Charles Bernstein's 'Poetry Bailout' Statement

[via Grand Text Auto] Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers by Charles Bernstein: From a statement read at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008...

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance. Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

Alliteration and Memory Performance

Sweet Silent Thought: Alliteration and Resonance in Poetry Comprehension (2008) by R Brooke Lea, et. al.:

We used current theories of language comprehension as a framework for understanding how alliteration affects comprehension processes. Across three experiments, alliterative cues reactivated readers' memories for previous information when it was phonologically similar to the cue. These effects were obtained when participants read aloud and when they read silently, and with poetry and prose. The results support everyday intuitions about the effects of poetry and aesthetics, and explain the nature of such effects. These findings extend the scope of general memory models by indicating their capacity to explain the influence of nonsemantic discourse features.

Discussion by Dave Munger here.

James Fenton on Douglas Dunn

'Goodbye to All That?' from The Strength of Poetry (2001) by James Fenton:

There was a time when, given the belief that empire was an absurdity and 'all that was in the past', a poet like Douglas Dunn could write his 'Poem in Praise of the British' confident that his ironies were shared....One could say of it that it takes nothing seriously, is unshockable and untroubled. The past is this wonderful absurdity. the politicians of the Right are not to be feared. We are living in this wonderful afterglow, and all is well. One of the things one would not have guessed about Terry Street when it came out was that its author was Scottish. In fact, given that most of the poems in the book are about a working-class district in Hull, one might perhaps have supposed him English. 'A Poem in Praise of the British' was untypical of its volume, but not untypical of the way Dunn later wrote at times, when he wrote as if he were expressing himself in French, in an easygoing, dandyish way of which sometimes tempted him. But what is absolutely untypical of the later Dunn is the insouciance with which he treats the subject of empire. Within ten years, in the volume called Barbarians, which shows the influence of the hard revolutionary Left, you find a poem called 'Empires' which might alos have been written to remedy the defects in seriousness of the earlier one....Soldiers are no longer funny. Empire is no longer an amusing mystery. By now Dunn has begun to think of himself as a barbarian to idenitfy with the victims of empire. And this phase gives way to a further phase in which, to a great extent, his Scottishness becomes his subject matter. He returns to his roots.

'A Poem in Praise of the British' (quoted in the above essay) from Terry Street (1969) by Douglas Dunn:

The regiments of dumb gunners go to bed early.
The soldiers, sleepy after running up and down
The private British Army meadows,
Clean the daisies off their mammoth boots.
The general goes pink in his bath reading
Lives of the Great Croquet Players.
At Aldershot, beside foot-stamping squares,
Young officers drink tea and touch their toes.

Heavy rain everywhere washes up the bones of British
Where did all that power come from, the wish
To be inert, but rich and strong, to have too much?
Where does glory come from, and when it's gone
Why are old soldiers sour and the banks empty?
But how sweet is the weakness after Empire
In the garden of a flat, safe country shire,
Watching the beauty of the random, spare, superfluous,

Drifting as if in sleep to the ranks of memorialists
That wait like cabs to take us off down easy street,
To the redcoat armies, and the flags and treaties
In the marvellous archives, preserved like leaves in books.
The archivist wears a sword and clipped moustache.
He files our memories, more precious than light,
To be of easy access to politicians of the Right,
Who are now sleeping, like undertakers on black cushions.

Reuven Tsur on the Heart Conceit

[old] What is Cognitive Poetics? (1982) by Reuven Tsur:

According to migratory theory, someone at the dawn of the history of literature happily 'hit' upon this heart-conceit; from this point on, the conceit migrated until it reached the Arab poets in Spain, who transmitted it to the Hebrew poets of the eleventh century in Spain, as well as to the Provençal poets, who are known to have influenced the poets of the dolce stil nuovo in Italy, who are known to have influenced English Metaphysical poetry. The geographical proximity of Provençe to Paris may account for the appearance of the conceit in Villon's poetry. This explanation is not without geographical or chronological plausibility; but it appears to be too concrete, too uneconomical, and to leave too much to chance. Above all, it does not explain how poets and readers of poetry handle novel conceits. it fails to explain why an earlier poet should be more likely to 'hit' upon a certain conceit than a later one. In addition, the above explanation is counter-intuitive from the point of view of what we seem to know about the inventiveness and ingenuity of the Metaphysical poets.

