Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

Xyzzz, Melnick quit writing in the 80s after writing a long poem on the AIDS crisis and becoming absorbed in his job as a copyeditor at the SF Chronicle. He purposefully dropped off the map, and in the only interview he gave, he seems pretty content with his decision.

It's probably best for you to shut up when you don't know what you're talking about.

That’s never stopped him before.

Remember that not everyone longs to be in the limelight, or to have their work read by everyone.

Which is why the point about ubiquity still stands for me. The idea that collective or shared experience is more profound than individual experience, and that thus, more popular media is more profound than what lurks in the shadows, is an absolutely ridiculous one. I'll argue that to the end.

You bring up that the media only writes about Lowell but you just want things you find good to remain obscure and then lash out when people apparently don't know what you're talking about, or people don't know the names of these poets. It's just incoherent rubbish.

Lock yourself in a room with trashy SF and cheap crime paperbacks for a year to get these banal notions out of you head, table

That’s never stopped him before.

― Solaris Ocean Blue (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 19 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

As for you, put up a witty YouTube link, that's all you're good for.

Fellas… this is the wayr room

lol!

I'm not going to waste more time responding to blatant projection and mischaracterization.

Today, my plan is to do one final read-through of Cooper's 'I Wished' to get some pull quotes for the review I'm working on.

Currently reading Clark Coolidge's 'To the Cold Heart' before bed, and Gail Scott's 'Permanent Revolution' with coffee in the morning. The latter is disappointing when compared to her novels-- there's something about her style that doesn't work well for me in the essay form, but is extremely provocative in her novels. It might be her approach to disjunction...trying to put my finger on it.

I like Clark Coolidge fine. Is that what you meant by experimental? He seems to me to write in a high Modernist style which I find enjoyable and interesting but very much anchored to early 20th C aesthetics.

'experimental' i think invokes at this point a set of strategies to unsettle preconceptions of how writing makes sense (i.e. 'anti-' gestures that interrupt legibility in various ways) tied to avant garde ideals of progress and novelty. The idea that these kinds of approaches continue to lead an aesthetic vanguard I think is fairly outmoded even within this very limited bourgeois construction of modernity. This is also true in the more straightforward sense that these traditions, regardless of the popularity of individual poets, are now similarly sanctified by just as many stuffy cultural institutions.

From this point of view I agree that the positioning of certain kinds of works as 'experimental' is useful to claim and repudiate certain kinds of capital and prestige for works/authors but I can't see that it has any utility that I would find particularly productive or interesting.

Good post, plax.

I'd argue against that categorization of Coolidge, if only because the guy has written so many books that simply saying he writes in High Modernist tradition is doing the breadth of his work a great disservice.

I don't really agree with the rest of your post because the experiment that you call 'outmoded' continues to be so stridently rejected by institutions that many of the finest poets of our time are lucky to sell 100 copies of their latest books, but I'm also not sure what sort of stuffy institutions you're speaking of.

There's also much beyond the ease of avant-garde ideals of progress and novelty...maybe it's just me, but I actually think some people are interested in playing with and unsettling language not because of any unconsciously absorbed bourgeois desire for progress, but because that is what interests them. I don't think anything I write is progressing anything, but I do it because it allows me to think and feel in a way that feels most like myself. If other people like it, fine. If not, fine.

I do wonder what you'd consider an aesthetic vanguard these days, but this isn't the thread for it.

I will also admit that one of the reasons I get worked up about this stuff is that I am consistently called an 'experimental' poet, and many of my best friends are also categorized in this way, so when all the work we've done is dismissed as mere bourgeois trappings, I get defensive. Seems like punching down.

"I'm not going to waste more time responding to blatant projection and mischaracterization."

If you don't like your own words thrown back at you be more precise.

This table is broken.

"I don't really agree with the rest of your post because the experiment that you call 'outmoded' continues to be so stridently rejected by institutions that many of the finest poets of our time are lucky to sell 100 copies"

As if you are interested if it sells more. Comforting that it doesn't, huh?

If other people like it, fine. If not, fine....all the work we've done is dismissed as mere bourgeois trappings...Seems like punching down.

These two attitudes would appear to be at war with one another. Not that this is wrong or bad. We all struggle to reconcile conflicting ideas and feelings. Absolute consistency of judgement is not a sign of infallibility so much as lack of self-knowledge.

1. I think its fine for a general characterisation of a writer to not take in and reflect the full breadth of their work. This is the nature of general characterisations. So I do not retract this characterisation which I think was broadly accurate and I would be surprised if Cooldidge himself would take any umbridge at it. I would hope that any authors work would at least aspire to something not entirely identical with these categorisations.

