Is Poetry Weird?

Pity poor Pat Schofield. By all accounts, an unremarkable mind, she has become immortalised by the satiric pen of the major British poet, Carol Ann Duffy. At first, I sided with Duffy in this, as a poet myself, who knows poems need snow and gunshots (to paraphrase Truffaut) - and Schofield is an epically-proportioned dunce, for trying to ban Duffy's poem because it deals with a violent subject matter (murder by knife); especially ironic, this, in the country of Romeo and Juliet, and Hercule Poirot. However, has Duffy not killed a flea with an A-bomb? By titling the poem with a real person's name, has she not been, ultimately, a tad too cruel? Even Yeats and Swift, in their satiric swoon, often titled their invectives less directly. This poem could practically be mailed in the post.

I fear, this streak of brilliant malice may cost Duffy the position of laureate - we can't really have the Queen's rep naming and shaming dumb citizens at will, can we? Imagine if every poet titled poems about real people who annoy them, everytime they do? We'd all be wading in lawsuits, or eponymous verse. I had hoped a more imaginative solution could have been opted for - a character invented, to symbolise all the idiots in the world who don't like poetry - at last count, over 5 billion, and 99.99 % of humanity. Instead, poor Schofield gets the lion's share of the blame, for a genetic/ social fact that science or religion cannot obscure: almost everyone except poets now thinks "poetry is weird". And, hold on a minute - isn't it? Would poets really love it so much, if it was not weird? Weird, in the wider sense, pertaining to futurity's power, and magic, and so on, as well as linguistic strangeness. It boils down to this: only a poet would write a poem to try to undo the damage an ordinary person caused by admitting they don't get poetry's charisma. It's like sending roses to someone with hayfever.

Duffy has just made a poetry-hating dolt famous for all time in the English canon. How's that for a dish served cold? Maybe not. But, has any poet yet figured out how to build a better verse-trap? No. Try as poets might, if they go too experimental, they're accused of being obscure; and if they go all Armitage-loves-Oasis on us, they can't compete with the real celebs like Damien Hirst and Beckam, let alone Hollywooders. Follow the money: we're in a world where poetry is less valued than day-old day passes. Let's start satirising almost every human on the planet, and make them love us, fast!

Poetry Reading Monomaniacs

I had a fun night reading as guest poet at poet Angela France's Buzzwords series, in Cheltenham last night - it's a tight-knit group of serious, local poets, who gather for workshops, open mics, and guest readings, every month, back of a pub. The sound system is professional, and the listening mostly very attentive. The poets presented a strong field during the open mic. They also buy books, a good sign. But, what is it with poetry events? I know it's not just me.

After a long (40 minute) reading (I was asked to do that much), which had gone over well an "actor" in the room sidled up, fixed me with that gleam I know so well, and began to tell me how to "improve my reading for next time" - offering some unasked-for tips. Never mind that it was now 10 pm, I was tired, and looking forward to the justly-deserved after-reading pint.

Poets, it seems, are afflicted with such amateur critics, because, I suspect, few who attend such events fathom the effort, energy, and skill, that goes into planning a serious, engaged, longer set (choice of poems, themes, tempo, inter-poem banter, or not, etc.). To the uninitiated, or the plain egoistic, poetry readings are simply an excuse to make another St. Anthony pin-cushion out of the visiting guest poets.

Should poets create some form of Etiquette? Like - if you want to say I was a bad reader - don't. Or not, please, 30 seconds after stepping down from the stage, tired.

Poem by Craig Santos Perez

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Craig Santos Perez (pictured) this Friday. He is a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guahån (Guam), and has lived in California since 1995.

He is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of several chapbooks, including all with ocean views (Overhere Press, 2007) and preterrain (Corollary Press, 2008). His first book, from unincorporated territory, has just been published by Tinfish Press.

His poetry, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in New American Writing, The Colorado Review, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, Jacket, Sentence, and Rain Taxi, among others. He is currently a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.



from descending plumeria
for my cousin, renee

~

(it's renee, my auntie jeanette cried into the phone) renee. had moved to san francisco after high school to become an artist. (that night) she was a passenger on a motorcycle. at an intersection. a car ran a red light and never stopped the motorcycle fell. on her body we waited. by the phone across. blue eyes of the pacific. (that night) there was an early season storm. we took the usual precautions: boarded the windows. (i don't want the kids to go, my mom said when she returned from my sister marla's room to check on her) unplugged the gas stove, placed towels on the bottom of the doors. (they need to go, my dad insisted, for charlie) and moved the furniture away. from the windows. i don't remember the name. of the typhoon, but it was. mapped and monitored.

