Brett Callwood, The Stooges: Head On

I was a little leery of the new version of Brett Callwood’s The Stooges: Head On, A Journey through the Michigan Underground (Painted Turtle/Wayne State University Press, 2011), since the original British edition of this book was rife with typographical errors. Happily, the editors at Wayne State have done wonders, and this edition is not only eminently readable but contains much new and worthwhile material, while the “personal journey” aspect of the original has been cut.

To give Callwood credit, his genuine appreciation for the Stooges always shone through, even where previously it may have come across at times as a the work of a fan, though perhaps that is not a bad thing either. He has also written a book on the MC5 which went through the same process: poorly edited and full of errors in its initial edition (in that book, for example, Callwood more than once referred to Pabst Blue Ribbon as “Pap’s”) but then given the revision treatment by Wayne State. Finally, however, he appears to be hitting his stride. It goes to show what a good editor can (at least in some ways) do for a writer still in the process of figuring things out. Now, it seems, he has.

And now that I’ve vented my irritation at the earlier edition(s), let me say that the new Stooges: Head On book is a valuable addition to anyone’s collection. And I say “anyone” because the Stooges were not merely a niche group, but in retrospect are just as important and innovative as an artist like John Coltrane (albeit not as prolific and obviously working most of the time in a different genre). Like Coltrane, they constantly evolved their sound, and that aspect of the band is captured here. Recognizing his role as band biographer, Callwood devotes a large portion of the book to interviews and quotation. His choices of what to include are insightful. He highlights Ron Asheton’s originality on guitar (see the first two Stooges albums) with this quote from Ron himself: “You move ahead…. Like anybody who keeps playing music, you always learn, you always get better every time you play up until the day you die.” Mike Davis, the recently deceased MC5 bass player, notes that

Ron didn’t have a musical background playing in bar bands and that sort of rootsy stuff – he taught himself everything. He knew there was a new world and he went for it. [….] It turned out to be something that was completely unique. It was a breakaway from the traditional way of playing guitar.

Further, Callwood includes this take on Asheton’s playing from Danny Kroha:

There weren’t any Chuck Berry licks in it; there weren’t any recognizable blues licks in what he did; it was something that he totally invented and came directly from his soul. There was no precedent for it. It was almost like John Lee Hooker where you can’t discern any influences. It seemed to have come from a primal place.

This accords well with my own view of Asheton as a guitarist and sets out the difference between his style and James Williamson’s on the Stooges’ third album Raw Power (1973), when Williamson had taken over on guitar and Asheton was “demoted” to bass. Williamson’s style is based to a degree on Chuck Berry licks. Not that that is in any way a horrible thing, yet as much as I like Raw Power, if I had to choose, I prefer Ron Asheton (I’ve written further about him here). I think it’s a good thing, though, that these two divergent styles exist within the discography of one great band. Callwood handles this tension well, providing commentary and opinion from both sides of what for some is still a contentious debate.

This edition of the book includes portions of new interviews with Scott Asheton, James Williamson, Scott Thuston, and Mike Watt, all of which add crucial details to the story. But someone who is missing here is Jimmy Recca, the bass player for the Stooges in their crucial but under-appreciated 1971 lineup. I’ve always wanted to read more about this phase of the band (Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed [2007] is one of the few sources for this, along with the You Want My Action CD box set), and Recca (who was also in Ron Asheton’s post-Stooges band The New Order) does not appear to be too hard to track down. The Stooges: Head On gives us a mere few pages on that interstitial time between Fun House (1970) and Raw Power, when the band featured a two-guitar attack and toured with some of their best (though not properly recorded) material, before imploding due to heroin issues (Ron Asheton and Jimmy Recca excluded). Callwood touches on the drug stuff, but he might have gone further into the music, the tour, and the album the Stooges hoped to record before being dropped by Elektra.

There are a couple of other little nitpicky things to note. Contrary to Callwood’s claim, “Down on the Street,” the lead track on Fun House, does not “[continue] pretty much exactly where the first album left off.” Not only are there some obvious differences between that song and “Little Doll” in tempo and feel, but the two albums on the whole have vastly disparate sounds — not to mention that such a statement contradicts the idea of change and evolution that Callwood emphasizes elsewhere. The discography section lists Iggy’s solo album Zombie Birdhouse (1982) as part of the Arista catalogue, when in fact it was released on Chris Stein’s Animal Records. It’s great that Callwood includes excerpts from an interview with Scott Thurston (the band’s keyboardist on their last Raw Power-era tour), but why not also get Bob Sheff who played with them a little bit before? Like Jimmy Recca, he’s still around and would probably make a decent interview (he is listed as a source in the Trynka book).

Still, these are minor complaints about what is on the whole a very good book about a very great band. Most of the material here on the Ashetons’ post-Stooges groups The New Order, Destroy All Monsters, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, and Dark Carnival, and up-to-date discussion of the lately re-formed Stooges, will not be found elsewhere. The Scott Asheton interview sections where he speaks of his own ambivalence about playing with James Williamson again after his brother’s death are stark and moving. The Stooges: Head On is well worth the read and is a great overview of the band’s career. The best thing about it, perhaps, is that Callwood views the band and its members as eminently important in their own right, rather than merely being footnotes to a wider Iggy Pop career. Iggy is given his due of course (there could never have been any Stooges without him!) and contributes both an interview and a blurb, but this is one of the few books out there that is truly a Stooges book.

Poem in Reprint Poetry

A poem of mine is online at the site of the journal Reprint Poetry. (The pic appears there as an accompanying image.)

On Bukowski’s Form

The poet Adam Fieled recently posted an essay about Charles Bukowski on the As/Is blog (and later added it to his Red Room profile) . Titled “Learning from Bukowski,” it argues for the value of Bukowski’s poems as “triumphs of logopoeia, articulating serious, universal problems and finding consoling resolutions in solitude, seriousness, literature, and memory.” Ezra Pound defined logopoeia as the way a poet “employs words not only for their direct meaning, but [...] takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word” — or to put it another way, the directly assumed meaning of the word, the content of a poem as opposed to its form. Thus, while Fieled accepts the criticisms of those who see Bukowski’s writing as rough and “lack[ing] of formal skill” (indeed, Fieled writes, “I do not deny that Bukowski’s lack of formal skill is a serious flaw”), he challenges those who dismiss Bukowski for his emphasis on a particular kind of content. For Fieled, Bukowski’s value need not be bound up with formal concerns. Much more important is the “precision of his worldview and its presentation-in-verse.” And certainly, this is what seems to be foregrounded in most of his work, at least from a certain point onward.

Further, Fieled claims,

More important even than logopoeia is rhetopoeia, the rhetorical impact or heft of any given poem. We must be convinced by any given poem’s rhetopoeia that it needs to exist, is a necessary entity. This Bukowski is able to do, time and time again, because (in his best poems) he has something substantial to say. Bukowski is a relevant poet because, while form can be faked, content cannot. You either have something substantial to express (whether it is on an emotional, psychological, aesthetic or any other level) or you don’t. In considering Bukowski and form, give the man at least the credit of volition — his writing career spanned forty-odd years, if he’d wanted to learn form, he would’ve. Content was obviously so important to him that form was (mostly) superfluous; and who’s to say he wasn’t right?

I find Fieled’s essay intriguing, and as a Bukowski fan myself I like the fact that he has taken such a bold approach. It’s as if he is saying, “Okay, so maybe Bukowski isn’t that great on a technical level, but there is so much more going on with him that is of even greater importance.” I like that he argues for this alternative way of gauging the value of poetry and poets, a sort of “screw you” to academic elitists who see form as the be-all-and-end-all. In doing so, he looks to the precedent of Whitman (who was similarly attacked in his own day) and to the fact of Bukowski’s very real popular acclaim as a redeeming factor. It is an audacious and original argument, and one that I can only wholeheartedly support, within the assumptions that it sets for itself.

