tom t's periodic recess

A Terrific Review

2012-02-12T07:47:00.000-08:00

A terrific review of the February 10 performance at the Gershwin Hotel is up at the blog Lucid Culture.

It's true there were a lot of spiders in my poems—including the French, mid-western and the Central Park varieties. All the poems except the first three are new and unpublished.

Here's the set list:

Haydn: Sonata in C minor, Hob XVI:20, performed by Dmitri Dover

Poems (all these are in slightly revised forms from The Pitch): "All Scents Rise," "The Lake," "The Water Towers of New York" (revised version of "Gloss Upwards" from The Pitch)

Prokofiev: Selections from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 75, performed by Dmitri Dover

Rodion Shchedrin: Basso Ostinato, peformed by Inna Faliks

Poems: "Unnamed," "Between Seizures," "Weekender"

Liszt: Symphonic Poem #4, Orpheus, transcribe for piano for four hands by Liszt, performed by Dmitri Dover and Inna Faliks

Liszt: Transcendental Etude #11, Harmonies du Soir; and Paganini-Liszt: "LaCampanella" performed by Inna Faliks

Poems: "The Very Image of a Child," "The Spider's Line"

Debussy: Selections from Preludes, Book I, performed by Dmitri Dover

Poems: "Specimen," "Progression & Absence"

Chopin: Scherzo No.2, Op. 31, performed by Dmitri Dover

Music/Words Reading, February 10

2012-01-17T05:50:00.001-08:00

I am excited to be reading February 10 at 7:30 at the Gershwin Hotel in NYC at the next Music/Words with performances by Inna Falks and Dmitri Dover: Haydn, Liszt, Prokofiev . . . Thompson.

This is gonna be interesting. For details, click here.

A green chaos. Or a wood.

2012-01-08T10:45:00.000-08:00

“The modern version of hell is purposelessness.”

—John Fowles, The Tree, 53

It is the time of lists. The 5 Hottest Movies of the Year; The 10 Best Novels of the 21st Century; The World’s 15 Most Eligible Bachelors. For years these unsourced, uncommented-on rankings have been more essential to end-of-year celebrations than champagne, but now they’re a year-round phenomenon. They’ve become the go-to style for bloggers and site managers of all descriptions because of the way they mimic “data”—in a way that turns the old, human art of gossip into a set of items an algorithm can read and manipulate. This tendency does disservice to both algorithms and gossip. So why do we love lists so? Because of the crude but accurate (the data shows it!) insight into the psychology of what drives people to click on a link, and the neatly protestant belief that success in increasing Web traffic (our good work) is meaningful evidence of divine selection (or Google’s).

I’m an enthusiast and fully fledged participant in all this. Both out of professional interest as someone who works in marketing and as a social person in the early 21st century, I compile comprehensive “books read” lists on Goodreads, share amazing ninja kitten photos wherever possible, and pimp my favorite current movie on Twitter (by the way, I saw “Hugo” last night, and, no joke, it’s completely magical, entrancing and makes me want to make things like no other movie in recent memory. See it in the theaters! The big screen 3-D is worth it). Beyond reasons of paying career or cultural pull, I love this new world. I really like learning what interesting people are reading, looking at and dreaming of. Yet, for all that, re-reading John Fowles’s 1979 essay The Tree over the holidays left me with two contradictory feelings. It was unquestionably the best thing I’d read in months, and worth every star I could tweet for it, but at the same time it’s a book that wants nothing to do with lists. It’s a book that demands a bigger, weirder, slower, and wilder consideration.

The Tree begins as Fowles’ argument against the central tenet of his father’s life. His father a man with a middling to disappointing business career who poured the better part of his life into the care and nurturing of a few fruit trees in his suburban back yard—pruning, watering, and clearing them relentlessly until they produced the sweetest, fullest fruit. But the trees John Fowles loves are wilder and rougher; they adhere to no man’s touch, only to the chancy exigencies of their own particular non-human nature and condition. This is an argument between father and son that goes beyond aesthetic preference, to the heart of what each man believes: Is it better to shape your world through care, will and steadily applied civilized knowledge, or to tap what Fowles calls “green chaos”? To Fowles credit, he makes clear that his father produces by far the healthier trees with the fuller, more flavorful fruit. He also makes it clear that every naturalist and arborist he knows takes his father’s point of view. It is a position expressed with the force of moral:

“No fruit for those who do not prune; no fruit for those who question knowledge; no fruit for those who hid in trees untouched by man; no fruit for traitors to the human cause.” (23)

The patron saint of this worldview is the great naturalist and genius of scientific method, Linnaeus. His system does more than classify our world. It provides a fundamental lens for all ensuing scientific practice. It is the practice of science that has grown to the level of religion—believed in, worshipped, profited by—a religion of which Fowles’ father is an eloquent and passionate adherent.

Against the belief systems of Linnaeus and his father, and in clear-sighted recognition of both men’s accomplishments, Fowles sets his sense of “green chaos” as the essential propagating force of both nature and art. Linnaeus’ classification systems feed the human need to make use of the world. But, for Fowles, “we shall never full understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability.” (39-40)

This is heresy, at least, and no way to make a living, for sure. It goes against the ethos of the start-up culture that surrounds us now, a culture I treasure and feed, and (more to the point) that feeds me and my family. “Our approach to art,” writes Fowles, “as to nature, has become increasingly scientized (and dreadfully serious) during this last century. It sometimes seems now as if it is principally there not for itself but to provide material for labeling, classifying, analysing.” (46) But in all the lists we read and create, all the tags we apply to our blogs and posts, all these ways in which we make ourselves and our every moment traceable, trackable, researchable, usable, are we not responding in fear to the nature of the chaos out of which we’re formed? The exhortation echoes for each of us: “Make something of yourself.” Is there nobility in preferring not to? Beauty even, or even, weirdly, power? Or is it silliness at best, madness at its extremest?

