Brodsky

“’More than a crime against language or a betrayal of the reader, the rejection of meter is an act of self-castration by the author.’”

- Joseph Brodsky, as quoted by J. Kates in an essay on translation at the back of the anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian poetry in a new era.

I’ve tried. I’ve tried to say something in response to this. It’s one of the awfulest statements of poetics I have ever read. I try again. I erase everything. Based on the above I suspect Brodsky has never written a word worth reading.

what $10 & a poem got me

I went to the Small Press Distribution open house today. I bought a book for a poem. Then I bought ten more for a dollar apiece. I wrote about all that on LuvSet.

But since I write about books on this blog, this is where I’ll tell you what I got.

For a poem:
The Geography of Home: California’s poetry of place, edited by Christopher Buckley & Gary Young

Each for a dollar:
The Androgyne Journal, by James Broughton
An Inn Near Kyoto: writing by American women abroad, edited by Kathleen Coskran & C.W. Truesdale
Stories in the Stepmother Tongue, edited by Josip Novakovich & Robert Shapard
The Notebooks of David Ignatow, edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr
Sound Off, poetry by Spencer Selby
Island People, a novel by Coleman Dowell
Three Vietnamese Poets, edited & translated by Linh Dinh
The Talking of Hands: unpublished writing by New Rivers Press authors, edited by Robert Alexander, Mark Vinz, & C.W. Truesdale
The Stuttering of Wings, poetry by Sheila E. Murphy
Bite to Eat Place: an anthology of contemporary food poetry and poetic prose, edited by Andrea Andolph, Donald L. Vallis & Anne F. Walker

“a terrible Chinese”

Paisley Rekdal has a mother of Chinese heritage and a father of Scandinavian. As with many multiracial people, new meets frequently try (& fail) to name her ethnicity. Rekdal spent a year abroad, teaching English in Korea. At the end of her trip she traveled in China. Though as a child she heard her grandparents speaking Cantonese, she never spoke it herself. On her trip she finds herself speaking in a muddle of English/Cantonese/Mandarin/Korean:

“[T]he language … bubbles up out of me. Guttural or singing, a swift collection of monosyllables I recognize as the roots of the Korean I’ve been studying, this language comes to me faster and more instinctively than I would have dreamed. But my rising and falling is more Cantonese than Mandarin; I am speaking a terrible Chinese triggered in a brain part only now unearthed, taught or reconstructed by these faceless teachers. Like a resuscitated grudge this language oozes and seethes from my throat with impoliteness and anger. No one can really understand me – I can barely understand myself – but somehow the Chinese pretend to believe what I am saying is Chinese. ‘Where are you from?’ they ask, and a few even look surprised to hear it’s America.”

source: The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: observations on not fitting in by Paisley Rekdal

notes toward an autobiography by others, part 9

“I felt that in choosing literature as a career I’d placed all my money on a single number and it had lost.

“When I made this melodramatic declaration to a friend, he said, ‘What else were you planning to do with your life? Be an accountant? Civil engineer?’”

That’s from Edmund White’s City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ‘70s. Ed had published his first novel but no one seemed interested in a second.

As I’m in my 40s now and I’ve yet to publish a full-length collection (o slim volume of verse!), it’s pretty clear I’m not much good at this game. I like my poems. After I’ve read books full of work by others then turn to my own I’m struck again – surprised! – by how much I like my poems. I did a year without poems – 2008. I pledged never to write another poem. After all, I’d written so many. It would take all my writing energy just to go back through them and decide which were ones I wanted others to see. A little cleaning and polishing, and some sending work to magazines and ezines, and I could have that thing that looks so stunted and faded currently in its little pot in the corner – a poetry career!

In Ed White’s case a career at least had the potential to pay the bills. He wanted to write novels.

But the friend who said to me, What else are going to do with your life?, was me. It’s not like I didn’t write any poems at all in 2008. I reworked some old ones (you can see ‘em in the LuvSet blog archives), and I must have scratched a new one out here or there. And the habit of mind that makes poetry kept going on in my head. Choosing not to write any of it down began to seem an arbitrary decision. Nobody was reading the poems I’d written? Nobody was going to read the ones that were scrawling themselves across the inner walls of my head.

What my year off poetry seems to have helped me do is unshackle myself from the worldly ambition that pushed me to very occasional success and a lot of hurt feelings. It’s not that I don’t still want people to read my poems – I sent a batch to Fence Magazine last month with my usual hopeful fatalism – but … But needing the approval of others (editors! publishers!) in order to assign value to the poems was pernicious.