However, I think that it also possible to make an argument for Bukowski on the basis of form. Contrary to Fieled’s (and others’) portrait of a poet who couldn’t be bothered to “learn form,” Bukowski’s own early work suggests otherwise. The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966 (Black Sparrow Press, 1988) shows us quite a different poet than the more usual, later Bukowski many of us are familiar with. In the earlier poems, sound devices such as alliteration and assonance are to the fore; word choice is anything but “boring” and diction is anything but “flat.” Take these lines from “22,000 Dollars in 3 Months”:

night has come like something crawling
up the bannister, sticking out its tongue
of fire, and I remember the
missionaries up to their knees in muck
retreating across the beautiful blue river
and the machine gun slugs flicking spots of
fountain and Jones drunk on the shore...

Alliteration is present in the “beautiful blue river,” while the assonance of “gun,” “slugs,” and “drunk” cannot be lost on the attuned reader. There are the further poetic devices of simile (“like something crawling/ up the bannister”) and metaphor (“tongue/ of fire”), while the poem ends with the anaphoric sequence of “dead communists, dead fascists, dead democrats, dead gods and/ back in what was left of the hut Jones/ had his dead black arm around her dead blue waist.” Bukowski knew what he was doing, and any number of examples from this volume could be further cited as evidence for his skills as poetic craftsman.

In 1987, Bukowski himself wrote in the introduction to The Roominghouse Madrigals that

The early poems are more lyrical than where I am at now. I like these poems but I disagree with some who claim, “Bukowski’s early work was much better.” Some have made these claims in critical reviews, others in parlors of gossip. [....] In my present poetry, I go at matters more directly, land on them and then get out. I don’t believe that my early methods and my late methods are either inferior or superior to one another. They are different, that’s all.

What Bukowski posits here is a conscious shift in style. He admits that his own earlier work was “more lyrical,” with all the attendant strategies that lyric poetry implies. It is therefore clear that his later style was not that of mere “technical incompetence” (as Fieled describes it), but indeed a chosen stance. Even a perceived disregard for form is inherently a kind of form in itself. I agree with Fieled that Bukowski’s (seeming) anti-formalism allows him to more readily “bare himself whole” and thus more easily facilitates a sense of “catharsis” for his audience. But, for me anyway, the idea that he isn’t eminently aware of all this is a bit hard to believe.

For me, a more salient question is not the dichotomy between notions of a crucially important content versus a supposedly effete conception of form, but rather why Bukowski chose the form that he so obviously chose (“give the man at least the credit of volition”). I think that Fieled is on to something when he writes of “the thousands of normal people around the world who share in Bukowski’s alienation, solitude, and appreciation of the redemptive powers of poetry and the written word,” but I don’t think that such a sense of authenticity can only be arrived at by an ignorance of the techniques that Bukowski only later eschewed. Let’s give some credit to those thousands as well. Fieled posits the concept of rhetopoeia, and surely Bukowski’s later style is a rhetorical strategy. There is nothing wrong with this; in fact, there is no escaping it. Everything that anyone puts into words, every form, or denial of form, is a rhetorical stance unto itself, as much as it also a “necessary entity.” Bukowski chose the form that he chose because it was necessary for him to both continue to move forward as an artist and to reach his readers in the way that he wanted to. I completely agree with Fieled on the importance of Bukowski as a poet with something substantial to say, yet surely Bukowski’s critical reputation (a primary concern in the piece under discussion) can only be enhanced by a tandem awareness of his deliberate formal choices.

Steve McQueen, Shame

Steve McQueen’s latest film Shame, like Hunger, features Michael Fassbender. I thought it was great. Later, I happened across a short review in Pittsburgh’s City Paper in which Harry Kloman damns the film with both faint praise and outright criticism. According to Kloman, “There are no new insights or emotions, and some choices do more to advance plot than character. It’s about sex addict Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and his waifish visiting sister (Carey Mulligan), both of them damaged by circumstances that writer/director Steve McQueen (Hunger) never reveals, let alone explores.” On the contrary, I would suggest that there are indeed plenty of new insights here, but it’s the second sentence of this quote which really irked me. The lack of exploration of such circumstances is clearly deliberate and exactly McQueen’s point (among further points). He doesn’t need to explore yet another abusive childhood. We can quite easily imagine for ourselves what sort of things may have happened to these characters when they were kids or teens — we all know these stories by now. Instead, Shame is a psychological portrait of who they are in the present. Whatever one’s childhood, we all live in the here and now, and understanding the issues that have formed us rarely if ever alleviate them. In other words, McQueen knows full well that such an exploration would be boring and pointless.

What matters most is the immanence of the present moment: headlights of the subway gleaming on the painted iron posts in the station as the train approaches, the bleak westside docklands of Manhattan in the cold grey rain, the walk sign that has somehow fallen over, so that the lighted figure of the man is upside-down. One further point of this film is McQueen’s vision of New York. I thought of it as a contrast to the portrait of Manhattan put forward in Woody Allen’s films. The far western end of Chelsea is not exactly the obvious choice for a filmic Manhattan location. Annie Hall and Manhattan romanticized New York, even at the height of its decay (the late 70s), while Shame argues an alienating, hollow place in the cleaner, safer 2010s. In a recent interview, McQueen asserts, “You are always framed by the city. There’s always you and this huge metropolis. So what does it do, mentally? It must make you feel insignificant in a strange way.” This is crystallized in the scene where Carey Mulligan / Sissy performs the song “New York, New York.” It seems to echo the singing scenes in Annie Hall, but the piano accompaniment here breaks the song apart, and the vibe is more that of struggle than triumph. But sure, it also matters, the effects of whatever it is that makes us us — and clearly both the main characters in the film are struggling with this in different ways. But McQueen doesn’t have to explain every little thing. Kloman appears to think we need that explanation. I don’t.

Kloman ends his short review, “So I’m still waiting for a drama about people who can make endless love and not end up in a gutter” — as if McQueen were actually moralizing about sex (a charge also made in the longer and better review by A. O. Scott for the New York Times). Yet there is in fact no such moralism in Shame. There is a seemingly crucial moment toward the end, when Brandon is having sex with two prostitutes, when a look of anguish comes across his face. Later still, after his sister attempts suicide in a mess of red blood, he collapses onto the pavement in the rain. But at every moment (it seems to me, anyway) it is apparent that this is the story of two individual people, not a lesson for humanity. It is these particular people (and the performances are utterly convincing in this regard) who are going through these things; that’s it. Ultimately, we cannot be sure if their lives will really change. We think we see some kind of expression of shame on Brandon’s face for a second, but he might not recognize it as such himself. The message that Sissy leaves on Brandon’s phone before her suicide attempt (“We’re not bad people, we just come from a bad place”) on the surface appears to validate Kloman’s fixation on their past circumstances. But I think it’s the first part of the statement that is more important. Neither of these characters is a “bad” person; they are just people. Most of us come from a bad place in some way or another, probably, but what I’m more interested in is what life is like, through art, despite all that. What sort of things a filmmaker like McQueen notices when he’s thinking of these situations.

The Burning Bush 2

The Burning Bush 2, which is an online revival of a print journal I edited from 1999-2004 (with, for the first four of its eleven issues, Kevin Higgins), is now online. This new version is edited by Alan Jude Moore, a regular contributor to the old print edition, and it’s full of a lot of great poems, including some by former contributors and others by newer poets who weren’t around at the time but hopefully would have appeared in the old Burning Bush if they were.

