VRZHU bullets of pure love

NEW ANTHOLOGY "FULL MOON ON K STREET" POEM ABOUT WASHINGTON DC BY POETS OF WASHINGTON DC

Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC
Kim Roberts, editor

Featuring over one hundred contemporary poems, the book captures DC's unique sense of place, from monuments to parks, from lawyers to bus stations, from go-go music to chili half-smokes.  All poems were written between 1950 and the present, by past and current residents of the city. Edited by Kim Roberts, the publisher of the acclaimed online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly, this anthology captures the city's many moods: celebratory, angry, and fiercely political.

Contributors include: two-time US Poet Laureate Reed Whittemore; DC's first Poet Laureate, Sterling A. Brown; senator and five-time presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy; Cervantes prize winner for lifetime achievement in Spanish-language literature, Jose Emilio Pacheco; renowned gay rights activist Essex Hemphill; and President Obama's official inauguration poet,Elizabeth Alexander.

Full Moon on K Street is available at Busboys & Poets, Politics and Prose in Washington DC and elsewhere!

Reviews:

The Washington Post called it "the first anthology of modern poetry to be wholly for, about and by current and former Washington residents—[that] teems with poets who've distilled the region's lifeblood into verse over the past 50 years."

The Current Newspaper's family of neighborhood papers (The Northwest Current, Georgetown Current, and Dupont Current) noted, "If you love D.C., even if you haven't read a poem since high school, you'll find that the book is full of intriguing perspectives on familiar places and events...And for newcomers--or those who want to send the book to folks back home--the introduction to each poem explains the local references."

The Hill Rag acclaimed, "What better place for a poetry journal than the nation's capital?"

Q&A with editor Kim Roberts by Plan B Press publisher stevenallenmay.

Plan B Press: What prompted you to start Beltway Poetry Quarterly online magazine?

Kim Roberts:  It was the idea of my friend Kathy Keler. Kathy is a painter and graphic designer, and she started a website called "washingtonart" to showcase other area visual artists. She thought it would be a great idea to pair this with some poems, and--after convincing me, since I initially took some convincing--Kathy taught me some basics of html, and designed the logo and overall look of the journal. I can't believe that it will be ten years old this coming January! The journal has taught me so much, and introduced me to so many poets.

Plan B Press: The anthology, Full Moon on K Street has evolved from a celebration of Beltway Magazine to a more sweeping look at the city’s poetry over the past 50 years. How did that happen?

Kim Roberts:  The anthology is an overlapping of my several obsessions: poetry, of course, but also literary history, and the built environment. love cities--their architecture, their grid, the way large groups of people use the space--and I love DC especially. I've looked at a lot of other anthologies, and nothing like this exists--a portrait of the city from 1950 to the present, and the places within the city that have meant something special to these authors.

Plan B Press: What types of obstacles have you had to deal with in preparing the anthology? What has been most frustrating and most rewarding in the effort?

Kim Roberts:  Compiling an anthology is much harder than I imagined! There were lots of authors I knew I wanted to include, and I looked back over their work, and was surprised to see that many never wrote poems set in DC. That includes such authors as wide ranging as Larry Neal, Archibald MacLeish, Owen Dodson, and Anthony Hecht. There were other authors, such as Dierdra Baldwin, Gloria Oden, and Haki Madhubuti who did not respond to my request for poems. It would have been lovely to have included all of them. But there were lots of wonderful coups as well. I spoke to the next-of-kin of many authors who have passed away who were enthusiastic about the project. Some, like Ed Cox's family, were thrilled to be reminded that their loved ones are still read and loved by the larger literary community. I am so grateful to them (as well as the families of Hilary Tham, Ann Darr, Betty Parry, and others) for the warm responses they gave. I was also gratified by the poets who--like Myra Sklarew--decided to write poems specifically for this anthology. And I was pleased to be able to track down so many authors who once lived in DC and have since moved away, such as Michael Lally, Gray Jacobik, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Sharan Strange. There are also poets included who I think should be better known to readers. I was able to get permission to reprint a poem by Essex Hemphill, the pioneering African-American gay rights activist whose poetry is a revelation, but whose work was long kept out of circulation by family members wanting to preserve their privacy. There are poems by Percy Johnston, a leader of the Howard Poets of the 1970s, and Eugene McCarthy, best remembered as a Senator and five-time Presidential candidate. Their poems, different as they are, show great humor and an deep engagement with the world around them. Jose Emilio Pacheco, little known here, is widely considered Mexico's greatest living poet. He taught at the University of Maryland for one semester a year for many years, and his poem about Sligo Creek is a terrific addition to the book. And Gaston Neal, who published so little during his lifetime but was a mentor to so many, is included with a tribute poem to Sterling Brown.

