poems, mostly metrical, and rants and raves on poets, poetry, and the po-biz (with 8-string stuff)

Or rather, lunch reading his reviews of poetry at The New Criterion, and I was struck by this passage, from his discussion of Charles Bukowski’s 479th posthumous book:

A literary culture needs its Bukowskis, if the language is to be freshened and sustained. Without some sense of the rhythm and consequence of speech, poetry becomes an antiquarian exercise.

That’s almost exactly right, if one allows “antiquarian” to encompass the avant garde, or at least that part of it still chasing theory.

And one more thing—though I did write a favorable review of one of the other posthumous books, Come On In, I hope it’s not just the Bukowskis, but also at least a few sonneteers, who can give poetry a “sense of the rhythm and consequence of speech.”

I don’t have much to say, but I think that’s because I’ve been silent. Not writing is not the way to get writing done.

Poetry, of course, goes on its merry way with or without me—via Arts & Letter Daily comes a piece which The Chronicle of Higher Education deigns to let non-academics read (have I mentioned just how despicable I find the access policies of JSTOR and Project MUSE?), “The New Math of Poetry”, which estimates that 100,000 poems will be published this year in English-language literary journals alone. Hey, if The Writer counts as a “literary journal”, 0.001% of them are mine already!

But even though very few people will read any significant portion of those 100,000 poems, people do still talk about poetry, often in surprising contexts. Scientific American, for instance, in an article on the enteric nervous system, has this:

“The second brain doesn’t help with the great thought processes…religion, philosophy and poetry is left to the brain in the head,” says Michael Gershon, chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, an expert in the nascent field of neurogastroenterology and author of the 1998 book The Second Brain (HarperCollins).

See? Poetry gets some respect. And even the technical stuff shows up in odd places: here is Joshua David Stein reporting on the Winter Olympics in Salon (you’ll need to click on “Continue Reading” at the bottom):

If the Ski Jump is the haiku of the games, the compulsory ice dance is a villanelle, a sport corseted so tightly with rules and regulations that the gasps of creativity are remanded to grow through the cracks.

I personally find villanelles rather useful machines for forcing me out of my mannerisms, and I think I’ll write one this week.

Arlo Haskell, Media Director for the Key West Literary Seminar, was kind enough to send me a link to his wonderful interview with Richard Wilbur. I blogged a couple of months ago about three new poems from Wilbur in The New Yorker, and I am delighted to learn from the interview that they will appear next year in a new collection, along with 37 riddles from Symposius and a translation of Mallarmé’s “For the Tomb of Edgar Poe.”

In addition to bearing good news, the interview is delightful, full of talk about literary life in Key West – no Bass Ale before two rounds of Anagrams were done, played with the likes of John Ciardi and “Jimmy” Merrill – of of Wilbur’s relationships with Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, and of the forms of poetry – he’s not interested in them per se, though he’s “only written and published one free verse poem.”

My thanks to Mr Haskell, and you’ll thank yourself for reading the interview.

Echidne of the Snakes hosts a weekly poetry slam, I’ve learned from bluegal, whom I follow on Twitter. I posted a wintry villanelle on this week’s thread, which is rather sparse so far — but there is a pretty fabulous piece on our war-criminal former Vice President.

for the first time this fall.

My great-grandmother’s maiden name was Stella Baird — “star singer” — and she used to rock me to sleep reciting Whitman, Longfellow, Lanier, Tennyson, and Scott. I tried to write a sci-fi epic featuring her as the lost sister. This is all that has survivied:

Stella’s Song

There rise the rain-bringing Sisters,
And there follows the Black Bull
Whose horns hold black nothing, and light
So old and heavy it seems full
Of nothing, and nothing in me
Answers with its own night,
Answers with my own dying fall.

Willow, wake and weep
Earth, my body keep

Too long since I dreamed of flying,
That wide ringing, that clear burst
That carried me, and carried—how
Was it lost? How was I cursed,
And once cursed, did I live, content
Beneath the willow bough,
Between the willow and the earth?

