VRZHU bullets of pure love

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.

The More Things Change...

A RADICAL-CONSERVATIVE

By Harriet Monroe

MAX EASTMAN speaks up again for exact metrics and against the freer forms which he once called "lazy verse." This time his argument—American Ideals of Poetry he calls it—forms the preface to his new book of delicately wrought "poems and songs and sonnets," entitled Colots of Life (Alfred A. Knopf). In this thirty-page article he sums up his case, the case of a man whose lingering conservatism, chased out of other departments of his mind, finds a last refuge in art.

 

Why not admit that Max Eastman is one of the most vivid and exuberant of human souls—an ardent creature who works, as he lives, with passion, convinced that he would not cringe before the white light of truth ? The truth—he finds it in the old pagan clarity, uniting, across the Christian centuries, with the pitiless searching breath of modern science to bear away speculative fogs and aristocratic snobberies and humilities of faith. Like Rupert Brooke, he gives his ardor, to a cause, and would die for it in glamorous ecstasy if need were. And, again like Brooke, he sees the figure of Beauty not quite lithe and nude, as Blake saw it, or—let us venture to say—as H. D. sees it today, but decorously draped in the sheerest and most softly colored of veils—silken chiffons that fall, almost with but effort, into rhythmic folds, into wistful modern reminders of the austere Greek line.

 

But, in presenting the fine brief sonnets and other lyrics which are the result of his prayerful communings with Beauty, he is not sure enough of them to offer them without preliminary theory, without a plea. His plea takes the form of a contrast between Whitman and Poe, and an indictment of free verse as necessarily unrespectful of the line and therefore unstructural and formless! He quotes from Whitman's proud invitation to the poets of the future—that assertion that "there is something inevitably comic in rhyme," and that "the truest and greatest poetry, while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic and distinguishable easily enough, can never again, in the English language, be expressed in arbitrary and rhyming metre;" and over against this he sets certain "icy" admonitions from Poe's Philosophy of Composition which he thinks assert that poet's "preoccupation with 'verbal melody' " and his point that "beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem." And Mr. Eastman adds: "The details of this difference are fascinating, but the generalization of it is what will illumine the modern problems about poetry."

 

Well, in Mr. Eastman's generalization one gets indeed his point of view, the clever argument of a special pleader, but not much illumination. He says, "The opposition of these two characters and attitudes is complete;" when, in fact, however the personal characters of Poe and Whitman may be in contrast, their aesthetic principles are far from irreconcilable. Does Mr. Eastman seriously ascribe to Whitman "a grand contempt for beauty?" or think that Poe, in asserting, "beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem," means by beauty merely "verbal melody"—indeed, a metrically restricted verbal melody at that—and does not include spiritual motive? Does Mr. Eastman mean to imply that iambic metrics, rhyme, the pentameter line, or any other familiar instruments of English poetry, are anything but tools and aids, are in themselves structure? Does he find more "form" (much abused word!), more sheerly structural modelling, in The Raven than in that glorious elegy When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed, even though the former poem is in the school, let us say, of Houdon and the latter in that of Rodin?

 

To come down to our own immediate moment, does Mr. Eastman find more form—a more severely modelled classic shape—in Witter Bynner's fine Celia lyrics, or his own purely carved love sonnets in this volume, than in Carl Sandburg's Lost or The Great Hunt, H. D.'s Oread or The Shrine, Aldington's Choricos, Amy Lowell's Venus Tran- siens, or Ezra Pound's Dance Figure and certain other lyrics? Mr. Eastman may prefer strictly measured iambics to free verse—no one will deny him a right to his preference; but when he tries to ascribe to these all the architectonics of the poetic art he is treading on shoals and quicksands.

 

Mr. Eastman complains that the line-divisions of free verse are arbitrary, that if they were once scrambled together in any poem even the author could hardly unscramble them. But may one ask him what that alleged fact has to do with the case? If this scrambling makes prose of any piece, then it was always prose—as indeed much verse is, both bond and free. Would Hamlet's soliloquy or Antony's death-speech be any the less poetry if written out as prose, or if scrambled into irregular lines ? Is Lincoln's Gettysburg speech any the less essentially poetry, in rhythm, structure, and spiritual motive, because it happens to be printed without line- divisions ?

