Moore's "What Are Years": How Does This Poem Be?

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Moore's "What Are Years": How Does This Poem Be?

via Harriet on 3/18/09

In the midst of the energetic discussion around my recent "Listening to Poetry" post, I happened to come across the following extraordinary poem again. It was in a wonderful format, an illustrated anthology called Parallels: Artists/Poets published by MidMarch Arts Press, accompanied on the facing page by an abstract charcoal sketch by Claire Heimarck. I found myself staring face to face with the poem, and I couldn't stop re-reading it —in part because, as far as I can tell, it belied everything I had been saying.

W.H.Auden and Marianne Moore

My post was about listening to poetry, reading it with the musical part of the brain. But really, it was about ways that poetry takes us into "the zone"—that place of oneness of being that is so hard to describe but that we recognize when we are there.

Moore's poem was taking me into the zone, but not in any of the ways I had been describing. Certainly the rhetorical stringencies and the idiosyncratic idiom, playing off of the syllabic constraints, are part of what's going on—but how much does that really tell us? What makes Moore's poem vibrate and hum in its own beingness, feeling while behaving and continuing while surrendering, steeling its form straight up, just in the way it itself describes?

John Ciardi asked, "how does a poem mean?" while Archibald MacLeish said "a poem should not mean, but be." But I have a different question about "What Are Years": "how does this poem be?"

What Are Years?

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, —
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourage others
and in it's defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

 

 

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New from Andrei Codrescu

fan fan fan fan. Is it hot in here?

 

 

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New from Andrei Codrescu

via Possum Ego by Dale on 3/18/09

Now here's some Dada I can dig.... Andrei Codrescu announces:

My new book, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, was just published by Princeton University Press.... I don't know about you, but I think that the 21st century cannot do without Dada; this book is not another study of Dada! it is a practical guide to the Dada life. Order now from Cottonwood Books and we will send you a signed book. The first fifty-one books will also come with a special Exquisite Corpse gift. The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world-all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Café de la Terrasse-a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution-lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future ideologue over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, I've created my own Dadaesque guide to Dada-and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich. The Posthuman Dada Guide is arranged alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with entries such as "eros (women)," "internet(s)," and "war." Throughout, it is written in the belief "that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources."

Royal Praise:
"This highly original, beautifully written, and charming book is vintage Andrei Codrescu. No one else has written anything remotely like it. One is carried along by the author's sheer energy and drive, his good humor, his ability to laugh at himself, and his own truly Dada personality. The Posthuman Dada Guide will introduce Dada thinking to a whole new readership."--Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox

"No other book has treated the relationship between the artistic and revolutionary avant-gardes as originally and provocatively as Codrescu's. This is both an immensely illuminating essay of intellectual history and a disturbing meditation on absolute ideals turned into alibis for tyranny. Magically blending sarcasm and gravity, Codrescu invites us to engage in an emancipatory laughter as an antidote to morose scholasticism and dogmatic obscurantism."--Vladimir Tismaneanu, author of Stalinism for All Seasons

 

 

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Jack Kerouac's Golden Eternity Realized

 

 

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Jack Kerouac's Golden Eternity Realized

via Issa's Untidy Hut by Issa's Untidy Hut on 3/19/09

Well, I had a W. S. Merwin poem all ready to go this morning, but there is a typo and I don't have the book at hand, so I'll have to check it out when the book is in hand.

So, it's time to punt.

Ed Baker commented on a recent post when I talked a bit about Jack Kerouac's Tristessa, urging folks on to his The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (You know that I'm listening, eh, Ed?). I've been wending my way headily through: here is section 29 of a book made up of tiny meditations, koans and prose poems (as the back cover touts, rightly):

------29

Are you tightwad and are you mean, those are
the true sins, and sin is only a conception of ours,
due to long habit. Are you generous and are
you kind, those are the true virtues, and they're
only conceptions. The golden eternity rests beyond
sin and virtue, is attached to neither, is attached
to nothing, is unattached, because the golden
eternity is Alone. The mold has rills but it is one
mold. The field has curves but it is one field.
All things are different forms of the same thing.
I call it the golden eternity — what do you
call it, brother? For the blessing and merit
of virtue, and the punishment and bad fate
of sin, are alike just so many words.