Reuven Tsur Interview

Interview with Reuven Tsur by Beth Bradburn:

When I was a teenager, at high school, studying Hungarian poetry, I was very much annoyed by the fact that our literary studies concerned mainly the idea contents of poetry. I had very strong intuitions that the most important things in poetry were not conceptual, but something of the kind that, now I know, was 'perceptual'. I spent the ensuing decades in a pursuit of that 'perceptual' something. One of the main problems appeared to be this: language by its very nature is conceptual; but it is an observational fact that poetry sometimes conveys emotional, perceptual, or mystical qualities. At the university, in Israel, I was exposed to 'New Criticism', and was committed to close-reading of poems as the only worthy critical activity. But I always felt that there was that important something which I later called the 'perceived effect' of the poem, and I soon realized that this could not be accounted for merely by appealing to the structure of the text; one had to assume a perceiving consciousness. Wellek and Warren along with Wimsatt and Beardsley provided the theoretical constraints within which I attempted to solve the problem. The latter warned against the 'affective fallacy', while the former conceived of a poem as of 'a stratified system of norms that is a potential source of experience', but categorically rejected all psychologization of the literary endeavour. I thought, therefore, that I must eschew what is individual and idiosyncratic in poetic experience, and pursue the intersubjective foundations of the 'perceived quality'. Eventually I found the redeeming formula in a noncognitive context, in L.C. Knights' Notes on Comedy...

Mary Gilmore's Little Shoes That Died

The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore: Mary Gilmore was Australia's foremost woman poet during the first half of the twentieth century and it was as a poet that she wanted to be remembered when she died in 1962. More attention however has been given in recent years to her long and eventful life, her role as feminist, her championing of Australian literature as an instrument of national identity and her activism for various forms of social justice.

'The Little Shoes That Died': Also included in the anthology Hell and After (2005) edited by Les Murray:

These are the little shoes that died.
     We could not keep her still,
But all day long her busy feet
     Danced to her eager will.

Leaving the body's loving warmth,
     The spirit ran outside;
Then from the shoes they slipped her feet,
     And the little shoes died.

Bad Rhymes

Rhyme Crime: The 20 Worst Rhymes in Pop Music: When Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder managed to rhyme 'public' and 'subject' in 'Tears of a Clown', it was sheer genius. Getting that perfect coupling of words and phrases is what makes for a brilliant song. Then there are musicians who just write down words because they rhyme, or because they think they rhyme, and hope that we won't notice that the lyrics don't make any sense. Some examples:

Giant steps are what you take, Walking on the moon, I hope my legs don't break, Walking on the moon. Sting phones it in again. Are limb injuries a big concern for astronauts? Really? Wouldn't an injury be less likely in the diminished gravity? 'It’s one giant leap for man, it’s one, ouch, my ankle!' On the Peking ferry I was feeling merry, Sailing on my way back here, I fell in love with a slit-eyed lady, By the light of an eastern moon, Shangai Lil never used the pill. You have to love this [Rod Stewart] verse from what is actually a great song. It has it all--cultural insensitivity, geographic fallacies, clichés and of course really bad rhymes. Shanghai Lil sounds like a Sino-Germanic hooker from a 1930's movie. The only thing a river knows, Is runnin' to the sea, And every spring when a flower grows, It happens naturally. Where is our Gravol? [Michael] Bolton makes Lionel Ritchie read like John Keats. I'm like a bowl of gumbo, You ain't hotter than this, I'm what they play in the clubo. All right, making fun of Mariah Carey is like making fun of the kid with the helmet on the short bus, but c'mon, this line deserves some recognition. But then again, Carey is like gumbo--lumpy, thick, and of indeterminate ethnicity. (Ed Note: Thanks to user CentralTheme for pointing out that the offending gumbo/clubo rhyme is rapped by Mystikal, not sung by Mariah. For more Mystikal related hilarity, checkour Cliffs Notes on Mystikal's 'Pussy Crook'.)

[poll] Taxing Music: BBC Radio 6 Music's quest to find the worst music lyrics:

#6: Toto's 'Africa' The wild dogs cry out in the night, As they grow restless longing for some solitary company, I know that I must do what's right, Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti. #1: Des'ree's 'Life' I don't want to see a ghost, It's the sight that I fear most, I'd rather have a piece of toast, Watch the evening news.

Poetry Doctor: How to Tell Good Rhymes from Bad Rhymes (2007) by David B Axlerod: If a poem is obsessed with rhyming, if the rhyme is clearly there in the way of saying what the poet means, it can be said to be a bad rhyme. This, of course, assumes that the purpose of the poem is to say something to the reader and that the message comes before the rhyme.

Guide to Bad Rhymes (2006) from the Worldwide Center for the Study of Lief: A list of the most annoying, cliché words pairs that should be avoided as much as possible. They represent the most widely used rhymes that can ruin songs by their predictability.

Heretical Rhyme Generator: This assault on the aesthetic brought to you by Steric Hindrance Inc.

Stephen Dobyns on Yannis Ritsos

Ritsos and the Metaphysical Moment in Best Words, Best Order (1996) by Stephen Dobyns:

For Ritsos, what is important is that a connection is made between human beings and that our lives have been increased. This is his business as a poet: to help us live by awakening us to something beyond the mundane, by trying to connect us to a mystery that his poems celebrate.

