Monday Mailbag #11

Dear Tribal Hack:

In certain circles of lit crit, as well as in informal dialogues, I've lately noticed a disparagement of the comma, its overgenerous deployment, "roadblock to natural flow", and stylish pretension. Call me behind the times, but what brought this on? Seems petty. And ill-informed.

-- Dan DePause



Dear Dan:

I've also noted this. It's simply another avenue into snapped-shut claptrap, and away from the natural idiosyncrasies of unfolding thought. Thought itself is on trial. Or perhaps it's an insincere gambit, an academic make-work project, if you will. Intricate -- even serviceable -- construction is condemned as a holdover from patriarchal assumption, the sudden shifts in tone, subject, and dynamics a deflecting ploy, a smoke-and-mirrors display in order to dust alert corneal jiggles with chalkstick residue, the hypotactic vertigo an honour roll of borrowed authority, ideas as clauses, congestion as complexity, rhetorical overreach as vatic hammerlock, as tropes are ransacked for any quarklike hint of concrete plausibility, plain statement scuppered in a brew of appendages and spirochetes tapering into dendrites blowing free off a cliff recalling Wile E. Coyote that frozen moment mid-air when the eyes bulge and you realize the hens have all come home to roost, or to mangle comparables (else what's a meta-survey for?), the horses have all left the barn, those plain statements gaining unearned cachet through the overuse, misuse, abuse of that obtuse backwards-C curvature no writer with spine would ever cripple his or her prose with, and whose cheap separation by that one (now) not-so-humble abasing waver entire streams of illogic are compressed like a narrow dike battlement wedge, parapet sandbag on a driving river, or serpentine rat maze in a weir where the purl is all and the pearl non-existent, non-existent, yes, but the suggestion being sacrosanct, a stamp and promise, a block and hackle, a this and that of imperious crossbalk blackening the pages like crows on a white bedsheet in a Smithrite whose eggshell blue paint peels under a sun fixed and boring into the bin's contents like a magnifying glass burning the promiscuously jumbled detritus from the three-story firetrap, the residents hidden in a curlicue of stuttering neglect.

Monday Mailbag #10

Dear Tribal Hack:

How will this end? A while ago a new kid on the block elbowed its way on to the CanPo scene: the niche anthology. At first this didn't seem to be much of a problem, and it actually made sense in some cases when the broad scope of "work poetry" or "love poetry" created easy access for general readers who otherwise mayn't have noticed the individual efforts. But lately I've been befuddled and annoyed by the bodily devolution of this option. I've chanced upon bowling poem anthologies (no, not a selected from Tim), Dennis Rodman poem anthologies, beer making poem anthologies, and black light gardening poem anthologies. What's your take on this runaway train?

-- Peg Squared



Dear Peg:

You don't talk about the quality of any of these poems in the tomes you outline. Remember, any subject is on-limits, or unlimited, if you will. What I'd like to see are more of these micro-niches combining their obsessions. For instance, a poem about Dennis Rodman stumbling into someone's black light garden at two in the morning after an all night bender may achieve tragic proportions. It's all in the handling, of course, but I don't see why an intrepid editor couldn't already find a hundred-page assembly of that sort. And good stuff, too, pared down from thousands of likeminded poems. Of course, a journal can simply make a call for that narrow subject through a theme issue. Much more interesting than a theme issue on "war" or "dreams". After all, if you're going to make restrictions, make it a challenge.

Monday Mailbag #9

Dear Tribal Hack:

We're in the midst of a hot debate in our university seminar course about which of T. S. Eliot's masterpieces was the better, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or "The Rum Tum Tugger". Any thoughts?

-- Anal Isis



Dear Anal:

Tough call. This conjures up all the old arguments about the supposed inferiority of light verse vs more respected poetry. Ralph Gustafson stated that "some believe light verse is not serious, but they are mistaken". Slightness can be more apparent in "serious" verse than what is on display in Edward Lear and .... well, Eliot's "Prufrock".

Let us turn to the great modernist's light verse caper. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" begins with the immortal lines, "Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky". It's a jaunty mood, no doubt, and the breezy tone dominates. There may not be much contrast and counterpoint, but amongst the bourgeois teacup-and-marmalade fest are profound existential conundrums. "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?". The poem, even after many reads, may happily affirm the banker's (the one reading, that is) experience, but a few nagging questions as to breakfast choices and hairstyles are voiced. This is light verse non pareil.

