Ruminate

The other, better Chris and I almost share a birthday. Her enthusiasm about it seems to wax and wane as much as my own. At any rate, I survived the deadly day as I expect to survive the upcoming year (in case you missed it, that’s me being cheerful). Many thanks to those who shared birthday wishes, horror stories, and some interesting gifts.

I finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. A fantastic read combining erudition and research with great– sometimes ribald– humor and a compelling, complicated story of scientific, political, and personal intrigue. I suspect I am going to read it again fairly soon. This despite my initial disappointment that this novel was the first of three prequels to the wonderful Cryptonomicon, rather than the sequel I was hoping for.

Today I picked up the new David Foster Wallace book Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. Read through the first section. If the rest of the books maintains this form, this may well join Infinite Jest in my personal pantheon of great books. I love the inspired pairing of Wallace and the concept of infinity, which is so well-suited to his style and concerns that it makes me happy just thinking about it. And everything I like about Wallace (who is similar to Stephenson in some respects)– the sense of humor, playfulness, and irreverence tempered with casual, big-brain displays of a voracious intellect. The first section should be required reading.

This also brings to mind one of my Ultimate Fantasy events: having a happy dinner and long, post-prandial conversation with Neal Stephenson and David Foster Wallace. Or just watching the two of them…

Sorry for lack of recent activity here. Please choose an appropriate excuse from the list below, or make up one of your own:

• I’m busy composing a vast ode to my vasectomy, a book length poem on the history of the carpentry nail, or an experimental poem combining both of these together with a lot of bad puns and the occasional mathematical formula.
• I have sworn off email and internet communication to the degree possible, preferring to make my own paper and write messages with a fountain pen, delivered by horse and buggy to my eager correspondents.
• I am stuck in an infinite loop attempting to understand women.
• I am going into a deep depression in anticipation of my birthday.
• I am busy whooping it up in anticipation of my birthday.
• I’ve been swamped at work and sick with the flu.

Nevertheless, I still love all of you. Each and every one.

Because the day draws nearer and my mom asked, but in case anyone else is so inclined, here is a snapshot of my current birthday needs:

• Another DiscSox heavy duty CD case or, better yet, a DiscSox CD Chest
• Pelikan M200 fountain pen (fine nib)
• Compact OED (unabridged– what’s the point of an abridged OED?)
• Books, books, books, such as:
  • Prose poems: The Party Train, Moments Without Names, Models of the Universe, No Boundaries, and The American Prose Poem
  • Poets from blogland: Kasey’s Deer Head Nation and Noah Gordon’s The Frequencies so I can see what all the fuss is about.
  • Jazz poetry: The Second Set, a subscription (or back issues of) Brilliant Corners
  • Fiction: Ilium, Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, The Fan Man, etc.
  • Nonfiction: The Codebreakers (not the softcover that has been gutted), The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox, or the Verbatim Anthology
• or DVDs, perhaps The Fawlty Towers Complete Collection, the Ben Folds Five Sessions at West 54th, the Black Adder Collectors Set, or the Red Dwarf Series Pack…
• Maybe a Dell Axim X5 Advanced handheld, since some bastards stole my Palm
• An Amalfi stationery set so I can singlehandedly revive the art of the
  personal letter
• CDs are also a good choice, though I own so many that the risk of duplication is high. Some that are still on my list and readily available: Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, Warren Zevon’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead anthology, the Neil Young Decade box set, BNL Everything to Everyone, Ben Kweller’s Sha Sha, Australia by Howie Day, the Essential Sly and the Family Stone, Poe Haunted (and come to think of it, I need to replace my lost Hello too), and how about some Stone Cold Funk?
• Many of these and about a million more ideas from the cheap to megabucks, from normal to the criminally insane on my wishlist…

Why is it that I can never think of all those little objects that spring to mind every day when I’m actually asked this kind of question point blank?

Given that X is the number of waking hours in my week, and Y is the amount of that time devoted to kids, work, and slave-adjunct teaching (each of these are complex entities), then X-Y already leaves a frighteningly small number, out of which I have to find time for important things that keep me sane like writing, reading, and occasionally listening to music.

If N is the variable number of hours that I end up spending reading all these other fascinating weblogs, surfing the links thereing, following the web of serendipity along my lines of interest, and then posting to my own feeble site, then X-Y-N leaves a number that approaches zero, the result of which is incipient insanity.

I’m not closing up shop here, but for a while at least, please don’t feel a compulsive need to check this site every few hours for new material (a common malady, I’m sure) since I will be spending more time with pen and paper writing new stuff out “there” and less time with keyboard and pixels posting new stuff here.

Hopefully this will be seen as a focus on quality over quantity and I won’t disappear from everyone’s list of links and– more importantly– from their poetic hearts. If there were but world enough and time to play in blogland as much as part of me would like…

• I am not yet aware of any good reason that I shouldn’t eat cucumbers whole, unpeeled, like long, green apples.
• Note to the goateed guy with the Sex Pistols shirt at the next table that talked loudly for my entire writing session at the coffee shop: expressing rebellion by growing the goatee and wearing the Sex Pistols shirt is probably about as cliched as such rebellion can possibly get.
• Second note to goatee Sex Pistols guy: going to the anti-war rally to try to “get into the pants” of the tall, redhead with dreadlocks and cat-eye glasses is not demonstrating the virtues of democracy.
• Third Note: the tall readhead with the dreadlocks and cat-eye glasses was sitting right behind you.
• Curling is not a sport. Curling is shuffleboard for boring people who are youn enough not to have to worry about broken hips.
• Why isn’t Bill Knott more famous?
• Reading Weldon Kees poems. After the first: Wow! After the second: Jesus. After the third: Now I almost want to disappear, to Mexico or the great beyond. Or both.