Jack Kerouac

For those who feel that this is a little too much philosophy and not enough poetry (you are out there, you know), the good news is I found my copy of the Book of Haikus I was searching for (see Tristessa link, above) on the recent anniversary of Jack's birthday. So there — or, rather, here:

Ah the birds
-at dawn,
my mother and father

You paid yr homage
-to the moon,
And she sank

Bach through an open
-dawn window—
the birds are silent

All three poems on two facing pages of the book opened at random: that's poetry, friends. Perhaps I should misplace Merwin (and Jack, come to think of it) a little more often.



***********************************************************



I had the calendar marked for the 19th as the birthday of jazz master Ornette Coleman. In double checking before posting, I see his birthday was actually March 9th, not the 19th, so it seems the serendipitous mistake is the theme of the day. As a college professor of mine used to say (I believe he said it at least three times): once for the intelligent and aware, twice for the intelligent and unaware, and three times for the unintelligent and unaware. Well, I don't have to be hit over the head more than three times to go with the flow - today the mistake is the truth, so let's celebrate Coleman's birthday today. Enjoy.

best,
Don


PS Ruminated and typed to the delicate, forthright word-picking of Jolie Holland. Ain't it all beautiful, eh, Ed?

 

 

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(title unknown)

 

 

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(title unknown)

via Silliman's Blog by Ron on 3/13/09

Michael Davidson reading (MP3)

& talking with Charles Bernstein (MP3)

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Charles Bernstein's "Morality"

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Tim Griffin on Rae Armantrout

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Talking with Norma Cole

"Why I am not a translator, take 2"

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Notes on Conceptualisms

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Allen Ginsberg: Mind-Writing Slogans

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Talking with Michael Schiavo

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Noah Eli Gordon on Andrew Joron

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Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence

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Merrill Gilfillan's
"A Nap by the Kickapoo"

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The secret anthology

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Nate Mackey's
Song of the Andoumboulou 1 to 7

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Samuel R. Delany
at the Philadelphia Free Library
March 18

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Collected vs. selected
in Olson & O'Hara

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James Longenbach & the line

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SUNY Buffalo gets funds
to digitize tapes

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Citation as explanation:
Louis Zukofsky & Walter Benjamin

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Two books by Ed Baker
(one with Cid Corman)

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The First 100 Days
poem-a-day
project
has reached the halfway mark

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Ronald Johnson, visionary

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Reading report: Futurism

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Oulipo in New York

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"the poetry of the stones"

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Close reading flarf, part 12

Part 12b & 12c

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One less indie publisher

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Yet another plausible
portrait of Shakespeare

§

The Best of Contemporary
Mexican Fiction

§

It's e-book week

§

The Shelley Memorial Award
goes to
Gary Young

§

The 5 rules of book cover design

§

Whatever became of Bill Barich

§

"My lunch with M.F.K. Fisher"
& Jessamyn West to boot

§

Poets who don't read
& other problems

Reading vs. writing

§

In the office with Franz Kafka

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Alissa Valles' Orphan Fire

§

The Journals of Grace Hartigan

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John Zorn at Yoshi's SF

Zorn & Richard Foreman
in the Astronome

§

Johnny Magic

§

What are intellectuals good for?

§

Kierkegaard the post-avant

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Perry Anderson's
The Origins of Postmodernity

 

 

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Collapsitarian

How's 'bout a calvinist total depravity version? And the nobility of suffering, and the incarnational reality of suffering and dying gods...