Eliot's "The Rum Tum Tugger", on the other hand, is all sturm und drang. "If you offer him cream then he sniffs and sneers,/For he only likes what he finds for himself;/So you'll catch him in it right up to the ears,/If you put it away on the larder shelf." This is, of course, savage, an unalterable playing out of natural encoding. And "sniffs and sneers" , in a brilliant twinning, condemns human capriciousness and cruelty, as well. Yet for all its weight, this entry from Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats effects a light rhythm to balance its terrifying content.

It's a close call, but I'll give the nod to "The Rum Tum Tugger". I guess I'm still a sucker for great themes and timeless conclusions no matter how charming and clever are worthy poems such as "Prufrock".

Rachel Zolf's HUMAN RESOURCES

Word Perfect 10364276 Machine 672 or no it's not how we function set down 42 once in a great while 998661294 sheer hosed 336 folding tents 5591 to search our engine 604 claustrophobia who knew 68 petals on a wet black hard drive 08 free your data base the lessons have arrived

Sharon Thesen's THE GOOD BACTERIA

The Good Bacteria, Sharon Thesen's 2006 poetry compilation, visits the highs and lows of her previous efforts. There's an intimate engagement with the natural world and with friends and observed strangers. Images are used as a stimulus for quirky and startling (though sometimes annoying) personal wit only tangentially tied to the original sight. "Eclipse of the Sun", unlike much from Thesen's opus, is strong and supple start to finish, integrated in thought, trope, and construction. And I love these lines from "Oh, Hello Count, How Are You, Do Come In": "ants cart a corpse. The hourglass/of their home is a sand volume". Either this volume was rushed to print, though, or the author hasn't managed to discriminate enough to shave and shelve, because diaristic prose -- on trivial subjects, no less -- pop up like running commentary on a news feed. "The Day Lady Di Died" is only one such example. An uneven book, but an entertaining one, and occasionally memorable.

The Openness Of The New Academics

"History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric, a term drawn from anthropology, which tells us more about the meaning of openness. We should not think our way is better than others. The intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them aware of the fact that their preferences are only that -- accidents of their time and place. Their beliefs do not entitle them as individuals, or collectively as a nation, to think that they are superior to anyone else. John Rawls is almost a parody of this tendency, writing hundreds of pages to persuade men, and proposing a scheme of government that would force them, not to despise anyone. In A Theory of Justice, he writes that the physicist or the poet should not look down on the man who spends his life counting blades of grass or performing any other frivolous or corrupt activity. Indeed, he should be esteemed, since esteem from others, as opposed to self-esteem, is a basic need of all men. So indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is discrimination. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for each discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is replaced with an artificial one."

....

"Thus there are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference -- promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers -- and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination. The second kind of openness encourages the desire that animates and makes interesting every serious student -- "I want to know what is good for me, what will make me happy" -- while the former stunts that desire.

Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled. It is historicism's ruse to remove all resistance to history, which in our day is public opinion, a day when public opinion already rules."

....

"The loss of the books has made them narrower and flatter. Narrower because they lack what is most necessary, a real basis for discontent with the present and awareness that there are alternatives to it. They are both more contented with what is and despairing of ever escaping from it. The longing for the beyond has been attenuated. The very models of admiration and contempt have vanished. Flatter, because without interpretation of things, without the poetry or the imagination's activity, their souls are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around. The refinement of the mind's eye that permits it to see the delicate distinctions among men, among their deeds and their motives, and constitutes real taste, is impossible without the assistance of literature in the grand style."



Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Monday Mailbag #8

Dear Tribal Hack:

I'm deep into the composition of my first novel. Unfortunately, I've bitten off more than I can digest, assimilate and emit. There's a long, intricate plot, multi-layered and from multiple points of view. I long ago introduced the hero as naive about an infelicity pertaining to the upholding of his spouse's honour, but since then, everyone has commented, ruthlessly, upon his whereabouts and secret links to the Scientology elite, his creative culinary carelessness, and his bank account with the burgeoning right-margin zeroes while dressing in tie-dyes and puka shells. What can I do?

-- Dawn D. Layed




Dear Dawn:

Beats me. Sounds more wayward and nonsensical than intricate and interesting. Why not turn it into an uproarious, goofy romp, a post-logical send-up of expectation. If a murder mystery, fink on the real killer in chapter one, or better yet, page one. If a schmaltzy romance, make the characters unappealing in the first two descriptive sentences. If a war narrative, make the countries antagonistic in the techno-theaters Canada and the Seychelles. If a political intrigue, remember, everything hinges on the celebration of Juan Bautista's birthday. If in doubt at any time, make it a meta-commentary through the perspective of a failed TSA candidate. Good luck!