POETIC NON SEQUITUR (10)
09-20-2011
Hoboken Hype
I went online in the year 2000. I remember the commingled joy and frustration I experienced for months on end in exploring the Web into the early morning hours.
Among the sites I viewed in my rookie sojourn on the Internet was that of a poet from the city of Hoboken, NJ just west of Manhattan across the Hudson River. In the blurb for his poems, this poet recommended his works because he was from the hometown of Frank Sinatra. The poet did not simply mention that he was from Hoboken like Sinatra, but waxed poetic (Ha!) about him, their hometown and the superiority of his poems in a conflated association that was confused. I like “Old Blue Eyes” and I do not have an animus against Hoboken, though because I am a New Yorker (not of the city but of the state) to me this city was someplace “outta town.” I had lived in New York for a few years, but never felt impelled to visit Hoboken. Reading the publicity for the work of this poet, I thought it amusing that he would advocate for it on the basis of an association of Sinatra and their mutual city of birth. I thought it might be a new marketing tool for poets, recommendation by incidental geographical association. I thought that I might do the same. I could claim that people should read my poems because once my car had broken down in the city of birth of Emily Dickinson and I ended up sleeping for the night in a flophouse. It might be worth a try. Who could prove that I had or had not? (About Springfield, MA, the birthplace of this eminent poet: whatever it was in Emily’s day, it is now not.) What do you think? It made an impression on me and in the back of my mind (or wherever) a note was made to keep a lookout for other such specious poetic marketing forays.
I was not disappointed.
*(I will state that I did not stay on the website of the poet from Hoboken to read his works, and what I wrote above is not an evaluation of them.)
Poetry by Association
A few years after the above, I read the notice in the newspaper of a woman poet who would give a reading of her poems at a local university. Under the thumbnail photo of the poetess, it stated that she was the daughter of a man who had an association with something that, at the time, was a great fad in the country, but now is forgotten, though it may still have its devotees. (Nor was the fad anything to do with poetry or literature.) The idea was that people should attend the reading because of a parental connection to a faddish event. The poems, further, were not claimed to be about the event or the association of her father with it. She was a per usual poetess in the modern canon, confessional, meditational, etc.
I thought this was neato: An attempt to interest people in one’s poems with a spurious relation? I guess that poetry must have taken a note from capitalist marketing. I might do the same. I could claim that I once knew a guy whose great-grandfather was an associate of Dracula in Transylvania. (Actually, I think something like it was true.) Or, I might claim that a relative met Hillary Clinton on a personal level. (This is true, but I am not quite certain how I am related to the person and would have to review it.) Or, that in the eruption of Vesuvius in 1905 that my father had witnessed, he had seen the writer Alvaro Corrado prance around. Or, I might relate the story of the Mexican who had dinner with Pancho Villa, but since the punch line is scatological, I will not give the joke.
I hope the lady poet had good luck with her reading. There is something to say in favor of poets: They burn the midnight oil in writing verses unlike many persons who stay up late at night thinking of ways to exploit their neighbors and fellow citizens.
*(I did not go to the reading, I never read her book and I am not evaluating the poems of the woman.)
Pavlovian Poetry
One night on TV a man was being interviewed for winning a prize for a book of poems about the war, but whether about the Gulf War, Iraq, or Afghanistan, I do not recall. (But then, all wars are the same, as people, and as many women and children as combatants, get brutalized, murdered and mutilated in them. Only the names, dates, sites and ordnance are different.) It used to be, and not too many generations ago, that war was advocated as the ne plus ultra of masculine virtues. (I believe that books of verse written after the Civil War were patriotic in this sense. I seem to remember having skimmed books of patriotic ballads of this war written by Vermonters.) I have Teddy Roosevelt in mind who was perhaps a proto-fascist before the manner of Mussolini. Whatever the case, our fascination with violent death never fails to interest hoi polloi in reading of it, and it can be an entry for a poet into the media. Now, though, it is the horrors of war that impress us most, and thus the subgenre in poetry. (We may soon return to the patriotic glories of warfare, as the major universities are allowing Officer Candidate Schools to open once more on their campuses. Well, after all, we need all those young men to fight to keep our advantages in the world, --- against those who want to take them from us and would do worse to us than we do to them.)