~
________________________________________________

During and after the war, the Allies controlled the Marianas, a primary base in the Pacific. The US military shipped equipment and salvaged war material to permanent bases and scrap metal processors on Guam. The first brown tree snakes reached the war torn island as cargo ship stowaways.

Poem by Craig Santos Perez; reprinted from his new collection with permission of the author.

Spoken Softly, With A Big Stick

This is a close American election now. The battleground states that matter are few - it may come down to Ohio, for instance. Anyone who wants to write off John S. McCain as some kind of Bush Mark II or III are being simplistic. McCain is a maverick, and he does represent fundamental change. It is different in kind from Obama's, but it ain't gonna be business as usual. Take his speech of last night. Some are saying it was weak, or muted. No, it was soft-spoken, but underlined with steel.

At the end, when McCain, in his last 50 seconds, repeated, growing in speed, "fight with me, fight with me", I saw an outcome where they do fight with him, and the Republicans win. Few Americans can call on their fellow citizens to fight, without it seeming silly or sinister - but McCain said it, and it sounded both moving, and modest. "Nothing is inevitable" he said. I'd bet on that. Obama has to fight harder in the next 55 days. Let's hope he does.

The Tudors: Watching For Love-Cars

The Tudors is an abomination. Eyewear does not dismiss all televisual eyecandy - seriously immoral, or moral, viewing, both have their offerings to consider. However, amoral TV is the most grievous harm, to body and soul. It drips cynicism like some circus barkers do sweat.

Last night's (on British terrestrial) episode of the Tudors was simply bad karma in two dimensions. It purported to engage with the tragic, moral martyrdom of Saint John Fisher and Saint Thomas More, at the hands of pragmatic Protestant king Henry VIII (here slimmed down to a lithe sexual predator with a nu-metal band member's facial hair) - and their fine splitting of theological and political hairs, regarding conscience, and obediance (church and state matters); while, equally, celebrating the bedroom romping of a king whose finger merely has to crook to conquer young starlets.

This approach may make good TV (after the watershed) - but sits poorly with the solemn, heart-rending bloodshed whacked down upon the heads of good Christian thinkers. It is as if The Sopranos were wedded to a series about the Council of Nicea. I understand the commercial appeal of sex and execution - but surely, it was a cynical edit to follow the beheading of good Cardinal Fisher with Michelangelo's profane holler of "asshole!".

Guest Review: Noon on Bloomberg-Rissman

Alistair Noon reviews
Zeitgeist Spam
by John Bloomberg-Rissman

If someone out there has access to a complete database of 20th century poetry in English, plus a bit of spare time, could they confirm the following for me? The word “stone” turns up a lot in mid- to late Modernist poetry. Eliot’s “dry stones”, in an early Modernist poem ruminating on a crisis in Western thought, are soon reappropriated by the next generation for their associations of permanence. “Stone” becomes almost like a magic word uttered to hold back the collapse. For Romanticism and the evocation of beauty as something we can all sense, the counterpart – please run this through the appropriate database too – might be “flower”.

What, then, is the key word of Postmodernism? Ipso facto, I guess there shouldn’t be one single term, but John Bloomberg-Rissman may have hit on a candidate with the second half of this book’s title. From the printed catalogue sent five times to the same address, to the current statistic of 100 billion spam emails dispatched every day, word-waste is all around us, even if it also points to record levels of literacy and the dissemination of computer skills.

“Zeitgeist”, too, is a powerful word for its geographical expansiveness combined with temporal limitation, and Zeitgeist Spam is an astute title in both an ironic and a non-ironic way. T he ephemerality of text is flagged up, yet the sense that these poems give of long, stony attention – revision, or reading, or revisiting of earlier work – ironizes that ephemerality. The opening poem combines stone and spam:

"When we lived in Gondwana"

When we lived in Gondwana
By the shore of the Tethys Sea
My hands were never cold like this
Even in December

Remember all the fun
We had with stones
While waiting for the placodonts
To lift their walrus-snouts
Above the water?

Every day I’d write you poems
In ammonite ink

Such poems!