The movie I saw last night (four out of four stars!; seriously: see it on the big screen) ends with a single, useful moral: Each of us needs a purpose. It is a lesson that applies to both people and machines, and it is beautiful to me to think that we are each part of a perfectly engineered system, and that, therefore, each of us fits, with a perfectly designed role. The only tragedy is not knowing what that role is. I’m only halfway through the book, so I don’t know if this sentiment is in the book or was brought out by the filmmakers, but it hardly matters. The movie is a profoundly moving, deeply magical expression of the ethos of our age. It shows the clever, nearly magical workings of the machine that produces magic. At the level of movie makers and magicians, yes, there is a method and a mechanical engineering to the most awe-inducing scenes, as there is a grammar and an expertise to the writing of a novel. But all those cogs and tracks, spindles and discs, hum in the service to something that’s harder to tease apart. “A green chaos,” as Fowles has it. “Or a wood.” (53)

Miranda Field's blog

2012-01-08T10:43:00.000-08:00

"Tom says, Why not just bite off the thread and toss the knot out the car window?"

Miranda Field's answer is beautiful, knotty and needs reading. Read her newest writing.

Monday, October 24, 2011 Reading

2011-09-29T07:39:00.000-07:00

My next reading:

Monday, October 24

8PM

Poetry at Bar 82

136 2nd Avenue (between St. Mark's and 9th Street)

NYC

http://www.bar82nyc.com/

I'll be taking some new work for a spin from my "Homage to Jaime Saenz's Homage to Epilepsy."

Modus Operandi

2011-02-16T10:57:00.001-08:00

"I like schools, I like people to go to school, but the purpose of the Academy is to give answers. If they don’t have an answer, they give a solution. The purpose of art is to ask questions. They’re antithetical."

I like Lawrence Weiner qtd in the 2/14/11 Paris Review blog. Yep.

What I Say, What I Mean, What You Hear

2010-10-02T05:47:00.001-07:00

Guy le Charles Gonzalez, a slam poet who has gone on to establish himself as a really bright voice in the conversation about the future of book publishing, reposted a funny Venn diagram with two, distinct, non-overlapping circles: "What the poet meant" and "What you thought they meant."

Funny because, of course, yes. And yet... At last Thursday's NYU reading series, Matthew Zapruder fielded several questions about the difference between public and private language. The questions arose from this line in his poem "Come On All You Ghosts": "In this poem // every word means exactly / what it means / when we use it in every day life." This gesture, startlingly generous and probably surprising to most readers of contemporary poetry, assures the reader that we have the means to understand one another. It asserts that the writer / reader circles of the Venn diagram can overlap. Even for me (my own readerly predilection being for poems in which each word spirals out in countless directions), it's a line that comes sweetly, openly, irresistibly.

But that does not mean Matthew thinks the circles overlap 100%. In the Q & A, he made explicit the difference between public and private language -- and that each word functions in each realm all the time. "Really," he said, "it's a miracle we can understand each other at all." He mentioned his young nephew coming to learn the word "tree," for whom it means, first, the very specific tree in his backyard -- one you and I will never see. That tree will always live inside the nephew's word. And each of us has our own private tree inside the word. ("Towering tree within the ear," Rilke wrote in his first Sonnet to Orpheus.) The word is both "public," the abstraction you and I understand and communicate with, and "private," the particular no one else can know. So the poem -- "a machine made out of words" as Williams has it -- delivers a structure for readers, each of us, to share. Together, privately. As Matthew's brilliant "Come On All You Ghosts" gives us in its final lines: "I have done my best to leave // behind this machine / anyone with a mind / who cares can enter."

The lucky ones

2010-10-02T05:13:00.000-07:00

At this week's literary salon at NYU, Matthew Zapruder filled the house. While I've almost stopped going to readings altogether recently, this one felt like a can't miss. And it was: His new poems are among the most exciting work produced by our generation and he read them with warmth, humor, and wit. Looked at simply in the context of the poets in the audience that night -- Rachel Zucker, Timothy Donnelly, Cate Marvin, Mark Bibbins, Brenda Shaughnessy, Geoffrey Nutter, etc. -- ours suddenly looks like not only a generation of promise, but, suddenly, one that delivers amazing contributions across an impossibly wide spectrum of interest and style. Add in a few of my other favorite poets who weren't there -- Thomas Sayers Ellis, Claudia Rankine, Linh Dinh, Prageeta Sharma -- and this is one crazy good group. But while all of the above are roughly the same age, and all are good friends with each other, "group" isn't really the word, is it? They all share an at-playness with their circumstance. But some use persona, some use "self." Some use a forthrightness of delivery, some tell it slant. Some mix-up diction, some keep it straight up. Some keep the politics personal, some invest it in you, dear reader. Afterward, a friend lifted a glass to the whole evening -- which included all of us reading and writing poems today. "Aren't we the lucky ones," he said. Yes.

