I noticed this link from the vehicule press blog on negative blurbshttp://www.scribd.com/doc/468653/Poetry-Blurbs-that-People-Will-Not-Have-the-Balls-to-Write which reminded me of the self-mocking blurbs for one of the funniest books I've ever read, Bored Of The Rings, the parody of The Lord Of The Rings. The Harvard Lampoon (Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney) included a few send-ups on their own reworking of Tolkien's great trilogy, such as:
"A slightly more liberal reading of the leash-laws would keep books like this off the stands. I don't know how you'll fare, but my copy insists on long walks around suppertime, bays at the moon, and has spoiled every sofa cushion in the place."
--Wilmot Proviso, The Rocky Mountain Literary Round-Up
"One of the two or three books ...."
--Frank O'Prussia, Dublin Gazette
Monday, April 13, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
In Defense Of Punning
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/opinion/28Tartakovsky.html?_r=1, NY Times column by Joseph Tartakovsky.
"Universal experience confirms the adage that puns don’t make us laugh, but groan." --Tartakovsky.
That's the point, the groaning amplifies the creator's joy and unabashed laughter. I'd even say the effective pun often makes a sober, sane, witless, grown man cry. (Is fucking another term for ingrown foreskin? And there's, at times, an awful lot of groaning going on in that act.) Ahh, I can't stop! ....
"It is said that Caligula ordered an actor to be roasted alive for a bad pun." -- Tartakovsky.
It's interesting that a contemporary "roasting" of someone involves puns as endearment and respect, something the crankypants Tartakovsky can't recognise in his churlish jeremiad.
"Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion."-- Tartakovsky
So what? The average human male orgasm lasts for 4 seconds, yet that hasn't stopped the practise of sexual intercourse to lag not far behind in popularity than television surfing. And punning, like orgasms from the fairer sex, can be serial before they're toast.
"Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping."--Tartakovsky
Logical formulas? Perhaps the groanery is a result of realized obtuseness on the part of the hearer. The best puns are created out of lively, quick wit. And why should every joke be a "knee-slapper"? I should think that terminology would more appropriately fit a cracker hooked on Roseanne Barr or Jerry Springer. You know, the kinda guy or gal who supposedly delights in punning.
"The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies."--Tartakovsky
Not in my experience. Off-colour jokes are only embarassing if they're unfunny, which has nothing to do with their level of propriety. Trinkets can be tawdry, as can the kink-set of those who stifle social silliness only to have it turn up in bizarre, repressed actions when the corsets and high collars are inevitably unbuttoned.
"Shakespeare, however, does [use puns]. Many are bawdy: puns operate, after all, on double entendre. Yet the poet is guilty less of punning than wordplay..."--Tartakovsky
Hmmm, so his prior argument seems a little inane: Twain and Wodehouse didn't pun, so punning is beneath literary esteem. But Shakespeeare .... well, his wordplay was more common (or, rather, "common", ironically). Face it, Tartakovsky, lit gents and ladies often dislike punning because they can't reconcile the tactic with "great" literature, which is just another euphemism for pretentiousness and marketing ambition. I'd like to see any of Shakespeare's fools (from his darkest tragedies) turn up in those narratives, unannounced and bemused.
"the least intolerable puns are those that avoid the pun’s essential puerility."--Tartakovsky.
Au contraire, Mr T. Puerility, like groan-inducement, is often the point. Puerility is a useful strategy when a conversation becomes pompous and somber. Again, Shakespeare's Malvolio, here, is a good example. Would you rather have a beer with that Twelfth Night drudge, or with any of hundreds of counter-forces in S's works?
"Surely puns silence conversation before they animate it."--Tartakovsky.
See my last point, above. Sometimes it's a very good thing when a conversation is silenced, if for no other reason than the self-preservation for those present who have imagination and wit. It's a law of physics that inertia is self-perpetuating. How else to break things up than by shock, in this case the non-harmful punning kind. The bores aren't insulted, and hopefully the conversation can change direction from how the fourth footnote of a religious transcriber was misrepresented in a Thoma a Kempis' sleep-inducing treatise. Then again, sometimes there's no other alternative than to head for the exits prematurely after your attempt at immature humour falls on superior ears.
