Kurt Brown

Simic, on poetry
"Who is the real author of the poem?...Schools of literary criticism and the writings of poets themselves can be divided by how they answer that question. Here are just a few possible ways:

             —The poet and no one else writes the poem.
             —The unconscious of the poet writes the poem.
             —All of past poetry writes the poem.
             —Language itself writes the poem.
             —Some higher power, angelic or demonic writes the poem.
             —The spirit of the times writes the poem.

Probably all of these have a role in any work, but dogmatic criticism likes to pretend that there is only one correct viewpoint..."

"It is worth emphasizing that the poet is not in control of his poems. He is like someone who imagines he is driving from New York to Boston only to find himself in Tuscaloosa, Alabama."

"...we cannot turn to our imagination and say, give me an original description of what the moon looks like tonight because I need it for the poem I'm writing."
                                       —Charles Simic, on James Fenton's book, The

                                       Strength of Poetry, FS&G, 2001, an article which                                        appeared in The New York Review of Books, July
                                       19th, 2001

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"Some readers feel that revision, which plows and plods, is the enemy of inspiration, which strikes like lightning. Not true: revision is the desire to have a long love affair with inspiration and not just an evening's fling..."

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"...the poet, as García Lorca reminds us, is a professor of the five bodily senses."
                                      —John Frederick Nims, from his introduction to the

                                      Poems of St. John of the Cross, The University of

                                      Chicago Press, 1979

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"I think there's always a part of us that wants to be writing poems that are entirely different from the ones we are writing."

                                      —Jeffrey Harrison, from an interview on the web

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A good portion of what we teach when we teach the writing of poetry, is extreme editing. Editing of a sort that combs the verbal snarls and burrs of speech out of what we write for the sake of clarity, effectiveness, and sheer strength of concision.... One is constantly reminding students that the language and grammar of casual, ordinary speech is not the language of poetry—though, paradoxically, it must appear to be so at all times. That is: worked-over, rhythmic, sonorous, well-constructed lines of poetry must, simultaneously, have the feel of spontaneous, casual, naturalistic speech, must flow as if directly from the mouth of a person of some awareness and unusually perceptive wit. It is this very quality that makes students, at least at first, think that it is easy to write good poetry—because it looks so easy to do! To read the poems of Jane Kenyon, for instance, and then to try to emulate them successfully, will underscore the point.

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Still, such nitpicking about line-breaks betrays a lack of imaginative vision and inspired subject matter. If poetry is only craft, it isn't much more valuable than woodworking. Or: those who are obsessed by craft probably have very little to say.

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I just said to my wife, "Honey, I've written a brilliant thing about a Mary Oliver Poem. It's so brilliant, I don't even know if it's true."

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I am wary, too, of any critical explanation of difficult, arcane literature that is equally difficult and arcane. What is there to hide? And why? The answer is always the same: nothing. Or, something ordinary. That is the primary reason for hiding it.

                                                          •
—on the current state of contemporary American poetry.
Well, it's a hodgepodge. But was it ever any different? Was there really a golden age of poetry? The 19th Century sounds like a candidate: uni-voiced, for better or worse. Except for Whitman, of course. That's undoubtedly where American poetry begins. At present, no one knows who's leading the way. Shaped Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Beat Poetry and Found Poetry are decidedly dead. Confessionalism is domesticated. The magical influence of Spain and South America lingers, while the dry, meaningless example of the French has crept in through the corridors and classrooms of the New York School. Postmodernism struggles to assert itself, but the shadow of Modernism is long. Language poetry plays with blocks. The New Formalists aren't as good as the Old Formalists. Now we have the New Narrative Poets. And Fractal Poetics. And the Elliptical School. Slam Poets continue to fulminate, coast to coast. Everyone claims they have no credo, no aesthetic. NO MANIFESTOES! they assure themselves. This is their credo. American poetry is still the most exciting game in town.

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"The natural prayer of the soul: attentiveness."
                                      —Malebranche

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"What conscious moment
is not, in essence, worship..."
                                     —Mark Cox

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It is only what is imagined that is eternal, only the imagined that lasts (Art). What is "real," solid, actual (Life), passes like dust.

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People don't want style, mastery of form, technical brilliance. They want honesty. Hence the proliferation of poems that sound like frank talk. Immediacy. Directness. That's what's wanted. Yet there's still style, mastery of form, technical brilliance. Maybe it's all the same in the end.

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I work and work because it is always the next book that is going to save me. The next poem.

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In Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana remarks: "There is...such a connection between different parts of a vessel, that one rope can seldom be touched without altering another," an apt and beautiful metaphor for the making and revising of poems. In a well-made poem, the addition or deletion of a word or phrase might play havoc with tone, rhythm, subtlety of meaning, or the smooth unfolding of a theme. This is true whether you are writing formal or free verse, or the wildest kind of experimental text. A poem, a successful one, is bound together in all its parts, great and small, with some connections running down into the unconscious like guy wires into the depths of the hold where they are invisibly but soundly fixed. Anyone who feels that they are liberated from all aesthetic constraints, that any constraint at all is boringly conservative, will find these remarks prissy and backward. I almost find them so myself, but they are true.

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The world is not responsible for paying attention to what I write; I am responsible for writing something worthy of the world's attention.

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"We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is 'me.' The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones."
                                       —Tomas Tranströmer

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... I cannot wear a beret, because it's associated with two pretensions in the American mind: first, with the cultured French intellectual, and secondly with the Beats about whom everything, at this point in time, seems pretentious. The irony is that the beret in France is a peasant hat, and the Beats existed precisely to lampoon and deflate pretension of all sorts, especially in poetry. But the beret is such a simple, handsome, practical hat. Too bad.
                
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"Fiction is a linear art made of time, poetry is childishly timeless and circular."

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"The so-called literary devices, metaphor, symbol, irony...are the natural workings of the human brain. One doesn't have to think of using them, they're already there like one's hand or eyes. It's the way the species thinks and expresses itself in ordinary commerce. It's how we're all wired, to use a modern expression."

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When the question of willful obscurity in post-modernist poetry came up recently at a Q&A following a reading, I heard a young poet say: "I think obscurity in contemporary poetry is masking a longing for real depth" and I thougt—bingo! That sounds about right. What young poets want, always, is intensity (Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Keats, etc), but somewhere along the way Modernist emotional, psychological, and physical intensity was rejected or abandoned for sheer intellectual intensity; who knows why? The problem with pure intellectualism in poetry is that it produces superficial titillation for the brain, but none for the heart, soul, and body. Intellectualism produces anemic verse, as Pound asserted almost 100 years ago. Abstraction weakens verse. Great poetry is always visceral. It is body-knowledge, not cerebration. The glory of Homer inheres in his immediate physicality as much as in his ideas or themes. These can be abstracted out of his work easily, but what you leave behind in doing so is the poetry.

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The young are beautiful and don't know it; which is like not being beautiful at all.

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What I love about the past, what obsesses me, is that I was so present then. It is that, and not a warm nostalgia, that draws me back to scenes and experiences when I looked neither forward nor backwards, and all my senses were sharp. By the past, I mean childhood. Somewhere between the ages of three and adolescence when it seemed I was fully conscious of everything—not intellectually—but viscerally. It is that condition to which I would gladly return; to which I do return, in poem after poem, story after story. For me, at least, a subtle transition occurs somewhere in the mid-twenties—when a person is first able to look back and consider the past, and the future becomes real, when one's place in time is apparent and progress is felt as a motion, a momentum, finite and inevitable. It's this tri-partite awareness that makes us reflective, distracts us from the full experience of the present, living in three phases of one's life simultaneously and so not fully in any one of them. The trick is not to idealize or romanticize the past, but to understand it's allure as a total absorption in the moment, a radical being-thereness which occurs only in rare moments later in life, then quickly vanishes again. "Spots in time," Wordsworth called them. But once, he implies, there were no "spots," only a keen awareness-continuum comprising everything in a moment.

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Much of the beauty of James Wright is that [he] refused to disturb the subjects of his poems—creatures, lovers, objects—by exhaustively defining them, or approaching them in an authoritarian way. Rather, he hinted at their beauty, their

significance, before withdrawing, leaving them alone withut any need for him—

the POET—to invest them with a power they already possessed: self-sufficiency, being, existence. Their own mystery and truth. He wished not to rob them of their mystery by over-defining them. To write deeply of things, and yet to leave them alone, uncontaminated by the writer's own ego, unharmed—that's the trick.

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It is important, as well, to recognize that the most profound things are generally expressed in the simplest terms. Complex language may look like it is expressing

something profound, but too often—when it has been "deciphered"—it turns out

to be saying something quite ordinary and mundane.

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"With a single thread one has the entire skein."
                                     —Cervantes in Don Quixote

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In a retrospective article about James Agee in the New Yorker (Jan. 9, 2006), David Denby writes; "Agee chronicles being...he is incapable of physical disgust...For him, there is only an endless variety of shapes, textures, and dispositions, none of them beyond redemption in words." I like every word of this, and whether or not I can say the same of myself or not (I'm certainly capable of disgust), I have aspired to this sort of aesthetic catholicism as a writer as well.

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I have decided to reject any critical article, essay, or book that uses the word "hermeneutics." This decision may appear simply eccentric, but it is not. This

word, and perhaps several others, are signals, faithful and unvarying signs—to me

—that what is written will be as thoughtless and unoriginal as the jargon it is written in. Once jargon enters the vocabulary of any field, all real thinking about that field stops. Consensus and repetition become inevitable.

                                                           •
In 2004, one-and-a half million books were published, but less than two percent of those books sold over 5,000 copies.

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To a student interviewer
....on what students should know before they go to a reading:
I'm not sure I want students to know anything in particular, but I would like them to come with an open mind, a fertile imagination, an ability to pay attention (tough skill in this era of sound-bytes), and a love—or at least an interest—in language. These things seem to me to be prerequisites to enjoying poetry. Without them, poetry readings might be dull affairs—no strobe lights, rock bands, dancing around the stage, etc. Poetry audiences are small, and probably have to be, because of the intimate nature of the art. Poems, generally, do not scream at you. They speak frankly in a small quiet voice, like one of your closest friends talking to you across a table, but they speak truthfully, directly, closely, deeply to you. Rock concerts may be louder, and superficially more exciting, but poetry goes much, much deeper— if you can let it in.

...on the writing process...
A poem can start in any number of ways. Sometimes it is only a bit of language that gets me going, a phrase or two I read or overhear. Once in a while, it's an idea, some peculiar concept I want to play around with to see what I can get out of it. Most often, though, it is an image that sparks my imagination—seeing an accident on the highway, or two lovers on a bench in the park, or even something as ordinary and mundane as an old tire in a ditch by the side of the road. I am often inspired by reading the work of other poets. Reading their poems gets me going, makes me "hear" language again in a fresh and interesting way, and puts me in touch with my imagination through experiencing theirs. However I start, I usually do not know where I am going when I write the first few lines. That's important. If I knew where I was going when I began, the poem might wind up feeling more like an essay than an experience—and I want my poems to be experiences, explorations, that entail discoveries and surprises along the way. I love poems that transform themselves as they move along: they start somewhere and wind up somewhere else completely unexpected. As the poet Charles Simic says: "It is worth emphasizing that the poet is not in control of his poems. He is like someone who imagines he is driving from New York to Boston only to find himself in Tuscaloosa, Alabama." Those are the kinds of poems I want to write, though I don't often succeed in doing so perhaps.