The Bruise by Magdalena Zurawski

2010-08-03T07:08:00.001-07:00

The Bruise by Magdalena Zurawski

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Early in this novel the main character M--- is in a writing class where the prof delivers the old (not untrue) canard that stories need something to "really" happen in them, not simply possess the potential for something to happen. Zurawski tests this truism in a novel composed as the experience of a single consciousness over a period of time. M--- possesses something like an Autism of Pure Feeling, although I don't want that label to make her seem merely strange, when in fact what she's going through will be recognizable to anyone who has tested the limits of imagination and found the boundaries blur. The story stays so deep in M---'s consciousness the people surrounding her -- although she seems more or less like a regularly social college student -- seem not to exist. Or to exist only in her imagination. Which of course they do, although that doesn't settle the question of their "reality" or lack of it. With so many (all?) stories from the publishing industry built to be movie-ready packages of plot, it comes as a relief to read a novel that confronts its own existence as imagination, the active ground between reality and fantasy. What a joy to encounter a novel that is composed of words, and could only exist as words. If a movie were to be made of The Bruise it would have to translate all the activity from words to images; it would have to be something else. It is a brilliant, moving, sympathetic take on the coming-of-age of the imagination as a coming-into-selfhood.

View all my reviews >>

John Ashbery's Flow Chart, first lines

2010-06-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

Restarting Ashbery's "Flow Chart" this morning, the opening lines mirror my feelings on the state of book publishing (and my place in it):

Still in the published city but not yet

overtaken by a new form of despair, I ask

the diagram: is it the foretaste of pain

it might easily be? Or an emptiness

so sudden it leaves the girders

whanging in the absence of wind,

the sky milk-blue and astringent? We know life is so busy,

but a larger activity shrouds it, and this is something

we can never feel, except occasionally, in small signs

put up to warn us and as soon expunged, in part

or wholly . . .

Nose-deep on a Sunday

2010-05-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Beer and Poincaré

2010-05-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

Reading an essay by Henri Poincaré and a book by John Beer, it occurs to me:

a poem is ground for invention.

Each reader, each reading, always the invention occurs in the act of engaging the words.

A kelson of the creation

2010-05-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

We can argue about the poetry, but Robert Hass is hands down the best teacher of poetry we have today. I love this interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air:

automatic class generator

2010-01-25T07:14:00.000-08:00

the blockbuster movie stylings of milton's paradise lost

the uses of synecdoche

how metaphor is foundational to thought

thing is to place: the new syllogism

is everything allegory or is this just a prison?

Poem for the new year (petit mal)

2010-01-06T03:00:00.000-08:00

The lord of absence turns
away from absence
a spiral

raises the top of his head
to a dome An aura
some sense in themselves

when neurons storm open
too many paths at once

The ant turns
into the ant turns
into the ant Each

segment of its body
glistens The colony
won’t wait

Let’s

"The future of hardcover publishing is at stake"

2009-12-10T08:06:00.000-08:00

When did we go from caring about words/stories/ideas to worrying about boards & paper?

RT http://www.twitter.com/PD_Smith: "The future of hardcover publishing is at stake." -- Nat Sobel, literary agent

The long flash

2009-12-05T06:16:00.001-08:00

What if epiphany is not a brief flash that changes everything? Lessons of spiritual practice suggest that the flash of insight is usually illusion, or, at best, passing.

Blake's epiphanies are not flashes, but worked out in the dialogue between Heaven and Hell. Not of one, not the other, but of the long, dynamic interplay.

In Bill Viola's show up now at James Cohan Gallery, the bodies of light ("Saints," "Innocents," "Acceptance," et al) look like epiphanic experiences emerging from between life and death. But the flash of your own life? It feels long, right? Messy. Complicated. And yet, underneath the busyness of this or that daily white-noise-actions, the flux of apparent needs, wants, responsibilities, there is a tone that some call personality. It might even be something like what some refer to as soul. But what if that personality -- is it warm? generous? frightened? mean? -- is part of that individual's one experience. The long flash we live in. It just depends on the speed of the film, the exposure, the settings, including distance, we see it by.

Miranda Field

2009-11-28T12:56:00.000-08:00

If you like poems, the english language, the forest floor in winter, or film theory, you should read one of the most recent poems from Miranda Field, "Oneiric Theory." It's published in the most recent Boston Review--an issue filled with excellent work, including the discovery of a poet I've never read, Farnoosh Fathi, but expect to hear a lot more from soon. And it was the Friday, Nov 27 pick for Poetry Daily.

The future of publishing is poetry! Muwahhahaha…

2009-11-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

When it comes to the plummeting fortunes of the publishing industry, everybody wants to talk about the record industry. But it looks to me a lot more like mainstream publishing is heading down a wavering trail blazed by the last few decades of poetry.

Announcing a new self-publishing venture recently, Harlequin unleashed unholy fury from writers across the spectrum—established, emerging and hoping-to-be. Even the indie publishing community spoke up against the venture (make sure you read the comments on Small Beer Press’ hilarious post). They’re not the first publisher to experiment with a vanity division, but their readership is among the most intense. Apparently “brand” does matter in book publishing—or at least some do. In this case, the publisher’s struggle for new revenue streams slammed up against the reading/writing community’s passionate belief that the old school system is the only legitimate way to confer the title “author.” This conflict mirrors the poetry contest wars over the last twenty years. See under: Foetry.