The Meaning of Simplicity from Ritsos in Parentheses (1979) translated by Edmund Keeley:

I hide behind simple things that you may find me;
if you don't find me, you'll find the things,
you'll touch what my hand has touched,
the imprints of our hands will merge.

The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a pewter pot (it becomes like this because of what I tell you)
it lights up the empty house and the kneeling silence of the house--
always the silence remains kneeling.

Every word is a way out
for an encounter often canceled,
and it's then a word is true, when it insists on a meeting.

Three more from The Negatives of Silence (1987).

James Longenbach on Jorie Graham

The Wasted Land: Longenbach's review of Sea Change (2007) by Jorie Graham:

In Sea Change, Graham traffics in large statements ('the / end of the world can be imagined', 'fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef'), but at times her thought can seem muddled, her diction puzzlingly imprecise, as when she writes that love is 'like a thing floating out on a frail but / perfect twig-end.' How do we respond to a poet who is certain about the Great Barrier Reef but evasive about what stands before her eyes? .... Counting the swans, observing them closely, is for Yeats a way of reinhabiting ordinary life, as it is for Graham. Except that Graham is suspicious of the work of precision: to her, it feels like 'ownership', as if to name the world certainly were to lock it down, close off possibility, get it wrong. This suspicion is commendable philosophically and politically--especially if one's subject is the end of the world; nobody wants to be Chicken Little. But it's poetically problematic, since poems thrive on precision, and with a skilled poet like Graham, the avoidance of precision should not be anything but precise--a conscious choice to appear confused and incomplete. Why would a poet feign the inability to find the exact word for the thing at the end of a branch? Are a poet's errors of perception comparable to the mistakes that raised the temperature of the Gulf Stream, forcing a plum tree in Normandy to blossom out of season?

[poem] Summer Solstice (2007) from Seachange

Michael Hofmann's Bricks and Blank Spaces

[review] Selected Poems by Michael Hofmann: ...prove[s] that he is a precise poet of desolations and furies, says George Szirtes.

[old interview] Where is our home key, anyway? (1999): Before I discovered blank space, or had any use for it. Other people’s poems were like swans carved out of butter, or something. My things looked dense, uncompromising, undifferentiated. The 'brick' was to suggest utility, interchangeability, compactness, aggressiveness even. I began by despising most poetry for being archaic and mindless and ornamental and unnecessary. Of course, a lot of it still is.

'Body Heat' originally from Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983):

This evening belongs to a warmer day--
separated clouds, birds, bits of green...
We wake late, naked, stuck to each other:
the greenhouse effect of windows and bedclothes.

Fifty years late, you finish Love on the Dole.
--Who knows, perhaps it can really be done?
The Boots hair-setting gel no longer works;
your pecker is down. The underdog's leather jacket

is here to stay, the stubborn lower lip
of the disconsolate punk...The poor hedgehogs,
they must help each other to pull off the leaves
that covered them while they were hibernating.

James Fenton on Wilfred Owen

'Wilfred Owen's Juvenilia' by James Fenton (The Strength of Poetry, 2001):

...a complicated set of forces combined to release [Owen] from the spirit of his juvenilia. When reasoning about our creativity, we cannot assume that causality is going to behave in thew ay causality normally behaves. There must be such a thing as causality, we assume; but we cannot expect to understand its workings. In the writing of poetry we may say that the thing we predict will not happen. If we can predict it, it is not poetry. We have to surprise ourselves. We have to outpace our colder calculations.

To-- from The Collected Poems (1963):

Three rompers run together hand in hand.
The middle boy stops short, the others hurtle:
What bumps, what shrieks, what laughter turning turtle.
Love, racing between us two, has planned
A sudden mischief: shortly he will stand
And we shall shock. We cannot help but fall;
What matter? Why, it will not hurt at all,
Our youth is supple, and the world is sand.

Better our lips should bruise our eyes, than He,
Rude Love, outrun our breath; you pant, and I,
I cannot run much farther; mind that we
Both laugh with love; and having tumbled, try
To go forever children, hand in hand.
The sea is rising... and the world is sand.

More from The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.

Gémino H Abad's Native Clearing

As Imagined, As Lived: Sense for Language, Sense of Country (2008) by Gémino H Abad:

If we ask why the system of education in any country includes its literature as a required subject, the answer is pretty obvious: because a country's literature is its own image, that is to say, its imagination of how its people think and feel about their world and so, justify the way they live. In short, its literature is its lived ideology. In that light, our country's literature is 'our native clearing' within the language that has been forged and adopted for the artistic mimesis. Now, one's country is basically how one imagines her. Note the poetical gender: Inang Bayan. For one's sense of country is essentially a poetic sense: an imaginative perception of our day-to-day living in the very element of our history and culture.