...on "Why poetry?"
....Today, after forty years of reading and writing I'm as thrilled by reading a good poem as I was when I was a teenager. Words knock me out. And every time I enter my imagination I enter a world beyond the world, a world without time or space or the usual laws or rules of polite society. Anything can happen, and does. ....I'm not a good essayist, or a playwright, or a novelist, I'm a poet. I can't help it. ... I've got my one genre to mess around with—but think of what Emily Dickinson did with that! One thing I learned early: poetry, literature, is endless. There isn't the least possibility that anyone will ever exhaust it, it will never be something about which I think: "Aha! I understand it now, I've come to the end of it, there's nothing more I can learn—from here on in, it's just the same old thing." I learn something new every day.

...on growing up...
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lived for a few years as an infant in Freeport, Long Island. But fortunately for me, my parents moved to a very small town in northwestern Connecticut when I was still a boy and I grew up there wandering around in the woods and fields, fishing on the Housatonic River, getting to know about seasons and weather, and animals of all kinds in the wild. The poet Dylan Thomas has a fabulous poem about childhood, entitled "Fern Hill," which was a farm in the Welsh countryside he used to explore as a child. The place I grew up in was my "Fern Hill." An Eden of sorts, wild and ancient and untamed. At least, that's the way I thought of it, and still do in a way. Not that I'm a nature poet (whatever that is), but that it helped form my sensibilities as a poet. As William Blake says, "Nature is Imagination!" I needed to experience all of that rural life, not just city life, human life, but nonhuman life too in order to begin to see how vast life really is and how much of it does not fit into our human scheme of things. I am deeply grateful for my days in Connecticut, and often go back to them for subjects, images, experiences I can exploit in my poetry. The landscape of that small town, that whole area, is the landscape of my imagination. It connects me to something much older and more lasting (and in some ways more humbling and terrifying) than the cityscape in which I live now—old and enduring as it may seem.

...on knowing he wanted to be a writer...
...essentially, higher education taught the old masters and that was that. Great stuff, of course, and I'm glad I have a background in it. I read it avidly today, with far more understanding than I read it then. But it wasn't until my friend decided he'd become a writer that it occurred to me it might be possible to write in the present about human life and experience and get it published and have someone actually read it and enjoy it. Then I discovered the Beats, and I was off to the races. Kerouac and Ginsberg proved to me that you could write about highways and sex and smokestacks and cities and that it could be interesting and vital. The contemporary world was a place of human struggle, human reality, and the writer could delve into it for material. Later, of course, I learned that there were many living writers, not only the Beats; people who had been working all along to portray the kind of life I knew and wanted to write about myself. With that discovery, I was confirmed in my desire to become a writer myself and try to add my voice to the rest. That is: I was confirmed in my belief that writing was a worthwhile thing to do, and that many, many others had chosen the same path. I wasn't alone, and I wasn't crazy.

...on hobbies and interests...
What a boring person I am! I spend my days reading and writing, trying to make myself a better poet and produce something worthy of being published and read. Beyond that, I love music and traveling, and good wine (thank you, California!), and recently I've learned something about cooking, and I've begun to fish again, after abandoning it in my youth. All experience, everything I do, is fodder for my poetry. Being a writer is a bit like being an actor. You're almost no one in particular because you have to empty yourself to be anyone or anything at any time. I recall what someone said about Whitman: "Perhaps his life had to be partial, in order for his work to be whole." Writers spend their time sitting in a chair alone in front of a computer screen, silently, staring into themselves and bringing out something they can put into words that fall silently on the page. Then they send these words off into the vastness of nowhere for strangers, whom they will never know, to read. Meanwhile, they are back in their chairs, writing more. Sometimes, when they are not writing, they sit in a chair and read. Again: silently, and alone. But writers also know that solitude is a luxury in our gassed-up, super-quick, party-on, constantly-distracted, superficial, don't-have-time-for-it world. John Lennon said: "Life is what happens when you are making other plans." .... Hobbies are largely a distraction

from this intense form of attention. The poet is not a hobbyist, but—as Lorca says—a "professor of the five senses." Almost nothing happens on the outside, in either the writer or the reader (which is why movies are seldom made about writers). Everything happens inside, where we live.

...on inspiration and finding material for poetry...
Almost anything inspires me to write. I've already said that the poems of others provoke me to write poems of my own. Every time I read a good poem, I think to myself: "This is what it's all about, there's almost nothing better for me to be doing than this." It's not competitiveness that makes me want to write a poem of my own after reading a great poem by someone else. It's the need, the deep-seated desire to want to add my voice to the chorus, to participate in the great conversation among poets of all times and places, to contribute something valuable and important to the general knowledge and experience of the world. And I am practically obsessed with trying to transcend myself, to go beyond my own abilities, and write something I never knew I was capable of writing. I'm inspired by my own potential to do something more. Each new attempt is a new failure, as Eliot remarked. But it's worth the effort.... As for what is material for poetry: everything. Good, bad, beautiful, ugly. As long as it's the truth, as you see it, as long as it has substance and reality and importance. There is no place for the trivial in poetry. Humor, yes. Joy, yes, as well as tragedy. But not the trivial. Perhaps that is why poetry is not more popular than it is in a culture that tends to want to trivialize everything. But here comes that soapbox again, and this time I'm not going to stand up on it. What inspires me to write, finally, is the good old-fashioned desire to want to move someone deeply, to make others think and feel and be more awake, more alive. If only for a moment.

...on finding poetry fulfilling...
It can be immensely satisfying. But as I've indicated, it can be just as frustrating when you finally admit to yourself that you're never going to be the kind of poet you dreamed of being, and that you will never write the kinds of poems you had hoped to write. "I can't go on," says a character in Samuel Becket's absurd play, I'll go on. It doesn't make much sense, but there it is. I'm aware of the fact of how silly and dumb much of what I have said may sound. Maybe I'm just trying to make up justifications for my own peculiarities. Why anyone would want to try to do something like this is just plain crazy. Why almost everyone, everywhere and in all ages, has tried to do so, must speak for itself.

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Earlier, I had noted Max Eastman's comment about Greenwich Village and it's comparison with the left Bank in Paris: "New York had an ethical, while Paris had an aesthetic, bohemia." Another fine distinction, beautifully articulated, comes from Van Wyck Brooks, noting the difference between New York and Boston: "In New York, I should die of stimulus. In Boston, I should be soothed to death." This can't be said more elegantly, or truthfully—even now, fifty years or more after Brooks made that observation. That verb, "soothed" is fiercely accurate: not only does it refer to the pace and energy of the city, much more relaxed than that of New York, but to the well-bred, polite manners of patrician Boston and the cloyingly civilized atmosphere of the place. New York is brusque, direct, almost crass in comparison. It is positively alive and doesn't give a damn for the niceties of life.

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...in high school and college I had always had a keen interest in science. Physics seemed interesting, and of course geology and chemistry. But what fascinated me most was biology. I don't think I ever got over looking into a microscope for the first time and seeing all that tiny, invisible life swarming around that we can't normally see. I used to draw pictures of paramecium and diatoms, and anything else I could discover through that powerful lens. It knocked me out. I think that if I hadn't chosen to become a poet, I would have become a biologist. Or perhaps a photographer, but that's another story. As for mathematics: numbers basically stymie me. Like most poets, whenever I see a few numbers hanging around on a street corner I run the other way! But I always knew there was something there that I simply wasn't getting. Finally, I took a summer course entitled "Mathematics for Poets," and learned, among other things, about primary numbers. I saw that rainbow of integers arcing off into infinity, and I was hooked. I still don't understand much about mathematics, but I know there's beauty there, and mystery, and some truth about the universe that I will never know. Having finished collecting poems about science and mathematics for Verse & Universe, I began noticing essays written about the relationship between science and poetry, so I began collecting them as well for a companion volume, a collection of prose: The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science.

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The language of science is very tempting for a poet, there are wonderful words and phrases that come to us from neuroscience, for instance, like "the Aqueduct of Silvius" (in the brain) or concepts like "The Serial Position Effect," that poets might find interesting. Science also provides the poet with innumerable concepts to be exploited as metaphors. Again and again today, we see poems referring to black holes or dwarf stars. The imperative for science, and certainly mathematics, is to find a language that transcends all connotation, a language that is fiercely denotative and precise, words and phrases that mean one thing and one thing only. By comparison, poetry revels in connotation, ambiguity, double entendre, suggestiveness of all kinds. If a word can mean six things at one—all the better! Strip Shakespeare of connotation, and you'd have considerably duller plays. Finally, I guess we're talking about the old idea of how the brain is divided: right side / left side. One handles rational ideas, abstraction, logic, precision, and one handles visions, dreams, creativity, metaphor. But the fact of the matter is that

together they make up a whole brain, so they are related—literally—and we could

no more live without one than the other. It's also true that in past ages, great thinkers were both poets and scientists. Galileo wrote poetry for about ten years, after the church refused to let him continue his scientific investigations; someone has recently published a volume of Leonardo da Vinci's sonnets; and a few of the Romantic poets, Shelly, I think, conducted genuine scientific experiments involving liquids and gasses. Edgar Allen Poe delved into the science of his time, and wrote essays and stories based on his findings; and Aristotle saw the value of both science and poetry in his writings. In India, mathematical concepts and formulas were often expressed in poetry. We were not once so divided into "two cultures," as C. P. Snow would have it. Once, the man of science and the man of poetry were one. Every field of knowledge was open to anyone willing to think about them.

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Somewhere along the way, probably in the 19th century, wide ranges of thought and human experience got divided up between what we called "the sciences" and "the humanities." Thought and intellection went one way, while dreams and feeling went the other. That's why we have the stereotypical idea of the dispassionate scientist, coldly rational, and the wild emotional poet falling in love and articulating his or her visions. Now that I think of it, I have heard almost exclusively from scientists, or people who are interested in science, about my books, and relatively few poets who've shown any interest at all. In some ways, I think poets are more snobbish about science, than the other way around. But that's a generalization, and not to be taken too seriously. I have heard from a few poets who are using Verse & Universe in their classes. So that's a good sign and goes some way towards refuting what I just said. Still: I have the impression that more scientists are reading poems and novels, than poets are reading Scientific American or Omni magazine.

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It is no harder or easier to write a poem about science or mathematics than it is to

write a poem about anything else. That is: it's difficult to write a poem—a good

one, a successful one—period. Just as it's difficult to make a new scientific discovery, even a small one. Poets, like scientists, are mostly noodling around trying to make something happen. Most of the time, you're just working on something—an idea, a hunch—and following it to see where it might lead. Often, it leads to the expected place, a place you've been hundreds of times before. No one shrieks eureka! much—either in the laboratory or the library. But when they do, life gets a little more interesting and the world becomes a bigger place.

