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Part One

I was talking to an astute poet and poetry reader and found myself saying that I had no idea how to critique or suggest improvements or point out weaknesses in a prose poem.

It's not that I don't like PP's. I like them a lot. But I'm hard pressed to say what unites them other than  (1) brevity and (2) no line breaks.  Even between a couple of the two earliest  prose poem writers, what they are doing seems pretty different in what we call their prose poems: Baudelaire and Rimbaud. B's twenty poems in prose and R's illuminations are strikingly different.

And I'm not trying to be some kind of taxonomic calvinist here.  I say: yes, prose poems are poetry. Why the hell not? Big tent, etc.

But if you ask me how can I make this prose poem better? I would have no idea what to say.  All my usual diagnostic tools are of no use. If it was a poem with line breaks I could say that a line seems slack, a rhythm off, a set up doesn't come off, word choice, diction, meter, rhyme, constraint, etc.  But it's not. I guess I could read it for whether it fulfills the requirements of fiction, or prose: a single effect, set up, pay off, whatever. But this is admitting defeat. 

From the name, prose poems should share characteristics of both, and also have some elements missing from each category.  I think they were originally called poems in prose, which confuses me, and the only thing I can think of is Yeats writing out prose drafts of the poems he was planning to write.  Though I doubt those would qualify and are more like storyboards -- the final product is considerably different.

Maybe it's because I don't and haven't read (or written) drafts of fiction with the intent of workshopping them. Maybe those of you have done both can enlighten me: what do you look for in a prose poem when you're reading it critically? It becomes even more confusing when you consider something like flash fiction or short short fiction which has the nearly the same length requirements and occupies the same habitat as prose poems. 

And of course shall we not say there are some things that are clearly poetry and some things that are clearly not?

Yes, though I think of these things as centered in the field of poetry or prose and not the periphery. My image has always been that the boundaries of poetry are very fuzzy indeed, spectral in the sense of continual gradations.  Presses such as Rose Metal Press work these boundaries with a lot of success (Claudia Smith's absolutely brilliant The Sky is a Well). And maybe prose poems are as diverse in their relationship to poetry as other kinds of poetry are, nu? But. Who are we to judge?

Part Two

A common trope in writing about poetry is to say something to the effect of "The Cheesequake Renaissance School's first generation was Ginsbery, Ashburg, Aharo, and Mandelbrot. However their poetries were diverse and putting them in the same school was geographically convenient, but does not mean that their poems looked, read, or sounded the same," or "most of the poets who we think of as Idiolalia Poets would deny that they write Idiolalic poems."

In other verbs, we, on the one hand, parse various movements, schools or groups of poetry, and then, on the other hand, are quick to make apologies for including any particular poet in one of them, or, on the third hand, poets pegged in this or that group protest [vociferously] that they are NOT part of that group.

Which is odd. Now some poetry genres put more emphasis on the community and shared assumptions while other designations make a big deal out how each poet is an individual, pursuing and writing her own truths.  And this is largely an ideological divide. But I've noticed that the same begging off happens in both kind of groups. An alternative [defensive] symptom of this is something like "How could you lump together poets as diverse as Collinsky, Gluckins, Pinn, Dunic, and Gieuaoa?"  This when some else is doing the pigeonholing.

But both the cutting out from the herd in naming affinitative groups (The Parabolic Poets, The Pre-Derrieres) and the infinitely divisible exceptionalism of each particular poet are wrong.

And to correct this we need only point to the most successful taxonomic system of all time: Linnean classification.

Why would we apply this sort of system to poetry?

First, it allows for both similarity and difference. We do not argue that because finches look and behave differently than titmouses that they are not both passerines, or that such groupings are for convenience only. This way poets can both belong to and be separate from an associated group in the way that individual species differ from other members of a phylum.

In biological classification, groups diverge through evolution and promulgate by branching (a hierarchical tree).

I believe tradition can serve a similar purpose for poetry.  Even a break from a particular tradition or practice is tied to that tradition or practice.

A key concept in Linnean classification is that species change, arise and die out over time in the context of particular environments, but that none of this is progressive as such.  There is no pinnacle of evolution, only continual change.

And there is room for disagreement and improvement of how the classification works. So the system is not rigid.

So a cladistic analysis of poetry and poetic affinities is needed.

To be continued . . .