The first of the new edition can be viewed online here and downloaded or simply read on-screen in magazine form via Issuu here. I was asked to write an essay for this project, and it can be viewed directly here. The new magazine, like the old, is based in Ireland but has a broad international vision, both in regard to geography and poetics. I think it holds a lot of promise, and if you are so inclined, please bookmark it, link it, etc., etc.

In addition, here is the text of my introductory essay:

“New Magazines for Old”: Some Brief Thoughts on the Aztecs, Poets in Protest, and The Burning Bush 2


James Liddy wrote, ‘I have always wanted to exchange new magazines for old, for I know that magazines can alter the shape of a literary landscape’ (qtd. in Tyler Farrell’s essay for Liddy’s Selected Poems).  The Burning Bush 2 is in a way not a new magazine, being partly an online revival of a print magazine that existed from 1999-2004.  But given the distance in time between the old print journal and this one, as well as the different context, it is indeed new.  Many of the aims of the old Burning Bush have now been achieved with the simple passage of the decade (it can’t really take credit).  There is room in Ireland now for poetic modes or practices (at least I think so) that were maybe previously thought to be squelched under the weight of entrenched interests.  But then there are always entrenched interests, whatever their character.  These must constantly be unseated, for every entrenched interest, however poetically or politically desirable it may initially be, will eventually become conservative.  We must demand a more or less ongoing revolution (even if it’s never fully realised).  By this I don’t necessarily mean simply the invention of new ‘styles’, but rather the revising of our aspirations and frames of mind.  Perhaps at some point, though, this very state of continual change will become institutionalised and people will then demand a new state of stability.  But then that too will sometime become the norm, calcified, and a new revolution will inevitably occur.

In thinking about revolutions poetic or otherwise, however, I would make a further observation.  In Aztec poetry there was in the period immediately preceding the colonial Spanish devastation a split between two different schools of thought.  One was the school of the war cult, which was the expression of the dominant ruling class, and the other was the Toltec school.  As Edward Kissam and Michael Schmidt note, ‘The Toltec culture was highly civilized and humane….  To the mind of Aztec and vassal princes who felt dissatisfied or disgusted with the war cult, Toltec tradition represented an alternative, a humane vision’ (Flower and Song: Aztec Poems).  We don’t know how these two opposed schools would have continued to develop in relation to each other and to Aztec society.  It’s possible that the era of widespread blood sacrifice practiced by the war cult would eventually have come to an end as Toltec poets rose to the fore.  But Aztec society ceased to be through brute colonial force.  It is also noteworthy that Neil Young’s song ‘Cortez the Killer’ was banned in Spain in 1975, a good 450 years after the conquest of Mexico (at least Young himself claims so).  The upshot is that, while some kind of change will happen anyway (it is the unavoidable state of existence), it is still desirable that the right side comes out on top.  What Cortez and Franco represent is not, to my mind, the ‘right’ side.

But Alan Jude Moore, the editor of The Burning Bush 2, is on the ‘right’ side (I put the word in inverted commas because I know that its precise meaning will always be up for debate).  He is the only writer to appear in every issue of the original TBB, aside from myself and perhaps Kevin Higgins (TBB’s co-founder, who continued to appear in the magazine even after splitting as editor).  So when Alan said he wanted to revive TBB, but to do something new with it, I said great idea, do it!  He and I have in common a vision of poetry which is liberatory, anti-dogmatic, and anti-hierarchical (and fun).  How that translates into politics, or how politics necessarily translates into poetics, is an essay unto itself, but we are now living in an age when armed police attack unarmed poets in the name of protecting their banker masters’ economic interests (as they recently did to Robert Haas at Berkeley).  I don’t know what exactly Alan has planned for The Burning Bush 2 in the future (possibly there is no concrete plan, which is probably a good thing), but at the very least, to paraphrase James Liddy, let this ‘new’ magazine alter the shape of the literary landscape(s) if it can.

John Goodby, Illennium

John Goodby’s Illennium (Shearsman Books, 2010) utilizes the cut-up as its primary poetic device, reconfiguring original (and some borrowed) lines throughout the course of this 84-page collection. Its secondary poetic device is the sonnet form; although Goodby eschews rhyme, metre, and the “turn,” each of these Roman-numerated sections consist of fourteen lines. Its primary theme is shame, more often than not sexual (e.g. “dork inability”). Its setting is Wales, often more particularly a pub (the “No Sign Bar”). Various personages, the speaker included, move in and out of the poems, reconstituting themselves in continually changing contexts. The speaker seems to be a poetic persona of Goodby himself, a version, as references to some of his earlier books appear, including his landmark study of Irish poetry, Irish Poetry Since 1950: from stillness into history (2000), which was one of the first critical volumes to treat seriously previously marginal or “experimental” Irish poets. This interest in radical poetics is reflected here in the cut-up form, which recalls not only Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, and William Burroughs, but perhaps also the contemporary Irish poet Trevor Joyce. It’s always been (for me) an arresting technique, and Goodby deploys it to great effect.

So, beyond the exploration of the theme, and the nods and references to certain great poets (Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas MacGreevy, Eugene Watters [Eoghan Ó Tuairisc], John Weiners, and others), what I especially like about this collection is, as may be obvious from the foregoing, the language that proceeds out of Goodby’s cut-up process, the lines that unfold over the course of the book. It seems unlikely, however, that Goodby’s process is completely random. There is not so much a disruption in syntax as there is more usually an unexpected object, or subject-verbs that normally don’t combine. Occasionally, the effect recalls the sound of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Often, jargon phrases combine with dream-sense to create poetry maybe not unlike the manner in which “a carp accomplishes the size of its pool” (the latter being one of the phrases recurring throughout the sequence). The primary material is limited, like the size of the tub containing the poor Xmas carp. Yet, despite these limitations and the seeming obscurity of much of the results, units of meaning accrue, as in this example:

LV

Raising Spring from Winter Polly tereus the maypole
-dusted tors                   The Westbourne
Concealed in rotten smoaks                               certain
what being a sham meant
that is so anguish there as to brush that hair
In Frenzy                 The ka of a black Panther
opens wide                         a urinal gargles
& Oystermouth’s glittery necklace of bay, & furbelow
transgressive-yet-dependent. He loved you
that’s less soft, but one apiece (4)
simonised by tears             foreskins and mad Beryls
bodily fluids under bridges. My dream: a revolver
to shoot the nightmare
Call it aimance                     & she steps inside.

I can’t say I “get” all of this, but a number of motifs emerge, primarily sexual. We have spring reemerging from winter, with the maypoles on tors (hills) likely serving as phallic symbols. Contrasting with this life-giving spring energy, there is the Westbourne (a hotel, a pub?) concealed in “rotten” smoke, wherein (?) is someone, a man, who knows what it means to be “a sham” (possibly due to the aforementioned “dork inability”?), which results in anguish and frenzy. Disturbing visions ensue — “The ka of a black Panther/ opens wide,” “a urinal gargles” — and further sexual images torment — some quick research reveals that Oystermouth in south Wales is situated nearby a pair of breast-shaped hills that define the local shore-scape (thus the light glinting off the bay is like a “glittery necklace” near a woman’s breasts), while “furbelow” just might allude to pubic hair. The protagonist is reduced to masturbation under bridges, wishing for death to end “the nightmare.” The final line renders the piece more ambiguous than ever, though. “Aimance” must be a reference to Derrida’s concept of the relationality implicit in a friendship, and then suddenly “she steps inside.” Does this “she” suggest some kind of salvation, or merely further torture?