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I'm tentative about writing poems that use science directly because I know so little about science. I can only use broad concepts, and then only metaphorically. But there are poets who really have backgrounds in science—Forrest Gander, comes to mind, or Roald Hoffman, Patiann Rogers, Alison Hawthorne Deming—and I look to them to enlighten me and show the way. It is very exciting to me to use facts in poetry. Real facts. I don't mean the facts of one's life, or historical information or dates, I mean the volume of a certain gas at a certain temperature and how it changes under pressure, or the fact that bees cannot find their own hive if the hive is moved even a few inches from its original spot. I read this fact in a poem by Anne Marie Macari recently and I was thrilled. This is positively fascinating to me. And the world of science is packed with such facts. Blake said that nature is imagination, and I believe him. A few years ago, before his untimely death, the great Czech poet and scientist Miroslav Holub told me that no literary magazine he had ever read was as full of wonder and imagination as the latest issue of any given science magazine. I hope he's wrong. But I shudder to think he's right. There are great poems being written, and poetry is experimenting in many ways, ways that are exciting and productive of new styles and effects. Let's hope the experimenting continues, and that new poetries arise out of the old, as they have always done. If Ezra Pound is right, and poets are "the antennae of the race," then perhaps poets are way out there ahead of the scientists in some ways anyway. A great poem, or great body of poetic work, might change your life just as directly and decisively as a new technological discover [sic]. It has that power, without a doubt.

                                                           •
I write about history, time, death, existence, consciousness, all things I know almost nothing about. Perception interests me, and the natural world. Human experience of all kinds. I might write a poem about the guilt I feel over destroying a bees nest for no good reason one summer when I was young, or I might write about the city of New York, where I live, about how timeless it seems, how huge and comprehensive it is, how everyone—no matter where they come from—at one time or another seems a part of it, whether they live there or not—or whether they've ever even visited it or not. Someone they know, someone in their family, has lived there and passed something of the city on to them in their bloodstream. As I wrote in a poem recently: "This isn't a city, it's the world." I write poems about regret, about aging, about poetry and language itself. Often I write a poem about some odd idea or event—about the artificiality of baloney, for instance, or a man in California who had sex with his car. It's all grist for the mill. One thing I am not good at is writing poems about traditional subjects: love, for instance, or my family or my own personal experiences. This is a real lack, but there's not much I can do about it. I only hope that some of my own personal experience gets filtered through what I do write about, in some shape or form.
                                                          

                                                           •

I delight in my failures, as I have worked so hard to achieve them. Even my failures are a kind of success, an accomplishment. I don't mean this as an easy way of turning things to account. There is nothing easy about it. Not doing anything: that is the only true failure. Let my monument be my failures, the work that I have done.

                                                           •
Responding to "Not Then, Not Now," in The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later and the following:

          "I don't pretend to understand how that impulse toward visionary
           completion, that Aquarian thrust that was for a short time undeniably
           there, just fizzled...There was a powerful shared mood; it discharged
           itself and disappeared."

The first thing to remember is that Woodstock was not the beginning of the real ascendancy of that "mood," that Aquarian-age dream of love, peace, harmony and understanding, it was the final orgasmic gasp of it. It was the dream made manifest, lived-through, "proved," though of course it only lasted three days, which doesn't really prove anything. Still, it seemed to satisfy our ambition to show the world that masses of people—if they are young and healthy enough—can live together in peace under adverse conditions (Oh, the rain! The Mud!) with few material goods or comforts to console them. After the great climax of Woodstock, we seemed to feel justified, fulfilled ("by the time we got to Woodstock / We were half-a-million strong...") and we simply rolled over and went back to sleep. When we woke up, not much later in historical terms, our "revolution" was over and the backlash had already begun.

Secondly, this indicates the real problem with our generation: we were not true revolutionaries—ruthless fire-breathing ideologues desperately fighting tyranny and willing to put our lives on the line—but mostly middle-class kids out for a good time. Ultimately, we wanted to change the world so we could have more FUN, and not for any moral, political, or higher spiritual purposes. At least, none we could have articulated any clearer than "Love is all you need." We were a generation of privileged, self-indulgent hedonists living off the heady prosperity in the aftermath of World War II. Our commitment to change went as far as marching in the sun, then sleeping together afterwards in the park. And even this required a few good bands present to provide a soundtrack, some purveyors of tie-died t-shirts, and of course enough easily obtainable drugs to render it all carnivalesque and surreal. The few real sober revolutionaries among us either went to jail, or died young, and ceased to have any further influence on us at all.

Finally, inevitably, we caved into America's omnivorous materialism. Rather than resist, America prefers to swallow its critics, i.e. the opposition, whole. This is the genius of American capitalism: expropriate everything, even the counter-culture with all its protests, and turn it into something unthreatening and commercial. All of our putative innovations—in personal appearance, ways of living, thinking and behaving—were simply adopted by the establishment and converted into "fashion," and we were more than willing to accept this because we thought is was a victory: we had made the larger, older culture of our parents take note and bend to our wishes. That was enough. It was all we wanted. Long hair, bell-bottom pants, rock music, everything but drugs had become respectable (though even drugs have become a mainstream, American pursuit) and we reveled in it, thinking we had really accomplished something (WOW! Sonny and Cher got their own TV show, and Janice Joplin was on Dick Cavett). Mostly, we accomplished being eaten and digested by the open-jawed serpent of materialism. It shat us out, a decade or so later, as proper citizens, aka technology investors and soccer moms, concerned about the price of gas, lunch programs and refinancing the mortgage.

If I seem to be too harsh on our generation, I must also admit that I am proud of having belonged to it as well. At the very least, we had the right idea: would it be possible to create a better world by effecting radical change—not in the physical conditions of existence—but in the spiritual attitude of humanity? (bring on the Age of Aquarius!). That is, we were aware of the fact that the next great revolution in history, if it was to have any real significance, would have to be a moral, not a technological one. Unhappily, the opposite has occurred: morality and ethics have taken a nosedive while, of course, computers and every other species of electronic gadget have carried the day—leaving us as spiritually impoverished as before, but with even greater weapons at our disposal. And it is depressing to think that it was/is us who eagerly, happily fueled the appetite for more electronic paraphernalia and gladly entered the ranks of those marching towards "The Information Age."

The moral revolution we wanted was a secular, not a religious one: communes, "Back to the Land" environmental movements, social theories involving universal sharing, benign governmental programs with a conscience, and so on. The moral revolution called for today is emphatically a radical, right-wing religious one without regard for human beings or life on earth, and has been partly called into existence as a reaction to our ideas and activities during the 1960s.

...There was a moment, half a century ago, when it seemed something important, something transformative was about to happen. Now it's gone.

                                                           •
About arguing with people of faith, a friend of mine said to me recently: "You can't reason a man out of a position he hasn't reasoned himself into." Nothing is stronger than faith, and it would be futile to try to argue with it. I have deep respect for anyone's religions faith, but I don't only mean religious faith: I mean all kinds of faith. If, for instance, a person has faith in the government and believes fervently in its goodness and legality (though all the facts argue otherwise), what can be done about that? The same would be true about the economy, or education, or global warming, for instance. Water from the icecaps may inundate us up to our ears, but if we believe that the science concerning global warming is inconclusive and not necessarily true—what then? We'd better learn to breathe under water. Faith can move mountains, as Christ said, it is that powerful. It can destroy worlds, obliterate reality, devastate families unto the umpteenth generation, bring nations down, change the course of history. How can mere reason compete with a force that powerful? Facts don't stand a chance in the face of belief. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that.

                                                           •
"A poem looks from the interior outward. We create our knowledge and sense of meaning out of the meeting of inner and outer realities. Our entire, knowable lives are conducted at the junction of those two worlds. We are not solitary creatures: All our experience of a meaningful life is made at that moment of intersection, in which the self and other touch."
                                      —Jane Hirshfield from an interview in The Bloomsbury                                        Review

                                                           •
Any poem alive with the moment is immortal. That's the trick: alive with the moment!

                                                           •
I come to conclusions to which, of course, many others have come before me. But that is not anything to be ashamed of. The important thing is that I come to them myself, from my own inquiry and observation, and that means that I have made a discovery”—en if a hundred, a thousand, have been there before me. It's a little like finding a pristine lake glittering in the backcountry, one afternoon on a hike. For that moment, for you at least, you are Cortez, Columbus, Peary, Livinstone.

                                                           •
Is there anything more precarious than a woman in high heels making her way across a cobble-stoned street?

                                                           •
"My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second."
                                      —Wislawa Szymborska

                                                           •
"I knew from the moment I started writing that I never wanted to be writing about my life."
                                      —from an interview with James Tate in The Paris Review

That's exactly how I felt, and feel—I never wanted to appear in my poems as myself. I always, from the very first, wanted to make up worlds, worlds peopled by characters who were not me, but fabulous persons. Not necessarily unreal, but not me. The Beats shocked me with their obvious commitment to dramatize their own lives (even if, like Kerouac in his novels, the names were slightly altered). How can a person think his own life and experience is important and interesting enough to supply material for art? The lives of most writers are dull as dirt. Though not all, of course.

                                                           •
"But paradise is a myth made necessary by its loss. Paradise was simply the world, the real one."

                                     —Richard Hoffman

                                                           •
"St. Philip says that truth comes to this world clothed in images. Are we to undress it? Become costume managers in reverse, hanging veils and black leather in wardrobes, sending the truth naked onto the stage before an audience who yawns at the dreariness of abstractions...What's below...in the memories and dreams of the human psyche, is never abstraction... I am as interested in truth as anyone else, but my faith is in imagery..."
                            —Barbara Hurd from Stirring the Mud

And that was the faith, the truth, that Pound and the other great Modernists knew, and knew too that all great writers in all eras and in all places have known this same truth: Pound said this principle was not unique or particular to him. He was merely voicing what every great writer from Homer on has known, and practiced. This may be why Post-Modernism is so bloodless, so inward and abstract— because there was nowhere else for poetry to go after Modernism, but away from the concrete, physical image. We have now begun to undress the truth, and we send it on to the stage naked—or dressed in the harlequin robes of nonsense and idiocy. That's more like it, because Post-Modernism, by and large, does employ imagery, but imagery without context, continuity, or meaning. Which, in the end, might be the same thing as saying it is abstract. To the nth degree.

                                                           •
"A poem should be an experience," you hear advocates of post-modernist aesthetics say—"not the record of an experience." In order to do this, the reader has to abandon his or her normal assumptions when it comes to reading: the experience such poems offer is not of meaning, but of language itself devoid of associative or narrative logic. We are invited to look at words, phrases, or complete sentences (and sometimes not even that), without reference to any ordered, coherent idea out of which meaning might arise. That is: the poem has no semantic intent. The author has relinquished his or her traditional role as "sayer" or "knower," or even as "rememberer," in tribal terms. The poet no longer has access to any particular vision or knowledge. It is all technique, delighting the reader with tantalizing bits of nonsense or almost-sense that are meant to be engaging in and of themselves. Is this a new, genuine modesty, or a false one? And how long can such an aesthetic last before readers begin to hunger again after meaning and coherence, a shared vision of an admittedly fragmented world?