 

 

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Collapsitarian

via Possum Ego by Dale on 3/11/09

I found this entry on Collapsitarianism via John Robb's always-insightful blog. Kevin Kelly writes:

The idea of progress has been slowly dying. I think progress lost its allure at the ignition of the first atom bomb at the end of WWII. It has been losing luster since. Even more recently the future has become boring and unfashionable. No one wants to live in the future. The jet packs don't work, and the Daily Me is full of spam. No finds the Future attractive any longer.

The only thing left to believe in is collapse. That's not boring! The end of civilization would be terribly exciting, and unlike any future we could imagine, probably more likely. Dystopias are a favorite science fiction destination now.

We all are collapsitarians these days.

Zizek (somewhere in his expanding vastnesses) says something similar, noting how thirty years ago there would be passionate discussions on the Left about the future, but now, he asks, where have those conversations gone? No one offers thrilling visions of a future.

It is exciting to think about collapse—and the freedom—and hardship this would bring. I think there are very real climate and resource indicators to suggest that some kind of collapse is certainly possible, but the psychology of collapse, and the desire for it, compel me to think about my own attention to the gloom-n-doom fringes of contemporary culture. It's been a long time since I read Freud, but does anyone still talk about the death drive? Collapse, biologically, belongs to everyone's individual future. Perhaps the fantasy of the collapse of civilization provides a way to sooth the ego's horror of death. If I go, it all goes!

But Collapse is also itself a vision of restoration. If systems, and not only bodies, fail, some promise remains in the rearticulation of narratives of adventure that have become stale in the contemporary, cubicle-fated West. I've been looking at the folklore of the colonists who settled Texas. That corn pone world offered serious considerations of, say, how to move bodies through space, or how to track an enemy, or what to eat when there was little to be had. The lack of narratives of adventure makes life thin and uninviting in the present. Perhaps one reason for the post-War growth of Creative Writing departments had something to do with a need for adventure. Poetry promises to move us forward into new possibilities. Our other contracts with pre-Collapsarian life are fragile, delicately maintained, practicing attention to morals and manners in a world of boredom, where meaningful labor is rarely achieved. Instead, we contribute to the system's ongoing need to expand, satisfying its needs based on growth at any cost over more human needs to reveal our experience through stories and images.

On a related note, mass murders announced in Alabama and Germany today. Lone gunmen. Adventurous perversions. Maybe it's better to ask: when did the Collapse begin?

 

 

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Free US History Course from Stanford via iTunes

rockin

 

 

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Free US History Course from Stanford via iTunes

via Free Technology for Teachers by rbyrnetech@hotmail.com (Mr. Byrne) on 3/11/09

Once again through the great Open Culture blog, I learned about a free Stanford University course being published on iTunes U. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jack Rakove is teaching a course about Colonial and Revolutionary America. The course will cover all of the topics typical of early American history survey courses. You can find the course here or look in the Stanford section of iTunes U. When the course is complete there will be 30 lectures available, currently there are seven lecutures posted.

Applications for Education
This course will cover topics that students have heard about from elementary school history teachers through high school history teachers. iTunes U provides high school students with an opportunity to learn in more depth about topics with which they are already familiar.

 

 

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Anne Waldman Rips It Up, Corso and Ginsberg Interview Doctor Benway

 

 

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Anne Waldman Rips It Up, Corso and Ginsberg Interview Doctor Benway

via Issa's Untidy Hut by Issa's Untidy Hut on 3/11/09

Here's Anne Waldman setting the place on fire - real nice to have the quality of the material match the poet's all out delivery. Many thanks to Christina for pointing the way.

And, because, that's just not enough, try this one on for size:

To round out a Beat kind of post, check out Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg "interviewing" William Burroughs in 1961.

Finally, the Twitter Lilliput Poem-of-the-day - actually, 2 poems, in just 140 characters, one by W. T. Ranney and one by John Martone.

Where else will you get that, folks?


best,
Don

 

 

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What Part of the Brain Shouldn’t You Use?

This is very interesting. Vispo is something I experiment with.

