The Condition of Vision: Tom Hennen's Collected and New Poems

Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems by Tom Hennen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Some French writer when I was a boy said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are, I cannot remember by what argument he proved them even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children. If we knew the Fire-Worshippers better we might find that their centuries of pious observance had been rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some pool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the gods everywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories of all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our countrypeople speak with the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand death; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into the condition of quiet that is the condition of vision. We can make our minds so still like water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did not the wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of water, and that “even the generation of images in the mind is from water”?

—W. B. Yeats, “Earth, Fire and Water,” from The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

I’m using Yeats as a touchstone because his voice—relaxed but precise, meditative, unobtrusively erudite—is much like the voice we find in Minnesota poet Tom Hennen’s Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected & New Poems. What’s more, Hennen’s is a watery book, a flood of soulful, visionary images. He is a country person (or was: he lives now in Minneapolis) and like the countrypeople Yeats mentions is sensitive to the elemental earth, its seasons and creatures, and these seem to speak through him; or better: his poems are in conversation with them. We overhear that conversation in Hennen’s poetry. He seldom speaks to us directly, and as a result his work seems utterly natural, devoid of rhetoric. Unlike so many poets winning prizes these days, his work has the fragrance of black north country soil, not the carbolic odor of academe.

The world according to Hennen is one in which the human grasp exceeds its reach: we think we are taking control, farming the land, building our homes with their 100-watt lamps to hold back the night, but our grasp is finally not firm enough, the lights aren’t strong enough. Darkness sticks to everything.

*

I love collected poems, especially when discovering a new poet—and Hennen is completely new to me. We find him first in poems published in the mid-1970s. They are tentative in some ways, content to open up carefully circumscribed situations:

Out of Work More Than a Year Still No One Answers My Letters of Application

I late winter
Afternoon sunlight
Doesn’t budge the snowbanks
That have fallen whole into the backyard.

A forecast for more cold.
On the edge of the roof
Icicles are in deep conversation.
I pretend I belong and start talking.

There’s that water! Locked up in snowbanks, slowly dropping from the eaves. But there’s more cold in the forecast. A bleak but beautiful moment.

There is also a quiet humor in Hennen’s work that makes it especially appealing in these days of hyper-clever, grad-school in-joke poetry. It’s there early on, but begins to surface more frequently on his 1983 book Looking into the Weather:

Independent Existence

A small pond comes out of the hillside.
On its surface
Hangs a frog imitating moss.
A willow leaf
Drops on the water
And is immediately still.
Autumn air penetrates the ground.
Wind hums endlessly
To the tangled grass.
When things happen here
There is no urge to put them on TV.

Impossible to read that without smiling! And yet ... the poem seems to have very modest ambitions. I wouldn’t call that a character flaw, but that modesty was part of Hennen’s early poetic character, and it limited the scope of his work.

Which may be why a decade passed before Hennen published his next collection, Love for Other Things, where we find his poetry opening outward. The landscapes are more capacious, the contexts more expansive:

Picking a World

One world
Includes airplanes and power plants,
All the machinery that surrounds us,
The metallic odor that has entered words.

The other world waits
In the cold rain
That soaks the hours one by one
All through the night
When the woods come so close
you can hear them breathing like wet dogs.

This is not just a moment, but the portrait of a condition—physical and spiritual, personal and national. It’s also, I imagine, a sly riposte to William Carlos Williams’ dictum of 1944 (in his preface to his collection The Wedge) that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” No, Hennen says, quietly but firmly, a poem is not a machine, and the idea that it is has sullied our very language with a “metallic odor.” Real poems come from “the other world,” the non-human world where nature (“the woods”) comes close full of shivering affection, like a wet dog. This kind of complexity appears in Hennen’s early work only fragmentarily, in flashes, and it isn’t until his 1997 volume Crawling Out the Window that Hennen breaks out formally by embracing the prose poem form.