Now, I’m perfectly aware that this insight is banal. Since I was a kid I told myself what other people told me, that the work had to be the thing, regardless of what other people thought of it, and the place a poem would take me, a space of concentration and engagement, was one I rarely approached otherwise, and I liked that place. But delighting in a poem included the idea that others would, too. “Poetry will publish this one, surely! It’s better than anything in the last issue. And they say they could barely find enough good work to fill the last issue.”

I learned long ago that what I think is good and what the editor of Poetry thinks is good often fail to coincide – I know they reject work I would like and were I in their place I would turn back poets long comfortable in the Poetry stable. Nothing personal.

Same goes for every other magazine in the world. Or book publisher, probably.

Yet rejection balks me, hurts me. So I avoid it. I guess what happened during the year off was that the censorious voices I’d internalized gradually quieted. I will send poems out in the future. And I will occasionally take advantage of opportunities to self-publish. Print on demand services are more affordable than ever. Whatever. I’m not betting everything on one number. I’m diversified.

“the hidden present”

“In the first week of December, 1980, [John] Lennon bought an early Christmas present for five-year-old Sean. He was never able to give the present to his son; on December 8, John was murdered. Amid the grief and chaos in the Lennons’ home that followed the unthinkable event, the hidden present – a tiny Akita puppy – was almost forgotten. When Sean was finally given the present his father had left behind, the puppy was thin and weak. Sean named her Merry [after] Merry Christmas.”

source: the liner notes for Working Class Hero: a tribute to John Lennon, a compilation of Lennon songs covered by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Screaming Trees, Blues Traveler, Collective Soul, et al.

“’They weren’t allowed to land…’”“’When American bombers were coming back to Thailand from runs over Vietnam and they couldn’t hit their targets, they

“’When American bombers were coming back to Thailand from runs over Vietnam and they couldn’t hit their targets, they would drop their bombs on Laos, anywhere. They weren’t allowed to land in Thailand with their bombs.’”

- quoting a member of the “Mine Advisory Group, a British aid organization attempting to clear unexploded mines and bombs from Laos.”

source: The River’s Tale: a year on the Mekong, by Edward A. Gargan

“house built mainly of Oz books”

from a letter by Jack Spicer to his friend James Alexander, c. 1958:

“Went down to Duncan and Jess’s Friday … Their house is built mainly of Oz books, a grate to burn wood, a second story for guests, paintings, poems and miscellaneous objects of kindly magic. Cats.”

Duncan is Robert Duncan, the poet. Jess is Jess Collins the artist.

source: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: the collected poetry of Jack Spicer

word of the day: reredos

context: During the gold rush in Brazil “there was a proliferation of handsome churches built and decorated in the baroque style characteristic of the region. Minas Gerais attracted the best artisans of the time. Outwardly the churches looked sober and austere, but the interiors, symbolizing the divine soul, glistened with pure gold on their altars, reredoses, pillars, and bas-relief panels.”

Microsoft Word dictionary: reredos - “an artistic decoration behind the altar in a church, for example, a wood or stone screen or a wall-hanging”

source: Open Veins of Latin America: five centuries of the pillage of a continent by Eduardo Galeano

an attack of poetry

“A clapperless blue bell hung overhead,immense, flawless, infinitely clear. Stapled to it like the nub end of a rivet flared a white-yellow sun, naked and small. … On some hillocks, at a distance measured in exhausting hours, like a bag of spilled coffee beans on sparse carpet, herds of stoop-shouldered yaks gnawed at the touch, crew-cut grass.”

Edward Gargan has traveled to Tibet to the headwaters of the Mekong River, his plan to trace the river’s progress from Tibet down to the sea, passing through Burma, Laos, Camobia, and Vietnam in the process. Gargan’s prose otherwise rarely strays from the plain, descriptive prose of the journalist. The quoted paragraph is a spasm of metaphor that had me blinking. I like the bell-like sky. The coffee bean yaks? Less convinced.

source: The River’s Tale: a year on the Mekong by Edward A. Gargan

“… something round the next bend …”

Gottfried Hohmann, a researcher, on trying to make scientific observations of bonobos in the dense rainforests of the Congo:

“’People think it’s entertaining, but it’s not. … It’s so slow. So hard. … You always think there’s going to be something round the next bend, but there never is.”

source: “Swingers” by Ian Parker, The New Yorker, July 30, 2007

“Librarians appreciate quiet refrigerators.”

Says Rachel Levitsky in “Definining,” a poem in her collection Neighbor.

pile of reading

Dark Banquet: blood and the curious lives of blood-feeding creatures, by Bill Schutt
Did you know that there are three kinds of vampire bat? One feeds on chickens. It crawls up to a hen and nuzzles at the breast. Apparently this is sufficiently chick-like behavior that the hen feels reassured, even comforted and settles down over the bat while it sups at her breast.