2. I think the legacies of early 20th Century Modernism that I suggested in my previous post do enjoy high cultural prestige and are very much celebrated by conservative cultural institutions such as museums or music venues and in the specific instance of Coolidge I recall buying a very handsome copy of one of his books in the LRB bookshop a few years ago, probably on the shelf between Anne Carson and Emily Dickinson. He was not selling it photocopied out of the back of his car. It's certainly true that Cooldidge and his contemporaries hold far more prestige than other kinds of writing, say romance novels marketed to women or detective novels. Its also worth remembering that writers with all kinds of ambitions remain obscure regardless of how palatable their work might be to different audiences. Amazon is full of self-published books by writers working in the aforementioned genres as well as others others.

3. Regarding your assertion that some may be interested in playing with unsettling language because it interests them, I don't disagree. I would have assumed that some combination of this and a need to pay rent is why most people who do most things do thos things. This is also why people write romance or detective novels, watch TV or learn to bake sourdough bread. What psychic drives guide these interests is not really for me to say.

4. I thought in my post I was quite clear that the ideal of an aesthetic vanguard doesn't interest me all that much, but if it wasn't clear then I'm happy to clarify that this is the case.

5. I will end by saying that I was not in any way responding to you or your friends poetry, neither of which I have read. I cannot speak to the motives of anyone who has called it 'experimental' but rest assured that they and I are not conspiring in any way. I was only responding to the posts you have made in this thread. My characterisation of the ideal of an Avant-garde as being fundamentally bourgeois was simply my argument and opinion about a very large and important movement of aesthetic practices since the late 19th Century and was certainly not directed at you. And, as I am not myself Robert Lowell, I don't think this could be thought of as 'punching down' even if you want to think of it as punching at all, which I don't. I do note however, that nobody in this thread seems remotely exercised about the kinds of prestige afforded or withheld by cultural institutions in the way you are.

The idea that collective or shared experience is more profound than individual experience, and that thus, more popular media is more profound than what lurks in the shadows, is an absolutely ridiculous one.

Who has proposed this idea?

The only person who just about slightly has is Tim, in response to an earlier claim that people had proposed this idea.

I actually thought of exactly the same thing as Tim (ie: the one person who HAS claimed that ubiquity is great is Tom Ewing), and greatly enjoyed his reference.

I thought about Robert Lowell today. Years ago, I tried to read him. It didn't go well. I got little from it, and didn't go very far. It was a pity.

But I must say that this must be just as much about me as about Lowell, as I seem to feel this way about many poets.

It's definitely true that Lowell still gets vast editions of his letters published, and these still get vast reviews in certain places (for myself, I mainly just know the LRB). These reviews are typically quite tedious - but that's partly because they're always written by Colm Toibin.

The single most interesting thing about Lowell that I can think of is his appearance in Norman Mailer's THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT. That always intrigued me.

I'm not sure now whether anyone was arguing that Lowell was overrated compared to Bishop, but I'll add in any case these factual observations:

Lowell's and Bishop's reputations are certainly connected, but I would have thought that for some time (30-40 years?) Bishop has been more highly valued - or, simply, more frequently and highly praised. I don't think I've ever read a bad word about anything Bishop ever wrote -- literally. It feels as though you can find someone praising her to the skies literally every week somewhere in the literary press. I'm not sure that's true of Lowell.

Indeed, I ended up thinking that Bishop is probably the single most highly rated modern poet in the world now - perhaps with Heaney second?

As Lester Bangs, or possibly Frank Kogan, once said: "We'll never agree on anything again like we agreed on Elizabeth Bishop".

agreed re: tóibín on lowell. i read something by him once that was, typically of tóibín, fascinated and very easily seduced by class and wealth. He seemed breathless at the idea that lowell was from a very wealthy brahmin family and that this alone guaranteed an inherent degree of interest in his poetry. That he is such a great poet was simply a bonus. this is all obviously very tedious.

I like bishop a lot but i'm always baffled by what others say they like about her. i find almost everything i've read about her writing seems to describe quite a dull writer and not the author of 'the waiting room,' a poem I think about all the time.

Toibin wrote one of my favorite long things about Bishop!

I'm loving this discussion because I'd not once concluded like plax that Toibin is a writer fascinated and very easily seduced by class and wealth, especially since his master Henry James wrote about class and wealth with some fascination but not once was very easily seduced.

Reading parts of, though not the whole of:

Joe Cleary ed, IRISH MODERNISM (2014)

Maurice Bourgeois, SYNGE AND THE IRISH THEATRE (1913) - which must be virtually the first book ever written about him - in fact it was submitted as a student thesis in Paris in 1912! It has an astounding series of Appendixes detailing every known first performance of a Synge play in a given country, every translation (Dutch, Czech, etc!), every newspaper article about him. The level of empirical research here would put many current writers in the shade.