At one point in the interview, the war poet said, about a literary feature of his work, that he had been trained as a poet. I shrieked in laughter at that and nearly rolled off my couch. I was sympathizing with the experiences of this poet, but he lost me with that one. Extremities of emotion have the ability to squeeze out verbal responses, though perhaps these are less than what should be called poetry, but the first stage of it. I am not an advocate of verse in English that has been practiced since the end of the Vietnam War, but this was too much. You see, seals are trained and dogs are trained, and mechanics and physicians (in some ways) are trained, but not poets. Ezra Pound would refuse to deal with such a poet because he would assume that he had lost his mind. Eliot and Yeats would turn away from him in embarrassment. Stevens, Williams and even such later poets as Lowell, Plath and Riding would ignore such a person. Robert Graves would knit his brows in concern. Robert Graves was shot in WWI and left for dead, but recovered and went on to a great literary life. I never read in any of his works that he had been trained as a poet. Rather, what he did was, at a young age, sell all he had and bought the complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that remained his main reading material. That, I suspect, was the “training” that Graves provided himself.
After I finished my bout of laughter, I was plunged into profound depression. Unfortunately, that could be the key to the mediocrity of poetry in English, that they are trained to it, – and in a canon, also known as a dogma. The question to ask, in this context, is “trained” by whom? The answer in most cases is by a poet-bureaucrat of the academy, a professor X of course Y at university Z.
There is another aspect of being “trained” as a poet. It means that, in college courses, seminars, conferences, etc. a poet has been encouraged emphatically (or, “trained”) to use or not use certain features of poetry. Seals, dogs and physician are all trained using the same techniques, and when poets are subject to such a routine, it makes all their works similar. (This is true in novels and short stories, too, because the demands of capitalism in the marketplace for profits make commercial publishers tout what has all ready sold well.) This is a prescription for mediocrity that contemporary poetry has proven to be the case. Books of poems seem all to have been rolled off the same rundle like cloth sold by the yard.
If you want to write poems, you read assiduously those poets of the past whom you like, and spend some time reading other poets of the past for the history of the tradition. Poetry or any art is not cumulative. You learn your art by yourself, or you do not learn it.
*(I did not pick up the poems of this war poet, though I am certain his book is easily available. I think I had enough of war poetry from reading a book with the title “Obscenities” written about the Vietnam War that was well received in its time.)
Programmatic Poetry
There is an extension of the meaning of “trained” in poetry and that is to be “programmed.” (It was considered to be a literary term once.) It meant writing to an ideology, dogma or canon. I do not recall how the word arrived as cant in the vocabulary but possibly it was from early computer jingo, but then soon being programmatic was a term of approbation. It may have been related to those computer-generated books of poems that were fashionable, only briefly, --- thank the Creator for large favors! (What such an idea failed to realize was that even to mimic poetry a different program had to be written for each poem. That possibly would have been prohibitively expensive, and abandoned. That may no longer be the case technologically, but I have not seen a book of computer-generated poems reviewed, lately.)
So then I picked up a book of poems by a man who had gotten a scholarship to study in Italy by the Bollingen Foundation. I was really impressed by the status of it all. Ah, how superior a poet this man must be. In one poem, the poet started with the line, “From a villa in Tuscany….” I was immediately revulsed. I happen to be of Italian ancestry and took time to inform myself of the history of that benighted country. To toss off such a line without knowledge of the suffering that went into building that villa is unconscionable and repulsive. It is the taking of an elevated view, figuratively, without warrant. It is equivalent to writing, for example, “From the brow of Thomas Jefferson on Mount Rushmore”; or, “From Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden,” or “With Yellow Knife in His Last Campaign.” It is a line of superficial cultural perception that the academy has fostered. Ah, how nice it must be to be favored in that manner.
*(I merely read a few poems of this poet in his book until I reached the one mentioned above, and then threw it out. Good luck to him. He was well on his way to a life in literature by manipulating the university system.)
The Poetry of Name Dropping
I once bought a literary journal published by a small liberal arts college in the Northeast. I was impressed with it. I looked inside and became concerned. One of the first poems I flipped to was a poem that discussed some aspects of the Italian Futurist and proto-fascist poet Marinetti and related it to some of the famous other artists of that era, or in prominence of that era: Picasso, Arp, Isadora Duncan, whomever and whatever, though I am uncertain that I have recalled specifics. I was impressed again. How could anyone who claimed to be cultured not pay attention to such a poem? It would be an admission of uncouthness and that person would not be allowed to enter polite society. I like it, though. You could command the attention of people because of the status of who you discuss in a poem. It is shameless cultural blackmail, even snobbish. I might try it, and would begin by mentioning all the poets in translation that the elitist periodicals like to publish in translation, and I include The New York Review of Books. (For a list of the poets I would mention see my essay entitled “Treason in Translation.”) But Marinetti!?