 

 

 

You can catch readings from Full Moon on K Street by poets who appear in this wonderful anthology here:

March 22
Poet's Corner radio show, featuring a reading from the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC with editor Kim Roberts and contributors Teri Ellen Cross, Hayes Davis, David Moore. Interviewed by Abdul Ali.
Monday, 7:00 pm
WPFW 89.3 FM

March 23
Poetry at Noon: Reading from the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC with editor Kim Roberts and contributors Jonetta Rose Barras, Merrill Leffler, Ramola D, and Venus Thrash.
Tuesday, 12:00 pm
Free. Library of Congress, Jefferson Building, Whittall Pavilion, First St. SE, DC. (202) 707-5394.

Interview: Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize for I Was the Jukebox, selected by Joy Harjo. I Was The Jukebox is out 5th from W.W. Norton. I saw a prominently displayed copy in DC's Politics & Prose bookstore. Her first collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize judged by Marie Howe. It has already exhausted its print run earlier this year, and New Issues should be reprinting very soon. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Slate, and The Believer; she will also be featured in The Best American Poetry 2010.

Awards for her work include A DCCAH Individual Artist Fellowship, the Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Maureen Egen Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She has received fellowships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, VCCA, and Vermont Studio Center.

Sandra lives in Washington D.C, where she serves on the Board of the Writer’s Center. Her nonfiction has been featured in the Washington Post Magazine and she is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life, forthcoming from Crown.

Vrzhu has been paparazzing Sandra Beasley for while now, hoping to interview this engaged and active DC poet. We’ve been a fan since having her read in the Brookland Poetry Series, and other venues. When her first book came out, Theories of Falling, we read it avidly and with delight.

Sandra asked if we could ask questions she doesn’t normally get, and we have tried to accommodate her. She has only herself to blame.

Since we finished up the interview during February’s record-breaking snowstorm here in DC, imagine us sitting at a small bistro near Dupont Circle, warming ourselves with a couple snifters of 1968 Darroze Armagnac Peyron.

Vrzhu:  Before we ask some more, ah, non-normative questions, let’s start with some poetry GPS. During the VRZHU interview with Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert, Elisa mentioned that she finds herself liking books that were too “avant” for her before, and being less interested lately in more “traditional” books.

How about you? How have your poetry tastes changed over time? What poets, poems, and kinds of poetry excite you these days? Do you find yourself liking a greater variety of poetry, or getting tired of some of the well-trod poetry paths? Do you see yourself somewhere along the poetry spectrum, or do you feel that’s too confining, and inexact?

Sandra Beasley: If anything, having avalanched my home with the pages of contemporary journals, I swing the pendulum all the way back to the poets who first brought me here--Sylvia Plath, e.e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins--returning to their work, enjoying it more deeply than I did before. I read the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. I understand them now to be poets in dialogue, part of a complex community of artists driven by travel, attraction, depression, misunderstandings, petty needs, grand aims; before, they seemed almost fatally deadpan on the page.

I also find myself open once more to formal verse. A lot of it's dreary. But then, a lot of free verse is dreary. You gotta be willing to read a lot of bad poetry if you want to find great poems in the wild.

Over the years, I've become a better (or more capacious) listener to poetry. It used to be that I tuned out if I could not immediately discern a narrative. But years of going to readings around Washington, DC--not because I know the author but because I trust the host, or am intrigued by the venue--have introduced me to a whole other spectrum of styles, many of which demand a different mode of listening. Not too long ago, at Bridge Street Books, I was entranced by Kenneth Goldsmith's recreation of the media broadcasts of 9/11/2001. Keep in mind that in the moment, these broadcasts were not fully cognizant of what we now understand to be a national tragedy: real-time reporting on a mysterious set of incidents is peppered with the minutiae of advertisements, weather forecasts, traffic jams, etc., all transcribed by Goldsmith word-for-word. Listening, I could hear the poetry in these strange juxtapositions. Would I study it on the page? Nope. So I think the evolution of my ears needs to be treated separately from the evolution of my eyes.