"the similitude between puns and fruit flies, both of which die practically the instant they are born, but not before breeding others."--Tartakovsky.
Ah ha! The inmates are punning the asylum! They're breeding like rats!
Will Tartakovsky's column engineer its way into the soul of the NY Times reader for more than a millisecond?
"But low as puns may be, they have been known to appeal to the loftiest minds."--Tartakovsky.
Thank you very much, sir.
"Punning, it seems, like every non-deadly sin, is easier to excuse than to resist."--Tartakovsky.
It's irresistable, naturally so. Let yourself go, tart tongue. Sprinkle on a pun, life is sweet.
"Universal experience confirms the adage that puns don’t make us laugh, but groan." --Tartakovsky.
That's the point, the groaning amplifies the creator's joy and unabashed laughter. I'd even say the effective pun often makes a sober, sane, witless, grown man cry. (Is fucking another term for ingrown foreskin? And there's, at times, an awful lot of groaning going on in that act.) Ahh, I can't stop! ....
"It is said that Caligula ordered an actor to be roasted alive for a bad pun." -- Tartakovsky.
It's interesting that a contemporary "roasting" of someone involves puns as endearment and respect, something the crankypants Tartakovsky can't recognise in his churlish jeremiad.
"Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion."-- Tartakovsky
So what? The average human male orgasm lasts for 4 seconds, yet that hasn't stopped the practise of sexual intercourse to lag not far behind in popularity than television surfing. And punning, like orgasms from the fairer sex, can be serial before they're toast.
"Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping."--Tartakovsky
Logical formulas? Perhaps the groanery is a result of realized obtuseness on the part of the hearer. The best puns are created out of lively, quick wit. And why should every joke be a "knee-slapper"? I should think that terminology would more appropriately fit a cracker hooked on Roseanne Barr or Jerry Springer. You know, the kinda guy or gal who supposedly delights in punning.
"The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies."--Tartakovsky
Not in my experience. Off-colour jokes are only embarassing if they're unfunny, which has nothing to do with their level of propriety. Trinkets can be tawdry, as can the kink-set of those who stifle social silliness only to have it turn up in bizarre, repressed actions when the corsets and high collars are inevitably unbuttoned.
"Shakespeare, however, does [use puns]. Many are bawdy: puns operate, after all, on double entendre. Yet the poet is guilty less of punning than wordplay..."--Tartakovsky
Hmmm, so his prior argument seems a little inane: Twain and Wodehouse didn't pun, so punning is beneath literary esteem. But Shakespeeare .... well, his wordplay was more common (or, rather, "common", ironically). Face it, Tartakovsky, lit gents and ladies often dislike punning because they can't reconcile the tactic with "great" literature, which is just another euphemism for pretentiousness and marketing ambition. I'd like to see any of Shakespeare's fools (from his darkest tragedies) turn up in those narratives, unannounced and bemused.
"the least intolerable puns are those that avoid the pun’s essential puerility."--Tartakovsky.
Au contraire, Mr T. Puerility, like groan-inducement, is often the point. Puerility is a useful strategy when a conversation becomes pompous and somber. Again, Shakespeare's Malvolio, here, is a good example. Would you rather have a beer with that Twelfth Night drudge, or with any of hundreds of counter-forces in S's works?
"Surely puns silence conversation before they animate it."--Tartakovsky.
See my last point, above. Sometimes it's a very good thing when a conversation is silenced, if for no other reason than the self-preservation for those present who have imagination and wit. It's a law of physics that inertia is self-perpetuating. How else to break things up than by shock, in this case the non-harmful punning kind. The bores aren't insulted, and hopefully the conversation can change direction from how the fourth footnote of a religious transcriber was misrepresented in a Thoma a Kempis' sleep-inducing treatise. Then again, sometimes there's no other alternative than to head for the exits prematurely after your attempt at immature humour falls on superior ears.
"the similitude between puns and fruit flies, both of which die practically the instant they are born, but not before breeding others."--Tartakovsky.
Ah ha! The inmates are punning the asylum! They're breeding like rats!
