VRZHU bullets of pure love

Vrzhu tuesday

Vrzhu Press . . . In The News!!

Vrzhu Author Kim Roberts's The Kimnama is reviewed in the latest ish of Ghoti Magazine.  Oddly enough, Ghoti Magazine is not devoted to George Bernard Shaw studies.

What I want right now

I want some of you creative types to do something with these (see below) right now. The name of your new journal, a crown of sonnets, I don't care what.

Pfeffer's Flamboyant Cuttlefish

 

Quokka

 

Numbat

Navanax

Various

There's a nice "this I believe" over at the Plan B Press blog.  I have a lot of admiration for this outfit and their inherent integrity.

Some random notes from the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference, which I attended this past weekend:

• One of the speakers saying that F. Scott was a better writer than Ernest Hemingway. Well, he is.
• Elmore Leonard talking about reading F. Scott when he [Leonard] was starting out in writing: He used a lot of words.
• Leonard clearly more comfortable reading from one of his books (Killshock) than speaking about F. Scott Fitzgerald.
• Gotta check out the new issue of Gargoyle.
• Katherine Smith is a class act. Buy her book of poetry, Argument by Design.
• If you're at a multi-author book signing, sitting between two writers whose books are selling like hotcakes, it has no observable effect on the sales (lack of) of your books, even if, at some point, you say loudly to yourself: "My poetry chapbook is more goddamned hardboiled than any five best-selling mystery novels put together, unh."
• The delusion (scourge) that There's Money To Be Made In Poetry has not been completely eradicated.
• Though I wish, when crushing these misinformed human's hopes, I had said: "Wait! Except for conceptual poetry. That stuff is pulling in the benjamins! It's like the crack cocaine of poetry!"
  

Saturday Spooky Vrzhu

In honor of Halloween

1. Our Promise to You 2. My Failure 3. %!&*)$!#%^*&%#@$&^%#!!!!

See special important message of importance below the fold, honorable visitors!

***

Every once in a while, I feel the need to let all y'all know my personal commitment to the teeming masses who depend on this blog as lifeline, companion, and ongoing non-linear soap opera (ish).

I pledge:

• to provide content of some sort every Tuesday, or apologize abjectly for the absence thereof.
• to put up a video of some sort every Saturday.

Or your Monet back.

***

This article [manifesto? Nooo, I suppose not] by Andrew Sullivan--Why I Blog--makes me realize that, as a blogger, I’m a failure.  I’m a blogtaster.  Let’s check off the criteria for what a blog does, extracted from Sullivan's very thoughtful essay:

• the spontaneous expression of instant thought
• writing about yourself
• rewards brevity and immediacy
• balance itself between a writer’s own take on the world and others
• intimate, improvisational, and individual

I'm not sure I can cop to any of this. I watch hot topics with hundreds of comments whiz by, and current events entering the foggy crevasse of history like lemmings at a rock festival. And me? I’m an riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma hiding behind a conundrum.  With a marshmallow center!

Alas, too much water over the bridge, too many years of subterfuge, exile, silence, cunning, take-out Chinese food. 

You’ll just have to bear with me.

***

The theme of the last Brookland Poetry Series was payback poems, blue poems, and curse poems.

The reading was successful with poems such as this:

Dove in the Arch

Cursed!
be the father of the bride
of the blacksmith who forged the iron for the axe
with which the woodsman hacked down the oak
from which the bed was carved
in which was conceived the great-grandfather
of the man who was driving the carriage
in which your mother met your father.

Robert Desnos, trans. William Kulik, from The Voice - Selected Poems of Robert Desnos

And this (from the Irish):

A Shrewish, Barren, Bony, Nosey Servant

A shrewish, barren, bony, nosey servant
refused me when my throat was parched in crisis.
May a phantom fly her starving over the sea,
the bloodless midget that wouldn't attend my thirst.

If I cursed her crime and herself, she'd learn her lesson.
The couple she serves would give me a cask on credit
but she growled at me in anger, and the beer nearby.
May the King of Glory not leave long at her barrels.