I accept the fact that we can’t really know — perhaps both, is the answer. As Burroughs wrote, “Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter.... Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic.” Similarly, Goodby’s Illennium allows for, indeed embraces, differing interpretations. There is much, much more one could go into here, both in terms of theme and technique. But what I really want to say is that I think these poems are surprising and revealing, crazy and captivating, all of which is what good poetry should be, no?

Drew Blanchard, Winter Dogs

I’ve been meaning to write something about Drew Blanchard’s collection Winter Dogs (Salmon Poetry, 2011). I bought this book at Salmon’s off-site AWP reading in D.C. earlier this year, and now that the year is almost over it seems high time to respond. I like Blanchard’s writing; it’s strong. Take a look at “Not Whiskey” (the first poem of any collection always deserves special attention) which nicely sets things up, both in terms of Blanchard’s ethos and his style: the setting is the West or Midwest of America, because there are bison. But the bison are symbols; they become other things, parts of the landscape (“an electric fence”), other animals (“a fox”), abstractions in the speaker’s mind (“a question about crossing the street”), etc. Then they appear elsewhere, in a bar, “witness a son/ bankrupt” there (the “son” must also be the speaker), and suddenly they are not a number of other things (“box knives,” “a soiled sheet,” etc., and finally “not whiskey, not a time-clock”). Why are they some things and not others? It seems arbitrary, but simply to say there are things present and there are absences, and there is a mind, in a bar, drinking whiskey, trying to make sense of it (sometimes whiskey can help in this, sometimes maybe not). Yet this is not Blanchard saying “oh poor me, drunk in a bar” — this is not confessional realism — this is a speaker in a poem working things out through poetry. The bison, again, are symbols, perhaps images (“The bison, alone again in wandering”), rendered in language that is musical, redolent with soundplay, alliteration. This poem is short, and it’s a subtle one, but it’s a perfect statement of Blanchard’s poetics.

Throughout the collection, similar strategies are deployed. Often, what seems initially like a simple first-person or third-person narrative is transmuted into real poetry. Take “Winter Dogs” (the title poem too is of obvious importance), set in the Mayakovskaya stop of the Moscow metro system. There are (presumably) real-life events rendered here — a old woman with five dogs is begging change, there is a disturbance, and a man throws a bottle at her, allowing “two dogs/ [to break] free into the gray night.” The reader pities for the old woman (who is not unlike one of William Carlos Williams’s old women), and the dogs, but I think there are bigger issues at stake. Through the particulars, the universal. Extending the poem outward, we think also about the harsh economic and political situation in Russia, and, even wider still, how we all struggle in the world. Given that the setting is a metro station named after a poet, the ending must take on a deeper significance. What does it mean that these dogs have broken free? Why only two and not the rest? In terror, they have escaped the tie of their leashes but also of certainty. They have their freedom, but we all know what happens to us in the end.

“Mine Own Baudelaire” employs humor to undercut the “grand” poetic musings the reader may have expected from the title. Exploring the theme of the double, someone who looks just like oneself somewhere else in the world, Blanchard wishes for his to be a Baudelaire figure. Instead, in line at the post office, he actually does see his double (and so do the other customers), a criminal on a ‘Wanted’ poster, the reward for whose capture, incidentally, “was larger than my gross/ income for the entire nineteen-nineties.” Many other poems here (good poems) similarly vacillate between the serious and the vaudevillian. “Liddy’s Prayer Card” is a tribute to the late Irish poet James Liddy (who we have in common as a friend) (and for that matter with whom we also share a publisher); it is a rendering of an actual prayer card that Liddy had changed around (a sort of erasure-and-addition poem), crossing out certain words and writing in other ones to create a new, dirty, but affirming prayer to life. Such a balance of “deep” poetic themes, humor, and religious ritual might come in part from Liddy, but, in this first collection, Blanchard sets out his own stall. Winter Dogs is American, descriptive, imagistic, narrative yet surreal, big yet in love with particularity, and well worth the read.

Future/Now

Soon available from Salmon Poetry.

Advance listings:
Amazon US
Amazon Ireland and Britain
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Lars von Trier, Melancholia

For a guy who says some pretty stupid things sometimes, Lars von Trier is a pretty great artist. I have loved just about all of his films, going back to the Dogme days and up through his previous work, Antichrist. Melancholia does not disappoint — it too is a spectacular film. But I hope we don’t have another Ezra Pound-like figure on our hands, and that von Trier will give up his fascination with Nazism, no matter how “amazing” their aesthetics may or may not have been. It would be nice to be able to fully embrace such a great artist (and there are many one can), instead of (often) having to constantly make that life/work distinction, you know?

But back to the film. Briefly, Kirsten Dunst plays Justine, one of two sisters, the other being Claire (Charlotte Gainsoburg). In the first half of the film, Justine has just gotten married but can’t seem to fully go along with this state of affairs. The reception, at a lavish country manor house, is a disaster due to family issues and especially due to Justine’s own severe depression, and, even though she and her husband (Alexander Skarsgård) have apparently already tied the knot, he leaves her in the wee hours because she just won’t get it together. “I tried,” she later tells her sister, who is bitterly disappointed in her.

Clearly, none of this is real. I would say that the whole thing is deliberately contrived in order to explore the emotional interactions between people in fraught circumstances. Part two of the film concerns the impending doom of planet Earth, which is about to be swallowed up by a formerly hidden planet called Melancholia — the allegorical aspects here are obvious. Justine, severely depressed to the point of barely being functional, has arrived at the same manor home of Claire and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). As Melancholia approaches, Justine’s frame of mind seems to lighten somewhat, while Claire becomes desperate with the anxiety of impending doom.

Such is the plot. I don’t think we are supposed to care very much for any of the characters. If this were meant to be a realistic film, we would probably be exasperated at everyone: Justine (at the very least why not try Prozac or something?), her newlywed husband (he leaves her because she’s having a hard time, and on their wedding night no less?), Claire (yes, the world is about to be swallowed up by a rogue planet, but what can you do?), and John (who commits suicide instead of remaining with his family as the end approaches). However, identification with his characters is not what von Trier is after either.

What von Trier seeks to accomplish, instead, is to instill emotion and wonder in the viewer through the poetic deployment and juxtaposition of his images. And while there is a kind of realism in his Dogme-style use of handheld camerawork throughout, much of Melancholia is composed of surreal imagery that at times is reminiscent of David Lynch or the photography of Gregory Crewdson. Indeed, the opening sequence is a series of still or almost still scenes, and it is one of the most beautiful parts of the film (director of photography Manuel Alberto Claro deserves mention here). Von Trier has called it an “overture,” and it anticipates the motifs of the rest of the film in a brilliant manner. These are a series of moving paintings almost, which, taken on their own, initially seem strange or bizarre, but whose meanings are revealed in the context of the unfolding work.

There are too many dazzling scenes in Melancholia to mention, certainly not only in the opening “overture.” I will note just a few, though, which particularly stand out for me. One is the recurring scene of the manicured lawn/garden of the house with its two rows of trees, one row of which appears to lean in at an awkward angle while the other grows straight. The lawn looks out onto the sea, and when the planet rises there on the horizon, it is quite spectacular. Another is the aerial view of the sisters riding horses together through the grounds of the manor, through mist, through trees. These aerial shots reminded me a bit of certain similar shots in the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Finally, as the planet approaches, Justine has disappeared one night and Claire goes off to find her. She comes upon her in the woods, basking naked in the light of the planet, as a witch might do under the full moon — it is as if Justine is reveling in the world’s impending destruction, as if her fatalism somehow redeems and allows her to conversely embrace life, even if only for these brief moments before it ends.