                                                           •
The word "architecture" ought to be struck from poetry forever, as in the phrase "The architecture of longing" and a few others like it. For instance: "geology" (as in "The geology of hope") and archeology (as in "The archeology of desire"). After a hundred years, Modernism has developed a diction every bit as stale and hackneyed as the Victorian era, with its "purling" brooks and "laughing" sunbeams.

                                                           •
"Surely there are situations in which it's absurd to write poetry! One could approach his own death with poetry—I should think one would. But a slaughter, a slaughter for which he bears perhaps some responsibility? Or, he does what he does. I don't know what one should do..." Though George Oppen wrote the preceding in the 1930s, it is a relevant question today. Or: it is always, sadly, a relevant question. And there is no good answer. Except this (which is no answer): how much importance do you attach to poetry, how much urgency and necessity? And remember, before you answer, those poems of Miklós Radnóti.. After the war Radnóti's last poems, written in a notebook during a forced march, were discovered from the mass grave in which he was buried. Maybe that's the only relevant answer. The skeptical might argue: Radnóti was just doing what Oppen suggests— approaching his own death with poetry—and he was in no way "responsible" for the slaughter in which he would become a victim. Still. Would writing poems in his situation not qualify as absurd? And yet, he wrote them. It seemed supremely important.

                                                           •
"'Profession' has always seemed like a misleading, even laughable word for poetry—not just because it suggest [sic] that the economy has a Poetry Sector, but also because it suggest [sic] that poetry is masterable, that poetry itself is stable, that some persons possess poetry, and that others don't. Though a skilled craftsperson can create a facsimile of a real poem, a skilled reader can spot the counterfeit in a minute, and the word that reader might use to describe the counterfeit might be 'professional.'" This is from an essay entitled "Three Tenors" in Tony Hoagland's book, Real Sofistikashun. He goes on to say: "The making of poems is so mysteriously tied up with not-knowing that in some sense the poet is a perpetual amateur, a stranger to the art, subject to ineptitude, failure, falsity, mediocrity, and repetitiveness."

                                                           •
There are not many poems today that sing to me, though there are many that dance.

                                                           •
Of all the curses your work might suffer—"How interesting!" or "I like what you're doing..."—"That's very ambitious" is by far the worst, a put-down of the highest order.

                                                           •
Again, in Tony Hoagland's book, Real Sofistikashun, his comments with regard to the work of Michael Palmer are fascinating: "In Palmer's work, subject matter typically remains vague or unfocused, unnamed, yet seems to hover behind the compositional tapestry of the writing." Without going into what Hoagland means by "compositional" as a concept in poetry, I am struck by the metaphor here—it is a rewording and updating of comments made about Eliot's "free verse" poetry when critics were first trying to come to terms with it early in the past century, to wit: "the ghost of meter hovers behind the aras," which in its turn is an allusion to that officious fool, Polonius, hanging out to spy—audibly—on his daughter's mad suitor (or so he thinks). If, in the best Modernist free verse, meter was reduced to a ghost and relegated to the status of hiding behind the curtain of free verse, now in post-modernist poetics subject matter, too, has become a ghost, and joins meter somewhere behind the surface of the poem, felt perhaps, but not seen, not a major element front-and-center anymore. What else. Before long, can we expect to be stuffed behind the drapery of traditional poetry—until there is simply nothing left visible in the room? Until poetry is somehow all implication, invisible, only felt, never confronted. And what will happen when someone finally peeks behind that tapestry again? What long-lost treasures! It'll be like Pandora's box (to mix my metaphors). Things'll fly out as if they'd just been discovered....

                                                           •
"The work of writing...is far more satisfying than being a writer."
                                      —Annick Smith from In This We Are Native

                                                           •
Consider this comment by Scott Donaldson, in his biography of Edward Arlington Robinson: "...he [Robinson] took the idea of his calling seriously. In order to justify his existence, he had to write poems. But they had to be poems that would do others some good...'if some poor devil feels any better or any stronger for something I have written, I shall have no fault to find with the scheme or anything in it.'" The direct quote from Robinson was written in May, 1896. Now, compare it to a quote by contemporary post-postmodernist poet, Daisy Fried emblazoned on the back cover of Poetry magazine for January, 2007: "People who talk about poetry's social utility often concentrate on content. They think, perhaps, that poetry Tells the Truth, or Provides Solace. These notions make me queasy, and are treason to poetry." Fried goes on to quip, with not a little sarcasm: "If you're crawling to poetry on your knees, as I once heard a famous poet remark—in my view, you're not crawling to poetry. Prozac would probably work better." Let me add a sarcastic comment of my own, with regard to American poetry: "You've come a long way, baby!" And it might be time to wonder if the trip has been worth it. Fried's contempt for content—why, in any post-modernist's mind, should poetry mean anything, anyway?—is underscored by her sardonic capitalization of Tells, Truth, Provides, and Solace. Obviously she means to belittle each of these words, and what they stand for—in general, perhaps, and certainly with reference to poetry in particular. Robinson's idea of what poetry is (and does), and Fried's idea couldn't be further apart. Robinson didn't have recourse to Prozac. He had to rely on good old-fashioned alcohol. But he gave his life to writing the kind of poetry he thought mattered, and to the hope that his work would last and continue to be read by succeeding generations. To be fair, there's no reason to deify Robinson, or even his opinions when it comes to poetry; and there is no reason to demonize Fried, who after all is speaking as a poet of her time, a time radically different than the one in which Robinson lived and wrote and "had his being." Neither poet is a fool. But the contrast between what they both felt/feel and believe is Telling, if I might capitalize a word of my own. And the Telling couldn't be clearer with respect to changing notions of what poetry is and what it does, as it fluctuates over time and responds to social realities and historical events.

                                                           •
"That is landscape: not a place you live in, but a place that lives in you."
                                        —Karen Chamberlain from Desert of the Heart

                                                           •
In the world of poetry the race is not to the merely passionate, the constitutionally earnest or sincere, the zealot, the pushover, not to enthusiasts or connoisseurs, the dead serious or the easily led, the blindly caring, the quickly convinced, the smitten, the enraptured, the joiners, the wishful thinkers, the dreamers, the assenters, the virtuous, the acolytes of beauty and the common sublime;

but to the clever, the ironic, the self-knowers and skeptics, the intricate schemers, the complexly detached artificers, the doubters, the interrogators, the qualifiers, the ones who suspect that most everything believed is opposite of what's really true, those who resist easy answers, common beliefs, codes, creeds, screeds, the ones who respect without kneeling, who desire without groveling, who watch and calculate and weigh and speak only what they judge to be true.

Of course, they have to have character, and never condescend. They have to include themselves in the divine comedy. Their wisdom is provisional. Their irony a compensation, a kind of thinking in lieu of final ignorance.

                                                           •
"Everything startles with its beauty / when assigned value has been eradicated"
                                             —Galway Kinnell from Strong Is Your Hold

                                                           •
If I say what I mean, then you will know that I mean what I say.

                                                           •
The trouble with "experimental" writing is that we are asked to accompany the poet

while he tries one thing after anotherfirst this, then that—in search of a new

mode of expression. The ambition is a good one—art must continue to transfigure itself (it's methods, aesthetics, assumptions, etc.) in order to respond to reality, the present state of consciousness, and the world. Wallace Stevens says somewhere that all true poetry is experimental poetry, and I believe that this is what he meant. But the poet's ambition is not the reader's concern. When scientists spend decades in the laboratory before finding a cure for a virulent disease, we do not spend those decades in the laboratory with them. When actors run through a scene, over and over again, looking for the best way to convert experience into drama, we do not buy a ticket and sit in the audience, ready to applaud (unless we are aspiring actors ourselves). When automobile manufacturers spend years in search of a new alloy that will considerably improve engine performance, we do not test their formulas or take part in their deliberations. I am glad for experiment, and I hope it will always continue. But I am not drawn to experiment for its own sake. I am not interested in "experimental" writing, but in "achieved" writing. Call me when the experiments are finished, and you've found something.

                                                           •
"Childhood is founded on awe—that's why leaving childhood is so bittersweet. The lure of adulthood is powerful and physical, but the intuitions left behind have the haunting, asexual glimmer of timelessness.
                                      —Baron Wormser from The Road Washes Out in Spring

                                                           •
"Historically, experience is useless."
                                     —Steve Huff from "Alien Histories" in The Water We                                      Came From

                                                           •
"As for the relationship between literature and philosophy, for various reasons they are closer now than ever before. First of all, a generation of writers has emerged who studied philosophy. They share a need for reflection that was once satisfied by Christianity, Humanism, or socialism. Now that these have been rejected, there is no intellectual framework in which to operate. Philosophical literature can be seen as an alternative to faith and ideology. After all, the work of Jacques Derrida, Peter Sloterdijk, and Robert Pirsig has shown that the international culture is favourable to the symbiosis of literature and philosophy." This is from an article by Jaap Goedegebuure entitled "Between the Individual and Society" in A Companion to Dutch and Flemish Letters printed for the SFB's literary festival in Gothenburg in 1997. Goedegebuure goes on to say, "...The heydey of engaged art in the 1960s was followed by a skeptical reaction that led to the notion of literature as a sort of sophisticated parlour game. The time may now be ripe again for social commitment."

                                                           •
Most laughter is flattery, not pleasure—which is why you can only hear the distinction if it is not your jokes being laughed at.

                                                           •
Before I had ever visited the Loire Valley, a friend of mine—who had been

there—remarked: "once you've seen those palaces and estates, you understand immediately why there had to be a French Revolution." Seeing them for the first time, I had to agree with him. You might borrow this as an analogy for the literary world: when you go back and read Tennyson, you understand immediately why there had to be a Modernist revolution. It's not that Tennyson was bad. Far from it. He epitomized in many ways the best his age, country, and language had to offer (we already had Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson though almost completely

unknown). The 19th century had a "popular culture—it consisted of romantic

emotion (much like 20th century pop culture), superstition, morbidity, nostalgia, and a belief in purity, virginity, and absolute virtue. Nature, of course, was God's mystery and His masterpiece. No wonder that Tennyson could write "But O for the touch of a vanished hand," and thrill millions. He also wrote "The Kraken" and "In Memoriam," which redeem him somewhat. But it would not have been possible to continue in this way. The vocabulary needed pruning; the meter needed to be refurbished; the whole perspective and attitude needed to be replaced with a harder, colder, more unforgiving aesthetic. Enter Pound, Eliot, and Williams. They weren't uncultured barbarians, but revolutionists of genius, talented, even gifted innovators,

propagandists, and entrepreneurs. Rimbaud was a barbarian—genius—but a

barbarian. He had to suffer.

                                                           •
And this, one of my favorite quotes from Stein: "No artist needs criticism, he only needs appreciation." Imagine someone dropping that bomb into the middle of a writers' conference or an MFA program at a university!

