Passive resistance

Three things have happened lately that have made me think about how politics (not sure that is the right word) interacts with poetry/art and if I should be doing more of that, which in short I think I should. So...

1. I've been reading Michael Palmer's essays in Active Boundaries (New Directions, 2008) all of which so far are as much concerned with politics as with poetry (in his mind they don't exist without each other I feel). He talks about George Bush, the Iraq ware, Vietnam, The Cold War - all the things that shaped who he is/was as an artist I think. He is so passionate about it and yet from his poetry, you would struggle to find an overt political subject. But it seems if he is always thinking about it working on what he seems to feel is a 'war on language'. So that was really interesting.
2. I went to the start of the World Peace March (it starts in NZ and goes around the world in 90 days), which was also a celebration of Mahatma Ghandi's birthday. I'm not what you'd call a peace activist, but I'm certainly a pacifist and I think passive resistance is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen (I have seen it on a small scale and it's impossible to beat). So I was incredibly interested in that.
3. I watched the Tua vs. Cameron boxing fight which made me feel sick. I am not against sport or competition or even aggression in the context of those two things and the actual boxing match was not such a bad thing. I think it was the spectators that bothered me the most, the baying for blood. The comments after the match - how wonderful it was, how sensational - it had been a particularly short and brutal knockout. Cameron was out of it by the end of the 1st round and at the start of the second Tua had him on the ropes and was pummeling him even as Cameron's legs collapsed and he fell to the ground. So by anyones standards it wasn't a tense battle between two great sportsmen, it was one guy getting the shit kicked out of him by another guy, but that's what these particular spectators wanted. And while I am loathe to draw the connection between that and greater issues of violence - international war, domestic violence etc. Maybe it does start in places like a boxing match at mystery creek?

So I guess I'm saddened by the whole thing. But then what do you do with that? How do you write a good poem about it. Palmer might use the bullshit hype/marketing speak of the fight promoters to illustrate something (however obliquely) that way, but what should I do? Describe the fight in detail? Describe everything about the fight except the fight itself? Talk about what I would have been doing instead of watching it? Run with the words 'Mystery Creek'? Have a dream? Talk about hippos and dinosaurs? I dunno. My poetry is often meaningless and that seems to be my violence, the thing that saddens me the most.

Circling back

Letter 6, from Michael Palmer's Letters to Zanzotto (The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems, Carcanet UK, 1999):

Dear Z,

So we accused mimesis, accused

anemone

and the plasma of mud,

accused pleasure, sun

and the circle of shadow.

Yes! Mimesis and pleasure...

From Red Yellow Blue (Sarah's Eighth):

Now that you know all the words

and I have almost forgotten them

Or now that you have experienced rain

for days on end

and learned to paint with red, yellow and blue

those days which seem to have no end

[...]

Bad Google and bad language

Just read this about google trying to steal NZ author's copyrights. Don't be evil, my arse!

I hadn't even heard about this but it makes me fucking angry. Why isn't this all over the news? Authors are going to end up like Hollywood scriptwriters before we know it. We'll be underpaid (even more so) and completely undervalued.

Deep breath...OK...

Back on the Michael Palmer buzz which is good I think. He's so dreamy.

Wrote my fifth poem for the week and quite possibly the only decent one. So five more next week and that's it. Or maybe not? Maybe I should keep going and do revision in the afternoons? I think that could work. Anyway my goal is five more next week. I'll be in Rotorua visiting my parents and mountain biking, so hopefully I can fit it in between soaks in their geothermal spa pool. Oh yeah, that's real art.

And something nice and ironic to end on from Mr Michael "McDreamy" Palmer (Company of Moths, New Directions, 2005):

Your Diamond Shoe

Don't write poems about what's going on.

Murderers and liars, dreams and desires,

they're always going on.

Leave them outside the poem.

Don't describe you sad-eyed summer home

or wide-eyed winter home.

Don't write about being homeless

or your home-away-from-home.

Don't write about war,

whether you're against of for,

it's the same fucking war.

[...]

That's the only time I've seen Palmer use an expletive I think. His language is usually so much more refined than that. I guess he was being ironic there too. Quite a different tone, objective and form from his usual stuff. I read in an interview of him the other day that Your Diamond Shoe was inspired by another poet, so I guess that explains that, but one of the interesting things that has plagued me since I read that interview was his objection to what he calls 'bad language' in poems. Which I couldn't figure out what he meant and obviously if he could define what exactly bad language is I could then stop using it. I don't think it is simply things like expletives or non-musical language though, but I guess it'd be more cliched or boring language maybe? Although perhaps there is something of a smoothness element in what he was saying - a beautiful language? Most of his poems seem to share that kind of ephemeral, languid tone that comes from the language he chooses, although I would hope he wouldn't close his reading to that.