Poets who excite me nowadays: Erika Meitner, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eric McHenry, T. S. Eliot, Denise Levertov. That's today. Ask me again tomorrow.

Vrzhu: I like the going back to older poets you mentioned. Who's the earliest poet you find yourself going back to, or sympathetic with? Besides just experience, is there some way you have these poets (like Hopkins or Eliot) come alive for you?

Sandra Beasley: In Fall 2009 I taught a writing class at the Corcoran College of Art + Design; teaching is an exception, rather than the rule. I soon realized that contemporary poets who I found interesting, based on the ferocity of voice, did not engage the students; what they liked were poets who offered something structural they could unlock. William Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney. On one hand, they disdained the technical terminology of meter and rhyme; on the other hand, they sat up in their chairs when I could prove that the craft techniques served a higher thematic purpose. The week we looked at elegy, we considered poems by both Dylan Thomas and Marie Howe. Thomas's villanelle is all about thundering imperative; Howe's is all about ambivalent dialogue. I love Marie Howe, but they preferred Dylan Thomas. It was a challenging dynamic, and it made me think a lot of which "older" poets I loved, and why. I think T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams have a lot to offer with repeat visits. They also have just enough texture in their biographies to provide grit, without so much drama (a la Anne Sexton or Ted Hughes) as to be distracting.

Through a series of coincidences, 2009 was also a year of Emily Dickinson for me--scads of exposure to her biography--which makes me newly aware of her feistiness, her pride, her calculations of correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She was no fool and no simple recluse. Those short, lyric poems must be understood as telegrams, composed in the Morse code of a rock skimming along the surface of a much deeper lake. Whitman, on the other hand, took some basic philosophical beliefs and stretched them out on the loom of societal experience. I think he was as savvy as he was smart. It's funny how often these two poets are paired in literary critique as an asexual Odd Couple. They come alive to me in the sense that the older I get, the more I understand their writings in the context of biographical pressures. Some days it feels like a great insight. Some days it feels like a terrible fallacy.

Vrzhu: It sounds like you've become a better reader, too--going back to poets you encountered earlier and getting more out of them, including a deeper enjoyment, as well as the sense of listening in to them talking to each other through their poems. Getting a sense of that conversation is thrilling.

How do you handle the page and the reader versus speech and the hearer in your poems? Do you sometimes foreground one over the other? Is one more important to you in writing than another (for instance Dean Young says he is all about the page, and Robert Pinsky often talks about poetry as a bodily, aural art)? Could you recommend some good examples of one or the other to look up and at?

Sandra Beasley: You know whose work really flourishes off the page? Patrick Rosal, who has two books out with Persea. His work is great on the page, too, but that man gives a killer reading.

My poems favor the page, because I like wordplay; sestinas, which I've been obsessed with over the past year, just don't work when read aloud. You have to have the lungs of an Olympic swimmer just for the reading of each stanza, and even then the end-words--in their many variations--don't shine through. When I read, I'm quite strategic in alternating short, accessible poems with longer and more abstract ones.

There are a couple of poets who come to mind for giving truly compelling readings despite authoring books that are, according to the page, experimental and fragmented, only barely narratives: Kate Greenstreet, and Kristi Maxwell, both Ahsahta authors. They make it work. It is a tribute to the force of their imagery and imagination.

Vrzhu: Tupac or Biggie?

Sandra: I've got no dog in the Tupac versus Biggie fight. I know Tupac was the ostensible soulful poet, and I respect anyone who made Janet Jackson look like a good actress. I know Biggie was revered as a producer of talent, and I respect anyone who brought business sense to a risky business. What do I listen to when I'm cooking? Kanye West. Even after the unfortunate Taylor Swift incident.

Vrzhu: So imagine your poetry is going to be made into a movie, or, in addition,  the poetry of any of these:

Robert Lowell
Elizabeth Bishop
Kim Addonozio
Henry Taylor
Major Jackson

or any other poets that strike your fancy.

Now, what genre film would it be in? Who would direct? What would be the soundtrack? Hollywood, independent, mumblecore,foreign (French, Swedish, Italian, Iranian), Bollywood? What character actors would get small parts in it? If could make up an award at Sundance, what award would it get?