Will Tartakovsky's column engineer its way into the soul of the NY Times reader for more than a millisecond?
"But low as puns may be, they have been known to appeal to the loftiest minds."--Tartakovsky.
Thank you very much, sir.
"Punning, it seems, like every non-deadly sin, is easier to excuse than to resist."--Tartakovsky.
It's irresistable, naturally so. Let yourself go, tart tongue. Sprinkle on a pun, life is sweet.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Zach Wells' "Heron, False Creek"
HERON, FALSE CREEK
There, Heron, you stand
in my shadow, stick pegs
and twigged feet steeped
in the freezing Creek’s
shallows, scissor-beaked
slink neck stapled
to a feathered bundle.
There, Heron, you stand,
avatar of angler’s
waiting, waiting, calm
as monks praying, steeped
in the shitty Creek’s
tide-drained stink—
then tensile—blink—
like a Singer’s
stainless needle,
that scissor beak
stabs the reeking
Creek, springs back
with silver, flipping,
flashing in the seawall
lamp standard’s
glare. With a slurp
and a shake, like
a puffy glutton
at Monk’s Oyster Bar
(stilted in False Creek’s
salted shallows)
sucking a shucked mollusk
from its crusted
shell, you swallow,
Heron, stand there
in my shadow, stare
up at the seawall,
skronk, and awkwardly
flop up into the air.
-----------------------------
On a first read, I was put off by the direct address of speaker to heron; it seemed stilted, to use a key word from Wells' poem. But as the poem unfolds, and stabs its musical epiphany through stark circumstance, the relationship of speaker to environment is bridged by the procedure of the heron.
What of that speaker? I'm always curious when a poem -- and "Heron, False Creek" fits, to this point, perfectly -- uses the speaker sparingly, but suggestively. The first person singular comes up just twice (many poems are either saturated with "I", "me", "my", or avoid those pronouns entirely, by purposeful diffusion or programmed and hostile anti-Romanticism), in the first stanza's "my shadow", and in the illuminated and rounded identical phrase in the final quatrain. The speaker is implicated in the first "shadow", but, after the intervening text, is actually identified -- both in acceptance and (perhaps) horror -- with the actions of the predator.
The creek is "false" not only in name, but in vigour, marine and spiritual. The cross is that it spears, ala the heron, a busy residential inlet. The creek is "shitty" not just in a high-fecal coliform count, but in aesthetic and "shallow[s]" transmission. So the speaker realizes a flight (nicely and accurately drawn as "awkward") after a hard patience, a "waiting, waiting". "Monks praying" is an effective simile, here, though not in an easy, stereotypical sense. Monks are just as confused as the rest of us; it's only their persistence and ardour for truth that may set them apart from those who blithely go on their way, both happy but (troublingly) untransformed. We have a reverse rounding (from "my shadow") with the praying monks and the later (only teasingly sketched) denizens of the upscale "Monk's Oyster Bar". The parallels should be obvious: the heron's job is one in which its life depends for a successful completion; the "puffy glutton[s]" have performed their sleepwalking gulp hundreds of times with compromised pleasure, a pleasure of diminishing returns. The first aggression is from necessity (primal, in the heron's case; spiritual and artistic, in the speaker's evolution); the restaurant patrons' aggression is from clouded repetition. Only the speaker and the heron can take flight, though they still have to return to the mundane and polluted creek.
A few words on the rhythm and sound of this poem. Wells' aural and phrasal compression is memorable and mimetic of the action, here. Though the anecdote takes place outside, the tenor of the action is microscopic (with -- contrasting --brief suggestive similes and the Monk metaphor) in nature, even claustrophobic. The tight call-and-echo lines are effective, the assonantal repetitions mesmeric in the way both speaker and heron proceed (the first on the latter; the latter on the speared fish).
In other poems, this particular Wells' strength can be his limitation. It's impressive to stickhandle successfully in a phone booth, but line freedom, in a creative narrative nonlinearity, and in contrasting mood and tone and syntactic surprise/variance, could vault him above the highly accomplished, yet procedurally similar, poems of his greatest standard. And he has the intelligence and wit to bring it off at some point. One roadblock for a lot of poets, perhaps, is the (rightful) shrinking from Ginsberg's overblown mantra of "first thought, best thought". That bumper sticker -- which results from, and is influential to, Zen dabblers who misunderstand spiritual truths -- has resulted in more sloppy, self-indulgent verses than I'd care to count. But, like any influential creed, it holds a kernel of truth: all thoughts are first thoughts, including the reworked and laboured-over ones.