So, Mr Palmer, explain yourself please, what is 'bad language' and how do we avoid it?

Benjamin Nelson returns

I've been thinking a lot over the last few days about how to make these 'Bill Nelson' poems work. I've been playing around with the titles to get the 'character/self' thing going and at the moment they are all named after famous fictional or at least mythological/religious character. Not sure it that is quite there yet though. Another thought I had the other night was to use an alter-ego. Maybe someone called Benjamin? I don't know if that would work either, it'd probably be less interesting. There is also the problem of the section heading, I think that will be crucial. I'm talking with Damien on Wednesday about it.

When I was seven I had a friend who's little brother was named Benjamin. He hated the name and forced everyone to call him Fred. I have no idea why. But at the time I liked the idea and asked everyone to call me Benjamin. I previously owned a goat called Dr Ben, so it was a name I liked and not completely theft. Or at least the kind of theft that involves taking peoples rubbish. Anyway, no one ever called me Benjamin, I guess they thought it was stupid, and I couldn't really be bothered forcing people.

Showed a few of them to Ashleigh and she suggested having some that aren't so brutal as some kind of relief for the reader, which is something to think about and might be worth trying. It might work in the scope of the complete/balanced self thing too, although part of me wants the self to be completely unbalanced and tyrannical just to highlight that aspect. She also suggested going all out on the bruality where possible which is probably something else to think about too.

Got some book vouchers the other day and had a splurge on a Robert Hass essay book (must remember to lend it to Sarah when I'm done) and Sport 37. I really wanted to buy the Michael Palmer essay book but they all seemed so academic and mostly critiques of people like Dante etc. which is cool, but I'm not sure if it is essential for me to own. I'd love it if he had a book on poetics - I'd buy that in a second. So I've got a few vouchers left and will wait to see what comes up to buy. Maybe Michelle Leggot's new book? I'd like a book called 100 Contemporary NZ Artists too, but it's like $60 - goodbye vouchers.

Has anyone got any must-haves they'd like to suggest?

Soft decaying galaxies...of course

Read some more Seidel, wrote a poem and then read some of Vincent O'Sullivan's Further Convictions Pending (VUP, 2009). O'Sullivan is amazing. Beautiful use of language, and engaging little poems, some of them more accessible than others, but always quite surprising like in Being here:

It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for

an emblem at every turn, if you cannot see bees

arcing and mining the soft decaying galaxies

of the laden apricot tree without wanting

symbols - which of course are manifold - symbols

of so much else? [...]

Bees in 'soft decaying galaxies' - holy fuck, talk about blowing our little poetry reading minds out of the water. I think part of it is the manifest intelligence too. His poems don't dumb down language or make it 'relevant' or whatever, they are unashamedly talking about big things. Quite Wallace Stevensey in that regard and also doesn't not remind me of Michael Palmer's intelligence and mystery and beautiful, images, language and enjambment too. So yeah. Very impressed. Weird how I've kind of skipped over him before. How many other great NZ poets have I done that to?

Also, glad to here Sam Sampson won the Best First Book of Poems at the Montanas. I know that was like a week ago, but news is slow 'round here. Anyone of the three finalists (also Charlotte Simmonds and Amy Brown) deserved to win it, but you know, I guess I'm biased towards Sam's obliqueness. So well done him!

The perfect lyric poem

Nothing came today. I've been here 3 hours and nothing. I even tried to do the exercise that we have been set for a special workshop next week in the hope that exercises are limiting and therefore easy, but nope. Which I guess goes to show that the only thing stopping me writing is me. The little voice that whispers crap and reaches for the delete button.

I read some more Jorie Graham though and Michael Palmer. I've finally finished The Lion Bridge after, I think, about 18 months. Which, for me at least, has got to be some kind of record.

We are discussing Helen's reading package this afternoon about science and writing which should be interesting seeing as I've had a bit of science and software engineering background. I think it is quite a complicated issue, made more complicated by the fact that science isn't just one thing and can range from the naming of plants (botany) to the such hugely complex and unmeasurable theoretical concepts that they can only be represented by massive computer models (quantum physics?). It seems there is some space for poetry to meddle in there, but I would suggest it is more at one end of that spectrum than the other. That's not to say poetry can't try of course and can't dream. In fact I think poetry's ability to dream and make random, surprising connections is where sometimes it's strength lies with regards to science. It has the power of sci-fi, which I guess is the romantic end of science, where the ideas are born and before the real, nitty-gritty and (usually) mundane work is done. But who's to say someone can't write the perfect lyric poem that describes all the intricacies of string theory in some kind of perfect vortex of language?