Wisconsin poet and editor Thomas R. Smith, whose most recent editorial effort is the amazing Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, states in his Afterword to Hennen’s book that “Crawling Out the Window is one of the greatest prose poem collections written by an American,” and I think his assessment is indisputable. When we arrive at Hennen’s prose poems we see the poet fully come what Yeats called “the condition of vision. “ There is a new kind of layering, a new imagistic dimensionality, a fresh music that his lined poems simply couldn’t accommodate. Prose seems to have released Hennen in some way, giving him access to the full scope of his emotional, intellectual, and spiritual impulses. The title poem is a good example:

Crawling Out the Window

When water starts to run, winds come to the sky carrying parts of Canada, and the house is filled with the scent of dead grass thawing. When spring comes on the Continental Divide, the snowbanks are broken in two and half fall south and half fall north. It’s the Gulf of Mexico or Hudson Bay, one or the other for the snow, the dirt, the grass, the animals, and me. The Minnesota prairie has never heard of free will. It asks you, quietly at first, to accept and even love your fate. You find out that if you fall south, life will be easy as warm rain. You wake up with an outgoing personality and a knack for business. The river carries you. You float easily and are a good swimmer. But if you fall north while daydreaming, you never quite get your footing back again. You will spend most of your time looking toward yourself and see nothing but holes. There will be gaps in your memory and you won’t be able to earn a living. You always point north like a compass. You always have to travel on foot against the wind. You always think things might get better. You watch the geese and are sure you can fly.

It’s incredibly exhilarating to watch Hennen achieve mastery in these poems and in those gathered here in the “New Poems” section, where the work ranges from small but luminous lined poems like this one, worthy of Bashō:

An Autumn Gift

Red maple leaves
Like just so
In the tall faded grass.
Happy to do it.

To this one, my favorite of all his many water poems:

Minnows II

It seems nature has many clocks, all running at once, set to different times. Some are as big as Wyoming, some the size of a nameless creek. If you listened closely, the minnows were black seconds ticking, and it’s hard, but I caught one. In the palm of my hand it jumped and tickled and nibbled my skin so I was amused and a bit scared because I was sure that seconds must not be kept from ticking. And anyhow, it had already escaped back into the icy creek. The day was warm and thick as violets. I wondered if I should tell someone what I had been bitten by time and it wasn’t so bad.

Notice the shift from present to past in this meditation on time, the purposeful narrowing of the view from landscape to creek, the minnow’s escape that happens while the poet is distracted by his own thinking. and then the enlarging of the view to encompass the whole day, and the final observation about what it means to be “bitten by time.” There is no way of knowing, of course, but I imagine that the early Tom Hennen, the young poet of the ‘60s and ‘70s, would have begun this poem with the third sentence and ended it with the minnow’s escape. What he has learned in his years of mindful practice—not through theory, not in the classroom—is to give his poems the space they need to breathe as the world breathes: deeply, joyfully, intimately.

Jim Harrison, one of the few living masters of both poetry and prose fiction, in his introduction to Darkness Sticks to Everything compares Hennen with Ted Kooser. Both poets, he observes, “are amazingly modest men who early accepted poetry as a calling in ancient terms and never let up despite being ignored early on. They return to the readers a thousand fold for their attentions.” Poetry as a calling, not an occupation; poetry as vision, not machine. These are the “ancient terms” Harrison praises, and rightly so. We need more poets like Tom Hennen, though in truth they are probably all around us. I’m hopeful that this powerful collection will inspire them to keep that ancient faith and inspire readers to seek them out and support them in their work.



View all my reviews

Three Reviews: Bly/Tranströmer, Duncan, di Giorgio

Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer by Robert Bly

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Two giants of post-WWII literature exchanging letters about poetry, translation, politics, family, and their own deep friendship makes for riveting reading. This wonderful book made me put a considerable stack of enjoyable reading on hold while I read it, and my first impulse upon finishing it was to start right over again from the beginning. Yes, it's that good.

It's unfair to compare Airmail with Lisa Jarnot's Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography, of course, but since I read them almost back-to-back I have to say that the Robert Bly/Tomas Tranströmer correspondence delivers a clearer, deeper sense of what it is like to be a poet than Jarnot's exhaustive and exhausting tome. We get a sense of both these poets as men, as word-mad writers, and watch as their careers and their friendship deepen and broaden over a period of 36 years—until the correspondence suddenly ends, cut off by the stroke Tranströmer suffered in 1990, which left him unable to write in the old, free way that characterizes these letters. What a loss! Heartbreaking for all concerned—and thanks to this book, we as readers join in that concern.

