Poem (“Avion, Gorrion.”)

by Ben Mazer, from Jacket

Samson that great city, his anatomy on fire
Grasping with gnarled hands at the mad wasps
Yet while his bearded rage survives contriving
An entelechy of clouds and trumpets.
— Ern Malley, “Documentary Film”

Avion, Gorrion.
what does this mean?
DC-3 divisible by three.
a bilingual entelechy.
When it was raining
a man stopped into the store,
emerging from the street
as the street must have been
to him, entering the store.
He asked for a book that didn’t exist,
but were his questions answers
that didn’t exist, but for me.
The rain grew darker, and the quiet louder,
separate from what we were here for,
veering into ideas of evenings just around the corner
like streaks of newsprint honouring the living,
promising a glitter of excited chatter
and the audible crackle of a firm reply
in a dry room where a fresh gaze amplifies
the removal of a jacket to an unlooking chair,
where a cloud shifts in the glint of an eye,
glowing and growing on embroidery flowering,
sinking into a gutter of loneliness
where everything that happens is obscured,
where darkness and silence become comforting
because familiar, locking the library
while other people rush to see a play.
Cocktails and cigarettes, warmer, more rapidly
affirm the towering city,
and yet apart from it I saw you were
in need of identifying in thin layers
in circles turning, what you were
as if some smile were rained on high above
the revelers distracted from their hearing,
looked on and looking on
in the frank moment of your naked gaze,
as if you put it in a question to me,
that I hesitating not to answer
revealed like thunder in rained on eyes.
A sudden meaning of the printed flower.

Read the rest of this poem at Jacket!

D.A. Powell on Silence in Poetry

Gerke: The “pause” seems very important in your work. When you read out loud in public, you do so very slowly, with a perfect calm and in this poem there are extra spaces in the lines to slow the reader down. Can you talk about pauses and spaces in terms of what you want them to do and how they affect the words and phrases on the page?

Powell: For me, silence is a reminder of certain kinds of absence I perceive in the world. I don’t know that I would want to enumerate them. But I do feel them as palpable forces in my work. So much of poetry is an act of calling. And so much of poetry is a balance between calling and responding. This is the third way: calling, responding, reflection. The reflection can come as a well-placed caesura or as an articulation of discovery. It’s not necessary to prefer one form over the other. But just as much as we honor insight and intellect, we should honor feeling and inarticulateness. None of these need supplant any of the others. Poetry has room for both voice and silence.

— from Big Other

On Literary Community

At her blog swoonrocket, the poet Juliana Spahr writes, “to let [MFA] degree programs take over those loving institutions of community support that have for so long preserved literatures — such as the literary magazine and the reading series and the small press — is risky. It seems, for instance, that the growth of creative writing in universities and colleges has not lead to a parallel long term growth in the interest in literature. Almost weirdly the reverse. Although there is no evidence yet of a correlation and this is more an idle observation on my part — it seems peculiar to me that as more US citizens study creative writing in the academy that US citizens, as that NEA study showed, buy and read fewer books of literature every year.”

An interesting thought well-put. I've always been skeptical of academic hegemony and particularly of the MFA system; not that I have nothing but antipathy for these programs, only that I waver between accepting and denying their merits. The intrusion of university bureaucracies into literary communities permits a kind of artificial aristocracy, a form of official authority that springs from a title granted but not, necessarily, from respect earned (or work done). This is the reason that U35 POETRY @ The Marliave is an unaffiliated reading series. The series will fail or thrive on its own merit, but it will not be a class assignment, zombie-like and ever-revived by the steady pulse of incoming freshmen.

Nota Bene: Saul Bellow

“Better, thought Sammler, to accept the inevitability of imitation and then to imitate good things. The ancients had this right. Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself — Reality. One must be satisfied with the symbols. Make peace therefore with intermediacy and representation. But choose higher representations. Otherwise the individual must be the failure he now sees and knows himself to be.”