Also coming up on Vrzhu Bullets of Love in the coming weeks:

A second installment of Twofer Reviews - reviews of two poetry books by an author because we never got around to either before.

News from the Vrzhu Research Bureau.

An astounding new feature: Recipe vs Poem

And a face off between two classic rival anthologies!

Coming soon. . . .

To our faithful reader:

We are working feverishly on our regular Tuesday blog, which requires heroic amounts of research, analysis and baksheesh. It will be up by 11:59 PM today.  Stay tuned . . .

Saturday Vrzhutube

Some films of music by Gyorgi Ligeti accent on the first syllable rather than the second as in Italian.  Certain photos of Ligeti make him look a little like Klaus Kinski. Of course, Werner Herzog never planned to blow up the apartment building where Ligeti was living, so I suspect the similarity ends there.

Katyn - Wajda - Herbert

I was lucky enough (thank you, Bob) to see Andrzei Wajda's Katyn at this showing of the film here in the United States.  I say this because (1) the movie is heart-rending, and (2) no one has picked it up for American distribution.

If you don’t know, it’s about the Soviet (from the east)  and German (from the west) invasions of Poland in September 1939, the Red Army's subsequent capture, imprisonment, and murder of some 20,000 Polish officers [mostly] in the Katyn forests in Russia, and the aftermath through just past the end of World War II.

The officers, who were Poland’s intelligentsia – doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, merchants –were interrogated and the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) decided that they were “hardened and uncompromising enemies of the Soviet authority” as it says in the order from Stalin to have them shot. 

When the mass graves were discovered, the Nazis tried to use it as propaganda against Russia. In many cases the only identifiable evidence on the bodies were the brass buttons of the officers’ coats. When Russia retook Poland towards the end of the war, the Soviets fabricated evidence (including moving the date from 1940 to 1941) to have the massacre blamed on Germany. The movie is always about these twinned events: the Katyn Massacre and the Katyn Lie. The former lasted through the spring of 1940. The latter, the lie, lasted from 1943 through 1990.

These are the bare historical events surrounding the film. But the film concentrates, as Wajda says,  on “a family separated forever, about great illusions and the brutal truth about the Katyn crime. In a word, a film about individual suffering, which evokes images of much greater emotional content than naked historical facts. A film that shows the terrible truth that hurts, whose characters are not the murdered officers, but women who await their return every day, every hour, suffering inhuman uncertainty. Loyal and unshaken, convinced that it was only enough to open the door to see the long awaited man at it as the tragedy of Katyn concerns those who live and lived then.”

Katyn has tremendous force, and I can’t imagine the impact it has made on Polish audiences, though this article discusses its effect in Poland. At the film I sat next to a Polish graduate student. She crossed herself several times during the slaughter, and was somber and silent afterwards, as was most everyone.

Wadja does not engage in any innovative storytelling, but the stories are woven together masterfully. There is a very moving moment at the end that would never be allowed in an American film.  The music was written for the film by Krzysztof Penderecki and I think adds to without replacing (as in many of our movies) the thrust of what Wadja is doing.  At the end, after the last scene -- bulldozers pushing dirt in and over the bodies in a mass grave -- the screen goes black for 2 or 3 minutes while a choral piece (a requiem?) played. And then we left the theater.

One thing that shapes most works of art is tradition – all the poems that came before the poem being written.  I don’t think there’s necessarily any anxiety involved – think of the tradition as loam where the poem roots itself, or a stream that runs over the poem affecting its shape the way water can shape stones.

One thing major artists can earn is the ability to reflect back on their previous work in their current work. Yeats does this, as does Pound. Wajda refers back in several places in Katyn, particularly to his earlier peak movie, Ashes and Diamonds. Here are two examples:

Towards the beginning of Katyn, where the POWs are gathered outside a church, the camera pass by a crucifix with just one arm hanging, and in the same scene the rest of the Christ figure is shown being hidden under officer’s coats. This rhymes with probably the most famous shot in Ashes And Diamonds – an abandoned church with a dislodged crucifix dangling upside down.

In a more complicated way, there’s a vignette (there are several woven into the film) that refers back to Ashes And Diamonds as a whole.

In Katyn, a young resistance fighter is applying to go back to school. But his curriculum vitae contains a reference to the 1940 massacre. He’s asked to change it, he refuses, and, leaving the school, rips down a pro-soviet poster. He’s chased by the police who see this, and dies when accidentally hit by a car.