And yet the overall impression Airmail leaves is of the abiding comfort of friendship, especially when it thrives on both intellectual and emotional levels. The book quickly obliterates the image we have of poets as solitary garret-dwellers communing with the angels and shows us instead two deeply human beings seeking to heal the division between the inner and the outer life with searching intelligence and great good humor. Everything in Western culture militates against this healing, and yet this book illustrates that universal art (Tranströmer's poetry has been translated into 60 some languages) can arise from the attempt.

It may be that one of these days Bly himself will get the Nobel Prize (I happen to think he deserves it), but prizes are ultimately irrelevant. What matters is the inner work and its artful expression. These two poets, in different ways, have already succeeded in changing how we receive poems into our lives, and by extension how we receive our own experience in the world. I imagine not a few readers will revise their ideas of friendship itself, especially male friendships, on the basis of these luminous letters.



View all my reviews

*


Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography by Lisa Jarnot

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Jarnot's book is brilliant and horribly dull by turns. Whole chapters are given over to lists of flights hither and yon for readings, lectures, workshops, panel discussions etc., which Duncan undertook to make money. (He never had or really sought a secure place in the Academy.) She also lists all the people he met at those events and generally makes some cursory comments on how he was received, interspersing quotations from the letters he wrote daily to his partner Jess, who was evidently a painfully shy homebody. The book provides some insight into Duncan's character, which in print doesn't seem terribly appealing because of his erotic aggressiveness, persistent infidelity, raging ego, and general disregard for the others' feelings and views. In other words, this is not in any way a critical biography; it's too often a vessel full of literary gossip. What's missing is any in-depth insight into Duncan's writings.

I have to say that I've long admired Duncan from afar. He's what I think of as a process writer, a writer of sequences; there are few whole poems that stand alone, and because these tend to be the only ones Jarnot discusses, we're left with a very partial sense of the man's achievement. Jarnot does show us that Duncan was devoted to Charles Olson and his poetics, but gives no concrete examples of how he applied those ideas. My feeling is that Duncan rose above Olson's vague and wooly-headed theories and ultimately outdid his mentor. I can scarcely stomach Olson's poetry, but I continue to learn from Duncan and to read him with a sense of pleasure and discovery.

All this said, I can't pretend that Jarnot is entirely to blame. The fashion in biographies these days is the tome: fat books crammed with quotidian facts, as if readers needed proof that these people actually existed, eating and drinking, getting and spending, committing and betraying just like them. It's our own feeling of unreality that such biographies secretly seek to cure. Personally, I miss the days when literary biographies ranged from 200 to 350 pages or so, with a firm touch kept on the pulse of the work, which after all is the only reason to care about the writer's life (with some exceptions, of course). Jarnot's book could easily have weighed in at 300 pages and still had plenty of room to deal with Duncan's fundamental themes, adventurous structures, and varied music. We'll have to wait for another writer to wrestle with this poet on the terms that clearly mattered most to him.



View all my reviews

*


The History of Violets by Marosa Di Giorgio

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is the second book of translations I've read of Marosa di Giorgio's work, the first being Diadem: Selected Poems, translated by Adam Giannelli. Had I not read Giannelli's versions I might have assigned this book a higher rating. This is not to say that translator Jeannine Marie Pitas somehow failed the original work. In fact, she went out of her way in her attempt to bring The History of Violets into English, going so far as to move to Salto, Uruguay, di Giorgio's home town, in order to develop a deeper understanding of the poet. Unfortunately, Pitas's efforts aren't always successful. She seems to lack Giannelli's ear for English, and as a result her translations are a bit stiff. Here is an example, the 15th poem from The History of Violets, the Pitas version first, followed by Gianelli's:

The mushrooms are born in silence; some of them are born in silence, others with a brief shriek, a soft thunder. Some are white, others pink; that one is gray and looks like a dove, the statue of a dove; still others are gold or purple. Each one bears—and this is what's awful—the initials of the corpse it comes from. I do not dare to eat them; that most tender meat is our relative.