A rusty little boiling with a musicless mouth,
She hurled our with insult through the porch.
The Law requires I gloss over her pedigree
--but little the harm if she bore a cat to a ghost.

She's a club-footed slut and not a woman at all,
with the barrenest face you would meet on the open road,
and certain to be a fool to the end of the world.
May she drop her dung down stupidly into the porridge!

-Daibhi O Bruadair, trans. Thomas Kinsella, from Au Duanaire - And Irish Anthology -- Poets of the Dispossessed

Coincidently, this article by Steve Pinker (which I agree with, Steve, in case you were wondering) appeared (also in the Atlantic). All this got me “thinking” about one of the topics that pops up periodically on poetry blogs: the use of obscenities in [your/my/one's] poetry.

I’ve seen this issue bandied about in a “do you use obscenities in your poems and, if so, how” kind of way.  But this approach is a little limited.  I’d like to see a broader, and more rigorous, exploration of the issue.  WIth questions such as:

• What is the function and behavior of obscene words in poems?
• Does the use of obscenity in poems vary by the type of poetry, how does it vary and why does it vary?
• What is the stance of so-called “post-avant” poetry towards obscenity? Does it differ from the approach to language in general?
• More generally, how does a poet’s conception of poetry affect the use of “bad “ words.  For example, if you conceive of poetry has “elevated or heightened speech,” does make it less possible to use obscene words, or limit their use in some way?
• Is there any theory or separate aspect of theory or poetics that covers the use of obscenity?
• Are there generational differences, besides the obvious ones? And, if so, does this meaen that there “voices” in poetry now that weren’t possible before (e.g., the amazing Jennifer Knox)?
• What are the axes along which the use of obscene words in poems lie? Serious/Funny, angry/ironic, etc.? Examples? Explanations?
• Does this use of obscenity in poetry differ from its use in everyday speech? Are there class issues here?
• Is there a difference among various obscene words and their use in poems?
• Given the etymology of the word “obscene,” could you argue that obscene words should be excluded from poetry, in the same way that violence in Greek plays was always offstage, or hidden?

This is a lot of questions, and, along with these questions, I have some other research or thinking I’d like to see around this topic. 

For example, it’s been along time since I’ve read Ron Silliman’s Ketjak, but I don’t remember any words that could be classified as obscene in it. If this is true (you’re welcome to confirm and I encourage it), then why? If there are obscenities in the text, why don’t I remember them? Does it have something to do with the poem’s (broadly speaking) aesthetic?

I have similar questions for the work of John Ashbery. I think he uses obscenities rarely, if at all.  And when he does (if he does), are the words diffused or shifted somehow away from their alleged obsceneness? Same questions for the work of Billy Collins (at, as it were, the other end of the spectrum), Geoffrey Hill, and numerous other poets with a significant oeuvre.

There are other branches to this discussion.  Peter Green’s recent translation of the poems of Catullus is pretty good, better than I thought at first, but his translation of the notorious (I guess) Catullus 16 is pretty toothless. Why? Blank clearly knows what Latin words like irrambo and  XXX literally mean, so why join the ranks of defang translations of the poem?  And, more generally, what are the issues around obscene words in poems and translations.  I imagine the nuance of meaning here is even more pointed (if that’s possible) than with “regular” language.  How does the status of the obscene word in one language (or culture!) affect the translation into an other language, and culture.  For instance, if the word “frog-eater” is the worst thing you can call a male in language A, how do you translate that into language B? Do you use the worst word to call a male in Language B, or do you translate the literal meaning—eater of frogs—from language B, and does this vary by poem or word? Why?

I realize this is a pretty small topic.  But perhaps it would shed light on larger issues, but I’m also interested in things like:

• What’s your favorite poem with obscene words in it?
• What’s your favorite obscenity?
• What do you think the worst word is?
• What the most creative/original obscene word or phrase you know?

There’s more, of course. Later. Perhaps.

-----------------------------------------------THE FOLD-----------------------------------------------

Where I'll be this Saturday. Oh, Elmore Leonard will be there too, etc., etc.

Tuesday Vrzhu

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. -Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

Let's be careful out there.