There, Heron, you stand
in my shadow, stick pegs
and twigged feet steeped
in the freezing Creek’s
shallows, scissor-beaked
slink neck stapled
to a feathered bundle.
There, Heron, you stand,
avatar of angler’s
waiting, waiting, calm
as monks praying, steeped
in the shitty Creek’s
tide-drained stink—
then tensile—blink—
like a Singer’s
stainless needle,
that scissor beak
stabs the reeking
Creek, springs back
with silver, flipping,
flashing in the seawall
lamp standard’s
glare. With a slurp
and a shake, like
a puffy glutton
at Monk’s Oyster Bar
(stilted in False Creek’s
salted shallows)
sucking a shucked mollusk
from its crusted
shell, you swallow,
Heron, stand there
in my shadow, stare
up at the seawall,
skronk, and awkwardly
flop up into the air.
-----------------------------
On a first read, I was put off by the direct address of speaker to heron; it seemed stilted, to use a key word from Wells' poem. But as the poem unfolds, and stabs its musical epiphany through stark circumstance, the relationship of speaker to environment is bridged by the procedure of the heron.
What of that speaker? I'm always curious when a poem -- and "Heron, False Creek" fits, to this point, perfectly -- uses the speaker sparingly, but suggestively. The first person singular comes up just twice (many poems are either saturated with "I", "me", "my", or avoid those pronouns entirely, by purposeful diffusion or programmed and hostile anti-Romanticism), in the first stanza's "my shadow", and in the illuminated and rounded identical phrase in the final quatrain. The speaker is implicated in the first "shadow", but, after the intervening text, is actually identified -- both in acceptance and (perhaps) horror -- with the actions of the predator.
The creek is "false" not only in name, but in vigour, marine and spiritual. The cross is that it spears, ala the heron, a busy residential inlet. The creek is "shitty" not just in a high-fecal coliform count, but in aesthetic and "shallow[s]" transmission. So the speaker realizes a flight (nicely and accurately drawn as "awkward") after a hard patience, a "waiting, waiting". "Monks praying" is an effective simile, here, though not in an easy, stereotypical sense. Monks are just as confused as the rest of us; it's only their persistence and ardour for truth that may set them apart from those who blithely go on their way, both happy but (troublingly) untransformed. We have a reverse rounding (from "my shadow") with the praying monks and the later (only teasingly sketched) denizens of the upscale "Monk's Oyster Bar". The parallels should be obvious: the heron's job is one in which its life depends for a successful completion; the "puffy glutton[s]" have performed their sleepwalking gulp hundreds of times with compromised pleasure, a pleasure of diminishing returns. The first aggression is from necessity (primal, in the heron's case; spiritual and artistic, in the speaker's evolution); the restaurant patrons' aggression is from clouded repetition. Only the speaker and the heron can take flight, though they still have to return to the mundane and polluted creek.
A few words on the rhythm and sound of this poem. Wells' aural and phrasal compression is memorable and mimetic of the action, here. Though the anecdote takes place outside, the tenor of the action is microscopic (with -- contrasting --brief suggestive similes and the Monk metaphor) in nature, even claustrophobic. The tight call-and-echo lines are effective, the assonantal repetitions mesmeric in the way both speaker and heron proceed (the first on the latter; the latter on the speared fish).
