lobster bisque.

When it comes to writing, I’ve either become that which I feel sorry for or somewhere along the line I lost the courage of my convictions. Suddenly it’s all Greek. I grew up with the shame that comes from being poor and from a family that wasn’t well educated. I well remember (and I should because it still happens to me on a regular basis) the self-consciousness when I am in situations where I fear my “redneck past” (as Ben Folds so aptly put it) will be easily discernable by others around me and I’ll find myself guilty of the social equivalent of sipping from the finger bowl. I don’t want to be the guy who asks for Budweiser in the can at a black-tie affair, but when I see so much “post-avant” writing that leaves me cold, which seems devoid of passion, artless, and guilty of the same range of crimes and misdemeanors that “my” writers are being charged of, it leaves me bewildered.

At this moment in blogland, I’m unsure which would be better. Sip the water from the finger bowl and try to make a joke of it or just drink the Kool Aid that’s being offered?

(prompted by recent discussion on a few weblogs)

Web Del Sol is not a “literary arts new media complex”, it is a strip mall at the edge of the artistic part of town, a litter-strewn ghetto attempting to retain some allure by proximity to greater lights. Imagine their front page as a porn site, replacing the wash of self-promotion with ads for hot lesbian love and penis enlargement, and guess what? It still works. Commoditization and aggregation. The worst of the static tendencies of the mainstream coupled with the least effective groping of those who wish to be experimental.

The sad thing is, there’s some fine work buried amongst the dross (though in many cases it makes more sense to just buy the print journals and support the real creative forces at work than spend time shielding your eyes at WDS which is just cherry picking their content). The Houlihan pieces under much discussion in poetry blog-land, as weak as she might be in some of her analysis, at least weren’t afraid to tackle aesthetic issues head-on and take a stand about them. Double Room, which is the first item to lure me back to WDS in a long time (due to Ron Silliman’s recent mention), is incredibly interesting, particularly paired with The Prose Poem, which WDS has also scooped up into its gaping maw.

The problem is that most of the WDS original offerings are weak. The quality work suffers greatly being situated amidst the dreck, and the flaws of the original work suffer in the harsh spotlight of comparison… none of which is helped by the shrill shill design motif, multiple broken links, and the incessant tone of self-promotion that taints most of the site that isn’t created by someone else. What the place really needs is what it has never had– a firm, competent editor with a vision encompassing something other than self-promotion and quality as defined by quantity.

I just finished updating my Commonplace Book with an eye towards getting a bunch of stuff transferred from notebooks and scraps of paper. All the old links should automatically take you to the right place in my groovy new database driven system.

Oh, and I posted an updated picture of Althea… Daddy’s little girl isn’t so little anymore, but she’s still cool with me.

George Plimpton, Robert Palmer, and Herb Gardner gone in one 24 hour span. What the hell?

I now discovered that the other, good (there are so many people named Chris where I work that I have been dubbed the “evil chris”) Chris at tex files also had her interest piqued by Silliman’s post on prose poems and flash fiction. She also explored a lot further than I have. Good stuff. Check it out.

It’s hard to believe that Ron SIlliman’s recent discussion of prose poems, flash fiction, plot, and narrative hasn’t received more attention there or elsewhere. His post either directly addresses or alludes to some issues I find fascinating, such as what distinguishes a prose poem, how flash fiction “transforms the issue of time in narrative,” and more. I guess everyone’s still channeling Houlihan or recovering from same.

One issue is the fallacy inherent in the common assumption that prose poems must be brief, which leads to casting the difference between prose poems and flash fictions as questions of differentiation rather than understanding them as fundamentally different endeavours. I have to admit that my experience with prose poems has always been with short poems or short sequences, but the question of figuring out what is going on when I am reading a piece has remained open. Silliman is getting at something important to me in this question of understanding the nature of the prose poem. The position inherent in his observation is that the difference between, say, a book length poem and a book length personal essay is as clear as the difference between a prose poem and a piece of flash fiction, and that difference has nothing do with length. Philosophically, I agree. But I’m not sure how it works out in the real world of approaching texts.