 

If the eye-test shatters Mr. Eastman's arguments, the ear- test is similarly destructive. He says: if "two or three of the most free and subtle" of the vers-librists were "to read one of their favorite passages into the ear of an instrument, it is safe to assert that there would be less identity in the actual pulsations recorded than if the same two or three were reading a passage of highly wrought English prose." Possibly; but if these same two or three were to read Paradise Lost or the Ode to the West Wind, or any other poem of subtle or sweeping cadences, there would be still less identity. Such investigations as Dr. Patterson's (sensibly approved by Mr. Eastman and thoughtlessly disapproved, in a recent Dial, by John Gould Fletcher) will turn the pitiless light of science upon the empiricism of prosody, and upon the unrhythmic misinterpretations of poetry which most readers are guilty of. A life-time of theatre-going, including more Shakespeare and other poet-playwrights than may be found on the stage today, has convinced me that ninety-nine per-cent of actors deliberately hash poetic lines into prose so that even Mr. Eastman could hardly unscramble them. And few poets, whatever their rhythmic instinct, may be trusted to read their own poems.

 

In short, Mr. Eastman's argument will not hold water. It is a wistful effort to give the sanctity of unalterable law to merely individual theories and preferences. ( Mr. Eastman wants poetry as a refuge from life's passion and turmoil, and he uses the great name of Poe as his authority—Poe, to whom "a poem was an objective thing," Poe, who "would take sounds and melodies of words almost actually into his hands, and carve and model them until he had formed a beautiful vessel." Ah, but Poe's passion was beauty, especially beauty as it is found in poetry, whereas Mr. Eastman's passion is life, and its enhancement through social revolution. In politics and social ethics he is a radical; but shocked conservatism must take refuge in some sacred corner of one's being, and in his case the muse presides there with draped and decorous dignity. ) H. M.

Here's an article by one of our roving VRB reporters.  From the South Jersey Desk a report on the state of ultramodern poetry:

A Vrzhu Research Bureau Report - Techno-Lyrical Backlash

(filed 30 Mar 08)

Mount Holly, New Jersey - Here in Burlington County the techno-lyrical poetry season has just come to a close. Orphic Fusion, that exuberant annual showcase that brings cutting-edge poets to the county seat of Mount Holly to muse on the state of contemporary poetonomy and show off their latest tricks, ended a month ago. Lingua Avantguardia,  its less well-known Medford Lakes counterpart, wrapped up on March 14. The program for each was pretty much what I've come to expect. In Mount Holly, Ian Delancy cooked up a fine sestina using irrational numbers as end words, and scribbled lines in white ink across white paper and called it "In Memory of My Ironic Winter." In Medford Lakes, Martin Robinson talked about something called "synergistic de-elaboration."

And so, I’m asking: Is everybody tired of this stuff by now, or what?

Nearly two years ago, Adrian Ferrino started a revolution with his journal Rien et/o Nada? that thoroughly transformed modern poetry here, not only propelling Burlington county poets to the pinnacle of southern New Jersey literary acclaim (displacing Gloucester county in the process), but spreading a manifesto of high-impact, scientifically informed Sur-Objectivism around the 7 counties of south Jersey. Villanelles "spherified" with hydrocolloids until they looked like the gelatinous eyes of giant squid, haiku frozen with liquid nitrogen until they form ingot-shaped "stanzas," Petrarchan  sonnets on shredded magnetic tape and spun into a beehive “hairdos,” and everything from binary pantoums to sprung rhythm acrostics exploded into free floating phonemes—it's all part of a poetry style that places a premium on material innovation. At its best, this version of "molecular poetonomy" stokes the emotions and shocks the senses. 

But, from the beginning, some critics have scorned a mode of writing that relies, in their opinion, too heavily on technology (as if typewriters, computers, and even pens, aren’t machines) and often chooses “foam” over substance. In a recent e-mail, Harold Stefanos, an expert on innovative poetry in the southeastern part of the Garden State, wrote, "I am getting a little weary of Burlington-driven techno-composition. Many of these 'experiments' would be better off if they didn't show up anywhere but at AWP conferences, preferably at about 2 AM. Really, they should have a stall at Pennsauken Mart, if it were still around." His words sum up recent critical attacks: It’s all getting your eye poked out until someone starts having fun. I'd like some real poems now, may I please?

So, is it over? It is true that Adrian and his fellow poets are no longer as avant-garde as they once were. In food, you know your haute cuisine is no longer haute when you see it on the Applebee’s menu. In poetry, there are different indignities, from indifference to (shudder!) acceptance.