Sandra Beasley: I keep trying to place Ewan McGregor in a poem of mine. Any poem. Because I adore him: him as a person, him as an actor, him as a concept. It keeps not happening.

Honestly, I don't think poetry translates well to film, and so it doesn't give me any pleasure to theorize these combinations--not because it isn't a fun question (it is), but because no poet would be served by the translation. There's a great poet I studied with at the University of Virginia Gregory Orr, who has a theory that all poetry operates using four temperaments: the "limiting" principles of story and structure, which are intensive, and the "limitless" principles of music and imagination, which are extensive. I think the point of poetry is to privilege extremes among these four temperaments. I think the point of film is to balance these four temperaments. That's why Charlie Kaufman (who prizes story) fails when he directs his own scripts, as was the case with "Synecdoche, New York"; but he succeeds when paired with Michel Gondry (who prizes imagination), in the case of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." Of course, I'm revealing my bias with this theory: in poetry, because I am a practitioner, I seek brilliance. In film, because I am an audience member, I seek something to enjoy. Nonetheless, what makes a great Henry Taylor poem would make for a dreadfully boring film. What makes a great Elizabeth Bishop would make for a dreadfully boring film. What makes for a great Kim Addonizio poem would probably turn into a borderline-porno starring Monica Bellucci.

Vrzhu:  Well, you make a good point that poetry doesn’t translate well into film.  I appreciate your fairness to the poets mentioned and not wanting to do them an injustice.  Your idea that poetry brings one of Orr’s four temperaments to the fore as opposed to a film, which must balance them strikes me as a good distinction to make between the two arts. Perhaps there is an ontological gap between film and poetry that can’t be bridged without doing violence to one or the other.

I want to get back to the page versus the voice for a moment.  It’s interesting to me that you say your poems are weighted more to the page, because I think you give very compelling readings of your own work.  One quick follow up: When you’re writing, though, do find yourself saying the lines, or some lines, out loud, or maybe subvocally, in your head?  Or is the look of the page more of a guide for your hand and ear?  I think either works, I’m just curious.

Sandra Beasley: Thanks for the compliment to my reading style. That goes back to college days, when I competed in a number of oratory competitions, and coached others in speech and debate. Super dorky, right? But really fun. One week it would be Clarence Darrow's defense of Leopold and Loeb, then an Edgar Allan Poe short story, then Emma Goldman on anarchy, then a fellow UVA student's treatise on the Smurfs. Because I was wrestling with other people's words, I approached the text as blindly as the audience--and had to enunciate and emphasize in order to get a foreign meaning across.

Sometimes I think, as authors, we are so overwhelmed by our familiarity with the text that we lose track of what's going out to the room. I always rehearse my poetry aloud as part of the drafting process. I don't get much out of reading a line or two as a time; I read the whole poem through, many times over, no matter what the hour (though I feel a little guilty when it's 3 AM, and I'm chanting in my office, just outside my bedroom). I'll edit depending on where my vocal rhythm stumbles, and change words I find myself contracting or dropping.

The look on the page guides my hand, too, but that may not always be a good thing. I admire the tradition of poets who compose in wildly varying line lengths, and I'm wary of my tendency to pace myself toward an even-length line. That's something I'd like to push against in future projects, in the same way my second collection pushed against the first collection's tendency toward autobiography.

Vrzhu: Going back a bit--this interview seems to be semi-recursive--it’s fascinating that your writing class seemed to prefer older, more formal, poetry.  It is always revelatory how the craft of the poem, as it makes meaning, shows up for a reader. It kind of restores my faith in those poems to know that people can still latch on to them. And thanks for you insights contrasting Whitman and Dickinson. A rock skimming a deep lake, or a walk over a sudden trapdoor? Anyway, If you had to propose two alternative founding parents for American poetry, who would you choose?

Sandra Beasley: What's tough about that is that naming any two poets would seem to discredit those that came before them as being something other than "American poets." Let's suspend our fidelity to time for a moment, so I can say William Carlos Williams and Gwendolyn Brooks, without discounting the many fine poets that came earlier. I like their combined attentions to both form and free verse, larger society and the interior landscape. Plus, that would be one hell of a wedding party.

Vrzhu: What’s your process for picking titles? Before or after the poem? How important is a title to you for kicking off the poem? Any opinion on untitled poems?