                                                           •
"Always be closing" is a current adage from the business world —chiefly the

world of real estate sales—which has now bled across into other areas of human activity, even art. I notice a few poets are using it as a metaphor with regard to keeping the poem focused and to the point. It might also imply an admonition to keep the poem short—head for closure!—and don't waste any words on the way. My aesthetic is diametrically opposed to this: "always be opening" is my motto. Open to new ideas, experiences, theories, and technologies— "Always be opening!" Stay alert, stay alive, stay current, don't close down or, as an artist, you'll begin to die. There is no relevance without currency.

                                                           •
Any new generation has to find fresh terms and concepts to describe old concerns and problems. What is the difference between "deconstructing" a text, and "analyzing" it? Not much, as far as I can tell.

                                                           •
What I love about Simic: not an iota of bullshit, anywhere. Pretension is an impossibility, because he can always look at himself and assess what human reality is really about. He's a true Emersonian in this respect: the source of all knowledge is the self. Unless you're a self-deceiver, you can consult your own mind, your own experience, your own heart, and fine out immediately what's what.

                                                           •
Paul Dirac, the English physicist whose worked {sic] concerned the mathematical and theoretical aspects of quantum mechanics, once described his understanding of poetry as follows: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." At first glance, this is clever and probably accords with the feelings of many people who find poetry exasperating and obscure. Yet it misses the point, precisely, because it does not take into account the fact that science means only to convey information, however complicated, while poetry seeks to convey—even recreate—human experience. (always complicated, a priori). The difference between these two is essential to understanding why we need both science and poetry, and not merely one or the other. Information, in poetry, is an almost negligible element, a byproduct, if anything, compared to the emotional and psychological elements—and the sheer love of imagination, and what it can discover.

                                                          •
I get excited when I understand something. Let me recast that sentence: I get when I understand anything, which is miracle enough if it happens even once a day, and cause for genuine wonder.

                                                           •
Two basic approaches to style may be noted: to say the simplest things most profoundly; or to say the most profound things simply. Of course, there exist many degrees of approach between these two, and most people would choose the latter anyway—to say the most profound things simply. That is probably the advice any

writing coach worth his or her salt—whether in person or on a page—would

advocate. But not everyone would agree. For some, ornate language is the very essence of style. It denotes intelligence, education, panache. In this equation, complexity = profundity. But I prefer the former—saying the most profound things simply. This is, simply, the hardest thing in the world to do. Once you strip language down to its minimum, there's no place to hide.

                                                           •
Every love is destined for disillusionment. But destination is not what lovers have in mind the first time they fall into each others' arms.

                                                           •

"A person absent from his beauty is doubly beautiful." I love this perception by Violette Leduc in La Batarde. It's one of those assertions one reads for the first time and thinks: "Yes, that's exactly right. I've noticed that, but I've never thought to say it before, and so simply!" Beauty unpolluted by the impurity of ego. It's one of the attributes of innocence.

                                                           •
A new rule for old age: I no longer have to like people who don't like me.

                                                           •
I recall sitting in Peter Michelson's backyard one afternoon in Boulder when I was a graduate student, heatedly discussing the work of Pound and the Modernists, when Peter looked at me finally and said: "You're just an enthusiast." The idea stuck with me, stuck in my craw, but at the time I had no way of responding adequately to him. Years later, I found the following passage in Brenda Uland's book about writing, and I felt vindicated. It was one of those moments when you think: "I wish I had said that!" Uland is talking about Blake, and his ideas concerning the proper attitude for artists to take with regard to their work: ""For... 'Reason' as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. 'For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things.' And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic know-it-all, warned people against 'mere enthusiasm,' Black [sic] wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): 'Mere Enthusiasm is the All in All!'"

And later in Uland's book, she quotes Blake again: "When Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote: 'Enthusiastik admiration seldom promotes knowledge,' Blake wrote furiously in the margin of the book: 'Enthusiastic admiration is the First Principle of Knowledge and its last. Now he begins to degrade, to Deny, and to Mock.' And remember the word "enthusiasm" means "divine inspiration."

                                                           •
Where and when and in what manner did pop culture infiltrate art and become fit subject matter for poetry? I suspect it was with the so-called New York School of poets, and that it has been enjoying its heyday ever since. (But I shudder at the phrase I used: "a fit subject for poetry." A fit subject? The idea that only some subjects are "fit" for poetry is abhorrent. Like the idea that there is a proper or

official diction for poets to employ. Poetry can—and should—deal with anything,

anything it pleases, and in any words it chooses. There's no decorum when it comes to poetry.)

                                                           •
There is a taste, now, an appetite, even a passion for the disjunctive; for the collection of things that the poet doesn't necessarily feel any obligation whatsoever to connect for the reader—and the reader relishes this, revels in the idea of disorder, or at least relative incoherence. Parataxis is preferred over cohesion, atomization over solidity. There is even a distrust (a distaste) for hierarchies and orders of any kind, as if the impulse to integrate and connect is really an aggression, and imposition the reader resents rather than expects. Sometimes a post-modern novel or poem resembles a notebook more than a finished work or art. Creeley's Pieces is an early example of this. Or it resembles a kind of improvisation around an unstated and ultimately undefined subject or theme. Spontaneous snippets. Cognitive dissonance. The operations of chance or fate. Traditional fixed form has little place in such an atmosphere. No summing up, no neat categories and tidy statements emerging one out of the other in a progressive scheme of any kind. No architecture, no logical unfolding of parts. Is this the natural outcome of a drift from traditional form to free verse to post-modern verse? Is it intimately connected to some underlying—and for the time being transcendent—impulse in the culture as a whole? A firm belief in chaos, in disorder, in the disconnectedness of all things?

                                                           •
No fleshing out, no development, no building one thing upon another or following out the implications of things. The implications of things will be (or not be) played

out in the mind of the reader—thank you—as he or she prefers. The poet need

only note. The rest is silence.

                                                           •
Now I'm reading the poems of John Woods. Many years ago, I read his powerful poem, "The Deaths at Paragon, Indiana," and I never forgot it. That's the only poem of his I ever knew. Now I'm reading more. He's not good all the way through, but he can write sentences and phrases of great imagination and originality. In "The Old Man Dying," he describes the loss of various faculties as we age, and says: "the globe of sense begins to close." Marvelous! Just before that, he gives us an image of the old man in his nightgown sitting down in the yard: "He sits, his gown / Sifts into the grass." There are many moments in his poems like this, and when he writes this way he is hard to beat. Describing a river that passes a wheat field, he writes: "Hard by the wheat, the water curds." Or in "Flying Kites in March: "It was the wind stiffening in our hands." Sometimes his rhythms are a little jagged, forced. But he's a fabulous poet when he wants to be (when he can be). And of course, now, he's completely forgotten.

                                                           •
Lots of people—perhaps most people—who write free verse do not write it well. They get the "free" part without really ever considering the "verse" part. This isn't news, after a hundred years of the free verse revolution and how it has played itself out. But those who write superior free verse are easily spotted and their work will likely last, while a vast majority of practitioners of free verse will probably be

forgotten with their work. All poetry, no matter how it is written, requires rigor—

formal, intellectual, imaginative, structural, emotional rigor. Rigor of judgment and taste, style and execution. Even free verse, which is not "free."

                                                           •
Edward Arlington Robinson is often regarded as the "other" Frost, a lesser representative of early modernist formal verse using a colloquial language that reflects the particular ethos of New England life and experience. While this may be

true to some extent, it is also true—in my opinion—that Robinson was a keener

student of human character than Frost, which both limited Robinson's range and kept him from tackling the larger themes which Frost extrapolated out of his own local New England experience. So Frost is a larger poet, in many ways, while

Robinson focuses on the peculiarities of human personality—he is more detailed

and observant in this area than Frost. Then too, Robinson usually leaves the

subjects of his poems—the people he is so closely observing—in an uncertain

and indeterminate state. We don't really know why Richard Corey commits suicide, though the fact is pregnant with implications for the townspeople who are left behind to ponder it. Nor do we know what causes Fleming Helphenstine and the narrator of his poem to part ways in an instant when something spooks both of them, something that remains undisclosed. In many of Robinson's poems, this is the case. Something unexplainable happens and the people (and the reader) are left somewhat baffled by what ensues without any help from Robinson. This is both the power and the peculiarity of Robinson's verse. Both Robinson and Frost present us with a bleak vision of human life. Robinson focusing on the local, and Frost more on the universal (in the local). Both are great American poets. Robinson the more neglected of the two.

                                                           •
There's not a poem written anywhere at anytime by anyone that didn't benefit from having a definite, apprehensible subject.

                                                           •
Starting out, your greatest pleasure is in writing things down, seeing them there on the page for the first time, looking so smart, so permanent. Later, your greatest pleasure is in cutting things out, savagely, quickly, and without remorse, so the poem looks cleaner, sturdier, like cut stone.

                                                           •
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
                                    —Antoine de Saint-Exupery

                                                           •
Like anyone else, poets can lie—and do lie—but generally not in a direct or obvious way in their work. That is, poets rarely state an obvious falsehood: "The holocaust never happened," or "Galileo was wrong: the sun revolves around the earth." Such lies would be easily refutable, and are stated for purposes other than a poetic agenda. "I did not kill my wife," may be heard resounding in a courtroom, and later be proved categorically false. Most poets are not partisans of theory (other than literary theory), or rabid followers of political parties, or super-patriots loudly declaiming the superiority of their country over all others, or adherents of a single, fixed world view, or even pious followers of a dogmatic theology. This is one reason why Plato banned them from his Republic. You can't easily rule people who think and decide for themselves. Most poets, I believe, are stubbornly open-minded, skeptical, even suspicious of anything that smacks of absolutism. If they weren't, their poems would amount to mere propaganda, surely one of the deadliest sins a poem may commit, resulting in the worst kinds of poetry.

What I have said in no way implies that poets are saints, or pillars of rectitude, certainly not in their real lives. I know too many poets to ever believe that! I only mean to suggest that the lies poets tell are usually lies of the imagination, not lies of conscience, outright deceit, or self-serving fabrications. Poets love truth, which includes—most of the time—the acknowledgment that there is no truth. Certainly not truths that purport to explain the world. The poet steers clear of such truths, avoiding didacticism on the one hand, and preachment on the other. The truths the poet knows are the truths of experience, imagination, and emotion. And the job of the poet is to clarify these as effectively, as beautifully, and as powerfully as possible. The truth of what it has meant to be human, so far as the poet can discern it. And the poet's truth, when most effective, beautiful, and powerful becomes a

collective truth—it is true for many, if not all, human beings—because our

differences lie outside, not inside, of us. This is a large claim, and I wonder if it's true? Is there some common human ground, some overlapping territory of the self, which all people share, no matter what their outward differences might be? Can fear of death, for instance, or feelings of love be different for different people in different circumstances? Could the joy and relief an ancient Greek sailor felt upon reaching his home port after surviving a wild storm really be any different than what the contemporary air traveler feels on landing after one of the plane's engines burst into flame at 30,000 feet? It is hard for me to imagine how. Primal experiences seem universal, and without them art might not be even possible.