In other poems, this particular Wells' strength can be his limitation. It's impressive to stickhandle successfully in a phone booth, but line freedom, in a creative narrative nonlinearity, and in contrasting mood and tone and syntactic surprise/variance, could vault him above the highly accomplished, yet procedurally similar, poems of his greatest standard. And he has the intelligence and wit to bring it off at some point. One roadblock for a lot of poets, perhaps, is the (rightful) shrinking from Ginsberg's overblown mantra of "first thought, best thought". That bumper sticker -- which results from, and is influential to, Zen dabblers who misunderstand spiritual truths -- has resulted in more sloppy, self-indulgent verses than I'd care to count. But, like any influential creed, it holds a kernel of truth: all thoughts are first thoughts, including the reworked and laboured-over ones.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Tim Fletcher's "Icons fastened"
This is from the Great Works site:
Icons fastened
icons fastened
in our shadows
are alienated
collapse and re-configure
bodies broken on rocks
emit flights of diaphanous wings
armoured plating beaten into tectonic mirrors
cannot encase the ferment
that rips seeps out
melting steel into new reflections
we have wilfully honed and marshalled
have hunted desolation to slip from venerable strictures
but we are captivated by the iniquity
of labelling the inconstant so that we can enter the eternal
there is much exaltation in the purity of the self-contained
but opulence escapes without the perception and reverie
of the magician's crucible
organic gestalt or schizoid meltdown
both entwine in infinite venom and mutuality
I assume I am my own
damnation
therefore I am
from out of my damnation flows iconic hubris
-------------------------------------------------------------
Two reviews, just to show I have an open, albeit cloudy, mind:
1) I don't know how icons can be tied to "shadows". I know that poetic license is like crack to one with floating mind flotsam, but I can't draw any parallels here. I can't even "transcend" metaphor to see this as deeper identification. And what about that "our", those "we"s. Perhaps my biggest peeve in current verse is this phony-holy group profundity, the first person plural presumption, elevating banalities into universal experience by bogus "I can relate to that!" authority.
Can anyone see anything here? Four concrete nouns I counted, on a reread. They're thrown in as general objects in an abstract gumbo. Context? Your guess is as good as mine, or as good as the next person, or anyone. Something dark and IMPORTANT, though, no doubt, since "we" have those reverent words: "iniquity", "eternal", "exaltation", "purity", "gestalt", "captivated", "diaphanous". Speaking of diaphanous, "flights of diaphanous wings" seems both redundant and cliched, and the cliche can't be excused by irony since, whatever the tone imparted, irony isn't among the top options.
2) This brave poem fearlessly rips through the self-deceptions we all experience, and compassionately presents us the "diaphanous wings" of our best hopes and wishes. The author acknowledges our failures, but reassures us that "venom and mutuality" coexist, and can only be faced, equally, with precision and lucidity, in order to free us of unearned paradise on our one hand of the Father, or spiralling furnace-stokerdom on the Debbill's horn of dilemma-dipping frenzy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"Iconic hubris", did the man say?
Icons fastened
icons fastened
in our shadows
are alienated
collapse and re-configure
bodies broken on rocks
emit flights of diaphanous wings
armoured plating beaten into tectonic mirrors
cannot encase the ferment
that rips seeps out
melting steel into new reflections
we have wilfully honed and marshalled
have hunted desolation to slip from venerable strictures
but we are captivated by the iniquity
of labelling the inconstant so that we can enter the eternal
there is much exaltation in the purity of the self-contained
but opulence escapes without the perception and reverie
of the magician's crucible
organic gestalt or schizoid meltdown
both entwine in infinite venom and mutuality
I assume I am my own
damnation
therefore I am
from out of my damnation flows iconic hubris
-------------------------------------------------------------
Two reviews, just to show I have an open, albeit cloudy, mind:
1) I don't know how icons can be tied to "shadows". I know that poetic license is like crack to one with floating mind flotsam, but I can't draw any parallels here. I can't even "transcend" metaphor to see this as deeper identification. And what about that "our", those "we"s. Perhaps my biggest peeve in current verse is this phony-holy group profundity, the first person plural presumption, elevating banalities into universal experience by bogus "I can relate to that!" authority.
Can anyone see anything here? Four concrete nouns I counted, on a reread. They're thrown in as general objects in an abstract gumbo. Context? Your guess is as good as mine, or as good as the next person, or anyone. Something dark and IMPORTANT, though, no doubt, since "we" have those reverent words: "iniquity", "eternal", "exaltation", "purity", "gestalt", "captivated", "diaphanous". Speaking of diaphanous, "flights of diaphanous wings" seems both redundant and cliched, and the cliche can't be excused by irony since, whatever the tone imparted, irony isn't among the top options.