Most poets spend several years and many hundreds of dollars submitting manuscripts to contests in hopes of being chosen for publication. While some of the biggest names in the business (Graywolf, Copper Canyon, FSG, New Directions) have not had to resort to the contest model, nearly every other house has. While there are decent arguments against this system (especially re: potential for scams), the truth is there isn’t enough money to be made in publishing a book of poetry by anyone not named Billy (Collins or Corrigan that is). In fact, I have serious doubts that the Knopfs of the world will be able to continue to publish money-losing genres like poetry as long as they report to corporate HQ in Germany. In fact, when the corporate model hit poetry in the 1970s poetry publishing saw a big hit at all the major publishers – a reality that motivated Daniel Halpern and James Michener to create the National Poetry Series. The current poetry programs for almost all publishers are simply a vestige of the old system that will soon be squeezed shut by the increasingly harsh economic reality for books. If there weren’t contests, the only publishers of poetry would be wealthy scions like James Laughlin. That worked out pretty well for New Directions and modernism in general, but it’s not a model that fills me with hope for our own crowd-juiced, hyper-capitalist, nominally-democratic moment.

Still, despite all the hand-wringing, poetry has never been stronger. You can disagree about who the “best” poets are, but there are very strong books coming out in every style – lyric, abundant, absurdist, austere, flarfy, conceptuallissimo, spoken word -- and that indicates a healthy environment of creativity and readership. While no single book sells enough copies to make a mark on Nielsen Bookscan, the number of poetry readers in aggregate has spurred a creative new business model that has the industry buzzing. Hell, even the 2009 National Book Award for poetry seems to be cause for more celebration than angst.

There remains a working business model for the James Pattersons, Sarah Palins, and vanity press aggregators. But there is no room in that model for worrying about literature. Once upon a time this would have been a problem for serious reading. Access to major publishers was the only way to get work into the hands of the reading public. But with inventories tightening up at independent bookstores and major chains alike, publication by a major house is no guarantee your book will be carried in a general bookstore. That, combined with anybody’s ability to sell anything to anyone online whether through Amazon, SPD Books or from your own site, means that there is no longer a distinct advantage to publication by a major house. Wanting it both ways -- corporate-style profits produced by thought-inducing, break-the-mold art -- is unrealistic and as condescending to people who enjoy books-as-mindless-entertainment as those who like them as brainfood.

Literature has always done its best work as a coterie business. So it will.

Mothers & Fathers & Husbands & Lovers

2009-11-17T03:59:00.001-08:00

In a dialogue recently published at Candor Magazine, Sarah Manguso and Rachel Zucker go full bore at the question of what it means for each of them to write as a mother or as a “non-mother.” They bring extraordinary intelligence and tenacious integrity to bear on one of the most contentious questions women face--a question that becomes only more nuanced and complex the more it evolves with our cultural attitudes (subtly, perhaps; slowly, for sure). In book after book, Rachel’s content (motherhood) is as integral to her development of ideas as the form (poetry) they take. But while it is specific content, it is not limiting content. The content and the form are the way she gets at the core of what used to be called the human condition: love, fear, loneliness, what it means to live now. And while her experience is not mine, her experience allows me to access, understand, and question my own.

Sarah uses content in similar ways, of course, all good writers do. Her latest book is a prose meditation on a devastating illness she wrestled with in her twenties--and, as with Rachel’s work, it is in no way my experience, but it works through matters of suffering and desire in ways that extend my own understanding. But Sarah is wary of the ways motherhood would limit not only her physical capacity to write (the time and focus required to raise kids) but also a reader’s perception of her work (the ease with which a narrowcast mindset can shuttle off a book on motherhood to a “women’s only” section).

What does it say that this question, which feels so unavoidable to women writers now, does not come up with the two most important poets of the modern period, Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein? Nor for two of the most influential poets who came of age in the 1950s, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. The difference is in the cultural context. Dickinson, Stein, Moore, and Bishop wrote before feminism had radically altering options open to women with children. Their choice was stark: kids or writing. There is no evidence to indicate that any of these four ever considered having children. Though they may have thought about it, the question was simply not aired. It is only with the generations that came of age in the 1960s and later that the question of motherhood and (not "or") writing seemed even possible.

Fatherhood has changed nearly as dramatically as motherhood in recent decades, becoming more and more a hands-on experience. Yet, I can’t think of any men who tackle the question of “father” vs. “non-father” writers. To be sure there has been a recent spate of famous men writing about the occasions of their fatherhoods. But these don’t go much farther than relatively charming (or annoying depending on your angle) exercises in the lovably clueless man adapting to new domestic roles in changing times. The matter of fatherhood is not an occasion for soul searching or culture rattling. It’s just cute entertainment.

In a recent interview for the Poetry magazine podcast, Tom Sleigh spoke of Thom Gunne’s domestic life in San Francisco, suggesting that Thom Gunne was one of the few men who wrote about domestic concerns--even though domesticity in this case meant San Francisco’s gay scene. As surprising as this is to me, I’m hard pressed to come up with counter-examples.

Of contemporary poets, Galway Kinnell has perhaps written the most about his children--what young parent can help but identify with the poem in which his toddler wakes up and crashes the bedroom the instant any sex threatens to occur. But it’s not clear that fatherhood changed Kinnell's writing, or changed the terms on which he encountered the world through his work. For Zucker, motherhood is a radicalizing subject that pushes the very form of the poem in new ways. For Sarah Manguso, "non-motherhood" is a question in the foreground, and choosing against motherhood an occasion for profound thinking (as is the inability to choose to have children for women who cannot).