                                                           •
The language of poetry is not the language of thought. It is the language of the body, the language of experience.

                                                           •
Here's one theory: poets are the designated sufferers for humanity.

                                                           •
And while we're at it, who's finally blessed: those who suffer love, or those who escape it?

                                                           •
Reading Tony Hoagland's wonderful and informative essay, "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of the Moment," I thought of a metaphor for distinguishing the difference between traditional narrative-lyric poetry, that unfolds in a coherent way; associative poetry; and dissociative poetry. Think of them as jigsaw puzzles: conventional narrative-lyric poetry, then, would be represented by a completed puzzle in which all pieces are employed to present the viewer with a finished picture (a castle by the sea, for instance); associative poetry would present the viewer with only fragments of the picture scattered around the table, with many gaps or empty spaces between those fragments, but just enough of the scene presented in each fragment that the unfinished whole might be intuited from its semi-completed parts; with dissociative poetry, however, we get fragments scattered around the table made up of different jigsaw puzzles, so there cannot be any possibility of a gestalt, of suddenly seeing the connections between the dissimilar parts because there is no connection. The pieces of different puzzles do not even fit together physically, much less conceptually. It is all fracture, anomaly, chaos uneasily brought together to form a provisional but ultimately incompatible "whole."

                                                           •
"In the poems of his youth and even certain poems of his middle age he quite often appears ordinary and lacking in any great distinction...And then...something extraordinary happens...little about the external events of [his] life helps to account for that remarkable evolutionary leap...[he] went from being a mediocre poet to a great one." These words by Daniel Mendelsohn, in an article in The New York Review of Books, might easily refer to Walter Whitman, newspaperman and dandy about town, whose early attempts at writing were undistinguished but who somehow—scholars and critics do not know how—transformed himself (or was transformed by some experience) into "Walt Whitman, a Kosmos," a visionary artist of the first order and one of the greatest poets America has produced. But the above words refer, in fact, to Constantine Cavafy, whose transformation occurred over a period of time in his mid-to-late forties and who might be compared to Whitman in other ways. Both men lived in an age in which it was not advisable to be openly homosexual, for instance, and both suffered in their own ways from lack of companionship throughout their lives. At least, lasting companionship and love. The difference is that Mendelsohn claims to be able to discover how Cavafy was transformed: "...by tracing the course of his interior life, his intellectual development, from the 1890s to the 1910s [it is] possible to discern the path by which...Cavafy went from being a mediocre writer to a great one." Though some critics and scholars may guess at the source of Whitman's transformation (his trip to New Orleans, for instance, and possible first sexual encounter with a man there), no one can really be sure what happened in his case. I am fascinated by such transformations, both great and small. Many make "breakthroughs" in their work, but few transform themselves so dramatically and, in Whitman's case, in so short a time.
                                                           •
The idea that anyone would look in here for personal revelations makes me laugh. This is a journal of thought, a toxic-free dumpsite for the mind.

                                                           •
To make sense and still be interesting: that's the trick!

                                                           •
On the limitations of form: to work within those strictures, and still make the poem feel casual and free, as if those strictures didn't exist. That's the ticket.

                                                           •
There is something so simple, almost childish, about some of the greatest poems I admire—in vocabulary, in syntax, in image, in length, even somewhat in subject and thought. Yet, these poems have a depth and power far greater than more vigorously (self-consciously?) complicated poems that show the author's intelligence, formal ingenuity, and breadth of learning. Blake is the eternal master of this, of course, but there are others. Jane Kenyon is a good example. John Haines. Donald Justice. These poets write poems that make you think anyone can do it. Think again.

                                                           •
I have been kissed twice—chastely, and in friendship, on the forehead—by two
poets—Galway Kinnell and Charles Simic—and I wear those two kisses like seals, without irony or shame.

                                                           •
A French poet (Baudelaire?) once wrote: "Today I felt the shadow of the wing of madness pass over me." Less harrowingly, today I felt something deeply unsettling for the first time—life rushing past at a furious pace, leaving me behind. How had I drifted so far from the center of things, the flux and excitement of everyday experience, the feeling of purpose and belonging? It is what the old must feel, with increasing dread. Not physical pain, but the loss of immediate connection, the sense of participating in the moment, must be our greatest fear. And how much more painful it must be for those who have accomplished little, or nothing.

                                                           •
Poets: how can you figure them? A man or a woman may work years on a group of poems to finally publish them with a small, unheard of press in the slimmest of volumes which no one will review and almost no one will read, to be shelved quickly in the great Library of Oblivion never to be heard of again. Is it only ego, then? What sustenance can the ego take out of such slim pickings? There must be something else involved, something beyond mere personal satisfaction and the need to be celebrated and admired.

                                                           •
Poetry imagines a world that tells the truth about this one.

                                                           •

It's not the past, but timelessness I seek. That's why I've expended so much effort looking into the past—because it has separated itself from the present, and so it feels like timelessness exists there if anywhere. Nothing changes in the past, it is all accomplished, and therefore timeless. It exists forever as it is. Nostalgia lies in the future. Those who seek it think it will bring something better.

                                                           •
Have I said this before (if so, it bears repeating)—any art that needs to be explained to me is suspect, is only a partial-art, a sickly art that needs to be propped up on the crutches of theory and criticism. Real art is immediate, unrefracted, plain. That's why it's art.

                                                           •
In The Verse Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language, Craft & Culture, Hayden Carruth observes: "I do not see how anybody can write poetry, or write anything, if the environment is simply literary and intellectual. I think you need other things in your life, and if your life is attached to a university or a cultural center of some kind, then you have to go out and seek it." The same day I read these words, practically in the same hour, I read the following, from the introduction to Robert Lax's Circus Days & Nights: "In an interview in the New York Quarterly (n0. 30, 1986), Lax talked about the need to be immersed in life in some way in order to be able to write poetry." This made me recall remarks by Gary Snyder many years ago about how a poet ought to have something to do with his or her hands, some manual labor, to enrich the inner life, to balance it out and feed it and support it, if poetry of any real use is to be made. And there's also the example of Thoreau, and what he had to say about the physical life and making sentences as practical and disciplined as ploughed rows in a field. In other words, the testimony by writers to the necessity of actually doing something in the world, something [that] involve[s] the body, action, effort, other people, events, and so on is crucial to the imagination and to one's sense of art and what it is. Living in the immense, abstract, shadowy realm of the mind day after day, year after year, is not only not helpful, it is downright corrosive to the making of good poems. How I've fallen down on this ideal, and how I'd change it now if I could. Think of Stanly Kunitz in his garden. Why do you think he needed to do that? It wasn't only because he loved flowers.

                                                           •
Malcolm Lowry said something like this: "I hate writing, but I love to revise."

                                                           •
There may come a point that the only society to which poets feel connected is that of other poets. And that can be fatal.

                                                           •
"A poem is no place for an idea"
                                    —Edgar Watson Howe, Journalist, 1911

                                                           •
You spend the second half of your life trying to live down the time that, in your youth, you spent living it up.

                                                           •
A comment in The Washington Post Book World about James Fenton's collection of essays, Leonardo's Nephew: "Fenton displays throughout the passionate attentiveness of a scholar, the enthusiasm of an amateur, and the urbane cleverness of an English journalist." Put me down as an "enthusiastic amateur." Every Time.

                                                           •
Without clarity, there can be no depth. Only poems of great clarity and directness have depth. You can't see to the bottom of a murky lake. It is all surface. The murk of much poetry does not denote complexity or profundity. Only lack of depth.

                                                           •
A sentence is a limb you can crawl out on, but only so far.

                                                           •
Clarity and precision are what I value above all else, because I am a slow thinker (and certainly a slow and meticulous reader). I've always had trouble interpreting a dense, fast-paced argument—and the more abstract, the less likely I'll be able to follow it.

                                                           •
For me, lyric poetry is a miracle of compression. Like an atom, lyrics contain mostly emptiness. The imaginative space between words is vast. But when read by an imaginative reader, lyric poems crack wide open to release powerful energies. The lyric, though, contains two sorts of compression—which are not only related, but inseparable facets of the same thing: compression of language, and compression of emotion and thought. Many would-be lyric poets I have read, master only the first sort of compression, which leaves their poems feeling ponderous and shallow. The second sort of compression is the thing. Without it, the lyric fails and we are left with nothing but a residue of words.

                                                           •
As a child, I was infatuated with shadows. They were a curious fact, stretching across lawns and floors, transforming everything they touched. The days had a rhythm and a shape that pleased me in their ever-changingness, their inevitable return. I both loved and feared the night for its deepening mysteries. The stars too seemed companionable, and strange.

                                                           •
Great poems overwhelm you. Even when you don't initially "understand" them completely on first reading or hearing, you are convinced by their cadences and phrases, their tidal power and enormous reaches of imagination, the leaps and turns of their original logic. Good poems, too, draw you in. It isn't the reader's job to fight his way in, it's the poem's job to draw the reader in. So many competent poets forget that, or don't know it. Great poems require a great response, as good poems require some effort—but not enough to bar the reader from assimilating them. Once it becomes work, you're dead.

Imagine audiences having to work to enjoy jazz, or painting, or sculpture, or any art form really. Yet there are a lot of poets, and critics too, who think poetry has to be difficult to be good. To paraphrase Louis Armstrong: if it ain't a joy, it ain't art.

Imagine having to explain a joke before you could experience it as being funny!

                                                           •
Anyone who's read anything I've written knows that I spend a lot of time mulling over the past. I've said before that it's not the past, but time that interests me. However, that includes the past and most of what I write takes place in that tense. When people ask me "why are you so obsessed with the past," I reply, "What interests you?" "The present," they inevitably say, or sometimes, "The future." "Where's the present?" I want to know. "Now" is not a good answer, because the present lasts about 3 seconds before it becomes the past. The "present" is so fleeting it almost doesn't exist, and we really don't spend any time in it. The "past" is richer, accumulative, more approachable as far as literature is concerned. That's a very important fact to remember. We do want to live in the present, but we can only really write effectively and well about the past.

                                                           •
If I were to worship anything—life-giving, life-sustaining—it would be the sun.
Without it, there's no arguing, life on earth simply couldn't exist. Nor could any of the gods we've invented to console ourselves who depend upon us for their existence in turn. The sun and the oceans, and the earth. It's easy enough to sound like a New Age pantheist, but it's difficult to deny the absolute necessity of these three fundamental things, unless you're a spiritualist and hate your body. If I am to make it to another world, I will worship what sustains that one too.

                                                           •
I love to come upon a word in my reading that I haven't seen for years, a perfectly fine word that has through long disuse and neglect slipped out of my range of thinking, my vocabulary, and then suddenly there it is in someone else's sentence, in an entirely different context, and it's as though I'm meeting an old friend I haven't seen in years, getting to know him again, slowly re-familiarizing myself with [his] peculiarities and habits, his unique character.