2) This brave poem fearlessly rips through the self-deceptions we all experience, and compassionately presents us the "diaphanous wings" of our best hopes and wishes. The author acknowledges our failures, but reassures us that "venom and mutuality" coexist, and can only be faced, equally, with precision and lucidity, in order to free us of unearned paradise on our one hand of the Father, or spiralling furnace-stokerdom on the Debbill's horn of dilemma-dipping frenzy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"Iconic hubris", did the man say?
"Don't Cry for Me, Argentina"
Until the other day, I thought Obama's "change" mantra was a lie, and should've been "amplify". That was the accurate term until this announcement >>http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/20090318a.htm. Change, indeed.
"When the next stock decline comes, and even lower lows are carved, once more the USTreasurys will be chased as safe haven. We will be much closer to the arrival of price inflation by that time. No longer can one say that the dominant flow of USGovt funds is only to Wall Street firms, AIG, and Fannie Mae. Big USGovt spending packages are being agreed upon. Whether efficiently assigned or not, massive money is soon to hit Main Street." -- Jim Willie
"In total the commitment to counterfeit over a trillion dollars leaves only $682 trillion dollars worth of derivatives to sort out." -- Bob Moriarty
"Just last week, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao voiced concern about his country's massive investments in U.S. government debt. In the most unequivocal statement yet by the Chinese leadership on this issue, Wen made it plain that he was concerned with depreciation, not default. With his fears now officially confirmed by the Fed statement, we must wonder when the Chinese will finally change course." -- Peter Schiff
"This latest development of the Federal Reserve monetising debt is inflationary and confirmation that the Federal Reserve wants to debase the US Dollar. It is worth noting that the total debt in the US now exceeds US$60 trillion and its economy is around US$14 trillion. So, the US is already bankrupt and the only way it can ever hope to repay this gigantic sum is through monetary inflation and debasement." -- Puru Saxena
"When the next stock decline comes, and even lower lows are carved, once more the USTreasurys will be chased as safe haven. We will be much closer to the arrival of price inflation by that time. No longer can one say that the dominant flow of USGovt funds is only to Wall Street firms, AIG, and Fannie Mae. Big USGovt spending packages are being agreed upon. Whether efficiently assigned or not, massive money is soon to hit Main Street." -- Jim Willie
"In total the commitment to counterfeit over a trillion dollars leaves only $682 trillion dollars worth of derivatives to sort out." -- Bob Moriarty
"Just last week, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao voiced concern about his country's massive investments in U.S. government debt. In the most unequivocal statement yet by the Chinese leadership on this issue, Wen made it plain that he was concerned with depreciation, not default. With his fears now officially confirmed by the Fed statement, we must wonder when the Chinese will finally change course." -- Peter Schiff
"This latest development of the Federal Reserve monetising debt is inflationary and confirmation that the Federal Reserve wants to debase the US Dollar. It is worth noting that the total debt in the US now exceeds US$60 trillion and its economy is around US$14 trillion. So, the US is already bankrupt and the only way it can ever hope to repay this gigantic sum is through monetary inflation and debasement." -- Puru Saxena
Monday, March 16, 2009
Jack Spicer's "Improvisations On A Sentence By Poe"
"Indefiniteness is an element of the true music."
The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. The seagull
Alone on the pier cawing its head off
Over no fish, no other seagull,
No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning
As a French horn.
It is not even an orchestra. Concord
Alone on a pier. The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. No fish
No other seagull, no ocean—the true
Music.
------------------------------------------------------
Twelve lines, the first being a quote by Poe, and the last being one word (to emphasize the hushed importance of the "topic"?). So ... essentially a ten-line poem. Four of those lines are repeated verbatim, broken up by "The seagull/Alone on the pier cawing its head off/Over", in the initial setting down. Why the repetition? Beats me. Has Spicer so little faith in the attention span of the reader that he has to repeat it? Or is the repetition a ploy to emphasize the similarity between the seagull and "the true/Music"? (laughably pompous phrase). If it's the former, why not repeat it a few more times? If once won't do the trick of making his facile point, why should only one repeat succeed in it? If it's the latter, why not go for a direct, compressed metaphor between seagull-music?