This short chapter in Katyn reflects in compressed form the whole movement of Ashes and Diamonds.

In Ashes And Diamonds, Zbigniew Cybulski (who has charisma to spare) is a young member of the resistance assigned to assassinate a fatherly Polish communist official just at the end of WWII. He’s deeply conflicted, torn between the brutality he has learned and is ordered to use, and the normal life that seems to be re-asserting itself. In the end he kills the communist official and then has an accidental, unrelated run in with two soldiers who wound him. He dies curled in a fetal position in a field of refuse.

The arc of both the incident in Katyn, and in Ashes & Diamonds are almost identical: a resistance fighter whose youth is stolen by the war, the possibility of a normal, peaceful life, a romance that holds out that same hope, then an act that erases that possibility and accelerates the hero to his death.

But the difference between the two is crucial. Katyn opens up what the true cause of the tragedy is: the political oppression that permeates society everywhere, but also enters each individual, twisting in each heart relentlessly.

Unfortunately this all sounds didactic – which the movie is not in the slightest.

Wajda says in an interview: “"The best medicine, the best remedy for political and social problems is to show them and to speak truly about them. So, I hope that it's going to soothe people because we have finally shown the truth."  Wounds heal only when they are allowed to be shown.

By the way, at the time there was evidence and reports in both the U.S. and Britain that the Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre.  These were suppressed so as not to damage our and Britain’s relationship with the USSR as an ally against the Axis.  Hm, ignoring evidence and reports, huh? Perhaps every country needs a little truth and reconciliation.

When asked whether he would prefer the freedom of Western film-making to the artistic constraints of the Eastern bloc, Wajda replied that in the Eastern bloc film-making is “dangerous, but there are ways to get  around political censorship. There are no ways to get around the censorship of money that you have in the west, which is much stronger.”

You must see this movie after it wins the Oscar (sorry, Persepolis, you weren’t even nominated and you deserve one, too), and opens in the theaters of free America.

Youtube clips here, here, here, and here.

And here’s a poem:

Buttons
Zbigniew Herbert

Only the pertinacious buttons
have endured death, witnesses of crime
surfaced from the depths
as the only monument on their grave

they are to witness God will count
and take pity on them
yet how can they resurrect body
being a sticky element of the soil

a bird flew by a cloud is sailing
a leaf is falling mallow sprouting
and there’s silence on high
and the Smolensk forest is steaming fog

only the pertinacious buttons
a powerful voice of silenced choirs
only the pertinacious buttons
of coats and uniforms.

In memory of Captain Edward Herbert

Tuesday Chronicle

Oy, lots and lots of ground to cover this week. I must make good on my promise to finish off "Poetry and Amino Acids", some news about Vrzhu authors, and with luck a little dissection of some phrases. You'd think, with Monday being a holiday celebrating Rutherford B. Hayes, Millard Fillmore, and, greatest of all, James K. Polk, that I'd be completely assured of being able to make a fulsome and satisfying post. However, Monday included:

--finishing Endless Things, the last part in John Crowley's Aegypt series, though it is really one big book

--instructing nephew in Go: some tesuji ("there is death in the hane"), some fuseki, a handicap game

--nap

--dinner to include broccoli raab with sundried tomatoes and pignoli.

So we'll see what we can git to, though some of what needs to show up here is, by blog standards, old, old news -- I'm just not fast enough on my feet for the response time standards of the blogosphere. We'll see how I feel, and if any of this falls into the tedia of something like yesterday's TV dinner (you ate the apple crisp first, didn't you), then feel free to skip ahead or out altogether.

BUT not before this Important News:

Vrzhu author, Walt Whitman expert, and all around poet around town, Kim Roberts, guest blogs here on the submitting of work to journals, and suggests some things to make it less of a slog.

The second part of an interview with Vrzhu author, raconteur and thoughtful respondent, Hiram Larew here (first part here) -- this is really a wonderful interview -- and a profile of Mr. Larew here (which was pointed out in the best selling Silliman's Blog Here).

And Now:

The Future Of Poetry/Poetry Of The Future: markets, contests, DIY, constraints, and Amino Acids Part Two

Synthetic Genome: Signed, Sealed, Decoded

You were expecting poetry, perhaps? The secret messages hidden in J. Craig Venter’s synthetic bacterial genome have now been revealed. They are Dr. Venter’s name, and that of his research institute and co-workers.