                                                           •
Still: a word has many faces, but only one heart.

                                                           •
Here's what Emerson wrote in one of his notebooks in 1830 or so: "To believe

your own thought, to believe that what is true for you is true for all men—that is

genius." Fast- forward 150 years, and consider how that sounds in an age of multi-culturalism, gender differences, racial pride, class inequities, divisiveness of every kind. The genius of our age is to recognize that no man has a monopoly on the truth or represents anyone else's views, but everyone is part of his or her own clan and can know nothing but his or her own particular truth. There is no individualistic window any more on the world. So we believe.

                                                           •
Literature is necessary because of all the crap we write and talk about the rest of the time.

                                                          •
Jeffers may be a great poet, despite his blustering and obvious self-justifications.

On the edge of melodrama and bathos all the time, something yet gets through—

a haunted quality of vision that sees an almost nihilistic spirituality beyond matter and struggles to find a language, and form, to express it. For Jeffers, God is a faceless inhuman power and Oblivion is his realm.

                                                           •
Life, for a writer, is easier done than said. The constant effort to transmute experience into words that reflect that experience back again in a way that both stimulates and includes the reader. The world, passed through the medium of a brain, and offered back again to the world. Not to have to do this: that would be something like a vacation for the mind. To live like an animal, without thought.

                                                           •
"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."
                                      —Voltaire
Poetry students: listen up!

                                                         •
He was writing one poem when another intruded and elbowed the first one aside. The grand idea he thought he was pursuing turns out to be second-rate, while the as-yet unformed idea, is worth expressing. What about that mathematician—what was his name?—who pondered a proof for years, only to have a light go on in his head one afternoon as he was stepping onto a bus? And of course, Archimedes bobbing in his bath, suddenly conceiving of the answer he sought, before running naked through the streets yelling "Eureka!" "First thought, best thought," crowed Allen Ginsberg, and then wrote long strings of thoughts, one after the other, in search of a way to say the unsayable, pronounce the unpronounceable. Why do we revise? To get at the better thought inside the lesser one, the thought that is hiding inside other thoughts the way the French king hid among his courtiers to see whether Joan of Arc could identify him. She did, proving what a visionary she was. This is why conversation is so often shallow, and poetry is needed to talk about things in deeper, more meaningful ways. It may take years for some thoughts to arrive, or we may get to them the way Michelangelo said he got to a statue: by taking a rough block of stone and chipping away everything that was not the statue. More sweat than "Eureka," but more practical in the end than Joan and all her voices. How many among us could live up to her, though we burn with ambition and hope to write something that might last after we are dead.

                                                           •
"The future devours the past," says the philosopher. But isn't it the other way around?

                                                           •
What used to be called comic books, have now become "graphic novels," and are the "fastest growing market in American literature" according to a commentator on NPR. The definition of "American literature," then, seems to have expanded to mean "anything printed on paper." And language is no longer its medium.

                                                           •
I've become one of those old men who pad around the house in a cardigan sweater and slippers. Is it possible to reach such an age and still want more of everything? Regret, as we all know, is useless. Like bitterness, it can eat up your soul and the older one gets the more one wants to preserve whatever soul one has left. The heart often turns to leather. The mind slips and wanders. The body trembles. It's better to let things go and regret nothing. It isn't easy, but you can do it. There it goes.

                                                           •
I require at the very least that nonsense be interesting, as I require it as well of sense.

                                                           •
There's a certain moment, soon after I begin writing something new, that I start to

become interested in what I'm doing—not in the story, or content—but in how I

will tell the story. And that's what keeps me going. I certainly never have the feeling (as I sometimes did when I was very young) "Oh boy, this is great stuff." But I'm curious about how whatever I'm writing will unfold.

                                                           •
In her youth, she had married a wild, passionate poet but now nearing seventy, she'd prefer a sober, steady, practical handyman.

                                                           •
I like reading John McPhee. He has a no-nonsense, straightforward, sober style of writing that represents the driest facts as if they were fascinating (and they are, or can be, if handled right). His curiosity is endless, and this helps inform everything he writes with depth and precision. He is a journalist with a poet's heart.

                                                           •
One of my earliest paid gigs was at Toklat restaurant outside Snowmass Colorado where a group of chichi real estate agents had gathered for dinner after a day of meetings. I was the after-dinner entertainment. While they munched on strawberry shortcake and brown apple Betty, I recited "The Ballad of Sam McGee," while dressed up in a full-length fur coat and a Russian army hat. I had a long beard at that time, and I must have been a sight. I changed the last line, and put in a swear word: "This is the first god-damned time I've been warm!" They loved it.

                                                           •
All these books about unusual topics over the past twenty or thirty years—books about the history of cod, or salt, or tulips, or porcelain, or abstractions like time, love or ambition—nly prove that anything can be interesting if you look at it closely enough and you know how to write about it.

                                                           •
"Amidst his gray philosophizings, Life breaks upon a man like a morning"
                                    —Melville (Pierre)

                                                           •
Out of boredom with traditional narrative, human experience organized as story has been widely rejected; out of fear of sentimentality, real emotion has been avoided at all costs; out of disdain for nostalgia, memory and the past have been largely ignored. The repudiation of these staple elements of literature is understandable, given how exaggerated they were in run-of-the-mill Victorian writing which was packed with Romanticism and melodrama. Modernism was responsible for shoring up our fiction and poetry by stripping them of such excesses. Post-Modernism has gone even farther in turning its back on even justifiable emotion, the power of memory, and the uses of narrative as a way of probing and reflecting human experience. As usual, the pendulum, having swung too far in one direction, has been "corrected" by swinging back too far in the other. Some balance is needed if literature is to be restored to some value in a culture that already questions the value of literature altogether.

                                                           •
In an essay about Phillip Larken, Martin Amis writes: "His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them—was anxiously awaiting them. They seem ineluctable, or predestined." "Predestined" is Amis's word for the same concept Harold Bloom described as "inevitability." Some poets, these two critics suggest, bypass interpretation and go directly to understanding. They seem to echo thoughts the reader has already had himself, but needed the poet's words to fully express. We read or hear a stanza once, and we feel that it is inevitable and could have been expressed no other way.

                                                           •
And from that same Amis essay: "All ideologies are essentially bovine..." an expression I love, meaning someone with a little charisma, or a louder mouth, convinces others to follow him (or her) in a herding instinct that seems wired into our social DNA.

                                                           •
It's time to tell the people you love that you love them. When I was young, I only wanted to be cool—a condition that requires withholding one's feelings. But it's getting much too late for that. If the desire to be cool is characteristic of youth, the need to be forthcoming is a mark of age.

                                                           •
Recently posted on Google: "Sure, Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, but even more important, he invented the scissors." A sterile, utilitarian view of life, and an anti-artistic way of thinking. Why not: "Sure, Leonardo da Vinci invented the scissors, but more important, he painted the Mona Lisa." Which value system do you prefer? Which kind of world would you rather live in?

                                                           •
What Charles Wright gives us in his poems is not the meaning of existence (who could give us that?), but the feelng of existence, which is all the meaning we are ever likely to have. These are elegies of the first order. They have the whiff of the eternal about them.

                                                           •
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
                                      —Czeslaw Milosz, from "Ars Poetica"

I've had difficulties with Milosz in the past (for example: when he trashes Whitman for being a superficial optimist, a poet of light, an American naïf, etc. and by extension a criticism of American poetry in general). Of course, he's an important poet, but he has his prejudices like anyone else. The severity of that second stanza above is a bit exaggerated. "Unbearable duress" is one source of poetry, but not the only source of poetry. The practice of poetry reminds us of how many different kinds of poetry there are, and how many styles a poet might adopt, and how many possibilities exist for writing it. There is not one "real" or "true" kind of poetry. In fact, there is no one thing that can be called "poetry" if by that we mean it possesses some inherent characteristic or trait to the exclusion of all else. And history informs us that it has not been written rarely and reluctantly (though it's true that most of what's been written, and will ever be written, is very poor). The idea that spirits choose us as their instrument is quaint, and probably indefensible. Behind Milosz and his ideas stands twenty centuries of Catholic doom, and of course Poland has been wracked by terrible wars while we in America have remained almost free of such domestic suffering and destruction. But I'll stand by Melville, Dickinson, Jeffers, even Frost (among others) when it comes to pessimism, nihilism, and doom. No need to be ashamed of American literature there.

                                                           •
When asked "Does the complicity between literature and philosophy still pertain today?" George Steiner replied, "In my view, both forms are under threat today. Literature has chosen the domain of small scale personal relationships, and no longer deals with great metaphysical themes."

                                                           •
All evil is human evil, there is no other kind. And we've created the Devil to take the rap.

                                                           •
Born into Time, until Time is borne into us. A writer's job is to remember it all.

                                                           •
We only catch a glimpse of Rilke's meanings out of the corner of our eyes. When we look directly at them, to study them, they vanish. It is in glimpsing them, that we feel the full impact of their grandeur and importance. It is arguable that this might have been true for Rilke himself.

                                                           •
I'm sick of hearing that film is "a director's medium." Film is a writer's medium: someone has to conceive of an idea; write it down; arrange it, structure it, pace it properly; create characters, plot, setting; someone has to have something to say, a subject and theme to be developed; someone has to tell the story before the director comes into the picture—followed by the actors, technicians, film editors, costume designers, and so on. It all starts with the writer, not the director, who is only a professional audience member and the first to see the raw footage. Yes, the director has to envision the action (but the action has been created by the writer), and tell the actors what he wants them to do (but the characters have been created by the writer), and help the film editor put it all together in the end (but the writer has conceived of the story first, from beginning to end). And yes, the director can

change the original script, which he does by—guess what—asking the writer to

revise his original idea. Film is obviously a writers' medium. Everyone else lives off the writer's talent and efforts. Directors are like publishers: they come later, and help bring the writer's vision to life.

                                                           •
It takes a poet to write about poetry. This statement is so obviously assailable, I hesitate to make it: it takes a poet to write about poetry. There is more of interest, and more insight, in the critical writings of Charles Simic, Tony Hoagland, Mark Doty, Stephen Dobyns, et al, than in the academic effusions of Christopher Ricks, Helen Vendler, and their ilk. They seem to have their own professional language, like lawyers, which is both exclusive and stuffy. We don't need professional patois when it comes to poetry. We need those who know how to wield language effectively, and how to think clearly and originally. Not the sclerotic jargon of academic papers.

                                                           •
Maybe it's time to stop asking "Where are the great writers today" and start thinking about poetry as a useful, elevated form of human intercourse, still the highest use to which language may be put, and entirely necessary as speech stutters into abbreviation, cuteness, and incoherence limited to forty seven words or blasphemed endlessly in self-righteous ranting online. Poets may have fallen from the heights they once occupied in early cultures, but they are still cultural seers, the best commentators on the human condition, and stewards of the imagination that almost everything in our commercial society opposes, but cannot extinguish.