Spicer takes fourteen lines of self-important claptrap when all it should take to make his simplistic point is seven lines (leaving out "Concord" in the original line 8. And the first line quote could and should be put into a sub-header).
On to the content. Music has no meaning, whether it's the raucous, usually unwanted (by humans) sounds of a seagull, or the glorious sounds from an orchestra. I disagree. Spicer doesn't elaborate, preferring instead to substitute sledgehammer unmusical ( more on this irony later) redundancy -- "absolutely devoid of meaning" -- for intricate exploration of what constitutes meaning. Ralph Gustafson would also disagree: "Perhaps that was the craziness brought Chopin/In my head", as would Shostakovich, who once responded to an interviewer's question of meaning with: "It's all in my music". What a wonderful answer. He doesn't explicate it in pedantic fashion, yet he also doesn't negate that it has meaning (not a meaning, as the falsely simple would have it).
To return to my ironical aside, music is not poetry, and if Spicer is trying to glue the two together by a bald, false, unsupported claim of meaninglessness as to the former, then his conclusion is not only empty of authority, but intellectually dishonest. Yes, music sans song is obviously more suggestive, ambiguous, and open to wide perspectives and legitimate (on both sides) debate. That doesn't mean meaning is unresolvable or gauche. Also, meaning (as in poetry) has often to be made ambiguous for artistic purposes, but also at times for self-protective political reasons. Shostakovich wrote his fifth symphony to save his life (after being raked over the coals by Khrennikov for his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk opera in those horrific Russian years of 1936-7), inscribing it as a composer's "response to just criticism". Now, the irony of that brilliant terseness is right in the title. It's "just" criticism. I haven't heard any musicologist remark on that before, but it seems worthy of discussion. In any event, all one has to do is listen to the minor-key quaverings surrounding the "triumphant" flourishes (culminating in the climax) to know what Shostakovich was up to. But to a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E obsessive (what, words don't have meaning in schools of poetics?), meaning is a dirty word. Hypocritical, no?
Well, so much for content. Let's turn to form, and it'll be a shorter exploration. "no fish, no other seagull,/ No ocean." -- Does meaning only have merit with other objects? As in my Gustafson quote, musical meaning can take on emotional qualities which don't always attach themselves to objects of physical closeness. "No ocean" is rhythmically awkward, and why stop at three? Surely, if the design is to awe the reader with just how "meaningless" the sound is, it would be more impressive to emphasize it with a longer list, including, but not limited to, people on the shore (isn't this Spicer's main point-- human hearing?), the sky, drifting garbage, the wind .... The meaning in poetry is encoded in its music, but to the lead-eared reader, incomprehension results in the pre-emptive "no meaning in words" arrogance.
In the work of Spicer, his antecedents, and especially his followers, poetry not only is drenched in poetics, but is synonymous with it. That's why boring, lengthy explanatory justifications are frequent in live readings of poets obsessed with the "limits or impossibilities" of language-- those writers and readers aren't really interested in poetry, just in talking about it. (I recall not too long ago clicking on a podcast of a Calgary language poet giving, supposedly, a reading of his verse. The length of the recording was an hour; I listened to twenty minutes, and he --don't recall the name-- was still explaining what was to come. I finally clicked off.) I like talking about poetry, too. But it ain't poetry.
The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. The seagull
Alone on the pier cawing its head off
Over no fish, no other seagull,
No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning
As a French horn.
It is not even an orchestra. Concord
Alone on a pier. The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. No fish
No other seagull, no ocean—the true
Music.
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Twelve lines, the first being a quote by Poe, and the last being one word (to emphasize the hushed importance of the "topic"?). So ... essentially a ten-line poem. Four of those lines are repeated verbatim, broken up by "The seagull/Alone on the pier cawing its head off/Over", in the initial setting down. Why the repetition? Beats me. Has Spicer so little faith in the attention span of the reader that he has to repeat it? Or is the repetition a ploy to emphasize the similarity between the seagull and "the true/Music"? (laughably pompous phrase). If it's the former, why not repeat it a few more times? If once won't do the trick of making his facile point, why should only one repeat succeed in it? If it's the latter, why not go for a direct, compressed metaphor between seagull-music?
