VRZHU bullets of pure love

Vrzhu Birthday Greetings

"Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Cry, and the world laughs at you."

"I don't disagree with people.  I merely point out how wrong they are."

***

Hwaet. It’s been a while since we’ve done birthday greetings here at Vrzhu, but today and tomorrow are jam-packed:

May 8, 1930 Gary Snyder
May 8, 1592 Francis Quarles
May 9, 1938 Charles Simic
May 9, 1895 Lucian Blaga
May 9, 1265 Dante Alighieri

So here’s our first installment: Gary Snyder

As For Poets
Gary Snyder

As for poets
The Earth Poets
Who write small poems,
Need help from no man.

The Air Poets
Play out the swiftest gales
And sometimes loll in the eddies.
Poem after poem,
Curling back on the same thrust.

At fifty below
Fuel oil won't flow
And propane stays in the tank.
Fire Poets
Burn absolute zero
Fossil love pumped back up.

The first
Water Poet
Stayed down six years.
He was covered with seaweed.
The life in his poem
Left millions of tiny
Different tracks
Criss-crossing through the mud.

With the Sun and Moon
In his belly,
The Space Poet
Sleeps.
No end to the sky--
But his poems,
Like wild geese,
Fly off the edge.

A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.

Why I Take Good Care Of My Macintosh Computer
Gary Snyder

Because it broods under it's hood like a perched falcon
Because it jumps like a skittish horse
    and sometimes throws me
Because it is pokey when cold
Because plastic is a sad, strong material
    that is charming to rodents
Because it is flighty
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers
Because it leaps forward and backward
    is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a rock
& it winks when it goes out,
& puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of
    gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods
    strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out
and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at
    "delete" so it teaches
    of impermanence and pain;
& because my computer and me are both brief
    in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me
    right inside the tent
And it goes with me out every morning
We fill up our baskets, get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

Riprap
Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
              placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
              in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
              riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
              straying planets,
These poems, people,
              lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
              and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
              four-dimensional
Game of Go.
              ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
              a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
              with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
              all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

I saw Gary Snyder at the Folger Library in 1995, and he was impressive.  I used two of my five words of Japanese, and he replied with about 20, which, or course, I didn’t know. We also talked about how we  liked the little moleskine notebooks. I wish we'd talked about fuseki, which is the pure poetry part of Go, but I was too shy.  In Go, the board is set so that the grain of the wood runs from one player to the other, rather than like a fence, dividing them.  This is to show that the two players are united in a common effort: the making of the game. The grain of a poem, too, should join the writer and the reader, from one to the other, in a united effort, the making of the poem.

Anyway, he was completely charming. During his reading he recounted talking to some high-ranking economist who said that oil will never reach $100 a barrel. To which Gary Snyder replied, I don’t know. It just hit $50 a barrel, didn’t it?

Here’s a news item:

May 8, 2008. NEW YORK - Gasoline and crude oil jumped to new records Thursday, with gas rising 3 cents to an average national price of nearly $3.65 a gallon and oil crossing $124 a barrel for the first time.

Happy birthday, Gary.

Daybook Entry for May 8, 2008

All around us the bodies rose out of the stone, crowded into groups, intertwined, or shattered into fragments, hinting at their shapes with a torso, a propped-up arm, a burst hip, a scabbed shard, always in warlike gestures, dodging, rebounding, attacking, shielding themselves, stretched high or crooked, some of them snuffed out, but with a freestanding, forward-pressing foot, a twisted back, the contour of a calf harnessed into a single common motion. A gigantic wrestling, emerging from the gray wall, recalling a perfection, sinking back into formlessness. A hand, stretching from the rough ground, ready to clutch, attached to the shoulder across empty surface, a barked face, with yawning cracks, a wide-open mouth, blankly gaping eyes, the face surrounded by the flowing locks of the beard, the tempestuous folds of a garment, everything close to its weathered end and close to its origin. ...

-Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, describing the gigantomachy frieze of the Pergamon Altar

Art is never a weapon in the sense of concrete political action. It only conveys activity, it communicates qualities which we have to detect in ourselves. We are the ones who, upon closing in on a work of art, liberate the powers confined within. Without our ability to ingest, our own ability to think, the work remains powerless. However, with our attentiveness we transpose the latent vision into real, perceptible deeds.

-Peter Weiss, Notebooks

A-hem

Maybe it's the season, but I find myself becoming allergic to the trope "this poem is just prose broken up into lines." It seems to crop up on an irregular basis all over the place. Behind it I often catch the faint whiff of satisfaction at having exposed an imposter, the Emperor's new clothes.  And it crops up in discussions of what is "legitimately" poetry and what is not as a kind of Quod Erat Demonstratum -- the opponent is supposed to deflate in shame. Smug, smug smug.

It does, of course, mean absolutely nothing. It's sophistry and nonsense. It's like emptying all the gas and oil from a car, and, when it won't start, saying "Ah-ha, I told you this isn't really a car." Or taking the wings off a plane, crashing it, and saying "You see? Man was not meant to fly."