But, come afternoon the mushroom buyer arrives and starts picking. My mother gives him permission. He chooses like an eagle. This one white as sugar, a pink one, a gray one.

My mother does not realize that she is selling her race.

*

The mushrooms are born in silence; some are born in silence; others, with a brief shriek, a bit of thunder. Some are white, others pink, that one's gray and looks like a dove, the statue of a dove; some are gold or purple. Each one bears—and this is the horrible part—the initials of the dead person from which it springs. I don't dare devour them; that tender flesh is our relative.

But in the afternoon the mushroom buyer comes and starts to pick them. My mother lets him. He chooses like an eagle. That one, white as sugar, a pink one, a gray one.

Mama doesn't realize she's selling her own kind.

The differences here are small; many phrases are exactly the same. The differences, though, are typical of the two translators. Both translate "mi madre" correctly as "my mother"; but in the last line, where di Giorgio shifts to the more intimate "mamá," Pitas sticks with "my mother," losing the original's shift in tone. Earlier, in writing about the mushrooms themselves, Pitas translates "el muerto" as "the corpse," which takes the poem in a Poe-ish direction; we can see she means to do this because she translates "carne" as "meat". But surely di Giorgio's "el muerto" means "the dead person," as Giannelli has it, and her "carne" is (à la Giannelli) "flesh," as we normally speak of the flesh of fruits and vegetables. Pitas simply loses the subtlety of the original.

Finally, there's nothing "wrong" with Pitas's phrase "she is selling her race"; "vende a su raza" can mean this. But I think Giannelli is right in choosing "her own kind" for "su raza," because di Giorgio is talking about her kin—the dead whose graves are on the family farm where the poet grew up.

The above carping aside, I have to say we're lucky that Pitas chose to translate a complete, single book of di Giorgio's poems. Giannelli, with a different aim in mind, selected poems from the nearly 700 pages of the collected poetry (The Wild Papers); it seems that he took only one poem from The History of Violets, so Pitas's volume fills a real gap.



View all my reviews

Vanessa Sells Out

Let me see: what could I lay before you to concretize the acedia that characterizes Conceptual writing? Well, how about this:



Yes, as trumpeted by both conceptualist "author" Vanessa Place and her dopey-eyed peeps at Harriet, Place's ... well, what it is? a "book"? a "work of art"? ... let's just say "latest release" (such as one might enjoy some onanistic evening while pondering the idea of a canvas Duchamp had sense enough never to paint: "Nude Barthes Descending Staircase")...; to reprise mid-sentence, Vanessa Place, lawyer and con-woman, managed to "sell out" (are we surprised?) this work (is it fair to call it a "work"? oh why not—though it lacks the perfume of sweat and midnight oil) at the launch of this, "the first product of VanessaPlace Inc. [...] on May 3, 2013 at Cage, NYC."* Neither Harriet nor the freshly incorporated Ms. Place state how many copies constituted the "limited edition," and as a poet I am loath to resort to math, so suffice it to say that VP managed to sucker a large enough number of those who live at the intersection of Credulous and Tasteless to earn (earn?) her "product" a mention on the Official Blog of the Poetry Foundation. All this attention isn't surprising. After all, the ever-groundbreaking Vanessa managed to squeeze 50 bucks a copy out of her audience. (Audience can't be right; there is nothing here to hear ... except, oh yes, what Conceptualists love best: the rustle of money.) Anyway, what more could we ask for as we stumble toward another bankrupt weekend in corporatized America?
_________________
* Cage, NYC is evidently so ultra hip that a Google Search reveals nothing about it. Could it be a location akin to Nabokov's Zembla? Was Place's "launch" a fantasy launch? Does Place really exist? Is there a There there? Only the proprietors of Cage, NYC know the answers—and they're probably too drunk to remember. That'll teach 'em to serve absinthe at one of Vanessa's soirées. 