Spicer takes fourteen lines of self-important claptrap when all it should take to make his simplistic point is seven lines (leaving out "Concord" in the original line 8. And the first line quote could and should be put into a sub-header).
On to the content. Music has no meaning, whether it's the raucous, usually unwanted (by humans) sounds of a seagull, or the glorious sounds from an orchestra. I disagree. Spicer doesn't elaborate, preferring instead to substitute sledgehammer unmusical ( more on this irony later) redundancy -- "absolutely devoid of meaning" -- for intricate exploration of what constitutes meaning. Ralph Gustafson would also disagree: "Perhaps that was the craziness brought Chopin/In my head", as would Shostakovich, who once responded to an interviewer's question of meaning with: "It's all in my music". What a wonderful answer. He doesn't explicate it in pedantic fashion, yet he also doesn't negate that it has meaning (not a meaning, as the falsely simple would have it).
To return to my ironical aside, music is not poetry, and if Spicer is trying to glue the two together by a bald, false, unsupported claim of meaninglessness as to the former, then his conclusion is not only empty of authority, but intellectually dishonest. Yes, music sans song is obviously more suggestive, ambiguous, and open to wide perspectives and legitimate (on both sides) debate. That doesn't mean meaning is unresolvable or gauche. Also, meaning (as in poetry) has often to be made ambiguous for artistic purposes, but also at times for self-protective political reasons. Shostakovich wrote his fifth symphony to save his life (after being raked over the coals by Khrennikov for his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk opera in those horrific Russian years of 1936-7), inscribing it as a composer's "response to just criticism". Now, the irony of that brilliant terseness is right in the title. It's "just" criticism. I haven't heard any musicologist remark on that before, but it seems worthy of discussion. In any event, all one has to do is listen to the minor-key quaverings surrounding the "triumphant" flourishes (culminating in the climax) to know what Shostakovich was up to. But to a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E obsessive (what, words don't have meaning in schools of poetics?), meaning is a dirty word. Hypocritical, no?
Well, so much for content. Let's turn to form, and it'll be a shorter exploration. "no fish, no other seagull,/ No ocean." -- Does meaning only have merit with other objects? As in my Gustafson quote, musical meaning can take on emotional qualities which don't always attach themselves to objects of physical closeness. "No ocean" is rhythmically awkward, and why stop at three? Surely, if the design is to awe the reader with just how "meaningless" the sound is, it would be more impressive to emphasize it with a longer list, including, but not limited to, people on the shore (isn't this Spicer's main point-- human hearing?), the sky, drifting garbage, the wind .... The meaning in poetry is encoded in its music, but to the lead-eared reader, incomprehension results in the pre-emptive "no meaning in words" arrogance.
In the work of Spicer, his antecedents, and especially his followers, poetry not only is drenched in poetics, but is synonymous with it. That's why boring, lengthy explanatory justifications are frequent in live readings of poets obsessed with the "limits or impossibilities" of language-- those writers and readers aren't really interested in poetry, just in talking about it. (I recall not too long ago clicking on a podcast of a Calgary language poet giving, supposedly, a reading of his verse. The length of the recording was an hour; I listened to twenty minutes, and he --don't recall the name-- was still explaining what was to come. I finally clicked off.) I like talking about poetry, too. But it ain't poetry.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Leland Jamieson's "Nowhere to Plant the Feet"
Caught this sonnet online some time ago by Leland Jamieson. http://www.ascentaspirations.ca/acronesadvice.htm
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The contrast, at the turn, is obviously sharply realized. The idea is a chestnut -- the old revered over the modern -- but it's the language, and the clever, sardonic juxtapositions of image and meaning, that energizes the lines in a poetic etymology, if you will.
------------------------------------------------------------
The contrast, at the turn, is obviously sharply realized. The idea is a chestnut -- the old revered over the modern -- but it's the language, and the clever, sardonic juxtapositions of image and meaning, that energizes the lines in a poetic etymology, if you will.
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