Sandra Beasley: I get very fussy with people who haven't titled their work. It's not practical--we always need a shorthand way of referring to things--and it implies a disrespect for the poem. On the other hand, I choose very simple titles that either cite the central object ("The Angels," "Cherry Tomatoes") or set up a premise for a dramatic monologue ("The Sand Speaks," "Love Poem for Wednesday"). I might commit to a title at the beginning of a draft, in the middle, or at the end--it doesn't matter when. Some people do a lot of work with their titles, particularly visual artists, but I'm not one of them. I'd rather reserve that kinetic energy for the poem itself.

Vrzhu: Truth and poetry. Laura Riding famously gave up poetry in part because she felt it couldn’t tell the truth.  Obviously, we know that the voice in and of the poem is not the same as the poet, or least is not co-extensive with the poet, but in a larger sense, how important is capital T Truth to a poem or poetry?  You said above that in poetry you seek brilliance. What makes up the brilliant in poetry?

Sandra Beasley: Capital T Truth is only recognized in hindsight. So I agree, it is important--but you have to have a certain amount of arrogance to keep writing without knowing if what you're getting at is Truth, or just a convincing facsimile, or utter hyperbole. You'll never know for sure, and maybe Riding grew weary of that doubt. There's no shame in deciding you have better ways to spend a life,

Trying to define brilliance in concrete terms is going to make me sound like an ass. I know; I've tried. All I can say is that you have to try something new. You have to enter a poem without being confident that the subject or language at hand can, in fact, constitute a good poem. Taking the risk is critical--and when you read it, you know it. Some contemporary poets I've read whose work carries (for me) that spark of genius are Bob Hicok, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Matthea Harvey, Josh Bell, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi. But don't tell them I said that. You'll freak 'em out. I suspect it's a terrible burden, brilliance.

Vrzhu: Related question: Plato put forth two famous statements about poetry.  In the Ion, he said that poets do not contain the genius that writes the poems, but are possessed by the Muse who works through them, in the same way that a paperclip held by a magnet becomes magnetic itself.  In The Republic, he banned poets from the Just City because they lied about the gods: they did not tell the truth.  Agree, disagree, or something else with these two views?

Sandra Beasley: This is the stuff of dissertations, not interviews! I like that you're asking the question, I just wish I wasn't the one charged with answering. The Muse is a potent and unpredictable force, and I know that favorite poems of my own tend to be the ones somewhat untraceable in their origin. I assume that's the Muse at work. And of course, poets lie. Rampantly. Mercilessly. All the while justifying it, in pursuit of the Capital T Truth. Can't live with us, can't banish us from the Just City without a fight.

There's a gap between the way we're talking about poets, in these last few questions, and the everyday reality of writing poems and moving them out into the world. We're supposed to honor being possessed by the Muse, and write accordingly--yet also get kids to school, make a stir-fry for dinner, work, pay our taxes on time, and love the people around us. That doesn't even touch the professional side of submitting and publishing, all the while trying to maintain your integrity and passion. Let's not even pretend there's a Platonic balance to be attained; there is only the joys and sorrows of the act of balancing. To be a poet is to be a zebra standing on a marble, trying to make it look like it's all going according to plan.

Vrzhu:  "To be a poet is to be a zebra standing on a marble, trying to make it look like it's all going according to plan." Nicely put, and a valid point.

So, one more quick question: what is your favorite current font?

Sandra Beasley: I'm a lover of Garamond.

Vrzhu: Please fill in the blanks:

1. A poem should not ____ but _____

2. If ____ be the ____ of ______, play on.

Sandra Beasley: A poem should not describe, but invent.

If writing senryu be the duckpin bowling of poetry, play on.

***

Thanks, Sandra, for being such a good sport in entertaining our questions.  For more of Sandfra Beasley, check our her blog at Chicks Dig Poetry, or one of the following readings coming up soon:

UPCOMING READINGS IN 2010**
 
Friday, March 26, 2010 - 11 AM - Reading at Marymount University in Arlington, VA
& Friday, March 26, 2010 - 3 PM - Reading with Deborah Ager and Valzhyna Mort at
Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
 
Thursday, April 8, 2010 - 9:30 PM - Reading with the Typewriter Girls (offsite AWP
Conference event) at the Mercury Cafe in Denver, CO.
 