Language of the Power Elite

I can't believe this bit of brilliance from Keston Sutherland came to me via Harriet, which has been toadying to Con Writers and their Maven-in-Chief Marjorie Perloff for a long while now. I'm thankful to whatever whistleblower at Harriet found it and posted the link to it, though. Here's a sample:

[S]ignificantly for so-called “conceptual” poets, the refusal to give a conceptual account of the “subject” whose rejection defines the schema of their art is a manifest expression of contempt for the very work of conceptual definition itself. Conceptual poetry does no conceptual work toward defining the ”subject” whose rejection is its principal dogma. Poetry dismissed by conceptual poets as Romantic, subjective, expressive etc. often does a great deal more of that conceptual work than “conceptual poetry” does.

Sutherland also cannily observes that "the antisubjectivist dogma is an optic for ironic theorisation of value alone; its implications for a theory of labour are wholly reactionary. Marx’s account of the inhumanity of wage labour was precisely that it extinguishes the individual subject and reduces her to a mere quantity of 'socially necessary labour power' and finally to Gallerte. Capital itself is the fundamental 'antisubjective' force in the world and the pattern of all the others."

Hence the evident reality that Conceptual Writers claim to critique the language of the power elite while in fact furthering the aims of that elite by destroying the power of language.

Narayana Dreams the World

One of the most entertaining posts yet from poet/translator/editor Pat Dubrava's blog Holding the Light. The blog's name is the same as the poet's second book, Holding the Light, which you can buy here (scroll down just a bit to find it). It's a lovely collection of resonant poems like this one:

IMBRICATION

The poem "Naráyana"by Elsa Cross describes an
aspect of the god Vishnu, who dreams the world into
existence. He is often depicted sleeping on a bed of
coiled cobra, over primal waters.

Even in my downstairs study I hear
the muffled pounding over my head.
We took the low bid
and today four Mexicans arrived,
three men and a small boy who shovels
remnants of old shingles into a wheelbarrow.
None of them speak English.

Deciphering a Mexican poem about a Hindu god,
I ache to ariticulate the last line:
Y tu sueño va imbricado en sus escamas.
Imbricate: the same verb in English,
overlapping evenly, as tiles, do,
meshing with those final fish escamas.

Va impbricado: the verb to go,
if joined with the past participle,
signifies to suffer its action.
The imbrication then, is endured.
Not even that. It simply happens as you sleep.

Now we know why the bid was so much less,
watch as new tiles lap the roof in even rows.
wonder how little they are paid,
these dark men who have no English, no papers.

Escama: fish scale. The dictionaries give no echo
of other English sense, such as the social scale
or the wage scale or the scales of justice.
None of that in Spanish.
Only, in the second or third definition,
subtle resentment, vague mistrust.

The Mexicans climb my high, steep roof.
What if one of them were hurt?
The contractor shrugs. "Don't worry.
These guys make no claims."

Deep in the night of his vast sea,
Narayana dreams the world.
Over my musings shingles spread
their repeating pattern.
The sun reaches for noon and the boy tires,
leans against his father's battered car,
pushing rows of dents
into the yielding metal of a Pepsi can.
He ought to be in school.
"We won't use this contractor again,"
my husband fumes. "These guys are exploited.:
Pero, pobrecitos: they are here now.

Elsa writes in Mexico City.
I translate her Indian poems in Colorado
and these Mexicans on my roof nail their way
into our privileged realm, that place
where the world is made by dreaming,
but not before being covered with scales.

Pat's translation of Elsa Cross's poem appeared in the second issue of C. M. Mayo's late and much-missed bilingual literary journal Tameme:

NARAYANA

For Rubén Bonifaz Nuño

The seasons pass
and at the time when night
once spread its winter mist
                                                    to the horizon,
the sun now rises
over the waters,
yellow crown,
                                      VOWS
for the kindling day.

And below the day
the night of Narayana
makes blue arms undulate
from his bed of snakes.
And your dream is overlapped by his scales.

The Writin's on the Wall

My previous couple of posts may paint me as a stick-in-the-mud, an opponent of "innovation," a reactionary sonneteer or lover of Tradition (cue Tevye). No. There is a dimension of the avant-garde I enjoy and admire (the two responses need not align, but it's best if they do), and I believe one of the best spokesman for this dimension these days is Kent Johnson. I bring Kent up merely to direct Perpetual Birders to his Chicago Review takedown of Marjorie Perloff's "Avant-Garde Poetics" section in the latest edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Kent's piece speaks for itself, though he fails to state the obvious: Perloff is a phony, a PoBiz Operator, as devoid of intellectual credibility as a McRib sandwich.

