Gutsy

In the Fall 2009 issue of American Poet, I came across an ad for Donald Revell's new collection The Bitter Withy. The ad quotes TIME magazine's praise of Don: "It takes guts to write more poems about peace, war, God and children." Now, I admire Don's poetry but have to wonder about the times we live in when TIME can call it gutsy to write about such topics. I would argue it's gutless not to write about them.

In Praise of Serendipity (UPDATED)

A couple of weeks ago I was visiting family in Eugene, Oregon, a small city with several excellent used book stores. In my favorite store, Tsunami Books, I picked up Linda Hamalian's A Life of Kenneth Rexroth for a mere six bucks. The picture she paints of Rexroth isn't pretty—a tale of paranoia, sexist behavior, personal violence, egotism; serial infidelity on the one hand and pie-eyed romanticism on the other—but through it all Rexroth's powerful intellect and creative energy radiate.

As is my habit, I read the biographee's work alongside the biography: a revelation to find that Rexroth, whose poems I first read in the early 1970s, is exponentially better than I remember; at his best he weaves a spell (a cliché, I know, but no less true for being one), and when he mentions Sappho or Su Tung-p’o, Jakob Boehme or Fra Angelico, it's as if he's referring to a personal friend—so the allusions don't feel literary or historical, but intimate. And no American poet, I think, writes about nature as beautifully as Rexroth, who welcomed as a balm the ego-dampering force of the phenomenal world.

My point here, though, is not simply to praise Rexroth. I want to praise that same phenomenal world, which came to me in Oregon in one of its favorite guises: serendipity. I had not set out, after all, to look for a biography of Rexroth. It found me. And that fact made the pleasure of it even more intense. I buy a lot of used books online, and I appreciate being able (almost always) to find a particular title that's come to my attention. But when a book I've ordered arrives in the mail, there's no surprise, no "shock of recognition" of the sort that happens when an unlooked-for title suddenly appears on a shelf, and attracts my eye and my hand; in a few seconds the pages are turning, some phrase or other is catching my imagination, and it's as if I had always meant to read this book but got distracted somehow along the way. Serendipity. A law of nature as sure as gravity, as powerful as entropy—or so I like to think. What else can explain a Kenneth Rexroth? The son of a tubercular mother who perished in immense agony from gangrene of the lung when he was 11, whose physically abusive father died three years later (1919) from kidney failure; a boy who nevertheless read voraciously both in school and after dropping out of high school (he never earned a degree), who forged a personality strong and subtle enough to contain (barely) his many contradictions, and who produced some of the last century's finest original poetry and translations from French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and more (making versions more out of sheer imaginative sympathy and instinct than intimate knowledge of the original languages).

Charles Simic has a poem in his collection Unending Blues that perfectly describes poets like himself and Rexroth:

Elementary Cosmogony

How to the invisible
I hired myself to learn
Whatever trade it might
Consent to teach me.

How the invisible
Came out for a walk
On a certain evening
Casting the shadow of a man.

How I followed behind
Dragging my body
Which is my tool box,
Which is my music box,

For a long apprenticeship
That has as its last
And seventh rule:
The submission to chance.

The demands of cadence would not allow Simic to substitute “serendipity” for “chance,” but it’s the word I’d rather use, not least because of its fanciful origin. The word was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, according to my New Oxford American Dictionary, based on a fairy tale entitled The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” No poet, I would argue, submits to chance, but only to serendipity—at least when the words are flowing....

UPDATE: Thanks to Lyle Daggett's comment to this post and the links he embeds there, I discovered not only Lyle's insights into Rexroth and his work but this link to a rich Kenneth Rexroth page. Serendipity!

Careless

Joseph Duermer has a thoughtful Plumbline School post that draws on a quotation from Gaston Bachelard. It hit me with the force of revelation, though there's nothing new in its core idea—that "the true poem awakens the unconquerable desire to reread." What this means, of course, is that poetry in this country doesn't suffer from a lack of readers but a lack of re-readers. And why? Maybe it has to do with our long cultural history of preferring disposability over durability. Maybe the same careless farming practices, for example, that produced the Dust Bowl (see the recent episode of American Experience on the Civilian Conservation Corps) betray a deep flaw in the American character that makes us largely unfriendly to the attitude of care that poetry requires....

Opus into Opera

Here's a fascinating radio interview with poet Dave Mason on transforming his verse novel Ludlow into an opera. Enjoy!

A Blogger's Notebook 10: "Thought Police"

Herewith the reason I finally had to learn how to pronounce "Wittgenstein" (see my previous post).

THOUGHT POLICE
                   for Murray Moulding

As the critic drove, caught up in unpacking a scrap
of verse (did it, in fact, allude to Wittgenstein?),
he missed the light's turn and so never caught
sight of the city bus hustling to its next stop.
Now the jaunty firemen jabber as they scrape
the remains of him off the dash, and the 'copter
jabbers above the gawkers and TV reporters

who all jabber too—just as Wittgenstein jabbered
while shaking a fireplace poker at Karl Popper,
insisting there are no philosophical problems,
only linguistic ones (this a mere fifty miles
from war-rubbled London, when Hiroshima
and Nagasaki still lay flayed and smoking).
How all this jabber would distract our scholar

if he wasn't already heaped like raw sausage
in the throbbing sarcophagus of the ambulance.
In any case he'll never see those men in shades
slouched against a red brick wall, gazing out
over the accident scene in uncanny silence—
cigarettes angled from their lips, fists in pockets,
faint smiles shadowed by the brims of their fedoras.

Against Butchery

As someone who once told his high school college counselor that he wanted to major in English because, in part, "I've always been good at 'a sage,'" (by which I meant "usage"), I'm alerting those with a similar pronunciational affliction to the existence of a new and expanding resource: a site called inogolo.com. It was here that I recently discovered exactly how to pronounce Ludwig Wittgenstein (LOOD-vihg VIT-guhn-shtine)—though now I need to figure out how to work that into some everyday conversation. Not bloody likely.

For anyone curious about the title of this post, click here.

Poetry and the Mystery of Performance

Anselm Berrigan has two Harriet posts (here and here) that present a letter from his late stepfather, the British poet and novelist Douglas Oliver. The letter nutshells Oliver's analysis of the profound relationship between prosody and voicing in poetry and how that relationship affects each reader's understanding of a given poem.


I had attempted to get at something like this many years ago in a very rudimentary essay, but I had—and still have—neither the training nor the temperament, nor (needless to say) the insight, to do what Oliver does in his all too brief letter. The letter condenses ideas presented in his 1989 book Poetry and Narrative in Performance, which unfortunately is out of print, so I hope to track it down through my local library.


In any case, I highly recommend Berrigan's posts.