Sunday linkages

Thank you, Savage Chickens!

The marvelous, cool Julianna Baggott has an article up at the NYT about therapy, poetry, and why the two don't mix, sort of. Buy her stuff. Read it.

Listen to Julianna Baggott reading her stuff. At FSU.

Listen to Don Share at Florida State University, where Ms. Baggott teaches, is consulting editor for the Southeast Review, and writes.

Listen to an interview with the late Tom Disch.

Listen to an interview with George Saunders.

Ah, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly has it's first audio issue (Volume 9, Number 4, Fall 2008) up, edited by Kim Roberts and Katie Davis, aurally introduced by Katie Davis.  I highly recommend Abdullah Ibraham's Bra Joe from Kilamanjaro, despite the annoying voiceover interference.

Thank you, Pictures for Sad Children!

Saturday Vrzhu Vids

The remarkable Greg Pattillo, whose cd is available from CDbaby:

And Stanley Clarke and Miroslav Vitous: Freedom Jazz Dance:

Tuesday Vrzhu - How Healthy Is Your Poetry?

Today’s (October 14, 2008) New York Times Science section has an article about Dr. James W. Pennebaker.  Dr. Pennebaker, a psychologist, counts words. He also has some very good and practical advice about writing and how it can help you improve your physical and mental health. This is fascinating and I'd like to think about it in more depth here sometime--how something as abstract as language can affect something as concrete as your health. Pennebaker says: "The words we use reflect who we are. Word choice can serve as a key to people's personality and social situations."

He also has a cool article analyzing the candidates in the current presidential election. From the article:

Palin’s thought processes seem to be the least complicated of the four: she uses fewer words that refer to cognitive processes (insight, cause and effect relationships, inclusion, exclusion, and so on) than the other nominees. The only cognitive words she uses frequently are inclusive words (plus, and, with), which, like conjunctions, can indicate rambling. She uses particularly few inhibition and exclusive words. Using few exclusive words sometimes indicates dishonesty.

 

In any case, I recommend the NYT article because most poets spend some amount of time thinking about words.

But also for another reason. From the article:

…Dr. Pennebaker, a pioneer in the field of therapeutic writing, asked a group of people recovering from serious illness or other trauma to engage in a series of writing exercises. The word tallies showed that those whose health was improving tended to decrease their use of first-person pronouns through the course of the study.

Dr. Pennebaker also noted that the healthier a person becomes, the more that person uses causal words, such as because, cause, and effect.  But we’ll get to those some other time.

Poetic Trauma

One of the great antinomies of 20th and 21st Century poetry has been built around embracing or repudiating the personal pronoun in poems.  The responses to the personal pronoun vary: an outright ban, subversion, ironic use, badge of honor, deconstruction, vilification, gulag, mockery, and so on. Poetics statements run the gamut from condemnation of a self in poems as capitalist dupe, to assertions of personism.

I do think the native tendency is for the general reader to prefer the use of the personal pronoun rather than find it annoying.  This might be because of the generally held opinion among non-poetry specialists that a poem is about the person writing it or is a reflection of her experiences and thoughts.

But I have yet to see it used as a diagnostic tool in poetry.  So let me suggest a way we might start doing that. 

Given Pennebaker’s data, let’s use the word count of personal pronouns in a poem, or series of poems to indicate the degree to which a poet’s works can be described as traumatized.  I’m going to take two examples and see if this analysis holds true, or, at least, enforces the common conception of a poet’s work.

I used the poems available online that Sylvia Plath wrote in 1962 and the beginning of 1963 as a test case for traumatized poems, and all the readily available online poems of Richard Wilbur as an example of poems generally accepted as untraumatized.

Next, I did a manual word count of personal pronouns (I, me, mine, myself) in each batch of poems, and an automated word count of the total words in each batch.

Out of a total of 4,355 words, Wilbur's poems use the personal pronoun 47 times or about 1.08%.  In contrast, out of 14,437 words, the personal pronoun shows up in Plath’s poems 531 times or about 3.68% of the total number of words. This is almost 4 times more often than in Wilbur’s poems. 