Thankfully, von Trier is smart enough not to give us a twist ending. If everyone had somehow survived, or if the credits came up before the collision, it would have been a huge letdown. However, the earth does indeed end, and we see it, and it is a great filmic moment.

Maurice Scully, A Tour of the Lattice

Veer Books has published a selection of Maurice Scully’s work titled A Tour of the Lattice (Veer Publication 039, ISBN: 978-1-907088-30-8), excerpting portions of Scully’s gigantic poem Things That Happen. I like the book’s spare black-and-white design, and the listing of Veer’s catalogue which comprises the last few pages is a good introduction to this British press which I was not heretofore familiar with. (Scully is, of course, Irish.) Veer describes itself as “publish[ing] a range of unconforming writing in poetry and poetics, including some texts that other publishers might view as experimental.” It looks like it would be worth checking out more of their list in the future.

But, to Scully’s work: Most readers of this blog will know that I’m something of a Scully fan, having written about him many times now. So in a similar spirit to this new “selected” volume, what follows are excerpts from my previous engagements with Scully, which have appeared in a variety of different venues, arranged in the order of the work as it comes in A Tour of the Lattice.

On “Adherence” and “Steps”:

Scully has been called a “Heraclitean” poet, and this description is not off the mark. The ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is probably best known for his aphorism “All things are in flux,” and Scully’s world is indeed a constant flux — he has been said by Robert Archambeau to write “out of an aversion to the idea of the poem as closed system.” Vast and ambitious, his work is composed of long, ongoing sequences… While his is a huge undertaking, there nonetheless remains the sense in Scully’s work of a singular consciousness, the only possible unifying factor available in such a sprawling corpus. From section C of “Adherence”:

A fly cleaning itself precisely
by the window in the sunlight
forelegs back (rest) head eyes
shadows wings brittle-quick & quite
like writing really. Out there. That.

These lines do not truly attempt to convey an image of a fly in itself. Instead they observe a mind observing a fly, and it is from such a fundamental shift that much of Scully’s poetry proceeds.

There is with Scully too an overt critique of the received tradition. For example, a stanza from “Steps”:

PASTORAL
Valleys, villages, coastline. A map
of a stain on the wall. Alive & living,
not a crammed glasshouse of pistillate
verba. Grass bends back. The book
is fat, contains code. The world,
the water planet. The code contained in
this thing in the world, the book, changes
the things, the world....

By retaining a rural subject matter this is a pastoral poem, technically — but a poem that explodes the Heaneyan lyric from the inside. It is only in the consciousness of writing (“the code,” “the book”) that transformation is possible, not in a fossilised way of life or in a represented landscape. In this sense Scully can loosely be called postmodern, the self-reflexivity of the writing being a characteristic of postmodernism. Yet Scully’s work remains utterly vigorous, highly autobiographical, and fully situated in the material world. It is work, in fact, which examines the minutiae of the world (and the human comprehension of it) much more deeply than the romanticising action of the traditional lyric poem can allow. [from Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions, ed. Louis Armand]

On “Tig”:

“Tig” opens with an image of a butterfly migration, an “immense blizzard of wings,” but Scully, as always, wants to get under the surface of the image. It is not only the beautiful forms and colours one sees, but also “...light exuding // over the visible / light intruding...” and there is a comment on the evolution of insect wings, and a rectangle representing a window, “rain on glass to the side of yr face...” Then comes what is more or less the [section]’s central (and recurring) image, a leaf falling from a tree … again seen from a windowpane, a windowpane that is the lens through which the poet sees, at a remove:

different (or) touching a windowpane where
drops gather ( ) difference ( ) &
or different

The window implies a house behind it, which is a central concern here too. A couple of sections have the title “A Place to Stay”: a space where one lives, or from where to engage with the wider world, as in a society, how one approaches society from one’s own space. In Munster Irish, the word tig means “house.” The themes are simple, but the actual process may be complex. The section “Backyard” gives us a crisp picture, “on still pools oakleaf / folded in a muddy crevice” and wonders, “are we just / photographs talking...?” Life is “one elong- / ated crisis (with / modulations)....”

But it is the modulations that are of crucial importance here, otherwise why put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. The falling leaves suggest age; there is an oblique reference or two to death. And modulations in writing. The best thing about Scully, for me, at the moment, is his style, which he’s really honed at this point. It’s got clarity and precision, even the way it looks on the page is made for particular effect, the use of certain marks, and the occasional use of the Irish language and Gaelic literary tradition totally makes it.... Book two opens (nearly) with an observation: “essentially a poem is a flat surface covered in part by groupings of twenty-six quite well-known symbols.” Later an ironic joke:

All that these able writers have said on language has been challenging, provocative, & generally very helpful.

Thank you.

And that’s where it starts to get really good, I mean really turned up a notch. All the images from the first half of the book are reconstituted, repeated, cut up in a sustained burst of energy, like watching a fireworks display, which keeps getting more and more spectacular till the end. [from Fortnight]

On “Prelude”:

Archambeau places particular emphasis on Maurice Scully’s Heraclitean world-view, quoting him as saying, in a paraphrase of the ancient Greek philosopher, “There is nothing static in the world.” Even seemingly impervious stone yields to a vine plant in “Prelude”’s “The Pillar & the Vine”:

the tendril travelling
& the leaf with it
hacks at the

pillar [...]

Most of this piece is written in three-line stanzas, except in two places where the lines break up in disorder, serving to shake the reader out of pattern-induced complacency. “Stone” exhibits an even stronger sense of intentional randomness. “Prelude” is the first book of the five-book Livelihood. Judging by the extract of Book III which appeared in Metre 5 a while back, Livelihood becomes more personal — autobiographical even — than its Book I. Like most of the Wild Honey poets, Scully prefers to work on an epic scale, not only in reflection of the complexity of life, but also, as Archambeau says, “out of an aversion to the idea of the poem as closed system.” [from The Burning Bush]

Winter Tales (Serving House Books, 2011)

I have an essay (and a couple of poems) in a book collection titled Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging (Serving House Books, 2011), edited by Duff Brenna and Thomas E. Kennedy. The title gives you the basic idea of the subject matter. My essay is called “Paul Tillich Never Took Ativan,” which takes as its starting point Tillich’s assertion that “The fear of death determines the element of anxiety in every fear. Anxiety, if not modified by the fear of an object, anxiety in its nakedness, is always the anxiety of ultimate non-being” — in other words, my take on aging here is in reference to its ultimate outcome, but in a specific rather than an abstract way.

Other contributors include Norman Mailer (interviewed shortly before his death), Mario Vargas Llosa, Robert Pinsky, Steve Kowit, Stephen Dunn, Liam Mac Sheóinín, and many more. I like what the editors have assembled, and I think that Serving House is quite the up-and-coming press. A companion volume of women on aging is planned.

(Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging, 262 pages, ISBN 978-0983828907)

James Liddy, Selected Poems (Arlen House)

On this night when the Milwaukee Brewers are trying to battle back for the National League pennant, I think of James Liddy. Arlen House has recently published Liddy’s Selected Poems, a new version of which is long overdue. Anyone who’s followed this blog knows that I am a friend of Liddy (now deceased, 2008) and indeed have written much about him, afterwords in a couple of his Arlen House collections, and edited a festschrift to him, and all. I was really happy to see this new book. I love all of James’s work, older and later. The earlier volume A White Thought in a White Shade (1987) was a sort of new and selected poems too, but is long out of print, and his Collected Poems (1994), though more comprehensive, is also really a selected more than a collected. This new Selected, however, is both a great introduction to Liddy’s work for the present day and a worthy retrospect.