Kent cannot say such things, even if he thinks them (I have no idea if he thinks them, but he did, in a poem of his own, write of W. S. Merwin that "he is our Tennyson," so I imagine he could tell the truth about Perloff if he felt so moved), and I can say such things only because I am less than a bacterium in Perloff's world. What luminary would concern herself with the squeakings of such a microscopic creature? And yet this is the peculiar freedom of being a poet, as opposed to an Operator. My failures are easily overlooked, since no editor at Princeton University Press would ask me to do anything but fetch him or her a cup of coffee.

I'll fetch my own coffee, thank you very much. And I'll let Kent say, with infinitely more eloquence, what I would like to say myself about the avant-garde. Essentially that it is alive and well, but is misrepresented by the Conceptualists and Flarfists of whom Perloff is such a fan. Birders who want a reliable, impassioned guide would do well to consider Kent's Chicago Review essay, because it not only critiques Perloff but provides the beginnings of an authentic "Avant-Garde Poetics" entry. As Dylan sings in "Thunder on the Mountain," "The writin's on the wall / Come read it, come see what it say."

Stupid Stupid Shakespeare

Remember the children's books about a family named the Stupids? Evidently one of their descendants has landed a blogging gig at Harriet—a fellow we've met before: K. Silem Mohammad. His latest post is hard to beat for sheer stupidity. The irony, of course, is that our blogger resorts to actual compositional writing in order to praise a book called Words of Love for being "beyond the usual condition of appropriational recycledness"—a book, that is, of surpassing stupidity.

The book's "author," Mark Rutkoski, according to one of the book's blurbers, Paul Hoover, "numbers and alphabetizes all the words in Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets." Hoover means that Rutkoski counts all the words, groups the instances of each together, then places these groups in alphabetical order. But why quibble? Suffice it to admit that Rutkoski out-stupids the original Stupids, although his brand of stupidity lacks the puerile humor of the Stupids books.

If we step back a moment, we may fairly ask ourselves who is stupider:

• the "author" of Words of Love, Mark Rutkoski;
• the publisher of said book (Les Figues Press);
• The Mamas and the Papas, the title of whose iconic '60s tune "Words of Love" is said to have been appropriated by Mr. Rutkoski;
• the blogger who has betrayed his conceptualist principles in order to assemble coherent  sentences that pretend to justify the book;
• Shakespeare, for composing his poems in the first place;
• or me for wasting the time of anyone who has read this far and who, by now, has surely begun to feel that sickish fascination we feel when slowing down to stare at a bloody car wreck.

Personally, I lay the blame on Shakespeare, who everybody says was a genius even though he couldn't foresee that in a few short centuries his poeticizing would turn out to be a vast waste of energy. Talk about stupid!

China Doorknobs

Anthony Madrid is by far the most rewarding-to-read blogger on Harriet these days. One feels like each of his posts is a full bucket pulled up from a pouring brook: the taste is good and complex and one can't forget that the brook is flowing on as one reads—that the bucketful is merely a sample. In this post, Madrid offers a wonderful quote from H. L. Mencken; I only wish he'd documented where it came from:

The old-time poet did not bother with theories. When the urge to write was upon him, he simply got himself into a lather, tied a towel around his head, and then tried to reduce his feelings to paper. If he had any skill the result was poetry; if he lacked skill it was nonsense. But even his worst failure still had something natural and excusable about it—it was the failure of a man admittedly somewhat feverish, with purple paint on his nose and vine-leaves in his hair. The failure of the new poet is the far more grotesque failure of a scientist who turns out to be a quack—of a mathematician who divides 20 by 4 and gets 6, of a cook who tries to make an omelette of china doorknobs.

Madrid frames this as "anti-poetry," but it's not; it's not even anti-failure-in-poetry. It simply acknowledges that "the new poet" (plug in any name that fits for you: for me it would be one of the Languish Poets or one of those Kenny Goldsmith clones) fails in a singularly uninspired way: failure as a kind of grotesque mannerism rather than a genuine attempt to honor either language or the reader; in fact, as Goldsmith likes to point out, this sort of failure assumes there will be no readers, that even the writer of it will avoid reading what he or she has written. An omelette of china doorknobs, indeed!