This appears to justify the commonly held opinion that Plath’s poems are poems of trauma (or that the poems themselves are traumatized), and Wilbur’s are not.

I now think we can use the results to help current poets establish a trauma index for their own  poems.

Note that this is not meant to reflect the value or worth of any single poem, or, colloquially, whether any one poem rocks, or, on the contrary, sucks.  The following trauma scale merely measures the relative traumatization that the poem has undergone, or, perhaps, reflects. Also, this scale should not be used on poems written by adolescents or poems by relatively inexperienced writers, since in the first instance, trauma can be assumed as an existential condition, and, in the second, control over the writing is insufficient to reflect an accurate trauma-pattern.

The Poem Trauma Scale

Simply put, the parameters of the scale are these:

Any poem whose use of the personal pronoun is 1.08% of the total word count, or less, can be definitely placed in the category “untraumatized.” Any poem whose use of the personal pronoun is 3.68% of the total word count, or more, can be definitively called traumatized. 

Using the average of the two percentages, any poem with a personal pronoun count of less than 2.38% can be judged to be relatively untraumatized, and poems with a PPC of more than 2.38% can be placed in an increasing traumatized zone.

Using a large sample of my own poems, I found my PPC is 1.53%, relatively untraumatized, but more traumatized than Richard Wilbur.

***

On a completely different note, Mary Karr's Poet's Choice column this past Sunday featured Bill Knott.  I think Mary might be starting to hit her stride.

ADDENDUM: after reading this, this and this, let me hasten to include a link to Bill Knott's great blog (which I have praised heretofore) and his lulu page where you can download his poems for free. It's the equivalent of Goya giving away his prints on a streetcorner. They're that good.

And--I missed this before--the Emerging Writer's Network recently had an interview with "upstart publishers," including Vrzhu Press fave Rose Metal Press.  Both Vrzhu and Rose Metal have a book coming out immanently by the brilliant Carol Guess.

And, why not, while we're at it, here's an interview with Pattiann Rogers.

And, finally, here's an excerpt from Sarah Kane's play, Crave:

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the the programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you're late and be amazed when you're early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I'm black and be sorry when I'm wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I'd known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin and get scared when you're angry and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue and your hair to the left and your face oriental and tell you you're gorgeous and hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don't and melt when you smile and dissolve when you laugh and not understand why you think I'm rejecting you when I'm not rejecting you and wonder how you could think I'd ever reject you and wonder who you are but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep I can't find words for it and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because it would get more attention than me and keep you in bed when you have to go and cry like a baby when you finally do and get rid of the roaches and buy you presents you don't want and take them away again and ask you to marry me and you say no again but keep on asking because though you think I don't mean it I do always have from the first time I asked you and wander the city thinking it's empty without you and want want you want and think I'm losing myself but know I'm safe with you and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me because you don't deserve any less and answer your questions when I'd rather not and tell you the truth when I really don't want to and try to be honest because I know you prefer it and think it's all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life and forget who I am and try to get closer to you because it's a beautiful learning to know you and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse and make love with you at three in the morning and somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the overwhelming undying overpowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you.

***

Match the quote with the name:

1. We are such spendthrifts with our lives. The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.

2. When in doubt, take a nap.

3. The man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

4. In poetry we're trying to make birds, not birdhouses.

5. And what exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke?

6. Prosody is to poets what laying a fire is to married couples, a matter on which nobody is right but oneself.

a. W. H. Auden
b. Syd Barrett
c, Andre Breton
d. Paul Newman
e. Dean Young
f. Dean Young

Answers in our next full post!

 

Do poems have an inherent moral stance?

So last night I dreamed I was watching Wajda's Katyn again, this time at some version of the college I went to St. John's College Annapolis. I'm sure there was a sexual, incestous, coprophilic reason for this dream that my conscious mind rejects (though, really, at my age, I'm like all "bring on the sexual, incestous, coprophilic revelations! It'll make up for a slow Monday night."), but I connected it to someO

Oops! Sorry folks. The rest of this post is delayed a day or two, due to me watching the presidential debates.  Back with you soon.  In the meantime, here's a graphic on the two candidates' positions on the artsvote site of American for the Arts Action Fund.