Mostly, I am astonished that so few (no?) men talk about the ways children affect their work because having children has changed my own work in profound ways. This is true in all the obvious ways: by keeping me physically busier than I ever thought possible (tightening writing time to near zero), and by kid-matter inevitably invading the poems. But, more, the experience of having children has altered my sense of time, being and responsibility. It provided the occasion for the only thing close to a Blakean vision I have ever experienced. I spent the week after my first son's birth with just Miranda and the baby, never leaving, never sleeping, hardly eating. The closeness of it all became a fever dream that collapsed distinctions between inside and outside, night and day. When I first left our rooms to shop for groceries at the corner market, I looked at the 300 lb. man working the cash register and saw in him--physically, actually--the newborn he once was. It seemed neither confusing nor alarming, simply a reality that all the time of his existence was present in that one moment. Looking around, I saw all of us--the 80 year old woman behind me, hunched with osteoporosis, the sharp-lipped teenage girl one aisle over, the homeless man slogging a bag of cans for redemption--in our physical beginnings as infants. There was no distinction, in fact, between any of us. That this vision came from a near total lack of sleep and food is obvious. But while I don't see the layers of time as I did on that particular June morning 13-1/2 years ago, what I knew in that moment remains 100% real to me.

I like to read accounts of cave-meditators about the years spent alone with their infinite mind--the long, slow, boring, rolling, speeding, broiling, burning fact of it. In the course of my day, among all the wounds to lick, covers to tuck, shoulders to rub, porridge to sling, punches to punish, candy to swipe, tears to dry, feet to tickle, homework to enforce, empathy to extract, paperwork to push, soccer to coach, and plates to scrub, I think this father, this once-and-future narcissist known as me, is learning something of what they say.

Poetry Speaks

2009-11-14T14:33:00.000-08:00

Is there a role for commerce in poetry? Ezra Pound worked his (crackpot) economic theories into his Cantos. Katy Lederer wrote a book using her hedge fund experience to spin the stuff of the money-drunk 00’s into metaphors for longing, ambition, sex, God and grief. Money is considered anathema to the dream of poetry even if (especially because?) most poets make a middling salary in gigs as college teachers. Poetry magazine’s $100 million windfall from a pharmaceutical industry heiress caused all kinds of anger and belittlements from poets (including me). Complements for the Poetry Foundation’s wide-ranging efforts since then have been grudgingly given, even though the money has not only been used to revivify the magazine, but also to support a relatively wide range of the art through mainstream outlets and through building up its own vibrant online center of blogs, links, videos and essays.

But this week a project launched that throws money and poetry in a way that can’t be dismissed as charity, or scam, or mere academic exercise: PoetrySpeaks. To even type the words “.com” after a poetry site instead of “.org” feels like I’m pimping for one of the sleazy contests that charge a bundle and deliver nothing but profit for the organizer. PoetrySpeaks is made equally out of a love of poetry and a keen business sense, and it displays the potential of both to enhance each other rather than cancel each other out. You can explore and even contribute to its resources for free. Or you can buy books, videos, or individual poems. One of the advisors to this project, Guy Le Charles Gonzalez, comes out of the Nuyorican scene from the 1990s and makes the case that this new .com site offers more dynamic possibilities than the current scene. And he’s right. While my own background is traditional, I can’t ignore the ways in which traditional readings have grown stultifying: long-winded, academic introductions, a prevalent anti-performance style (as if the material itself is so deep it needs to be flattened to be accessed), and audiences that are either half-asleep or all the way there. How have we come to this? Surely this is a total waste of our time. While my own preference is for quieter, page-based work, spoken word events are much, much more entertaining. You are much more likely to have an experience at spoken word than at a traditional reading. There’s something of a vacuum, an anti-experience, about a traditional poetry reading.

Poetry’s as relevant as the people making it. But as makers we owe our audience an experience. Otherwise we’re just keeping a diary. It doesn’t matter who your audience is--your lover, the guys on your soccer team, word-gamers, philosophers, whichever people are in the room with you right now--you owe it to the work to connect with them. One way of doing that is to create new works in new forms than the paper page: video and audio, digital and physical. MFA programs should offer classes in Flash, Illustrator and AfterEffects. These are the newest tools for working “by hand” with your words. But as Kat Meyer mentioned during a chat on Twitter with the founders of PoetrySpeaks.com, digital poetry now simply means anything that can be tagged with metadata and accessed digitally. So the old ways of working by hand can also be considered digital: the hand-stitched letter press book, the hand-built box with free-floating typewritten lines.

Poets need to break with the idea that their words deserve to be archived because simply because they’re labeled “poetry.” The work falls for its audience before the audience falls for it.

anyone who stumbles

2009-09-03T09:13:00.001-07:00

Anyone who stumbles by here by accident or otherwise will likely know and read Maud Newton's blog. But today she quotes Thomas Mann in a way that puts me exactly where I am:

“The basic theme on which I’ve tried to play all my variations is the problem of the artist, the contrast between the excitement of beauty and the demands of life; between, if you will, the ab- or super-normal poetic vision and the normal necessity of catching the eight o’clock bus. My theme is also the paradox that the vision could never live without the opposing necessity since it must be inspired by it.” — Thomas Mann, New York Times, 1955

Top of the Pops

2009-08-06T05:16:00.000-07:00

There's a nascent movement to start an independent conference on Contemporary Women's Poetry. This is a brilliant, necessary idea for all sorts of pedagocial, political, and situational reasons--women are currently writing some of the most charged work at the intersection of autobiography, authenticity, imagination and political reality. Another one of the reasons this seems a good idea to me is that all of the poets who shake my brain (the way it likes to be shook) are women (with a few exceptions). My top five in today's rankings: Field, Minnis, Moxley, Robertson, and Wagner.