The second has to do with the transformative nature of flash fiction when it comes to time in narrative. At first I nodded my head in agreement with this sentiment, but now I find it troubling. Isn’t this the same kind of mistake of categorization that he points out above? The physical length of a piece of flash fiction is only indirectly related to the concept of time in its narrative. The same holds true in a short story or a novel. This has nothing to do with length in terms of narrative, but only the superficial aspect of physical brevity. Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Infinite Jest, and a multitude of other examples come to mind in this context.

And I don’t think fiction is anywhere near as moribund as Silliman implies. With people like David Foster Wallace, David Markson, and Mark Leyner reworking the shape of the genre, and others just spinning good yarns or blurring the boundaries between fiction and memoir, cultural criticism, etc., the enterprise of “fiction” seems as vital as ever in the work itself. Its place in our cultural repertoire is, like poetry and the public, not necessarily following the same lines.

I responded in Kasey’s weblog comments to his comment on my weblog post that was itself a comment to a weblog post of his. Got it?

I am a little confused by Kasey’s recent entry on Linda Pastan. Or maybe I am overwhelmed by the scope. I find it interesting that in response to Aimee’s post he glides through an assessment of the poem that is actually in question and then burrows down into a completely different poem. I guess I missed the post or person who held up “Prosody 101″ as a good poem. It goes without saying that most poets are guilty of uneven output, so I’m not sure that the aesthetic critique of the poem (as good as it is) is particularly relevant to making an argument centered around Aimee’s affinity for “love poem” much less as an argument about mainstream poetry in general.

So, the more interesting issue is an analysis if the argumentative meat of the poem, which would appear to represent Pastan’s view on prosody. Kasey takes a rather narrow view when he maintains that the argument “neglects rhythm.” I understand the argument of the poem to include rhythm when she mentions the “tension … between the expected and actual” and “the variations in that line.” In my book, this is an aspect of rhythmic quality. If you ever have a chance to listen to a high school jazz band and then contrast the drummer you are likely to hear there with even the most mediocre jazz group playing in anytown, U.S.A., then this aspect of rhythm becomes abundantly clear. I’m not sure that prosody, accent, and rhythm can be cleaved from one another that easily for argument’s sake.

Why does so much criticism focus on poems about poems? PAP’s are perhaps the deadliest category of poetry, more boring even than house-husband epiphanies or acts of opacity that are their stylistic opposite. They provide a convenient segue to discussing poetics in general, but that discussion has frighteningly little to do with the poem itself. Why not discuss the poem that was actually brought up by Aimee and figure out how it fits into this argument. For instance, how is it improved by being laid out as prose? I don’t see that improvement, because part of the strength in the repetition comes from the line breaks.

Incidentally, I have to admit that the idea of a roundtable, moderated discussion about the mainstream and the post-avant just makes me tired. Isn’t that what all this weblogging is about? And isn’t the deck a bit stacked, as Gabe Gudding points out in his comments?

After spending most of the week in meetings (bloody meetings), then travelling to make a presentation and spend even more time in meetings, I find that any desire I had to respond at length to the Houlihan brouhaha has faded. I’d have to spend the rest of the weekend trying to digest the lengthy exchanges and probably find that everything I am thinking has already been said somewhere.

Instead, I’ve been content to spend my free time browsing around at Title Wave Books, the best bookstore on the planet that isn’t named Powell’s Books. I wish I could claim to have purchased a plethora of volumes on poetic and cutting edge poets, but will remain content with scoring Aura by Carlos Fuentes, Do Not Disturb Any Further by the brilliant Jack Callahan, and the complete Memory of Fire trilogy by Eduardo Galeano.

Post-avant bloggers will be disappointed that the only poetry books on the menu are On Poetry & Craft, a volume of prose selections by Roethke, and The Poet’s Notebook, featuring selections from the notebooks of various “mainstream” poets.