Thanks to a link in his recent comment, I have unearthed Tony’s Unquiet Grave blog. Some interesting stuff there, particularly the October 4 entry (you may have to scroll a bit), where he reveals that we have been thinking along similar lines lately.

It should be obvious that I prefer productive approaches, and I like the idea of a more intelligent mainstream, just as I like talking about poems more than talking about poetry, and I am much more sympathetic to Eileen’s idea of “eros poetics” and Michaela’s pleasure principle of poetics than it might seem reading my meandering comments. This shared approach just isn’t well reflected here because this site is the area where I poke at the sore spots and scratch the itches, whereas my Po-eros and poetic pleasuring happens in private (poor me).

Anyway, back to Tony: it is interesting to contemplate, in broader terms, the action and reaction of the avant garde, official verse culture, etc. If it is dangerous to always be writing for the “center” it seems equally dangerous to be writing for the edge. The avant becomes the old guard, and the artists within it do so as well. Unless they gain some traction with a tight focus on being cutting-edge– but that is a recipe for poor poetry, as I don’t believe the poetic mind is best served by such an approach– or they create an elaborate structure of justification that purports that this natural process of evolution doesn’t really happen in poetry, we just think it does (ala the implication of Ron Silliman and his theory of the School of Quietude).

Fence and Slope will be tomorrow’s Ploughshares (assuming they are around that long, longevity not being a virtue in the publishing world as of late). And well it should be. Any other way is death, and no amount of elaborate justification can stave off that monster.

These things are of very different import depending on whether I am thinking as a reader, writer, or feeble wag. With my reader hat on, I’m looking for what moves me, and this might be in the form of intellectual engagement, but it is usually more sensual and immediate than that. Believe it or not, I don’t sit and ponder the “deep meaning” of everything I read, but I think a part of even the most natural apprehension comes from that mysterious understanding and empathy, the connection we make with the writing that is meant for us. In this respect, I don’t see pondering what a poet is “doing” with quite the same implicit approbation I keep hearing. But it can be carried too far, so while I ask questions I also keep sharing poems and prose and whetever else I think others need to hear, whether they are post-avant, SOQ, Atlantean, mainstream, crapitude, or whatever.

As a blog commentator publishing the cheapest rag around right here on this site, the ideas of poetic schools, cultural revolutions, etc. are grist for the big blog mill which grinds equal parts of narcissism, attention-seeking behaviour, self-therapy, and intellect into an unpredictable melange.

With my writer hat on, I’ve decided I’m not going to thinkg about these things at all. The workings of the creative mechanism are too complicated and obscure to try to influence them directly. I have things to say, so I will say them… and keep on saying them in the way that makes the most sense to me. There is no other way.

Who is occasionally (to be charitable) mystified by poetry… I can’t set sail on the ironic ship of post-post-avantitude quite yet, though, since in recent days Eileen, Chris M, Michaela, Kasey, Jordan, Gary, Tonio and others have managed to augment my feeble paddling towards understanding. What I like best is that there is so much talking about poems and not so much about poetry!!

Am I the only person on the planet who is disappointed that the long-awaited “followup” to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is actually (and only remotely) a prequel set 300 years earlier with two more prequel followups to come?

Quicksilver? OK, so it looks interesting, but will the subsequent books never appear? I hate that. What happened to the followup Neal?

Among the many problems of thinking too much about common issues in poetry blogland (besides falling over the edge into the morass of simple over-thinking) is that it becomes too easy to start reading any single poem as a representative of some entire school, division, faction, clique, etc.

I picked on Gary Sullivan’s poem a bit because I found its attempt at cleverness a little too obvious, its sexual entendre a little too slight. But I honestly do wonder if I am missing something more important about this poem outside of being a convenient breather if one is faced with too many stultifying attempts at profundity.

But a bad thing that keeps happening in the back of my mind is I keep thinking when I see such a poem “so this is what they are saying should replace my poem!?” Where this is whatever poem I don’t like, they are the semi-mythical post-avant anti-school-of-crapitude (or whatever the term du jour is for the demonized group) writers, and my poem is whatever poem from that demonized group I happen to think is like totally rad.

That’s an unfair burden for just about any poem of any stripe, and I apologize in advance for wherever this kind of reaction does find its way through and characterize my understanding. In my defense, I almost never just pick on a poem unless I am sincerely mystified and– most importantly– I am sincerely wondering what I am missing.

OK, I’m probably not going to win any friends with this one, so let me start with a few necessary props. I like and read Lime Tree and Elsewhere every day. Both are on my list of links– see them down there on the left?

But Kasey’s recent post of a Gary Sullivan poem is another head-scratcher. Is this a joke? And on whom?

With all due respect to Gary Sullivan, I just don’t get it. If this poem were pointed out (or brought by) some random kid in a first-year poetry workshop or similar I’d just shrug it off. But this is highlighted by Kasey, who spent many days flaying Linda Pastan (and perhaps rightfully so), and whose critical faculties I admire. So now I’d like to see the spirit of productive criticism at work and have Kasey enlighten me as to why this poem has been brought to the world’s attention in his blog.