For those who may need context, Liddy is a Wexford poet of the late Irish modernist generation who moved to America toward the end of the 60s — well, led a sort of dual existence, going back and forth, but finally based really in Milwaukee, where he taught at UWM until his death. The editor of this volume, John Redmond, makes both a sound selection of his work from the span his career and contributes an insightful introductory essay. Milwaukee poet (and former Liddy student) Tyler Farrell (who is, like me, published with Salmon Poetry) contributes the concluding essay, which is more of a personal view of the poet.

Redmond begins by acknowledging the difficulty of placing Liddy into neat categories — he is perhaps “an early example of the Americanisation of Irish literature,” but, as he points out, “Liddy had an open, multi-angled view of the world,” and so even this transnational lens is limited. What, then, of his form? Redmond notes that “he began in a relatively formal vein and the hard-earned casualness of his later poetry came gradually.” On one occasion, a well-known Irish poet I was in a conversation with suggested to me that Liddy’s poetry was “loose,” so Redmond’s percipience in this regard is well appreciated. Redmond goes further, asserting that the strength of his later work (especially) indeed lies in his “sudden shifts of thought within agreeably unstable forms” and that “in its hybridity and flexibility, its sincere uncertainty and cultivated mystery, Liddy’s writing points toward a possible future for Irish poetry.” I could not agree more.

Farrell, though he takes a different tack (his central theme being an analysis of Liddy’s many self-penned autobiographical notes), largely concurs with Redmond. He quotes a letter that Liddy wrote to him: “There is no final manuscript, only versions of what a poet might become.” He notes that Liddy “constantly evolved” (yes) and puts forward the example of his editorship of a series of literary journals, quoting him: “I have always wanted to exchange new magazines for old, for I know that magazines can alter the shape of a literary landscape.” The true artist must evolve — for me anyway, it is the essential quality of the true artist. Forgive me for sounding pretentious (?), if that’s how it sounds, but so it goes. Liddy embodies this quality of poetic evolution, and both Farrell and Redmond recognize it. I second them and laud Liddy for this.

Taking this idea to its logical extension, both Farrell and Redmond see Liddy’s later work as his best. Redmond claims that “his development was slow,” but although “he did not stop developing…he wrote his best work in his last decade or so…” Farrell asserts that “some of his most realized poetry [was] with Arlen House” (Liddy’s last and maybe most diligent publisher). I really can’t disagree with this. It is true that, for Liddy, an alive writer who never stopped believing in life and poetry, his work was always ascending, moving forward, both becoming “better” (I put quotation marks around this because at the same time I suppose it’s subjective to a degree which part of Liddy’s work is better, partly coming down to personal preferences etc.) and changing. So, as Redmond sets out in his intro, this book is weighted toward the latter half of Liddy’s career. Again, I must concur. I myself as a poet always like my newest writing the best.

As much as I have to agree with Redmond’s choices as editor, this volume still made me miss some of Liddy’s earlier work. For example, I think Corca Bascinn (1977) is one of the greatest long poems ever written, but here we get only two short verses. I also wished for more of A Munster Song of Love and War (1971) — it is hard to find in the original; yet, along with the aforementioned work, it exemplifies a major period in Liddy’s development (the influence of Jack Spicer’s serial poems). And maybe it’s just a subjective thing, again, but since Gold Set Dancing (2000) was some of the first Liddy material I read (besides the poems he sent to me as editor of a literary magazine), I hoped for more of that book than the three poems included. This is quibbling, though, as quibble every reviewer will with a volume of only selected poems. Redmond does an exemplary job as editor, and both he and Farrell scintillate in their essays. This book is both necessary and important, and as necessary as a short selected volume of Liddy is, it provoked in me the further thought, that someday there should be a true Liddy Collected Poems, everything he ever wrote, or at least published, or at least as much as may be possible.

Review of Kali’s Tongue

A book I have a piece in, Kali’s Tongue (The Vinyl Press), a poetic response to the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers, has received a very nice review by Matthew C. Mackey on the Buried Letter Press blog. Click this second link, scroll down a bit, and read the review....

Fionnchú

This guy has a really interesting blog: kind of an intersection of Irish stuff, ancient stuff, literature, art, the modern, the postmodern, post-postmodern (?), and punk, always with some arresting images. Kind of like what I do sometimes....

http://www.fionnchu.blogspot.com/

(The image comes from one of his posts about ancient art that seems modern.)

Regarding the recent BlazeVOX controversy

To briefly recap: An aspiring poet named Brett Ortler recently had a manuscript accepted by BlazeVOX Books and was then asked by its publisher to contribute $250 to the publication costs. The author objected and went public with the email exchange, posting it on the Bark blog. The post set off a firestorm of comments to the blog post itself (many worth the long scroll-through), arguments on both sides, and further blog posts on the subject all over the internet. BlazeVOX publisher Geoffrey Gatza first suggested he would cease publishing, but after a wave of support posted a statement saying that “I feel like I should explain a bit further the co-operative nature of our business model. I am not going to change what we do, but I do acknowledge that perhaps I could communicate what we do a little better.” On another page on the press’s site, Gatza writes, “We will rescind this program [of asking writers for funding] immediately and I am sorry for the troubles it has caused.”

Let me state that I once had a couple of poems published in one of BlazeVOX’s annual anthologies. I was not asked to pay, though I believe it was sold as an e-book or pdf only, meaning there were no real printing costs except to the buyer. I have never submitted a book-length manuscript to BlazeVOX and so have no first-hand knowledge of the situation described above. In my brief exchanges with Gatza, he has come across to me as a good guy, and his press publishes a lot of innovative stuff, which I like. The practice of asking for money in this way is something I would not agree with, however. And personally, I doubt that at this point in time I would be able to afford to pay $250 to publish with any press, even if I wanted to, though I have always done my best to support the presses with which I have worked, Salmon Poetry (Ireland) and Six Gallery Press (U.S.), whether through buying as many copies of my own books as I could afford, buying the books of other press-published writers, or supporting various other press activities.

I think this is the right thing to do, and, sure, it’s kind of expected (if you can afford it), if not exactly required. Given the sorry state that sales of poetry books are in right now, we need to support those who support us, if at all possible (for some it may not be, and that should be accepted as okay too). In this case, it seems that Gatza was looking for a more definitive, immediate financial commitment. So yes, he can be faulted for not being explicit about this up front, and in his statements he admits that. As far as I’m concerned, there was a mistake on his part for not being transparent and for being a bit confusing with the figures he used to justify it, but it is a mistake that has now been admitted (and even apologized for). Some of the language some people are using to describe the situation, though (“scam,” “scheme,” “Nigerian style”), is a bit extreme. I hope BlazeVOX continues to publish, as stated — presses of this sort are few and far between, and without some source of external funding they are hard to keep up.

There are a lot of things I could say about Ortler’s original post, like is it ethical to publish a private email exchange without (presumably) the other party’s permission? Even if Ortler felt that Gatza had acted unethically, do two wrongs make a right? Further, even after Gatza’s clarification and apology, Ortler seemed intent on rubbing his nose in it, writing in another post, “For all we know, he could be buying pizza and Pepsi” (with the profit Ortler alleges Gatza made from his requests for help with costs, as if he’s rolling in the supposed poetry dough), going on to ask, “Also, is Blazevox really a for-profit company? If so, then what they’ve been doing may be illegal. I’m no lawyer, but might this qualify for deceptive business practices [Ortler’s link] in the state of NY?” Well, I’m no expert on trade practices, but if you read this New York State Consumer Protection “False Advertising and Deceptive Trade Practices” webpage linked here by Ortler, you’ll see it refers to goods sold or “actual damages,” rather than to voluntary donations of the sort Gatza asked for. Ortler was asked for financial help, and he opted to pay nothing. He bought nothing and incurred no “damages” whatsoever. It seems to me, therefore, that Ortler either didn’t read the page he himself linked or is blatantly obfuscating for one reason or another. Or perhaps to give him the benefit of the doubt, he really is just clueless about legal matters (“I’m no lawyer”).