How does poetry get out into the world? We discussed this briefly here. For manuscripts, there are contests, or some sort of Do It Yourself publishing.

Much the same problem inhabits publishing or otherwise getting poems out there separately.  You can submit to journals, or find some venue of your own. Richard Brautigan, I believe, used to sell his on the street corner in San Francisco.  There are increasing numbers of poets who put their poems up on their blogs or other internet space.

And is goes without saying that regard for these methods toggles back and forth from legitimate to substandard/vanity, from totalitarian art vice grips to fawning & begging.

Poets are always interested in two things: ways of writing poetry (broadly, constraints) and places for their poetry to be read. For publication in a literary journal, there is the external constraint of the preferences of the editors/journal on the kind of poem accepted, and these can be either explicit or inchoate.

The internet has made a significant expansion of poetry's availability and the ecosystem of poems possible, not just self-publishing but also online journals, online submissions, and even search engines as generators of poems.

But where will the next poetry market be?

The answer is . . . inside!

but, Vrzhu, you ask, where is this inside whereof you speak?

The article up above is the clue. The Venter Institute has engineered the complete DNA of a bacterium.  Proof of this is in certain "watermarks" embedded in the bacterium's DNA, which use the call letters for amino acids to spell out words.

And here we find both our market and our constraint.  When genome technology is sufficiently commonplace, poets will be able to publish their poems as part of the DNA of bacteria! Poetry bookstores could become poetry tubestores where you could go and buy a petri dish of W. S. Merwin, or a prepared slide of John Ashbery. The old guard will complain about the innovative experimentalists flooding the market with non-narrative, anti-lyric spirochetes. Meanwhile, in winter months we'll catch a bad case of the "flarfs."

Here's the constraint. Dr. Margaret Oakley Dayhoff, the originator of bioinformatics, invented the one letter code for the amino acids that encode DNA. The  letters of the alphabet missing from the amino acid code provide the lipogrammic constraint for using this method of publishing. Here's a list of the amino acids and the letters with no amino acidic referent:

A - Alanine
B - Asparagine
C - Cysteine
D - Aspartic Acid
E - Glutamic Acid
F - Phenylalanine
G - Glycine
H - Histidine
I - Isoleucine
J - -
K - Lysine
L - Leucine
M - Methionine
N - Asparagine
O - -
P - Proline
Q - Glutamine
R - Arginine
S - Serine
T - Threonine
U - -
V - Valine
W - Tryptophan
X - -
Y –Tyrosine
Z - Glutamine

Everyone, exciting opportunities await you in the dynamic new field of Synthetic Biopoetics!

So Late to the Party That There's Only Ritz Crackers and Tonic Water Left -or- On the So-Called Absolute Materiality of the Signifier.

There's been a lively scrum all over the poetical blogosphere the last couple of weeks about what is and what is not meant by the term "post-avant."  This post started the conflagration, which was taken up here, here, here and here. Among other places. Chris Tonelli sums it up nicely and even-handedly at the Pshares blog (does that "ps" in Pshares stand for some sort of psychic ability?! If so, Chris puts the "chic" in "psychic").

At the same time, there was a response here and here to a Poetry Foundation questionnaire.

For the most part, I like the answers given by the esteemed Ron Silliman, though I doubt that the problem with teaching reading is an over-emphasis on the instrumentality of language.  But certainly poetry-phobia is inculcated in most schools.

But this phrase disturbed me:

". . . the absolute materiality of the signifier, the physicality of sound and of the graphic letter, is the one secret shared by all poets to which nonreaders of poetry seem literally clueless."

I know I'm reading too much into this, because, as we all know, poets are and must be aware of the materiality of words -- their sound and look -- as integral to the art of poetry, though of course there are varying degrees of this. But there is no "absolute" materiality of the signifier.  There's always a balancing act between foregrounding the word's thinghood or the word's meaning-containment.

To be continued . . .

saturday vids

Okay, vid kids, this week, three Pink Martinis, next week an all Ligeti program.  Promise.

Lynx

Some links to some reviews and stuff

Paul Claudel and Victor Segalen reviewed here.

In high school because I was crushing on the French Surrealists, I thought I really should know and read Claudel.  Never happened.

"L'homme et la femme sont images de Dieu dans leur corps et dans leur âme. Quand donc l'homme et la femme s'aiment, c'est une image de Dieu qui aime une autre image de Dieu".