Saturday Vrzhu Morning shows

Two shows this morning, buckaroos: an exciting fantasy, and a dose of reality.

Hayden Carruth dead at 87

Sad news.  A great one passes.

http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/82282/

Poet Hayden Carruth dies Tuesday September 30, 2008

Hayden Carruth, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet who lived in Vermont in the 1960s and 70s, has died at his home in New York state.

He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Award for Poetry for his book, "Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey."
Carruth published more than 30 books and was known for his poems about the people and places in northern Vermont.

In 1973 he received the Governor's ward for excellence in the arts from the Vermont Council on the Arts. He also received the Vermont Governor's Medal.

In 2002, a series of celebrations around the state honored his work.

Lois Eby, a longtime friend, said at the time that Carruth had a special richness of interest, a gift for language and a sense of humor that were all apparent in his poems.

He was 87.

Addeddum: Here are some additional obits and tributes

New York Times

Harriet (Poetry Foundation blog)

American Academy of Poets

Metafilter

Syracuse.com (great picture)

Washington Post

Verse

A review of Toward the Distant Islands

Can anyone give me a sense of his tenure as editor of Poetry? 

Here are a couple poems by Hayden Carruth:

Agenda At 74
Hayden Carruth

Tap barometer, burn trash,
put out seed for birds, tap
barometer, go to market
for doughnuts and Dutch
Masters, feed cat, write
President, tap barometer,
take baby aspirin, write
congressmen, nap, watch
Bills vs. Patriots, tap
barometer, go to post
office and ask Diane if
it's cold enough for her,
go to diner and say "hi,
babe" to Mazie, go to
barber shop and read
Sports Illustrated, go
home, take a load off,
tap barometer, go to
liquor store for jug
(Gallo chablis), go
home, pee, etc., sweep
cellar stairs (be careful!),
write letter to editor,
count dimes, count quarters,
tap the fucking barometer . . .



Prepare
Hayden Carruth

for Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth

"Why don't you write me a poem that will prepare me for your
death?" you said.
It was a rare day here in our climate, bright and sunny. I didn't feel like
dying that day.
I didn't even want to think about it -- my lovely knees and bold
shoulders broken open,
Crawling with maggots. Good Christ! I stood at the window and I saw
a strange dog
Running in the field with its nose down, sniffing the snow, zigging and
zagging,
And whose dog is that? I asked myself. As if I didn't know. The limbs
of the apple trees
Were lined with snow, making a bright calligraphy against the world,
messages to me
From an enigmatic source in an obscure language. Tell me, how shall I
decipher them?
And a jay slanted down to the feeder and looked at me behind my glass
and squawked.
Prepare, prepare. Fuck you, I said, come back tomorrow. And here he
is in this new gray and gloomy morning.
We're back to our normal weather. Death in the air, the idea of death
settling around us like mist,
And I am thinking again in despair, in desperation, how will it happen?
Will you wake up
Some morning and find me lying stiff and cold beside you in our bed?
How atrocious!
Or will I fall asleep in the car, as I nearly did a couple of weeks ago,
and drive off the road
Into a tree? The possibilities are endless and not at all fascinating,
except that I can't stop
Thinking about them, can't stop envisioning that moment of hideous
violence.
Hideous and indescribable as well, because it won't happen until it's
over. But not for you
For you it will go on and on, thirty years or more, since that's the
distance between us
In our ages. The loss will be a great chasm with no bridge across it
(for we both know
Our life together, so unexpected, is entirely loving and rare). Living
on your own --
Where will you go? what will you do? And the continuing sense of
displacement
From what we've had in this little house, our refuge on our green or
snowbound
Hill. Life is not easy and you will be alive. Experience reduces itself to
platitudes always,
Including the one which says that I'll be with you forever in your
memories and dreams.
I will. And also in hundreds of keepsakes, such as this scrap of a poem
you are reading now.

"Prepare" is from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1995,
available from Copper Canyon Press