Friday, April 9, 2010 - 3:30 PM - Booksigning with Joy Harjo, hosted by W. W. Norton
at the AWP Conference in Denver, CO.
 
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - 7 PM - Reading with Joy Harjo at Barnard College in New
York, NY.
 
Thursday, April 15, 2010 - 7:30 PM - Reading with Jason Koo at Washington &
Jefferson College in Washington, PA.
 
Sunday, April 18, 2010 - 2:30 PM - Reading with Dora Malech as part of the Frequency
Series at Four-Faced Liar in New York, NY.
Thursday, April 29, 2010 - 5:30 PM - Reading at New Dominion Bookshop in
Charlottesville, VA.
 
Sunday, May 2, 2010 - 1 PM - Reading (and launch party!) at Politics & Prose in
Washington, DC.
 
Sunday, May 16, 2010 - 4 PM - Reading with Susan Settlemyre Williams at Chop Suey
Tuey in Richmond, VA.
 
Friday, May 21, 2010 - 8 PM - Reading at Books & Books in Coral Gables, FL.
 
Friday, May 28, 2010 - 6:30 PM - Reading at Zu Coffee in Annapolis, MD.
 
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - Reading in the Word for Word Series at Bryant Park in New
York, NY.
 
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 - 5 PM - Reading at Square Books in Oxford, MS.

A NEW BEGINNING.....

COMING SOON......

 

Christmas is coming (#1 of a series of extravagant gifts for the poet in your life)

*drool*

A Way Out of Our Current Difficulties

For each bullet, name the poet it describes:

 

• served in Robert Devereux’s fleet, and was present at the siege of Cadiz.
• one work included a list of then-current card games and diversions, such as Tickle-me-quickly, Whip-her-ginny and Primifisto.
• one of the few early authors of a palindrome that can be credited as such spent much of his life as a Thames waterman.
• writings have considerable historical and antiquarian interest, with over one hundred and fifty publications in his lifetime.
• main literary gifts lay in a coarse, rough and ready wit, a talent for narrative, and a considerable command of repartee
• author of a constructed language called Barmoodan
• studies ended when he couldn’t get a grasp on Latin grammar
• wrote poems about a man who supposedly lived to the age of 152, a dog named Drunkard, a sonnet series on the signs of the Zodiac, and a memorial of monarchs.
• constructed a boat out of brown paper that was kept afloat with eight bullock’s bladders and set off down the river with oars made of giant dried fish tied to canes, and floated 40 miles downstream in it
• collector of the perquisites exacted by the lieutenant of the Tower of London
• an expert in the art of self-advertisement, creating new self-appointed identities, such as the King's water-poet and the Queen's water-man
• superintended the water pageant at the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth 1613, and composed the "triumphs" at the Lord Mayor's shows
• enjoyed the acquaintance of Ben Jonson, who said he did not “see ever any verses in England equal to the Sculler’s.”

 

The answer to all of the above is John Taylor (b. 1578 – d. 1653), a plebian who worked the Thames ferrying passengers and was a member of the guild of boatmen.  His poetry has not received (nor, perhaps does it) much praise or even consideration, but much of his life, art and character would easily fit in with creative types from the 20^th and 21^st centuries: the self-fashioning persona, the exploits designed to attract public attention, the “happenings,” the meiosis of high and low cultures, the polymathic interests, the (perhaps) less than virtuosic art.  Except for the details that tether Taylor to the 16^th and 17^th centuries, he is clearly a contemporary of our celebrity-soaked and polyvalent post-modern times.

 

Here is a brief extract from his “The Praise of Hemp-Seed, with the Voyage of Mr. Roger Bird and the Writer hereof, in a Boat of browne-paper, from London to Quinborough in Kent. As also, a Farewell to the matchlesse deceased Mr. Thomas Coriant. The Profits arising from Hemp-seed are Cloathing, Food, Fishing, Shipping, Pleasure, Profit, Iustice, Whipping”

 

So Hemp and Flax, or which you list to name 
Are male and female, both one, and the same. 
Those that 'gainst these comparisons deride, 
And will not with my lines be satisfide, 
Let them imagine e're they doe condemne 
I loue to play the foole with such as them.
The cause why Hempseed hath endur'd this wrong 
And hath its worthy praise obscur'd so long, 
I doe suppose it to bee onely this
That Poets know their insufficience is, 
That were earth Paper, and Sea inke, they know 
'T were not enough great Hempseeds worth to show. 
I muse the Pagans, with varietie, 
Of godles Gods, made it no Deity. 