Quite looking forward to dipping into the much looser Sean O Faolain's THE IRISH (1947).

re Bishop she's weirder than her reputation for "simplicity" or whatever should suggest:

Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Xyzzz, go fuck yourself.

Plax, I don't agree with much of what you wrote, but am tired of clogging up the thread, so will simply state that nobody else in this thread is exercised about these issues because they're not poets, as far as I know, and so these issues aren't personal to them.

The pinefox, I reworded exactly what Tim wrote, and both you and he are wrong.

Get fucked, table, stuff your chapbooks up your arsehole.

I don't have an arsehole, it was sewn up after I nearly died of cancer in 2019, so you'll have a find a better insult, dickhead.

You still have a mouth, don't you?

Is someone talking?

As for you, put up a witty YouTube link, that's all you're good for.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 19 February 2022 13:17 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

coming from mister fucking twitter lmao

The tweets have content, unlike your posts.

anyway I'm reading the Hollinghurst debut it's v good

not very experimental, but it ain't that sort of meal

I like Hollinghurst, tho have only read the most recent one and The Line of Beauty

how's the recent? imo he is the best modern (i.e. elegiac; aware of info overload) approximation of an austenian comedian of society i've read

He's gotten worse, or, rather, his material is thinning and his treatment of it etiolated and blah.

love both the Swimming Pool Library and the Line of Beauty (with the latter taking the nod). from reading round here, decided not to venture further, disappointedly.

Kind of agree with Alfred-- it's fine, and there remain some exquisite sentences (pages even), but it does sort of seem like he's run out of material.

Even not having read The Stranger's Child, I found Sparsholt to be a little much like The Line of Beauty, and one of the major criticisms of Sparsholt is that it was too much like The Stranger's Child..

That said, if you like his sort of thing, then it is probably worth a read.

The Line of Beauty is very much one of my favorite novels. I was afraid of rereading it 2018, but, happily, it still won me over.

'i knew i could never love it or want it, but it was an achievement, this armour of useless masculinity' is a rollercoaster in twenty words

I wrote:

Non-ubiquity, in and of itself, is no more profound than ubiquity.

That's the main point I was trying to make, that the extent to which a piece of art is well-known is a useless way to judge its quality. It's entirely possible to have a profound engagement with a popular (even an immensely popular) work of art, and it's just as possible to have a profound experience with a terribly obscure one.

TTITT, you "reworded" what I said as "collective or shared experience is more profound than individual experience, and that thus, more popular media is more profound than what lurks in the shadows" and that isn't what I think, neither is it what I said. That's at least in part my fault, because I added:

Less so if anything because at least ubiquity has the kind of profundity that comes from shared experience

This was only a half-expressed thought and I'm sorry for any lack of clarity. But here's what I think: my experience with a piece of art is deeply individual and comes from my individual engagement with it: that experience will be more or less profound according to the art and me. But that engagement also comes with a context (I might be alone, I might be in a class, or a book group, or a concert , or a club...) That context can also lead to a profound experience, in addition to the personal engagement with the art itself. Being one of a thousand people going crazy to an amazing record in a club can be (though isn't always) a deeply profound experience and it's a profound experience which simply isn't available from solo engagement with that same work of art.

To be clear, I'm neither saying being one of those thousand is a more profound experience than engaging intensely with a piece of art on my own, and I'm not saying work that millions of people engage with intensely is somehow better than work that a very few people engage with intensely, I'm saying that shared experience can bring its own profundity.

If it makes you feel any differently, although I'm not a poet (and thank goodness for that) I do engage in literary pursuits that also fail to get much or any attention outside a tiny circle of somewhat interested people and I feel the frustration of not being able to reach wider audiences who might find the work valuable, so these questions are at least somewhat personal to me also.

Great post Tim

tick.jpg

🥉ded

I didn't love Cold Spring but that particular Bishop poem is weird and great. Was it a misreading of a headline about the finding of a mammoth or am I misremembering? It read likes Poe or Washington Irving.

I liked Tim's post but it does use a model of ubiquity that is about as pure and perfect as possible to illustrate the point (something I'm going to clumsily call the phenomenology of engagement). The presence of media in that space is of course governed by contingency to some extent but nothing close to the governance of space in literary magazines - and in particular with regards to poetry. It makes perfect sense to interrogate the ongoing presence of someone like Lowell in that space, an interrogation that isn't really about engagement at all but about the 'political' (in the broadest possible sense) nature of ubiquity and who controls access.

This whole discussion seems to correctly revolve around trying to sidestep Old School High/Low Divisions or Poptimist/Rockist Divides, as opposed to Duke's Dictum "if it sounds good it IS good" or whatever Ellingon actually said, or its contrapositive, **WARNING Obligatory YouTube Content **
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CscPTI8fwA