 

 

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What Part of the Brain Shouldn’t You Use?

via dbqp: visualizing poetics by Geof Huth on 3/9/09

Every visual poem is about boundaries and the broaching of boundaries, so every magazine of visual poetry has to be the same, and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's new online zine, Medulla, whose first issue is a snazzy affair small enough to drink with a couple of quick gulps, does not disappoint


The magazine opens with a few bursts of color and sublimated text, each the handiwork of Daniel f. Bradley, who has moved deftly into the world of color. The works have an inner glow that coats the eyeballs in sherbety colors, something I wouldn't expect from Daniel. Yet the pieces, almost to a man, engender a bit of disquietude. The verbal elements of these pieces are so shrunken and disguised to afford almost no help in the interpretation of the pieces, though the last ends with an ironic/dismissive phrase across the face of it ("BRIGHT CITY LIGHTS'). This first piece definitely includes the letters "SC," which seems almost to spell out "scowl" or "scud" or "screw." We are left scratching out heads but sure the word is meant not as something naturally pretty but as something a little offputting.


Jim Leftwich is one of the machines of visual poetry production (along with Jukka-Pekka, the editor), but some machines have hearts and minds, and Jim's work, which uses collage most commonly, is never merely the accumulation of random bits. The pieces talk. They make points to us. We are meant to read them. In this little collage poem, Jim takes pieces of the consumerist world, but particularly dry and boring pieces, and he mixes with them scraps of newspaper clippings about the war, presumably the War in Iraq. This is a simple anti-war message, but also anti-consumerist, and anti-so-blind-from-mindless-consumption-that-you-don't-even-notice-the-carnage-carried-out-in-your-name. This piece seems unassuming, maybe meaningless, but it is passionate in a way that only its dispassionate presentation could demonstrate.


I have to admit that I am a sucker for any image that comes from the fingers of Musicmaster, so I'm happy to see that he is working so studiously with John M. Bennett on collaborations. This one is interesting for its unsubtlety: Upon the foundation of a poem of John's, one simply printed out onto a page of paper, Musicmaster has drawn one of his surrealist figures, which appears to illustrate everything in the poem (clog, pesto, hair, noose) without clearly integrating itself with the poem. It even obscures some of the poem, restricting our ability to read it. Yet I can read it, can hear John's voice declaiming it, can appreciate how this jumbly little collaboration, a weird drawing upon a tumbling post-surrealist poem, works just perfectly because working isn't its major goal.


Everyone except for Márton Koppány has multiple pieces in this book, but Márton works unlike his compatriots. He works slowly, producing only a few tight, verbally spare yet intellectually dense pieces of conceptual visual poetry every year. And the works are demanding. He demands more out of a reader of visual poetry than any other visual poet, and he stumps me far too often. This poem above is simply the letter A (or an upside-down V), with a few clouds thrown in to complete the letter. I see in the letter the vanishing point, the two far edges of the road coming together in the distance, straight rigid lines that merely move forward, but which are impeded by these three clouds, tinged with storminess, soft yet a little menacing, soft but soft in contradistinction to the hard surety of the roadway leading to disappearance. I see travel that is planned out, designed to move forward, but which is slowed by the unexpected.


There are pieces in this magazine that even I can't consider visual poetry myself. Among these are these beautiful abstract paintings by Peter Ganick. I love the colors of these and how they swirl together, but I can see no words, no letters in these swirls. I see nothing textual and thus nothing visual poetic, but I love them just the same. Similarly, Greg Evason's drawings earlier in the magazine are merely tied little doodles and scribbles. These do not intimate written language, so we cannot assume they are related to language. So this magazine stretches beyond visual poetry without admitting it does, but what do I care? Medulla is an interesting and engaging selection, and a good way to exercise your eyes and your mind.

ecr. l'inf.

 

 

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Oh God. This flickr set is so close to perfect.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fabulousmuscles/sets/72157614504294297/