Neighbor, poetry by Rachel Levitsky
I don’t remember where I got this exactly – the Friends of the Library book sale shelf at the library? I can’t recall having heard of Levitsky before but I like to read a totally random poet of whom I know nothing, once in awhile. Plus I was curious about what sort of stuff Ugly Duckling Presse publishes. “You can use most of this / though none of it is necessary”

The Mooring of Starting Out: the first five books of poetry, by John Ashbery
I bought this a few years ago and read most of it then stalled. Lately I came across it again and am pressing forward. As with Emily Dickinson I set myself the goal of reading two pages, just enough to get past the pages that are open in front of me. “They told this throughout all time, in all cities. The shape-filled foreground: what distractions for the imagination, incitements to the copyist, yet nobody had the leisure to examine it closely.”

My Vocabulary Did This to Me: the collected poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian
Jack Spicer seems to have a towering reputation, especially surprising considering he died early and his work was published only by tiny presses. I was curious about him. “Deep in the mind there is an ocean / I would fall within it, find my sources in it. Yield to tide / And find my sources in it.”

Angkor: the hidden glories, by Michael Freeman and Roger Warner
I tried to think what would be an exotic locale, where would I want to go that I never thought I’d ever really be able to get to? Angkor! Angkor is in Cambodia. Poor Cambodia seems to be doing okay these days. The era of the Killing Fields is over. I haven’t started reading the book yet. I’ve just looked at the pictures. The book looks like it will help me imagine myself there. When I can imagine myself somewhere it seems easier to get myself there.

Cahokia: ancient America’s great city on the Mississippi, by Timothy R. Pauketat
Another old ruin I would like to visit. Much less well preserved than Angkor – much of Cahokia has been leveled for modern city and superhighway.

Monkey Food: the complete “I was Seven in ‘75” collection, by Ellen Forney
I read another collection by Forney so when I saw this for a dollar at Half Price Books I picked it up. It just entered the reading pile. So far all I’ve done is flip through it.

Mindwalking: New and Selected Poems, 1937-2007, by Edward Mycue
Edward Mycue is an SF poet who I’ve known casually for years. He handed me a copy of his newest book at the last Poetry & Pizza. “what we experience we are / much passes through us / we leave nothing behind” Ed has a chapbook available for online reading at echapbook.com.

Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Levi-Strauss
I’ve been reading this one off & on for ages.

doctor says, bleed

So there really are diseases that can be treated through bleeding? Yes, says Bill Schutt in Dark Banquet: blood and the curious lives of blood-feeding creatures, and he goes through a few – porphyria, for instance. “Porphyria (from the Greek word for ‘purple’) is a disease of the blood that results from the faulty production of hemoglobin, which leads to the accumulations of red and purple pigments called porphyrins.” Decrease the level of porphyrins via some draining and things improve. Things like “sudden onset of bizarre behavior and strange outbursts.” Sounds like just the sort of behavior that would suggest bleeding, don’t you think?

Anyway, other diseases mitigated by bloodletting include a form of diabetes, hepatitis C (interferon treatment is more effective when you’ve got less blood, it seems), hemochromatosis, and polycythemia.

Not that a few rare diseases explain the notion that bleeding was considered an appropriate treatment for just about everything.

no wonder I hated the barber’s chair

The barber pole: “the red stripes signif[ied] blood, blue stripes … veins, and white stripes represented the gauze bandages [barber-surgeons] used to stem the bleeding. The pole itself was a symbol of the stick that patients would grip tightly as they were being bled and the ball atop the pole signified the blood collection basin (and the container they used to hold the leeches).”

During George Washington’s final illess he was bled – as a curiative by his doctors (& this method was standard practice at the time) – of “approximately 40 percent of [his] blood volume within a thirteen-hour period … For comparative purposes, the American Red Cross generally requires an eight-week period between blood donations of one-tenth the volume drained from the former president on what was to be his last day alive.”

So what was with all the bleeding? Illness, the prevailing orthodoxy had it, was caused (or, at least, worsened) by an excess of blood, blood being one of the humors that had to be kept in balance to maintain health. Illness was a result of an imbalance between the humors. For some reason blood was a prime suspect in imbalances – maybe because there was just so much of it and because its release can be so dramatic. Plus, you can get a little high from a bleeding, a temporary feeling of well-being.

source: Dark Banquet: blood and the curious lives of blood-feeding creatures by Bill Schutt