I also read the thing I wrote yesterday that was kind of spawned from a Wallace Steven's line and it seems reasonably interesting. I might have to do that again. He seems like one of those writers who writes nice open, philosophical one-liners that a ripe for quoting and reinterpreting.

History, language and influence

Wrote the third part to the Unsettlement/Settlement poem today. Thanks Chris for suggesting this and also giving me the 'Morning, Noon and Night' exercise, which I didn't do, but helped with the three-parter thing.

Watched Michael Palmer reading at Berkeley's Lunch Poems series. He mentioned a poem called 'So' (I think?) by Wallace Stevens that inspired a series of poems of his called 'So 1 (2,3,4...)' which piqued my interested because I think I am also influenced by Wallace Stevens, although I haven't read much of his stuff. The reason I say that because some of the things I have read of his just look and sound a little similar to mine, although I'm sure I've never read them before. So I'll try and find the 'So' series, it would be great to read a series of poems by someone who directly influences me on someone who indirectly influences me.

And on that note, I've just finished reading another Jay Parini essay on 'Tradition and Originality' which talks about borrowing/stealing from your precursor. This seems to have become accepted for writers to do in even the most obvious of ways since Eliot wrote The Wasteland and there doesn't seem to be much argument about this, not by writers at least. The most interesting thing he mentioned though, was how contemporary writing seems to inform how the canon is read (he cited an Eliot essay on this), so that by reinterpreting the past we are actually altering it. So if Michael Palmer was to write a poem that is influenced by a Wallace Steven's poem, then we would read the Wallace Steven's poem in a different way, perhaps contextually, perhaps just by giving it more significance. So it is a two way street, which is nice.

But he went on to compare this with the nature of language itself, how all words and stolen from the past and reinterpreted, recontextualised every time we use them and it is just that poets are conscious of this process and actively seek to give old words new meanings, old poems new life. I like that too.

Poetry is "about" the past, in that poets understand that language itself is history and that words have slipped through time, undergone mutations, shifts in meaning; but each word is a palimpest as well: it contains multiple erasures, which underlie its current meaning, coloring it, giving it character and ambiguity and direction. A poem, in this sense, is also a palimpest, a "writing over" of previous poems, and therefore a gift to the future, where it will be misread, misdirected, even misplaced.

Also, I like that small phrase "language itself is history." That might give me some help with my history series I think, which I really don't want to be about 'history' in the sense of this is what has happened in the past. Maybe etymology (and influence?) is the key. I started down that direction in one of the poems, although not very successfully. Maybe I could pick some interesting words that are 'normally' associated with history and look up the etymology, writing the poem from there? So it becomes the history of the word I guess.

Untitled

Not much to report. Started my 'other' new Michael Palmer book Company of Moths (2005, New Directions. ISBN: 978-0-8112-1623-4) and read a few more Rae Armantrout.

Wrote the 'Consolidation' poem.

Have to do a reading on Friday. Feels like I have nothing worthy to read. Should I go for untested new stuff (which I think is better, but who knows?) or the older more tested stuff? Damn it!

Promises lived up to (and Jorie Graham)

Seconds ago finished Promises of Glass have to talk about it so excited have to talk about it taken me awhile but so excited he is brilliant isn't he he is I want to be just like him don't think I am write differently so excited write more excited don't know maybe less misty just figured that out I think he writes misty just beyond reach can't grasp it unamed things undescribed things characters appearing receding fading the narrator or the reader the Michael Palmer character war rhyme has become prominent fashionable maybe I don't know he works it quite blatant but beautiful usually brings it in heavy for one stanza then drift away again something I should try maybe have to talk about it have to come down from Tower:

[...]

just now, wind and racing sky,

the distant cathedral of Epifan',

and after repeating the words pine

then pond a few so many

times I wrote them down

just now and the word crocodile,

and Beograd, Pristina, this night their fires.

Time was I would memorize

each thing that passed before my eyes

and scribe it on the magic list.

sleep's deeply secret tablet,

titled My Life as a Futurist.

Fucking amazing!

[Added 12:00pm]

Read a beautiful essay about Jorie Grahan by James Longenbach (Modern Poetry After Modernism, 1997, Oxford University Press NY ISBN: 0-19-510178-2). He was talking about her in terms of post-modernism and how she treats her writing after Pound/Elliot and then Elizabeth Bishop etc. but I get the feeling he is in total awe of her powers, the way she does something remarkably and astoundingly different with, not only every book she has written, but every poem. My curiosity is raised. It sounds like she is incredibly smart, incredibly ambitious and incredibly hard to read. I guess not aesthetically because she has good grasp of music and surprise, but because the classical references, the competing narratives, the largish words, the subtle philoosphical debates all require incredibly close reading and thought. Sounds like the kind of thing we should all aspire to write. But can everyone write like that? Should everyone try? I think attempting new things all the time is definitely worth while, but classical references, I've never been into that. But I like her ideas of melding disparate narratives, like in one poem she had some classical story (Greek or something) the story of a girl in a gas chamber and a personal story of visiting her grandmother in a home and somehow made them all one. Interesting idea. I'm going to have to get some of her stuff. I'll go look now and see what around to buy. Longenbach you are awesome!