Poetry and Authenticity

2009-07-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

As a follow up on my previous post about poetry and authenticity, see this very interesting essay Nora Khan published in the Daily Star.

biz blogging

2009-07-08T12:14:00.000-07:00

Most of my blogging time is going to work these days. See these posts for recent stuff. But Baudrillard's got me fired up. More to come on good ol' JB.

The Negative Ecstasy of Free

2009-07-08T11:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Chris Anderson, "The world is free, but I am not; the space is so saturated, the pressure of all which wants to be heard so strong that I am no longer capable of knowing what I want. I plunge into the negative ecstasy of [the Web]."

Love, Jean Baudrillard

What JB was really talking about was the "negative ecstasy" of radio. Re-reading Baudrillard's The Ecstasy of Communication 15 years after I first picked it up at Prairie Lights and nearly 25 years after it was first published, I'm amazed by how prescient Baudrillard is about terrorism, twitter, flarf and the costs of "free."

More to come.

Tag, You're It: Authenticity, Identity, and Play

2009-06-28T07:06:00.000-07:00

I am the last person on earth to discover music sites like Pandora and Last.fm, but that's only made me more evangelical. Listening to whatever music streams on the "Animal Collective channel" or the "Freakfolk channel" or the "Ambitious ambidextrous gluttons channel," I am completely absorbed and entertained thanks to the way tags, labels and channels can play to my mood. In my day job, I create, modify and apply tags in order to get the word out about all manner of books to the right people. Both the music and reader channels suggest that tags work, but not singly, only when considered in multiple. Steve Reich is both "classical" and "avant-garde," "minimalist" and "experimental." Emily Dickinson is both "lyrical" and "experimental," "Christian" and "heretical." No single label or collection of labels works across artists or even a single musician.

We're sold the idea that bands and authors are unified stable formations--whether it's a brand like The Pussycat Dolls or James Patterson constructed with marketing in mind, or more "authentic" acts like REM and John Updike. Recent concerns about Twitter and authenticity in social media suggest that this is not just a matter for big brands but also for the new mass anxiety around "The Brand of Me." To turn the perspective around: tags make us easier to market to, but the complex of our desires and thought-patterns are both infinite and evanescent. Art, music and literature are made created from a passing weather of personalities, situations, and materials.

Musicians themselves don't worry about the marketable myth of the authentic voice too much; they understand it's just part of the business (unless they're not fully recovered from outrageous success). But if ever an artist-type is prone to become trapped in this myth, it's the "poet." This is at least part of what's so exciting about Flarf and its place in the long, proud history of Conceptualism. But it's also what's frustrating about it. There is often an attitude around self-styled oppositional poetics that it alone is "authentic" in the way it demolishes the myth of authenticity. Writers, like musicians and artists, do have a style that has developed out of habit, circumstance and good old Emersonian "Genius," but it's still changeable. You don't have to take a sledge hammer to your style to play. You can both toy with authenticity and mean it, as Jennifer Moxley does in all her books, but particularly her most recent one, "Clampdown." Not to mention most anything Lisa Robertson writes.

New Sites for Wordies

2009-06-12T10:32:00.001-07:00

For all the concern that the Web = the death of reading, words still rule the roost. Witness that these two blazing sites that are pure porno for wordies: Wordle and Wordnik.

The picture is a wordcloud from my ms. in progress, Continuous Husband. "Moon" is just from one super-moony poem, btw. "Like," on the other hand, I'm worried about.

Googlism for: sack (via Miranda Field)

2009-06-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

sack is not a crime
sack is opening to your love
sack is the reason for 01/17/02
sack is a paper poke
sack is always a threat
sack is complete
sack is required
sack is flexible and tends to “round”
sack is big enough for several ferrets
sack is the answer to heavy duty sack demand
sack is made in the USA
sack is a simple rectangular bag sewn along the bottom and one side
sack is solid
sack is sealed with oil mixture
sack is a trademark of wham
sack is 4" x 10"
sack is sewed with cotton rope
sack is slipped upon the spout as shown in the picture the bottom rests upon a small table or platform which is so balanced that it slides down to the . . .
sack is completely absorbed
sack’s an attorney
sack is in the way
sack is placed
sack is for a specific child
sack is locked escape proof
sack is also good exercise
sack travels with professionals
sack is slightly more than half and measures 36" wide and 25" long
sack is attached to the hammock so you can never lose it
sack is reversible
sack is carried on the shoulders
sack is the statewide self
sack is a game whe'e dey ain't no winnas and no losahs
sack is something to think about
sack is so easy to sew
sack is a beautiful silent drive – der weg ist das ziel
sack is activated
sack is made of water
sack is 15" wide
sack is magic: inside it holds millions of

Immeasurable Present

2009-05-12T05:26:00.000-07:00

Where are the poems with people in them?

I mean friends. Where are your friends?

There’s the guy in the bar poems.

The postal worker hello poems.

Dude with Chihuahua poems,

Lady with scotch tape poems,

but the reached out to this one

and that one was there poems?