— Saul Bellow, from Mr. Sammler's Planet

Rockstar: Alex R.M. Evans

With All Due Attention

Is it even worth addressing the now-laughable derision that certain people feel towards the internet generation? We have walked this road. Again, and again, we have argued and reached no conclusion. I cringe as much at the prospect of dull repetition as I do at the annoyance of being accused. The millenials are ignorant and lazy! The internet is rotting their brains! They have no attention spans! Bah.

At The Lefsetz Letter, a defense with some bite: “Every day people throw their hands in the air, blaming the Internet for corrupting the Millennials, today’s teens and twentysomethings, saying the younger generation has the attention span of a gnat. No, this is not true. Kids are much better informed than we ever were, they can riff on not only Lady GaGa, but BP and the oil spill and Toyota and every other big story that appears throughout the Web, where they surf incessantly. Do not bemoan the lack of focus, speak to the real issue, you’re angry that kids today are not paying you enough attention!”

The case is further made that, in fact, young people today are not burdened with a lack of attention span but gifted with an ability to do away with all that is mediocre — to filter out the poor, the middling, and the just-alright material which was once the stock-in-trade of our culture industry. It is certainly true that one has more control today over the quantity and quality of material; but, to play the Devil's advocate, the ability to discern better from worse is developed through the consumption of an enormous amount of content of varying quality, along with the desire to sort through them. (Then, after all that effort, people's tastes inherently differ.) An ability to trash mediocre content has not, and will not, put a stop to mediocrity. There are other pitfalls to a new technology as well: as Rilke wrote, “All that we’ve gained the machine threatens, as long / as it dares to exist as Idea, not obedient tool.”

That being said, I agree that much of the anger directed at the internet generation has little to do with some over-reaching flaw in young people. We are as every generation before us were: some better, some smarter, many neither, and all misunderstood by our elders. The internet has not granted people inherently sharper critical faculties, and it didn't need to do that. So much of the 20th Century media apparatus was designed to provide cheap low-level content while taking advantage of restrictions to supply — it survived on the fact that people will buy and consume whatever you offer them, if there's nothing else available.

That is simply not the case today, not with the wide-open field of the web. Supply control is the horse-and-buggy of the internet age. As one book reviewer said at a BEA panel this year, “If you want people to pay more attention to your books, publish better books.” There is no longer any substitute for excellent content.

The Legacy of Joseph Pulitzer

“The big city daily, the kind of newspaper that everyone read because everyone had to read it—from politicians and businessmen to laborers and homemakers—is becoming a thing of the past. So are the profits that such papers used to bring in. Pulitzer’s paper made him the nineteenth-century equivalent of a billionaire; but now dying papers look for billionaires to bail them out as a public service. A century after Pulitzer’s death, the newspaper now promises to join the other great technologies of the Gilded Age — from railroads to coal mining — on the scrap heap of American history. It is by no means clear that we should dance on its grave.”

— Adam Kirsch, from The New Republic

Today on Craigslist with Maya Angelou

A Tin of Canned Food to the Universe

Stephen Burt, Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, 2010

Maxine Kumin, Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, 2010

Photographs courtesy of Kristin Waller.

20 Under 40

The New Yorker just released it's list of twenty fiction writers under the age of forty: "They are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37." Not a bad list as far as it goes, although an awful lot of them are pretty close to the high limit. I can't say that I'm familiar with all of them, or even most of them, so I don't have the same yawn reaction as many other bloggers.

Anyway, you know I wasn't really interested in the fiction writers. What I'm curious about is creating a list of 20 Poets Under 40. Help me out via email or comments. Let's get something together. Be bold. Send me links to their work. Prose is so 20th century.

Save the World: Use Garamond

Over at Go to Public School, they've discovered (through copletely un-scientific methodology) that Garamond is the most ink-effective typeface. I've also heard that British punctuation, with its single quotes in place of double, would save big on ink. Are we in for a sea-change?