Every day we’d lie among the ferns

My claws would leave
Four little moons
On the backs of each of your shoulders

In this imagining of Mesozoic spam and its perpetrators, restraint lies down with warmth, and clarity with a bit of mystery. The vocabulary stays simple, the rhythm solid; the stanza breaks denote meaningful shifts and developments in this impossible leap of perspective. I’m reminded of the learned monkey who presents Kafka’s "Report to an Academy".

There is a great deal of variety in the forty-odd pages of Zeitgeist Spam. Early 21st-century work drudgery, Asian art, prehistory, poetics, epistemology and language games appear in the form of first person lyric, free verse song, found poems, multiple translations/versions of the same poem, the anecdote shaped and worked up to mean something bigger, jazz chant. The tone is demotic with high-flying excursions. We get pastiches of Imagism –

It’s high summer now
The shit-spattered nests are empty
("One pill the color of a flower")

and Romanticism –

O earth! O dreams!
O night! O no one!
("Comics Without Pictures")

as well as satire, irony and wit:

I find myself drawn to the meeting room’s two slit windows
Bad John! Bad employee!
(‘The Adventure of Wednesday’)

The self and its personal relationships are constructed through asides to and cameo appearances by partner, friends and family, e.g. father ("I ponder his investment advice"); a personal element which serves more to draw in than exclude. The recounting of the day’s experience in the present simple may overpopulate poetry magazine submissions, but here it’s turned into High Art.

An easy meta-poetic aspect is there in many poems, and why shouldn’t it be, if other scribes – anthropologists for example – incorporate methodological reflections into what they write. And Bloomberg-Rissman’s general approach refutes the two oft-implied and contradictory fallacies which Peter Robinson discussed in a recent interview in Agenda: firstly, that autobiographically based writing is necessarily egotistical; and secondly, that non-autobiographically based writing is necessarily inauthentic; both dogmas effectively placing restriction orders on creativity.

The observation of the urban reminds me at times of Charles Reznikoff: "the roof of the truck / That beeps as it pulls from the loading dock"; "phone lines / Just above the western horizon." There’s a beautiful elegy for and in the style of Cid Corman. Collage and montage are favoured techniques: "Choppers circle Fallujah // Ungaretti crouches / In a trench".

The poem that most explicitly reworks the idea of spam, with the fairly obvious title of "Inbox" and including the stuff all email recipients get every day, is the least successful for me – more spam than zeitgeist, and beset by the problem that makes found poems only infrequently rise above the three-star category. The found text may have intrinsic interest and the linguistic play be fun, but there is something to Pound’s bon mot that "only emotion endures", and it’s hard to get emotion into found poems. Well, maybe that’s the point here.

I’m also unsure whether the wit of the pseudo-translations that close the book isn’t so anarchic as to lose track. But in the lyric and narrative mode everything’s powered up. Bloomberg-Rissman swings forward to the future in "Someday I’ll be dead":

What did you think?
Some old dead guy
From a thousand years ago
Had something important to say?
How could he
With his unengineered heart?
And his tiny unmodified brain?

I counted at least nineteen poems here with not a dud line in them. It was self-published in an edition of fifty copies. Order your copy today.

Alistair Noon writes reviews for Eyewear on a semi-regular basis. He belongs to the English-speaking minority in central Brandenburg. He recently edited a symposium on Seán Rafferty at Intercapillary Space. Links to his poems, reviews, essays and translations online can be found at www.myspace.com/alistairnoon.

Did Poems That She Wrote Send Killers Out?

The news that an anthology for students in Britain that contains a "violent" poem by major British poet Carol Ann Duffy is to be destroyed, is alarming. Eyewear has long bemoaned the "nicing-up" of poetry in the UK, where some in government want "innovation" without pain. Poetry, friends, is not all fun and games - sometimes someone writing or reading does lose (or gain) an eye. Poetry, since at least Poe, has been disturbing - and even in The Bible, horrifying subjects are treated. In fact, if all books with violent themes or issues were to be culled from UK schools, none would be left, or few worth reading. This reactionary attack is meant to appear tough on the causes of crime, but is really just a dumb stab in the dark at that easiest target to wound: poetry (and by extension, culture). Poets, and those who love poetry, should defend this anthology, and this poem - and stop its destruction at the hands of Gradgrinds.