But the most cogent dismantling of this hobgoblin is something I have already posted here a while ago. I urge you to print it out and have it put on an index card to hand out when the pernicious "It's not poetry, it's cut-up prose" poltergeist shows up:

The poet is charged with failing to do something that he never intended. What the poet intended was for the reader to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, the divisions of the lines where they were placed, not for the reader to guess, from the order of the words alone, i.e., a prose paragraph, where the lines of verse should end. For writing to be read as lines of verse, all that is necessary is for the poet to indicate that they should be read so. If you aren't willing to submit to the poet's judgment, you needn't look or listen. There is no need to explain your unwillingness by trying to show a relationship between divisions of writing into verse-lines and the kind of language the poet is using.

–Louis Simpson, The Poetic Line: A Symposium in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

And from the same book, this:

The line is a unit of rhythm. The poet is moved by impulses of rhythm which he expresses in lines of verse. Impulse determines where each line breaks, and the impulse of the poem as a whole determines the look of the poem on the page or its sound in the air.

–Sandra McPherson, The Poetic Line: A Symposium in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Of course, there are kazillion ways for a poem to fail, but, really, there are much more important things to talk about, even in the world of poetry.

vrzhu tuesday

JUST

In case you missed it, May is National Slushpile Awareness Month.  This is in addition to the month of May also being Victims of National Poetry Month Month.  Here at the Vrzhu Research Bureau we realize the serious dangers inherent in being exposed to National Poetry Month, and want to contribute to the alleviation of the pain and suffering caused by NPM in any small way we can.

ALSO

The Virginia Quarterly Review blog seems to be participating in National Slushpile Awareness Month (NSAM) with these entries, and we applaud their efforts.

And stop by "101 reasons to stop writing," the source of the de-inspirational poster at the beginning of this post and an excellent site which specializes in curing writers of their addiction.  The site is dedicated particularly to fiction writers. We're wondering if there's a similar site for those who refuse to use an entire sheet of paper to it's fullest potential. Let us know.

ON THE OTHER HAND

There's a very nice interview with Reb Livingston here that addresses eloquently the DIY poetry movement:

I no longer feel beholden to other publishers’ whims and circumstances. I know how to put together a book. There’s no reason I should spend hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars in contests and reading fees for something I can do myself.

NOW

Regarding Victims of National Poetry Month Month, first of all, don't panic. Regular readers of poetry, poets themselves, and other poetry aficionados are for the most part immune to the deleterious effects of Poetry Exposure.  If you fall into that category, you have no doubt built up a resistance to the sometimes alarming mental and physical injuries of reading or hearing poetry.  If you have increased your normal intake of poetry during National Poetry Month, you may experience some slight aftereffects, such as tingling in the extremities, changes in your visual field (unusual acuity or blurring), and mild depression or melancholia.  These will pass as the poetry is flushed from your system and memory.

For poetry civilians, those with little or no experience of poetry, who compromise the great majority of the populace, even a passing exposure to poetry can be dangerous. And the risk of a greater intake during National Poetry Month is very high indeed. 

Fortunately, even severe exposure to poetry is rarely fatal, and clinical studies have shown that poetry-related afflictions are not permanent. Full recovery, though slow, can be expected.

TO HELP

poetry civilians self-diagnose whether they have been exposed to poetry, or are suffering the effects of Poetry Exposure, the Vrzhu Research Bureau is here providing the following brief, and non-technical, guide to the symptoms of PE, as a PSA.

Types of Poetry Exposure

Poetry Exposure is categorized into first-, second-, or third-degree exposures, depending on the extent, duration, and depth of the incident.

First-degree exposure

First-degree exposure, also called second-hand poetry exposure, is the mildest of the three, and is limited to either the top layer of, or just below, conscious recognition. First degree exposure results from accidental, brief encounters with poetry, such as:

• Poems posted in public transportation areas or on public transportation conveyances, such as subways or buses
• Poems inscribed, or otherwise visible, in public settings, or on common objects such as benches, walls, etc.
• Casual or unconscious viewing while sitting or standing in proximity to someone reading a poetry book, or journal
• Other brief visual or aural exposures to poetry

Symptoms: temporary boredom, listlessness.

Second-degree exposure

Second-degree exposure is more serious and involves the conscious or active absorption of at least one whole poem. This exposure is often the result of:

• A poem sent by e-mail, text-messaged, or directly read to the victim
• A whole poem in an otherwise innocuous magazine, newspaper or other print medium
• A poem heard on the radio or the television, or as part of an otherwise entertaining movie.

Symptoms: irritability, annoyance, disgust

Third-degree exposure

Third-degree exposure is the most serious type and involves prolonged exposure to more than poem and retention of the event in the consciousness or memory for an extended period. Such exposure happens:

• At poetry readings, attended voluntarily or involuntarily; or accidentally, as when a poetry reading starts in an otherwise healthy bookstore.
• When given a poetry book as a “gift”
• In classroom lectures, seminars and discussions involving English, world literature, humanities and other related subjects.

Symptoms: shock, tremors, catatonia

saturday vrzhutube

Clare and the reasons:

4D man is indestructible. What is up with this guy's eyes?