I’ll let you parse through all that’s already been said about this nasty business, in blog comments or elsewhere online, and decide for yourself. But the debate has provoked discussion about some wider issues beyond what Ortler initially wrote, issues about poetry publishing in general, “business models,” the effect of a capitalist economy on poetry, small presses vs. the notion of “vanity presses,” and even the value of MFA programs. I want to comment on each of these, coming from the perspective of my own experience (which of course may be limited and just as subjective as everyone else’s).

To begin, the number of poetry publishers who are able to survive and thrive on sales alone (i.e. without grants, subventions, or other outside sources of funding) are few and far between and dwindling yearly. Some large and long-lived presses may still get by on their back catalogue of major names or their non-poetry bestsellers. If you’re Seamus Heaney or Billy Collins, you sell a lot of books. If you’re not in that category, you probably don’t. We can debate the whys and wherefores of poetry’s marginalization, but that is the economic reality at present. Very few poets can hope to expect a monetary advance or even to have their books on store shelves. Thanks to the internet, at least there are some other outlets (the obvious book-selling websites), but driving people to your links in itself takes a lot of work that the publisher may not be able to do for you. But we all know this, right? If not, we should.

The idea that a poet today can be “discovered” out of obscurity and offered a contract wherein one is treated like a big deal, the idea that the press will be able to afford to pay for everything, the idea that the poet can sit back and watch the sales total up, the interview requests roll in, watch one’s reputation grow accordingly — those days are long gone for most, and for those who still yearn for it, it’s largely a fantasy. Yes, it would be nice not to have to pay anything at all for one’s own book, and sure the lucky few won’t, but for most of us we will pay something one way or the other (usually it’s for copies / postage for mailing review copies). As I said, I personally would not be up for an arrangement such as had been asked for by BlazeVOX, but neither would I be extremely shocked by it. A polite, private demurral might instead have been in order.

The fact that BlazeVOX did ask for help with publishing costs has led some to charge that it is in essence a “vanity press.” At the HTMLGIANT site, Christopher Higgs wrote, “Back in the day, before the internet, there used to be this thing called The Writer’s Market … One of the first rules you would learn by reading The Writer’s Market is that anyone who asks you for money to publish your work should not be trusted … [T]his sort of pay-to-publish policy seriously threatens to diminish the press’s legitimacy in my eyes.” Again, I would have balked at the idea too. But in the current climate of small-press publishing, I cannot say it makes BlazeVOX “illegitimate.” I think Ortler and Higgs would be surprised at the number of writers who have offered or agreed to help out their publishers in the course of history (if the money was there and after already being honestly and impartially accepted). It should not be a condition of acceptance, of course, but these things do occur, at least from what I have heard now and again.

On the other hand, it’s not as if any of this is new. There’s the obvious Whitman example. Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, and George Oppen published themselves, out of their own pockets, with their Objectivist Press. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published his own books with City Lights. Trevor Joyce and Michael Smith published themselves and their friends through New Writers Press. There are numerous other examples. So the ire, the indignation over BlazeVOX asking for something like this strikes me as a bit overblown. Gatza made it clear he is not simply open to all comers who can afford to pay $250; he has an editorial process. Ortler would no doubt be glad to achieve anything close to the repute of Reznikoff or Ferlinghetti (wouldn’t we all?). Indeed, none of the aforementioned poets are stigmatized as “vanity” cases. Mike Meginnis makes some interesting points about this at the Uncanny Valley blog, going so far as to say that poets should actually publish their own books more often (though I would disagree with him when he contends that “If it’s really that bad out there, if publishing must inherently be both exploitative and pointless, then let’s just not do it” — there are other ways of doing it, I would suggest).

The truth is most poetry presses cannot survive without some kind of help. Should they then all fold up shop? No, of course not. If you think they should, if you think that nothing other than the cutthroat capitalist marketplace should dictate whether or not innovative or original poetry books are allowed to see the light of day, then you may as well stop reading this now. Because I don’t. I believe there is a value to poetry beyond what can be quantified monetarily. So aside from those rare profit-making poetry presses mentioned above, the reality is that this whole thing is a gigantic cooperative enterprise (Johannes Göransson has gone into this idea further at Montevidayo). Poets want to be published, obviously, but publishers (many of whom are poets themselves) need to know that the poet is going to do his or her part to support the book where the publisher just cannot. More books, for example, are sold at readings than in bookstores, and these are books that the poet him- or herself has therefore had to purchase from the press (hopefully at a reasonable discount).

The idea is to get our books in print, do our best for them in the present, and hope they resonate someday in the future (how many great writers are recognized in their day, and how many writers once recognized in their day are now considered great?). If there’s no way to do that, if we say that the market forbids us from leaving anything for posterity, then we are sunk. Better to get the books out, granted as “reputably” as possible, than not at all. This might entail something beyond the old model of expecting to be snapped up by a profit-making press. We might criticize Gatza (but let me reiterate that he has rescinded his earlier policy, and apologized!), but we cannot expect our publishers to single-handedly make us stars as we sit on our asses. Most of them are simply unable to. Let us get this through our heads. Equally, it is to be hoped that, if sales were in fact to outweigh costs, the publisher should pay the writer commensurately — this cooperative enterprise is a two-way street, and a contract that spells things out is no bad thing. After acceptance, the writer has the option of agreeing or not agreeing to what is in said contract. Just as Ortler had the option of agreeing or not agreeing to the conditions Gatza put forward after acceptance.

The question of MFA programs is kind of an ancillary issue, to my mind, but it is something that has come up elsewhere in this discussion, in blog posts and the other comments. While I strongly agree with Göransson’s vision of small-press poetry publishing as a cooperative, and with his negative view of the elitist “Great Figure” and “Literary Authorities,” I would have to disagree with him when he says of the latter two notions, “I do think this is an incredibly MFA-based idea of the author … I think this is a view definitely reflecting a common MFA pedagogy based on validation of the teacher, the institution.” Ortler has made it a point to mention his MFA credentials (almost as special pleading?), and Gatza in one of his statements has similarly made a point (possibly in response?) of noting that “I am not a teacher or associated with any college or university” (as if there were money in that, ha!). I think that some people have a lot of misconceptions about what an MFA program is and what sort of status it confers on those who earn such a degree, and so it becomes an easy target. Certainly there are MFA programs that promulgate this sort of elitism. But MFA programs as a whole are in no way a monolith; there is in fact no “common MFA pedagogy.” There are lots of different programs out there, some perhaps “based on validation of the teacher, the institution,” but many others whose focus is something other, or even on, say, avant-garde poetics and destabilizing that older idea of the author as an “authority” which Göransson attacks.

If an MFA student thinks that a degree is his or her ticket to publication fame and fortune, then he or she is probably going to be sadly mistaken. In my experience (I have an MFA and have read up on many MFA programs), no program that I know of is marketing itself that way. Ultimately, the value of the degree depends on the writer him- or herself. I took my degree at North Carolina State University and studied with a number of poets, all of whom I respect immensely, but whose work bears little resemblance to my own approach to poetics. This clash was for me quite fruitful. I learned a lot about poetry as a discipline and a practice, and it challenged me to think about my own poetic stance in greater depth. I didn’t want to be merely reinforced in my assumptions, nor did I want to become a carbon copy of my professors. What would be the point of either? Of course, I came into the program at age 40, having had a lot of experience in the “poetry world” myself and something of a “career” of my own already, however modest. And so I felt that I could go through the degree and get what I wanted out of it for my own reasons. In this, I am maybe an exception; there probably are 22-year-old grad students out there who can’t help but be inculcated with the prevailing ethos of their program, be it positive or negative. On the other hand, how long does it take for one to learn to think critically and independently? So I say again, the value of the degree depends on the writer him- or herself.