Sofistikated or sophisticated?

I've read a Tong Hoagland essay from Real Sofistikashun (2006, Graywolf Pr. ISBN: 13-978-1-55597-455-8) which talked about surface pleasures in poetry and art. He compared Henri Matisse to Stein, Palmer, Bernstein and some others with regard to how they use what he calls the effect of 'polka dots and pattern' to create simple, but somehow intriguing poems. He talks about their heightened sense of music and disregard of meaning and the referant. I can see that as a valid argument, but I'm not sure most of those poets would be happy with that summation of their work. I think they would see their work as reaching a higher meaning, perhaps more in tune with the reader's subconscious mind rather than diregarding meaning altogether. To be fair he did mention Michael Palmer as one person who somehow seems to transcend both spaces. I think Palmer's work is a natural progression of 'language' based poetry, he is using the techniques the underlying philosophy of the movement and hinting at wider themes, wider ideas. He just does it better than the others.

It was an interesting argument and I certainly don't disagree with anything he said, langauge poetry as well as Matisse do a carry a weight I think, it is subtle and ever-changing, but the work exists because it is a testament to the artists intention and attention whatever that may be.

I wrote some more history today. This time based on the section headings of Michael King's Penguin History of NZ: Prehistory, Settlement, Consolidation, Unsettlement, Posthistory. Cool titles for poems. I hope the body can live up to the head.

Poems in series and Lloyd Jones comes by

My two new Michael Palmer books have arrived, The Promises of Glass and Company of Moths. I'm working my way through the former. I won't go into a full discussion until I've finished reading it perhaps. Except I will just say that I am using it for inspiration before I write and in that sense it seems to have worked for me so far.

I wrote a poem in my now two part 'History' series. This is new ground for me. Palmer is right into this kind of thing and I love that about him and I am starting to see how he makes it work. I'm referring to his 'Autobiography' series which I think he kind of uses as place holder titles or maybe jumping off points, because I get the feeling he thinks of all, or at least significant amount of, poetry as autobiogrpahical and so this gives him a warrant to write virtually anything he wants and that is why they work, because the poems in the series are completely different in almost every way. Very cool. I might be wrong about his thinking on this, but it is how I like to think about it anyway.

So confidence is high today.

Lloyd Jones talked to our class yesterday. Damien tried to direct the conversation around his experience with short fiction and he talked alot about his personal move to put more emphasis on 'voice' over detail. I think he was trying to say he is experimenting more with the internal mind as much as the external world. Although it wasn't completely clear what he meant by 'voice'. I don't think he is alone in that and whenever anyone discusses voice I get quite confused about what they actually mean, so much so I don't think I really like the term in literature any more. Eeek, that is a bold opinion for such a novice.

He also talked, or should I say was interrogated, on the nature of truth, accuracy and fact in fiction and non-fiction. I was relieved to find he didn't have any answers on that, except to say that he writes fiction and that anything and possibly everything in his books is fictionalised. And I agree that he has a right to write in that manner if he wishes. It would be a scary world if writers had constraints about what they could and could not fictionalise. I find it a bit perplexing that people need certainty around this issue. I quite like the idea that everyone has differnt ideas about truth and factuality and that there is no golden rule and a kind of uncertainty about what is being written these days. And of course debate is always good.

So he was a nice guy and told us about his meeting an ageing Queen and being stuck on the mouse wheel of UK celebrity publishing promotion. Apparently Geri Haliwell made a speech at the UK Book Awards. I wonder what the organisers were thinking when they decided she would be better than some lowly nobel prize winner.

Michael Palmer does it again!

Wrote a poem I like today, tomorrow...I dunno, but for today it seems OK.
It came after reading a Michael Palmer poem. He fucking did it again. I don't know what it is about his work, but it inspires me on some mysterious level, emotionally I think, maybe tonally, I dunno. He just somehow gets me to write and write well. The book I have of his is The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems (New Directions, 1998), which I have been reading at a snails pace since early last year. I treat it like the magical elixir in Asterix comics and once it has run out there will be no more. I deliberately don't allow myself to read more than one or two a day. Fucked up.

We never say the word desert

nor does the sand pass through fingers

of this hand we forget

is ours

How can anyone not want to write like that?