Willow, wake and weep
Earth, my body keep

I know no willow ever wept,
And stars shape only black space,
I know the earth keeps maggots best—
There’s no love in its embrace.
My dreams are nothing in this world
But by this world possessed,
But for this earth I sing this last—

Willow, wake and weep
Earth, my body keep

Published long ago in The Louisville Review.

Thanks to Tad Richards, Lyn Stachyra, and Lea Cox for responding to my Facebook call for suggestions. You can hear it here, and here’s the text:

Some Reasons Why

Two shots, a beer, six packs of post-it notes,
And I was set to set our lives to rights—
Blue notes, my faults, and red, my stupid fights
With her, and green for notes for anecdotes
To make her laugh, and white for thoughtful quotes
From poets so she’d know I’d scaled the heights
Of culture, and bright pink for those delights
We’d teach each other while we made like goats—
I somehow didn’t see her leave her booth
When all at once her unfamiliar voice—
“Looks complicated, what you’re working on.
What’s it all about?” She didn’t want the truth,
I told myself, and I gave her no choice.
I never asked her name, and she was gone.

If you’ve got ideas, use the “Tell Me Something” link on the left under “Me and Mine” to send me an email – and thanks.

Lewis Turco, a wonderful poet both under his own name and as Wesli Court, is the author of The Book of Forms, the first edition of which first introduced me to real formal possibility. He’s started a collection of “Odd and Invented Forms” and he’s asking for contributions. Submission information is on the page.

I’m very pleased that Lew has included a form I concocted for Twitter, the twiplet (formerly twinnet). For a little while at least it’s the last item on his page.

Update 2/22/2010: Changed the URL to Lew’s new location,. Thanks to greywyvern for the heads up.

I haven’t seen much notice of Vice President Joe Biden’s appearance at the World Trade Center site on September 11 this year. He read Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” and I am grateful for the choice. Not that Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets — though she is very good — but that the Vice President, and maybe in particular this Vice President, chose such an apolitical and non-combative poem, a poem, finally, of joy, a rejection of despair and of anger, to read on such an occasion.

Yesterday The New Yorker published 3 new poems, “House,” “Flying,” and “A Reckoning,” by Richard Wilbur. “House” is heartbreaking; all three are very good. Also yesterday, my darling partner and bandleader Krys got a postcard, also from Richard Wilbur.

I’ve met him twice – two years ago (Krys supplied me with the courage!) we talked at a West Chester picnic for 15 minutes or so about his poem “The Mind Reader” (here from Google books), and last year Krys gave him copies of poems her 4th and 5th grade students had written in imitation of of his Opposite poems. The post card was in appreciation of and thanks for those imitations. This twice Pulitzer Prize winner, former Poet Laureate, foremost translator of French classical drama, collaborator with Leonard Bernstein, the finest American (and I think finest English-language) poet since Frost, at 88 years of age, took the trouble to find out where Krys teaches — there was no address on the copies she gave him — and send a thank you for poems written by children.

He is as remarkable a man as he is a poet.

Here is a review by Stephen Metcalf of Wilbur’s 2004 Collected, which begins “Richard Wilbur is living, white, male and, from all appearances, neither despondent nor mad. This is not a writer to whom glamour will attach easily.”

Nor does he need glamour. The poem “House,” linked above, is obviously written to his wife of half a century, who died just a few years ago. Wilbur’s last (so far!) separate volume of poetry, Mayflies includes this profoundly moving love poem for her, celebrating the steadiness — the lack of drama and glamour — in their long marriage. 50 years of love poetry to the same lover!

Update: I originally misspelled the first name of Stephen Metcalf, author of the New York Times review of Wilbur’s 2004 Collected.

but what the hell – here I get to use line breaks.

I’ll go to bed alone tonight,
But after afternoon delight –
And when the sun lights up our bed
I’ll kiss my sleeping darling’s head.