If it is an illusion that an MFA is a fast track to publication, then what is it worth? Just as there is a glut of poets in the wider, non-academic world seeking publication, so is there now also a glut of MFA graduates who think they’re the next big thing (well, some may think that), and clearly that won’t be happening for all of them. But for the percipient individual, it certainly can be a forum in which one can develop one’s work if not one’s prospects with big publishing houses. I think MFA programs can also help to educate its students in how to read poetry and how to interpret literature in general. Poets need readers now more than ever, and so we should be glad that MFAs exists. Without them, the readership for poetry is even smaller. Part, anyway, of the problem of poetry’s lack of readership can be solved by investing in arts education. As Brian Joseph Davis recently wrote in The Huffington Post, “This is what arts education does better than anything else: it protects traditions from suffering market fluctuations, challenges forms with new traditions and constructs large buildings named after dead people and equipped with ace sound systems, in which to debate and perform.” The attack on arts education, firstly in America but throughout the whole world, and the promulgation of the corporate model of education, to my mind are two of the major reasons why poetry has fallen into such disregard over the last number of decades. Right now, the tide seems to be continuing in that direction, unfortunately. But if we want innovative poetry to continue to exist in the public arena, we need to oppose this.

Review of Graham Clifford

I have a review of an English poet named Graham Clifford over at Todd Swift’s blog. Writing this review led me to think about the issue of reviewing friends or acquaintances, but not because Clifford is a friend nor an acquaintance. He’s neither. I’ve never met him and had never heard of him before Swift sent me the chapbook to review. Clifford is someone I probably never would have read otherwise. Lately, though, it sometimes (though certainly not always) has been someone I know or have some connection with who I end up reviewing or writing about (as in my McGrath review below). It is natural that your colleagues or friends will send you their books, and vice-versa. I think it’s also a good thing to have such poetry friends. There are seemingly so few readers of poetry to begin with, and so it’s understandable that you will want some kind of response from somewhere, and usually your literary associates are going to be good readers. We should be thankful to have any readers at all, really. But reviewing someone completely unknown to me again was interesting. Perhaps in retrospect this review is a bit didactic. But decide for yourself if you’ve got the time to click the link.

Niall McGrath, Treasures of the Unconscious & Who I Am

Interestingly, though unexpectedly, both of these collections by Niall McGrath reference me. Treasures of the Unconscious (Scotus Press, 2009) contains a poem titled “To Michael S. Begnal Founding the James Liddy Society of America,” which, though not stated here, I happen to know is written after a poem by Liddy himself titled “To Joan Navarre Founding the Oscar Wilde Society of America.” Thus, McGrath, who had published both Liddy and me in his journal The Black Mountain Review, humorously notes certain poetic connections. Who I Am (Lapwing, 2009) is a poetic treatment of McGrath’s family history, the concept of which, as the author explains in the notes that appear at the end of the volume, “originally…centred around the idea of ‘Ancestor Worship’, but as others (most notably Michael S. Begnal) have used that title, I searched for another.” One poem in the sequence nonetheless retains the “Ancestor Worship” moniker, and if I have in some small way inspired something here, then I am quite pleased for McGrath to run with it.

I have been aware of McGrath since we were both editors of separate Irish literary journals about ten years ago or so now. We appeared in each other’s magazines, and I was included in the anthology Breaking the Skin which McGrath’s Black Mountain Press published. I don’t know if all this means I can still be an “impartial” reviewer, but who cares; let’s just call this something else if need be, a response from a long-time reader and occasional associate. While we probably have certain philosophical differences, McGrath is an interesting poet to me, and I also see certain commonalities. But to these books.

In both of these volumes, McGrath is sure-handed and at home in the tradition of Northern Irish lyric poetry but is more than willing to extend it or to try other things. Much of his work is focused on the crisply observed details of his rural upbringing, as in the title poem of Treasures of the Unconscious, or in “A Farmhouse Kitchen in Country Antrim.” But then he occasionally presents something unexpectedly crazy, like the poem “2012,” a fantastical portrait of the North post-apocalypse. There are deft formal poems, such as “An Ulster Nativity,” alongside funny formal poems, such as “The Prince of Outer Baldonia and the Pepsi-Cola Kid,” alongside the surreal, television-inspired “Diabolical,” alongside elegiac poems of death. The humour and occasional weirdness leavens the often heavy tone of this collection, not that heavy is a bad thing in itself.

One aspect of McGrath’s work that does really interest me is his treatment of political and cultural identity in Ireland. In previous works of his, it appeared to me that identitarian politics was something he wanted to avoid, though the six-county focus could be seen as political in itself. McGrath, though, it often seemed , wished to rise above the fray of the North’s cultural divide. In Treasures of the Unconscious, the Troubles are briefly referenced as “a feud/ that made international headlines” (“Botanic”) (perhaps with an echo of Paddy Kavanagh’s poem “Epic”), while “Elder” justifiably affirms those Protestants who eschewed bigotry, even while their position in Northern society made them seem complicit in it to some. “Covenant,” which appears in both of the two books (in fact several poems occur twice in these overlapping collections) is about a grandmother who signed the Ulster Covenant, yet McGrath complicates the statement that signing the Covenant embodied: “she’d…learn/ other shades of green;/ and that pledges made in the heat/ of the moment don’t always ring true.”


Such muddying of the waters in regard to Irish identities and even family connections comes to the fore in Who I Am. On one level, this book is intended to solidify poetically the writer’s position in history and genealogy by exploring his family history and personal roots (which comprise both Protestant planters and native Gaelic Irish) — indeed the ancient Gaelic poets were practically obsessed with genealogy, and so this endeavour in itself helps situate McGrath in Irish tradition, if nothing else. However, despite the bold proclamation of the title, Who I Am ultimately seems to me to result in more of a sense of indeterminacy than certainty. One of the poems that perhaps best sums this up is “Name Calling,” wherein the writer, Niall McGrath, a Protestant with a Gaelic name, reflects on “growing up during the Troubles,/ one side suspicious because of the name,/ the other at first open, then clamming up/ on discovering you weren’t ‘one of them’.” But it isn’t even simply a North-South thing or a unionist-nationalist thing — the poem goes on to discuss a sister-in-law from the South whose parish priest refuses to call her by her given name (Deirdre) because it’s too Gaelic and thus pagan-seeming.

In the notes that appear at the back of Who I Am, McGrath states that “the experiences of forebears shape the individual as well as our own experiences.” This is true, I think. Yet, as in my own experience also, it would ultimately appear that assertions of identity can only be partial, contingent on many things beyond ancestors and family lore (as much as these things may touch us, and they do). McGrath himself is aware of this, of course, and this collection sees him opening up to the rest of Ireland, while rejecting the Catholic/Protestant divide that has plagued the country for hundreds of years now (McGrath posits a personal “Vaisnavist perspective”). The final few poems look boldly toward the future. I still couldn’t help but notice an interesting mistake in the text. The title heading on the verso pages of the book reads, “Who Am I,” instead of the intended “Who I Am.” From the author’s perspective this is probably an annoying error, understandably, but the question in a way is maybe just as interesting as the answer.

Poem in The New Yinzer

I have a poem titled “1877 Point Bridge” up at the journal The New Yinzer — right here!