Toto comes to the rescue

Thank God for Robert Hass and his clear unintimidating prose. Here, he is using a scene from the Wizard of Oz to discuss Robert Creeley' s poetics in Twentieth Century Pleasures (Harper Collins, 1984):

I am thinking of the scene in which the wizard, a stern face on a huge screen, booms out his mighty definition of himself: I AM OZ; and Dorothy's little dog Toto, the only creature in the room not scared witless by the impressiveness of it all, trots up to the curtain and pulls it back, revealing a nervous man fiddling desperately at a control panel and speaking into a microphone. Language has such power that poets are always both the image on the screen and the figure at the controls who tries to act as a medium for that powerful projection.

In this case Bob is Toto I think and for the last three days I've felt a bit like the tin man, the scarecrow and the lion all rolled into one. That big fucking face on the screen!

The image and telling people what to think

Benjamin and Bill have been collaborating under the expert guidance of Mr Robert Hass and his best friend Basho.

I do like the idea of the plain image. That thing that means nothing except itself. But it is so hard to write like that. I guess you have to really love the 'world' and feel your only goal is represent that world in imagistic words. But what about people, what about thinking, what about feeling? What if you want people to think and feel as much as see? Surely that is one of the great pleasures of being human. That we can think about our world on so many levels and reflect on our own ability to feel in way that goes beyond survival instinct. I guess the point Bob was trying to make is that the pure image removes all the ego of the writer, the sense that the writer is trying to tell us something, that what he has to say is somehow important. And I definitely feel his point there. So how do we write a sprawling philosophical poem that doesn't dictate> I guess there is that thing about more questions that answers. But is it satisfying to have nothing resolved?

Anyway, I wrote an imagistic poem, which is completely flawed and tells the story that I wanted to tell.

And Benjamin wanted to tell.

And Bob wanted to tell.

The discovery of the inner world

Read a Bob Hass essay ('Twentieth Century Pleasures', Harper Collins NY, 1997) about James Wright. He went into great detail about Wright's work on the self and his empathy with 'outsider' characters. Which was all very interesting. He also talked about a poem called 'The Undermining of the Defense Economy' which was a really lovely poem that as Bob described it

He tries to see what can be made to happen by saying beautiful things, by repeating his talismanic nouns and adjectives of the the discovery of the inner world.

So of course that sounded like a great exercise to do what Damien suggested when he read a metaphor I wrote a while ago and said - do more of those! Not sure if the poem is working, because I went for the brutal metaphor I think, the talismanic voodoo side of what Wright was doing, trying to make it fit into the Bill Nelson series. But it seems those kind of beautiful metaphors don't really work. I like the idea of relentless metaphor and adjectives though, it did make for a really interesting poem. So I will work on that one and try and bring it into line.

Other than that. I haven't written anything else this week.

James' workshop was interesting in that it highlighted the struggle with originality I think. He seems to be trying to do so many things in a fresh way he is struggling to progress and focus on one thing. I feel his pain.

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?

Lindsay vs. early Bob Hass: and the winner is...

Another weird day. They seem to becoming more common than not. I did write though, so in that respect maybe it was good?

Anyway read some of Robert Hass' Field Guide (Yale University Pr. 1973) which is interesting, but to be perfectly honest not as good as Lindsay's poems I was reading yesterday. WTF? I don't know either, but Lindsay has had some kind of imaginative explosion in his new work that I for one wasn't expecting and am completely astounded by. I guess you can't knock Robert Hass for his skill or wise understatement, but these early poems of his certainly aren't what you would call wild and exciting, not in the same way that Lindsay's stuff is. I was coming down with a serious case of writer's envy reading his work. Anyway I won't talk about that anymore, because I haven't formulated all my notes and stuff on it.

That imaginative excitement, surprise maybe even surrealism does draw me in every time. I love it and it seems so few people have the gift for it. It's that kind of harnessing of random connection and metaphor and I say harnessing because it is not completely random there is method in it, but yeah at the same time completely and utterly original. I guess maybe that's what it is, the fact that I know for certain I have never read anything like that before and may never again. That is good art?