Paul Claudel

Stephen Burt on Robert Creeley: What Life Says to Us.

Man, I got to get me some more better Creeley.

The Rain

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Robert Creeley

H. Larew Interview, but Our Regular Tuesday Posting

will be slightly postponed this week. Fighting off some kind of headache, dear readers. Please read this insightful interview with Vrzhu poet Hiram Larew at the Weirding Words site.  I will complete last week's post:

"The Future Of Poetry/Poetry Of The Future: markets, contests, DIY, constraints, and Amino Acids"

when I am once again in full possession of my faculties, or as full as it gets.  Here's a couple or threesome of quotes to tide you o'er:

This condition humaine concerns the awareness of finitude, of Man being “hemmed in”. Elsewhere, I claimed that this condition humaine underlies not only religion and religious poetry, but is at the roots of most poetry.

One of the basic assumptions of the present work is that in poetry adaptation mechanisms are put to aesthetic use. Emotion and wit are just such adaptation mechanisms, devised for coping with rapidly changing realities. Accordingly, in Western literature, there are two major poetic traditions, that of “high-seriousness”, and the “line of wit”. Romanticism and most kinds of mysticism typically exploit “high-serious” emotions; the various kinds of mannerism, that is, precieux and metaphysical poetry, absurd drama, and some kinds of modernism, exploit various degrees of wit. While precieux poetry uses wit playfully,most of the other kinds of mannerism have recourse to wit as a device for coping with the complexities of a world run wild, where sudden and fast readjustments are required. The particular effect of such literature arises from the witty treatment of extremely grave issues. In such instances, rather than treating those grave issues lightly, wit assumes their gravity.

-Reuven Tsur, On the Shore of Nothingness : A Study in Cognitive Poetics

Ideology is only secondarily a doctrine, or any kind of coherent idea. Primarily it is the replacement of thought by custom. People do not read poetry, for example, because people do not read poetry; it does not matter how clear that poetry is. Or rather, clarity and accessibility are a function of context; and because few institutions in our society offer them, few clients of those institutions will recognize or value them. “It was not that they didn’t understand what he was telling them,” wrote Enzenberger in The Sinking of the Titanic. “They didn’t understand him.”

–Frederick Pollack, “Poetry and Politics”

Men feared witches and burned women.

-Judge Louis Brandeis

A Free Contest? Hallelujah!

The Open Door Project
Deadline: March 1, 2008

A five-day publishing introduction intensive in New York City-- including a series of lunches with literary agents, book editors, and other publishing figures, a public reading, and a private cocktail reception with New York's writing community will be awarded to the winner of the first Open Door Project fiction competition.

The contest is open to gay men writing fiction with queer content who have not yet published a book of fiction. Accommodations and transportation will be provided to an out of town winner. Judges include Christopher Bram, Alexander Chee, Samuel R. Delany, Dennis Cooper, Robert Gluck, E. Lynn Harris, Scott Heim, Andrew Holleran, David Leavitt, Stephen McCauley, Dale Peck, and John Weir.

Submit stories or stand-alone novel excerpts of up to 8,000 words by March 1, 2008. A winner will be announced in late spring. There is no entry fee. Submissions should be mailed to:

Don Weise, Open Door Project
c/o Oscar Wilde Bookshop
15 Christopher St
New York, NY 10014

Please do not contact the bookstore for information about the Open Door Project. Queries can be sent to dweised@aol.com. No queries confirming receipt or status of submissions please.

Obama's real Poetry

I was recently wondering who the likely candidates would choose to read poetry at their inaugurals.  No one seemed to know much more than that the Clintons were going with Maya Angelou (of "a rock, a river, a tree") again.

Well, it turns out Obama is himself an amateur poet -- and I don't mean just his poetic oratory either.

Here's one from the Senator's student days when he was 19.  Titled "Pop", it's about his grandfather:

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me.

Ben MacIntyre of the London Times Online writes:

Obama's poetry, as evidenced by two poems he wrote for a college magazine at the age of 19, is actually surprisingly good. Indeed, he may be the best amateur poet to run for president since Abraham Lincoln, which is saying quite a lot.

Now reading this makes me wonder anew of who he'd choose to read at his inaugural? 
Any ideas of who his poetry might be reminiscent of who Obama would commission a poem from?
I also wonder if he still writes and/or reads poetry?  Could be promising.