The rest of the poetry universe has officially caught up to the Burlington revolutionaries: Ian’s journal has been replaced by a blog, and is no longer the source of the new new new thing. But poetry movements often survive in the valley of their PR long after the American Poetry Review has lost interest. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E craze passed years ago, but interest in the structures and codes of language, the application of process, and the recognition that language is political have become staples of our poetry praxis; new formalism is tragically  unhip, but I still find quatorzains and end rhymes in poetry journals. And though often used as a derogatory term, the confessional poets of the 50’s and 60’s altered the landscape of American poetry and broadened the horizon for poems to traffick in intimate and unflattering information, poems about illness, sexuality and depression.

All these  movements eventually show some signs of stagnation—clichéd tropes,  academic analysis, overexposure, and critics standing by to gleefully rejoice in the demise in whatever movement is in their sights.

But the poems themselves never really go away. The techniques are still there, in every de-stabilized persona that daubs a fragmented lyric, in every line made colorful by hard surrealism. We may laugh at the excesses of poetry manifestos, but we read them all the time.

The same is true of Burlingtonistas. It’s not the emblematic forms they use (or, as they say, “foams”) but their vigorous, often insouciant, search for the new. In an art where individual products take a hundred years or more to prove their staying power, every movement of the last 50 years is still very young indeed.

In the meantime, Ian is has been working on using nanosyllables to achieve more precise line measurement and, in collaboration with his father’s waste disposal business, Adrian is developing a poetry medium made from compressed inorganics. Adrian says: "Hey, there are guys who say, 'it’s over, let's put it behind us,' but that's just marketing BS. I can tell you from my own experience that there is more research going on, more energy, than ever before. At least on the weekends."

And there it is.  Poetry keeps changing even as it remains the same.  Some techniques will perhaps, mercifully, not withstand the test of time. And Ian has the third degree burns to prove it.  But others, whether it’s the ghazal or the new sentence, will seep into the poetry vernacular, enhancing the range of possibilities poets have at their disposal. It’s all part of the crazy candy-colored carousel that is Poetry.

This Week's Tuesday Vrzhu is...

and will be appearing late Wednesday, or early Thursday. Thanks for dropping by and come back soon!

Sunday Vrzhu Image Clearance Sale

I was saving these to accompany some witty/scintillating/ironic/perceptive commentary/counterpoint. William Logan/Adam Kirsch/Carmine Starnino would have quaked in their mukluks.  Not gonna happen. (Special thanks to Toothpaste for Dinner and Buttersafe.)

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!"
  

Snark: The New Poetry Month Poster

So the American Academy of Poets has announced the release of this year's Poetry Month poster. 

And it's a snoozer. 

As the official press release describes it:

"Red letters set in flight to spell "National Poetry Month" are the centerpiece of this bold poster. The image is anchored by two cupped hands."

"this bold poster"   

Really?

Yeah.  This is pretty bold. 

Bold like the "Got Milk" posters are bold.  Bold like the Dakota Fanning says READ posters.  Actually, the Dakota Fanning poster is more interesting than this job.  Dakota Fanning is at least an interesting person holding up Charlotte's Web and maybe someone out there in the target audience might think, "Wow, if the girl from "Man on Fire" and "War of the Worlds" is into Charlotte's Web, it might be a good read." 

I won't even get into the absolute lack of imagination on font-choice on this thing.  Let's just consider its express purpose:

How the hell does this inspire someone to go pick up a book of poetry?  How the hell does this inspire someone to go hear poetry for that matter.  Seriously.  This is the tamest, least imaginative advert I've seen in a while.  I can only imagine that deference for the lowest common-denominator, least offensive, middling banality was the call since these posters are going to be on the bulletin boards of classrooms across America.  But seriously, is this the best they could come up with?  This was the work of the folks at "SpotCo", who the press release bills as:

[the] New York City agency responsible for the lion’s share of poster designs for Broadway’s most popular shows. These include RENT, Chicago, and Avenue Q.

I can only imagine ticket sales for "NATIONAL POETRY MONTH" if this were the poster.  I'm thinking a very very limited run.

Aesthetically it's such a boring piece of work. 

This doesn't have to be.  The American Academy has done great work before.  Consider last year's poster with a really clever pixilated Whitman.  It was both classy and cutting edge.  Certainly more interesting then the flyaway letters of this year's effort.

What does this year's poster look like to you?

Here are my ideas:

• Help!  My letters are floating away!!
• Please sir.  Can I have some more red letters?
• Dismembered hands profit from the Poetry Foundation's novel program of sprinkling letters from zeppelins flying over the city.