“Snaking through your trembling hideaway.”

“The bird-fueled shack purring like a rocket.”

“One white plate, three slices of chicken. ”

Present our measureless head—swathed in lichen,

such monsters as men shudder to catch.

I Yi Yi

2009-05-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

Reading Shantideva's Bodhisattva's Way of Life, I'm struck by the explanation of the self as a label which can be expanded or reduced. Thich Nhat Hanh gives the example of how the right hand cares for the left as its own without jealousy, blame or discrimination. Shantideva shows how each of us can expand our individual sense of the "I" through a specific practice of expanding the sense slowly and deliberately day by day starting with those closest to us (as the mother experiences her child's pain as her own) and then practicing with those we feel neutral to and then on to those we consider "enemies."

This practice rhymes with my own sense of how all artistic disciplines work. Music works this way most obviously -- you can feel it in any decent live performance, as what we call "music" is the activity of locating and harmonizing the feeling-tones of audience and players, how they relate and feed each other. But you can feel it too with a live play, or even simply in the interchange between a painting on the wall and the individual viewer. And with poetry, too, of course, the kind that works. A working poem harmonizes the experience of the poet and the reader/listener/audience. It's why Ta-Nehisi Coates responds so directly to a Frederick Seidel poem that might seem to oppose his own experience.

I, Lyric

2009-04-29T14:06:00.001-07:00

Western lyric -- at least as it's traced through Italian pastoral (Petrarch et al) through England (Wyatt and Surrey) and on through to our own cutting fragments of a moment -- sparks against the impossible question, "Who am I?"

It's a trail worth following, making not only for one of the richest ways through which to read some of the best contemporary poetry, but also for brilliant insights into how we construct a male sense of self in the Western tradition. I talked about it in this review in the Boston Review, and certainly expect to go back to it in future reviews, essays and blogs since I've been thinking about it off-and-on for 20 years now. But then this morning I had a few minutes of coffee and Jack Spicer, and came upon his perfect "Sheep Trails Are Fateful to Strangers" -- inserted here like a bookmark to indicate the ongoing conversation:

Dante would have blamed Beatrice
If she turned up alive in some local bordello
Or Newton gravity
If apples fell upward
What I mean is words
Turn mysteriously against those who use them
Hello says the apple
Both of us were object.

Day job

2009-04-24T09:12:00.001-07:00

My post about book marketing & earned media is up on "Inverso" (includes free bonus Robert Hass couplet): http://tinyurl.com/ctqnur

Poetry and ambition

2009-04-04T10:51:00.001-07:00

Nobody writes about sunburn, whipcracks and negligees quite like Chelsea Minnis. She's not so quietly building up a body of work that does more than any one line, image or poem can accomplish. It's an argument about what poetry can mean at play in a world somehow both plush and spikey with lousy beautiful crystal gods and boffo luxuries. She's a little bit like Jeff Koons, but like a Koons where the pornstar ceramics and silver balloon bunnies have edges that could actually cut you. She read last night with Joshua Beckman and Noelle Kocut (whose "Poem for the End of Time" will knock you flat with awe). They'd just come from a reading at West Point, which blows my mind even to consider. Chelsey read a poem from her new book that's a response (after the fact) to a cadet's question about her goals for her poems:

"This a chain between your thighs...

This is a freedom from achievement...

Writing a poem is like trying to do something, isn't it?

It's like trying to have an ungroveling feeling."

I'm taping those lines to my mind.

Even as our culture starts emerging in fits from the encompassing fever dream of pure capitalism, Chelsea's mode means revolution in perspective: Do nothing. Do nothing deeply. It's the advocacy of Auden's "Poetry makes nothing happen." It rhymes with 9th century Zen Master Linji's "Nowhere to go, nothing to do." And, for that matter, with his famous shout, "If you see Buddha on the road, kill him." It corresponds to Baudelaire's whores and punks and clouds of ennui. It kills all the awards, all the teaching jobs, all the publications. As they will, after all, die anyway, it also always emerges triumphant. We cannot abide it. We cannot live without it. Chelsea's genius is to say yes yes yes yes yes and again yes to the botox in botux capitalism--so the botulism works its way into your face, dear reader, until you can feel it. So pretty it hurts. That's the goal, soldier. Your tools are a whip, a silver platter, and some mean lipstick.

Listen

2009-04-03T06:23:00.000-07:00

The Academy of American Poets throws a big party every year where famous people put on a show for poetry. There are arguments about why this is mis-guided: Why silence living poets? Why this myopic insistence on American poets only? Why is every chosen poem so tenaciously mainstream? Do famous people need another platform? But to rail heedlessly against the event is to miss what it accomplishes. It puts a different shine on a little corner of the enterprise. It encourages someone who kinda liked poems once upon a time to return to it, even for an hour, to sit and listen to a form they'd long-ago forsaken as it became buried by the exigencies of daily living. But more than that, it allows the audience a different entry point for particular poems. At this same event a few years ago, Mark Morris read several Frank O'Hara poems, all of which I'd read for years and loved deeply. But Morris gave me something new. He lived in the poems--giving them a body they hadn't had before, now a stance, now a gait, fresh attitudes at every turn that I'd not encountered in the poems before, but remain with me. O'Hara's poems had lived in the context of my life before, but now they lived on their own too. And that new relationship, like a marriage between two attached and independent forces, is infinitely richer.