 

And here’s a bit from his Poem in the Utopian Tongue (1613), which I take to be his nonce language, Barmoodan:

 

Thoytom Asse Coria Tushrump codsheadirustie,
Mungrellimo whish whap ragge dicete tottrie,
Mangelusquem verminets nipsem barelybittimsore,
Culliandolt travellerebumque, graiphone trutchmore.
Pusse per mew (Odcomb) gul abelgik foppery shig shag
Cock a peps Comb sottishamp, Idioshte momulus tag rag.

 

But what is most interesting to me about Taylor is his use as a guide on how to navigate the crumbling and shifting world of poetry publishing.

 

It is clear that all the current paradigms are fatally flawed.  Whether poetry contest, inclinatory nepotism, rhizomic affinity, self-publishing, other-publishing, or otherwise, all our methods result in the same perceived problems: glut, heavily patrolled territories, low quality to quantity ratio, little or no agreement on ranking or worth, and, to the populace at large, ennui, disinterest, and incomprehension, if not ridicule.

 

Let me be clear, I am not making a point along the poetry is dying/poetry is better than ever, or the poetry has no effect/poetry is vital axes.  I merely saying the what we believe to be the problems with our current poetry cannot be separated from how that poetry is published.

 

I am agnostic on whether the above list of problems really are problems or not. But if they are, then I can propose an alternative method, derived from John Taylor, that would reduce, eliminate, or detoxify most of them.

 

Here’s what Taylor did. Taylor would propose a book and write it when he had enough funds to undertake the printing of it. He would pitch an idea for a book, circulating a prospectus or “Taylor’s bill” that asked for backers. He would then write it when he’d collected sufficient promises of money to pay the projected cost of publication.  He was successful at this “publication by subscription” method because his outsize and entertaining personality, along with the wit and sense of fun in his writing, secured a large number of patrons.

 

The idea of publication by subscription is anodyne to the afflictions of our current poetry scene.  It is in some ways related to the current, and still what seems to be the most common practice of publishing poetry books, the contest.

 

In the poetry contest model, poets submit manuscripts to a publisher along with a fee, usually somewhere between $15 and $25. This amount is probably controlled by market forces, and represents a range that secures the publisher the highest total dollars.  That total amount is used, in whole or in part, to underwrite the production costs of the single book selected for publication.

The publication by subscription model both improves upon this and corrects its inherent deficiencies.   The poet or poetry publisher advertises the intent to publish the book, along with some description and samples of its content, its theme, or any other material that will establish the expectations for it.  Those interested in the book submit some type of promissory note indicating an interest in the book and the commitment to pay a sum for it when it is available.  After publication, the exchange of funds for goods take place.  The subscribers get a book they want to read, and the poet gets an audience that will read his book.  

From the sublime to the two of Vrzhu's favorite people.

Kristen Wiig reads from the oeuvre of Suzanne Somers.

Tom Disch - Winter Journey

Coming soon from publisher Payseur and Schmidt: Disch's second work to be published by Payseur & Schmidt takes on a more somber tone with Winter Journey, a 31-poem cycle named after Schubert's Winterreise and dedicated to Disch's recently departed long-time partner, Charles Naylor. The poems were written in the months after Naylor's passing, and are at times funny, wistful, heartwrenching, angry, despairing, and profound. These gems of poesy are interspersed with photographs of winter cityscapes by filmmaker Eric Solstein, along with a DVD (produced by Solstein) of Disch reading the entire Winter Journey cycle. As a bonus, the DVD will also feature 24 related mini-films by Solstein and other bonus features. Approx. 100 pages with DVD. Limited to 500 numbered copies.

Quiz

It's time to play...whooooo said it?!

Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.

Today's quote is not poetry related, but it's so good I couldn't resist. This is a three part quiz.

1. Who said the quote above?
2. Who are they talking about?
3. And who wrote it down for posterity?

J. G. Ballard

Most blogs have noted by now the death of J. G. Ballard, the British writer best known for his novel, The Empire of the Sun. Coming across Ballard's writing in the early 70's was a revelation.  His power to make visual images that were intensely real, his obsessed and enervated protagonists, and his vivisectionist's touch with our modern culture and relationships was and is unlike any other writer. Would that I had some excerpts from The Crystal World, Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise, or Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan handy. I owe him an unpayable debt.