A Lot of Funny Things

So what in the world’s worth anything?
Poetry is priceless (or at least that’s what they pay me).
Explaining, clearly, deeply, Love, and Duty,
what monkey-hearted men will never learn.

—Wang Fan-chih

My poems are poems,
even if some people call them sermons.
Well, poems and sermons do share one thing:
when you read them you got to be artful.
Keep at it. Get into detail.
Don’t just claim they’re easy.
If you were to live your life like that,
a lot of funny things might happen.

—Shih Te

Both of the above translated by J. P. Seaton in Cold Mountain Poems: Zen Poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-chih

The Creepy Pseudo-Thought of Languish Poetry

"[E]xperimentalism is often suspicious of formally conservative notions like 'ear' and the essentialist values they evoke. Language poetry in particular is in large part predicated on the rejection of the illusion of presence promoted by the privileging of speech and voice."

—K. Silem Mohammad at Harriet

Essential translation: Garbage in, garbage out.

Duncan on Having "a Tongue that is Ready"

Robert Duncan

What I call the Divine is what I begin to divine in the poem.... The dream, the dance, the falling-in-love, and the poem seem to me of one kind. A seizure, given to us, overcoming the pose of the ego, commanding us to attend the need, enthralling us in the spell of a form we must achieve. To be a poet is to be prepared for that seizure, to have learned in the hand all the command one has of language, to have a tongue that is ready and true to the heart so that speech may come when the mind is not yours.

—qtd. in Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus, by Lisa Jarnot (pp. 228-229)

W. S. Merwin on Being Sure

W. S. Merwin (top) & John Berryman

Berryman
by W. S. Merwin

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

Francisco Hernández Reads the Signs

I've been having fun trying to translate some poems by Francisco Hernández. He's difficult because he often puns on idiomatic phrases. In the following case, his statements about poetry involve plays on phrases commonly found on road signs. That said...

Francisco Hernández
& Antojo de Trampa (the book
this poem is taken from)

Respete Las Señales

            Para Toño Valle

No deje poemas
sobre el pavimento.

Página izquierda
sólo para rebasar.

Endecasílabos
a 150 m.

Conceda cambio
de estrofas.

Precaución:
entrada y salida de sonetos.

No rebase con rima continua.

Poesía urbana:
velocidad restringida.

No maltrate las vocales.

Poemas con más de 10 versos,
por la autopista.

Si escribe no maneje.

Precaución: poema próximo.

Despacio: hombres escribiendo.

Elija su poema oportunamente.

Esta carretera
no es de alta poesía.

Disminuya su velocidad
de lectura.

Se consignará a la persona
que tire poesía.

Retorno a 250 versos.

* * *

Respect the Signs

            for Toño Valle

Don’t scatter poems
along the roadway.

Left page margin
for passing only.

Hendecasyllables
500 feet.

Yield
to changing stanzas.

Caution: sonnets
entering and exiting.

No passing when rhyme is continuous.

Urbane poetry:
speed restricted.

Don’t damage the vowels.

Poems more than 10 lines long
must use expressway.

If you write, don’t drive.

Caution: approaching next poem.

Slow: men writing.

Pick your poetics before the road gets dicey.

This highway
isn’t for high-speed poetry.

Slow down the velocity
of your reading.

A ticket will be issued
to anyone trashing poetry.

U-turn in 250 verses.

The one that may puzzle you the most is the fifth from the last: "Elija su poema oportunamente," which literally means "Choose your poem wisely." The road sign's language is different, of course: "Elija su carril oportunamente," which means "Choose your lane ahead of time" (not "wisely," though wisdom is implied). Why would a driver need to do this? Well, seems it's used in situations where the lanes narrow up ahead—when traffic flows from normal size lanes into narrowed lanes on a bridge, for example—so that changing lanes becomes especially dangerous—as on a bridge. I'm still not sure I unpacked all this very well, but "Pick your poetics before the road gets dicey" seems about right, although not one of the English words is a direct translation of any of the Spanish words. Translator/traitor, indeed!