This year's event featured a similarly standout performance. But it wasn't of the reading of any particular poem; it was of the listening. As Jorie Graham began to read poems by James Wright, I was prepared to shut down: I'd adored the poems in my late teens but had since become convinced that Wright's poetics was a dead drag and not of any further interest to me. I figured I'd used the poems up. But as Jorie read "Hook" and then "The Old WPA Swimming Pool," Wynton Marsalis became electrified. Simply sitting on his folding chair behind her on the stage, Marsalis was immediately part of the experience of the poem in that room. His face opened. His shoulders swayed. His eyes widened and narrowed. I began to hear a blues in Wright where in the last decade or so I'd begun to hear mere self-indulgence. Steve Reich, reading just before Jorie, gave us this explicitly when he read out WC Williams: "Well, shall we think or listen?" Williams, Reich, Wright, Marsalis showing thinky me what it means to listen--and revealing, too, that Williams' question isn't really a conflict between mutually exclusive ways of being. That "or" is an accelerant for a chemical reaction between thinking and listening. Can your mind engage its moment in such a way that is pure listening?

Years ago, in a master class at my college, Max Roach stopped our best horn player after a solo. "You're playing a lot of interesting notes," he told the guy, "but you need to listen. Don't cram everything in just because it's your solo. Sometimes the most eloquent solo has no notes in it." Playing is listening. Writing is reading. How many readings I've attended, and given, but how many have I listened to?

[photo of Marsalis playing with Joan Baez (c) Brian Palmer]

Beckett's Dad

2009-03-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

I can't resist pointing to the lovely Joseph O'Neill review of Beckett's letters int he 4/5 NYTBR. The dad in me meets the writerly son in me here: "I can't write about him, I can ony walk the fields and climb the ditches after him." It's not online yet, but watch this space.

Filed By

2009-03-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

Just put my author page live on FiledBy. I'll be interested to see how this works--and who the real audience is for this kind of thing. With blogger et al. making it so easy to put your own page up, how is this service different from what already exists?

Disappearing Poetry

2009-03-12T08:16:00.000-07:00

I love this wild. vanishing-poetry user-generated campaign from the Academy of American Poets. I can't wait to see what comes out of it. The multi-media revolution has smiled upon the academy.

Kelp

2009-03-10T06:50:00.000-07:00

"How easy it is to lose oneself
in a kelp forest. Between
canopy leaves, sunlight filters thru
the water surface; nutrients
bring life where there'd other-
wise be barren sea; a vast eco-
system breathes. Each
being being
being's link."

"Kelp" from Jeffrey Yang's "An Aquarium." How it tends toward my longing: a poem moving through ideas but built entirely of one word, each repetition creating a different inflection and grammatical role in the word, movement in stasis, a la "being being being's."

Irresistible argument

2009-03-06T03:22:00.000-08:00

Can't resist the argument going on at the Poetry Foundation earlier this week. It's some of the most substantive back-and-forth about the importance and impact of -- and problems with -- negative reviewing. No age has been without its negative reviews, though ours feels more worked up about it than most that may be simply because we're so near-sighted. For famous example, the specious assertion that Keats was "killed" by lousy reviews. What's missing in the mix is the feeling that those negative reviews that do slam out the door every once in a while (from Logan or whoever) are doing so because the work means so much, has so much potentially at stake. If anyone has done that kind of review lately, it may be Michael Theune. So here's to more of that. Are you ready to take a poem to task from the long view, with an eye to building it up rather than lamenting its petty failures?

The point

2009-03-03T14:54:00.000-08:00

"The point of a poem is not its meaning... a poem must have a peculiarity, as if it was the momentarily complete idiom of that which prompts it..." --Wallace Stevens, May 16, 1945

Beautiful Island

2009-03-01T05:41:00.000-08:00

Fat weather tricks a man into getting out of bed when he’s thick around the middle brain, suggests a beautiful island where exists only exhaustion as streaked and wooly as his beard. Scan of the horizon suggests nothing more than rivers, mountains, clouds. Strike that: The chimney of an abandoned ice factory rises from trees in the middle distance issuing ghosts he takes for smoke. It doesn’t matter how far you go when you’re Irish there’s always another passport waiting across the sea, not to mention the ring and a lovely to wear it. Up you get then, man. Put the feed in your bag and spread light to all the chickens crowding round the slaughterhouse. “My kingdom is God’s kingdom, so why does it smell like garbage so?” Let’s be particular: Garlic and coffee grounds, cat litter, black avocado. My kingdom is a wet seed, you said. Wet seeds stink.

Describe whose reality?

2009-02-27T06:41:00.000-08:00

"We live in the description of the place and not the place itself..."

Wallace Stevens, April 4, 1945

Site update

2009-02-26T07:06:00.000-08:00

Check out my refreshed site. No major upgrades, more a freshening up for the coming spring. New links, including directing you here for news as it evolves.

tthompson.net

Old reviews never die

2009-02-24T05:17:00.000-08:00

Big print book reviews are dying left and right but online thinking burbles on... M. just found a two-year old review of The Pitch online from a review site I'd never heard of but definitely find worth further investigation (despite it's scary name--who wants to get reviewed by 'Cold Front'? yikes):

http://reviews.coldfrontmag.com/2006/10/the_pitch_by_to.html

Miranda Field

2009-02-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

Hot off the presses: a new website for my favorite poet, and a first site design by my amazing son, Willie. Check it out!