                                                           •
Here is what Melville (or his authorial avatar) says in The Confidence Man, about human nature: "The grand points of human nature are the same today as they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature." Which is what I have said to students a thousand times. Otherwise, we could not understand Ulysses or Clytemnestra, or Achilles, or any of the characters in Dante, or Shakespeare, etc. We may never be able to explain human nature, but we know it does not change. That's the paradox. And literature is the record of the attempt to explore it, without ever ultimately defining it. The "expression" changes in every work of literature, as Melville has it, but not the "features," the "grant points" of human nature. And that is why literature remains perennially relevant, and can never be anything else.

                                                           •
Versified knowledge and thought is not poetry. It's intellectual doggeral.

                                                           •
"There is more power and beauty in the well-kept secret of oneself and one's thoughts, than in the display of a whole heaven that one may have inside one," wrote Matthew Arnold in his Essays in Criticism. And he continued: "the literary career seems to me unreal, both in its essence and in the rewards which one seeks from it, and there fatally marred by a secret absurdity." I find this in a huge biography of Melville by Laurie Robertson-Lorant, and though it's preposterous to equate myself with men like Arnold and Melville, I can feel the truth of these statements even in my own inconsequential "career." I'm not sure what Arnold meant by a secret absurdity that mars the rewards success in writing might bring, but I'm convinced that the depth of the self and its experiences can never be expressed, by anyone, great or small. And when we die, we take that secret world with us, with which we have lived so long.

                                                           •
For many these days, honesty has become an empty virtue, emotion an embarrassment, sincerity a naïve joke. We have become, many of us, savage in

our cynicism. We mistrust almost everything—maybe everything—language,

perception, the self, and that artificial construct we call language. History, we read, is a sub-species of fiction. Poetry is suspect, unless it avoids a false engagement with the world. Language is a surface cast over nothing but our own conniving minds. Maybe I'm overstating the case, but these theories have been with us so long now that even they begin to look antiquated and dull. And maybe there's no going back, once the world has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning. But isn't it time for a new aesthetic vision, an adjusted perspective on things?

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Ptolemy------------ > Copernicus ------------ > Galileo------------> Pope John Paul II

in 1992, finally annulled Galileo's conviction in 1633 for his "heresy" and admitted that the Church had been wrong, and the sun really was the center of the solar system and the other planets, including earth, revolved around it. What frightens us about knowledge, change, the truth? Can we ever expect anything of humanity other than dogged blindness? The smoke of millennia of heretics chokes our lungs.

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I like that John Frederick Nims points out, in his introduction to Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, that the Greeks considered a poet to be "an athlete of the word." At the very least it implies some effort, which the simple word "writer" does not.

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Forget religion. If I want to know something about eternity I'll ask a geologist.

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I like Lawrence's way of writing criticism: he talks and talks and talks until he talks his way into what he thinks. No polished clarity. He leaves all the fat in. But in the fat, he finds morsels of real insight. He repeats himself until he finally lands on something solid, a real idea. He repeats himself until his repetitions refine themselves and become clarity.

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A frightened man is a dangerous man. He is ready to believe anything (except the truth).

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There's a certain kind of mind that fascinates me and repels me: the closed, focused, narrow mind that sees something it loves and then proceeds to deify it and adore it above all else. All else is trash compared to this one obsession. You've met these individuals, who declare in no uncertain terms that this writer or that poet is the only person worth reading, everyone else and what they've produced is benighted and inferior. The good news is: they have found something to love, that invigorates their life and their thinking, something they can feel passionate and certain about. The bad news: it blinds them to all other accomplishments and ideas. They are profoundly anti-catholic in their tastes, and by this they miss so much else that is worthy of their attention. Their lives become cramped, until they can find another single star to follow, if they ever do. I can't imagine being so narrow in my affections and tastes. What a weird, airless world it would seem to me. The opposite or [sic] richness and diversity.

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When conservatives brand someone as "liberal," they're suggesting that as far as that person is concerned anything goes. All moral restraints, ideas, theories or behaviors are permissible. So they have managed to turn "liberal" into a dirty word by suggesting that a liberal is nothing but a slobbering, licentious character. But most people who are considered liberal are really progressive. That means they are open to new ideas, but skeptical of them at the same time; willing to experience new sensations, but careful not to go too far; Excepting [sic] of other opinions and philosophies, but not without thoroughly examining them first. A progressive is far more thoughtful and considerate than a liberal. And a liberal is not a libertine.

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Even the irrational has to be interesting. It's not interesting just because it's irrational.

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Time is a tragedy we cannot accept, nor escape.

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In a review of Louise Glück by David Orr in the New York Times, Orr makes the following comment about what we have come to call nature poetry: that there is a "covert will to power in the traditional Romantic nature poem (to see ourselves reflected in nature is to make nature our servant)". This is probably true in so far as many poets project themselves into Nature (with a capital "N") and find that they are quite comfortable there, even happy among the flowers, trees, and animals who are finally compatible, charming, childish versions of human beings without articulate speech or possibilities for self-expression. Mary Oliver comes to mind as the most contemporary example of this kind of sympathetic, projective figure. But there is another traditi0n—D. H. Lawrence comes to mind, but he isn't the only one—that views nature as a completely alien world where no human being would want to venture, ever. Scientific knowledge of nature assures us that it is no place for empathy, or sympathy, but "red in tooth and claw." There is no "will to power" in this kind of nature poetry. No Romance. Only caution, and dread.

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Who wouldn't want to be the lover, rather than the loved? No one wants to be adored. Not really.

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I heard a new phrase on the radio today: "augmented reality." It refers to the new electronic devices about to appear on the market—special glasses that you wear through which you can see things imposed on the objective world; innovative digital watches worn like regular watches, but that do a plethora of electronic things. And more. "Augmented" reality really means "diminished" reality, a turning away from reality by substituting machine reality for it; or at the very least, partially obscuring reality by veiling it with digital imagery. Do we really think reality can be "augmented" by what is essentially unreality? Why would we want to augment reality? What does this imply?

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"What happens fast is illusion, what happens slow is reality. The job of the long view is to penetrate illusion."
                                      —Stewart Bran, from The Clock of the Long Now

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My wife, who is Belgian, has told a story for years which never ceases to amaze and entertain anyone who will listen. One day on the beach at Ostend, when she was a little girl, she came upon an old crone hunched over a tub of live eels that had only minutes before been hauled out of the North Sea. The eels writhed and churned with life. My wife watched as the old woman reached into the tub, grabbed an eel, and with a sharp little knife cut a circle of skin around its neck and with the other hand yanked the skin off the live creature all the way to the tail, like removing a sock, and tossed the flayed eel back into the tub. My wife was appalled: "Oh, but Madame," she cried, "they suffer so terribly!" The woman gave her a pathetic look, and said "But no, my little one. We've been doing his for generations. They're used to it! They don't feel anything anymore."

All those years, and not a single complaint!

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Of course, there might be scads of testimony from contemporary poets to counter Bernstein's view that many (most?) poets formulate a message before writing a poem; that they "convey" only what they know prior to the act of writing. Here's what Mary Reufle has to say on the subject: "If you have an idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff you haven't even climbed." She prefaced these remarks by asserting that even young poets know this. It's one of the first things they learn about writing poetry. Bring up Frost's now over-quoted (but still useful) remark: "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." Ad infinitum.

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Why is it harder to conceive of, or sell the idea of an abstract poetry when we can far more easily (many of us) accept the idea of abstract painting, music, sculpture, or even dance? Is it because color and pigment, notes of sound, solid materials, and

shapes of the body where [sic] never meant to signify anything beyond themselves— they are inherently abstract mediums—while words were invented for the very purpose of pointing towards things in the world? Of course, modern critics refute this. Words are mere breath, or ink on a page. They signify nothing beyond themselves. I guess that makes them as abstract as anything else. But no matter what they've become, weren't words originally invented for the purpose of describing the world? This is why it's so hard to read "language poems" or Gertrude Stein's poems, or most post-modernist poems because giving up or denying this historical habit is so hard to do. Can we read words as only words, without meaning lying beyond them, tied to them like the body to the soul? Would we want to?

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In the last twenty years or so, a new fad for titles has emerged using suffixes, like -ology or -graphy to denote seriousness and intellectual depth. Such words as cosmology, archeology, geography, taxonomy, choreography, cartography, and others appear in title after title, not only for single poems, but for whole collections. So we might find them linked with large and important abstract nouns, as in "The Choreography of Desire," or "A Taxonomy of Loneliness." Poets don't seem to notice how prevalent this has become; or it indicates a need to conform by repeating what they've seen elsewhere. In the 1970s and 80s, the fad involved gerunds: every title had to include the verbal form -ing. One of the more famous titles, Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck, didn't start the fad, but was probably influential in keeping it alive. Fads are clichés spread on a cultural level, or within a particular group. You'd think poets would avoid fads, but they seem as susceptible as anyone else.

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[It's] those tiresome poets who tell you, within five minutes of meeting them, everything they've ever published or done.

Kurt Brown wrote six books of poems: Return of the Prodigals (Four Way Books, 1999), More Things in Heaven and Earth (Four Way Books, 2002), Fables from the Ark (WordTech, 2003), Future Ship (Red Hen Press, 2007), No Other Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2010) and Time-Bound (Tiger Bark Press, 2012). The last in 2013, his posthumously published I've Come This Far To Say Hello: Poems Selected and New, was from Tiger Bark Press.

He was the author of six chapbooks: The Lance & Rita Poems, which won the Sound Post Press competition in Columbia, Missouri (1994); Recension of the Biblical Watchdog, which won the Anamnesis Poetry Chapbook Competition (1997); A Voice in the Garden: Poems of Sandor Tádjèck published by Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center (1998); Mammal News (Pudding House Press, 2000); Fables from the Ark, which won the Woodland Press Poetry Chapbook Competition (2002), and Sincerest Flatteries: A Little Book of Imitations, published by Tupelo Press in the Masters’ Series (2007).

He was Editor of three annuals: The True Subject (Graywolf Press), Writing It Down for James: Writers on Life and Craft (Beacon Press) and Facing the Lion: Writers on Life and Craft (both from Beacon Press). He edited the anthologies Drive, They Said: Poems about Americans and Their Cars (1994), Verse & Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics, and co-edited with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, his wife, Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars (1997).

He was the Editor of The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science (University of Georgia Press, 2001), co-editor of the tribute anthology for the late William Matthews, Blues for Bill (University of Akron Press, 2006) and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems (2007) and, with Harold Schechter, a new anthology, Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (2011) both from Alfred A. Knopf ‘s Everyman’s Library Series.

Lost Sheep: Aspen's Counterculture in the 1970s, a memoir describing the town during a crucial period in its history, was published by Conundrum Press in 2012; and Eating Our Words: Poets Share Their Favorite Recipes is due out from Tupelo Press in 2015.

A book of translations with his wife Laure-Anne Bosselaar, entitled The Plural of Happiness: Selected Poems of Herman De Coninck, was published in the Field Translation Series in 2006.

He taught poetry workshops and craft classes at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York and was a recent McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as a visiting writer at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah.

He was an editor for the online journal MEAD: The Magazine of Literature and Libations.