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs. I believe all excuses.

I believe all reasons.

I believe all hallucinations.

I believe all anger.

I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.

I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light.

--Ballard, J.G. “What I Believe.” J.G. Ballard. Eds. V. Vale and Andrea Juno. San Francisco: RE/Search, 1984.

A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan's manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth.

Annotation & Commentary by the author, J.G. Ballard, to "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", published in The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990

EVERYTHING NEW IS OLD

With a tip of the hat to John Crowley.

"Nestor, from Greek Asia Minor, was a man who enjoyed a wide following in the early third century AD. He wrote erudite poems on curious stories, odd facts about farming and habits of hyenas. He rewrote the entire Iliad, avoiding in each "book" the particular letter by which it was numbered.  The statue of Nestor has been found, but unfortunately lacks its head."

--Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians

"The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, poems is to convert a series into a whole:  to make those events, which in real or imagined History, move in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion -- the snake with it's tail in it's mouth."

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Starnino fails to realize, however, that even if we deign to ignore the anachronism of such an appeal to the antiquary[sic] authority of Coleridge (thereby conceding that forms must both reflect and perform the ideas within their poems, rather than simply force these ideas into an unnatural container), then I might respond with my own appeal to Rousseau (an important influence upon Coleridge, and a no less anachronistic philosophizer), who argues that, because vowels express our most primeval emotions, 'vowels are the first, the most vital things, the hinges of language'..."

--Christian Bok, on the Harriet Blog

--

Is poetry a spoken art or a written art?

Steeped in fuddy-duddyism, I lean heavily towards the former, but recognize that a reasonable argument can be made for the latter.  And, given poets’ inclination to want to have their cake and eat it at exactly the same time and in the same manner (third way!), there could be a “it’s both” axiom put forward.

I wonder if anyone has seriously tried to argue that poetry is neither?

Anyway, here are some dichotomies of the ear and eye:

Spoken word            Written word

aural                       visual
impermanence        permanence
fluid                       fixed
rhythmic                 ordered
subjective               objective
inaccurate              quantifying
resonant                 abstract
time                       space
present                  timeless
participatory         detached
communal             individual

(Sources: McLuhan 1962, 19; Ong 1967, 34, 73, 92; Postman 1979, 35).

Empirically, there is more poetry written than poetry spoken.  Projects such as Poetry Out Loud, and anthologies of the Poems-To-Read-Aloud sort only point out the dwindling space for spoken poems. Another sign is the falling away of memorization.  The written word, being permanent, does not need to be memorized.  The spoken word’s impermanence means it must be.

The ever increasing hegemony of writing as technology over spoken media is no doubt one of the root causes for the evaporation of poetry as spoken word. If poetry is essentially an aural art, then attempts at revival and promulgation are only signs of poetry’s ultimate quiescence. No species is more visible than when it is about to disappear (from Siberian tigers to snail darters).

Other arts, not being language based, have different problems.  How ephemeral dance is, and how hard it is to recreate great dances from the past because of the inadequacies of recording and notation.  Maybe video is the solution, or has it own deficiencies in preserving works of dance art. I don’t know.

I have my doubts about Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (there’s something anachronistic about his argument for a work’s “aura”), but one small section points out that even paintings, sculpture and other museum-able works have been affected by the dominance of the written word:

“For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which captions give to those looking at illustrated pictures in magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.”

I’ve noticed that museum goers tend to spend as much time reading the captions and commentary as looking at the art objects.

Back to writing vs. speaking.  A counter to what I’ve said above would be “but nobody is reading. Reading is on it’s way to obsolescence.”

But everyone is texting, twittering, facebooking, blogging. I don’t think the attrition in reading can be taken to mean that poetry as a spoken art is in no longer in the ascendance.

 

Maybe poetry is evolving. It was a spoken form, primarily, for most of its existence, but is now adapting to a changed and changing environment, and reflecting the concurrent changes taking place in other areas, such as the loci of public and private spaces.

If that’s true it might explain why we are treated to alarms about the death of poetry on the one hand, and it’s health and resurgence on the other. Or maybe that’s just one of those perennial antimonies, like the old complaining about the young’s loose morals, and the young complaining about the old’s….everything.

File this under Ramblings of a Middle Brow