*(I never got past the Marinetti poem and never bought a literary journal from that college again, and thus I am not evaluating the journal, the college or the poems.)
Dissident Poets
It was not long ago and possibly the immediate cause of my composition of these literary op-ed pieces that I read something in the newspaper that stunned me. A Chinese poet had been given entry into the United States and awarded a university post (though not in literature, as he had other expertise). The article noted, in addition to the technical expertise for which he was hired, that he was “a dissident Chinese poet.” Hey! Wow! What status. He was a professor at an elite university, and also a poet dissident of his home country? Life gets good!
I could do that. I am that. If by “dissident” you mean that you are in opposition to the prevailing political ethos of your country, I am so. That is what I am. I live in opposition to the predatory capitalist ideology of the United States, my country. So I am entitled to be termed “a dissident American poet.” Now if the Chinese would hire me at one of their universities in my expertise in another area than poetry (that I have), I would then be happy to write poems against the American corporations. I do it all ready. Oh, yeah – I write op-eds and letters to the editor of The Providence Journal against the theft directed by CEOs and Wall Street types, and I could easily turn them into political poems, --- not that the Journal publishes many of them. I could have them translated for a Chinese audience. Who would know? If the “dissident” poems of the Chinese man mentioned above were translated into English, who would know exactly what they meant? You could say that the difference is that the Chinese poet would be imprisoned (and perhaps was so) for his dissident views, and that would not happen to me, whether I said them in the U.S. or in China. Ah, but I am punished – by not having access to the major media to publicize my views. (You only get such access if you have the right name, the right education and have an elitist mentor, or political-poetic clout.) Besides, the Communist Party of China respects words and equates them with acts, and that is why they imprison their writers who do not agree with them. But Americans have nothing but contempt for the written word, and tolerate it at its lowest skill. They ridicule poets as talking heads or quill twillers. (Come to think of it, the respect the Chinese have for the written word might be a factor in their developing dominance.) There is no more certain way to destroy a nation or a civilization than to destroy its language, and America is becoming the land of the dumb and the dumber, literally and literately.
I will do that now. I will introduce myself, or have myself introduced, if I get the chance, as “a dissident American poet,” whether the poems I present are politically anti-capitalist or not.
I wonder if this essayette will improve my status as a poet? If would not take much to do so.
But that newly eminent dissident Chinese poet, alas, is a propaganda tool of the capitalists, as was Solzhenitsyn against the Soviets and as is Heaney used by the Brits against the Sinn Fein, --- though the works of these authors have other dimensions.
*(I have no idea of the value of this poet’s work neither in Chinese nor in their English translation, if such exists. But maybe I should read him. There might be a lesson of literary success in his poems.)
The Bureaucrats of Verse; or, William Vaughn Moodyism
The most thoroughly corrupt non sequitur in poetry is poets who claim that you must read their books of poems because they are instructors at universities. (They do not, of course, say it directly, but it is assumed by the notice of their university appointment in their bios.) It borders on the farcical. By the judgment of history, it could not be more wrong. Academic poets suppose that they have abolished the struggle of art, but rather they have abolished creativity. At point is Emily D.’s poem that I give below.
Essential oils are wrung:
The attar from the rose
Is not expressed by suns alone,
It is the gift of screws.
The general rose decays;
But this, in lady’s drawer,
Makes summer when the lady lies
In ceaseless rosemary.
Consider the line “It is the gift of screws” as to the life of the poet. But the academic poets are shameless in their presentation of themselves. They manipulated the academic bureaucracy and assume pre-eminence from it. They are specious poets.
* Once I concluded that of all the persons who could be considered educated, by which I meant those who had earned at least a BA, poets were the dumbest. (I exempt poets who do not have a degree beyond the secondary.) I tried it out on a favorite professor who had his Ph.D. from one of the best universities in the U.S., and who wrote poetry himself. He did not appreciate my insight. But I restate it. (I include myself in the classification. Perhaps I am not creative, but dumb and literal in a primitive manner and that would be a great gift.)
*(I read very little contemporary poetry, and I will explain why in another essayette, --- or maybe not. Basically, the bureaucrats of verse have made the practice of poetry an academic field. They have abolished the devices of poetry so that there are no objective standards, and thus have made its appreciation a matter of subjective academic judgment. So that poetry was the first field to go politically correct. It follows that such poetry is mediocre and disliked by the people who will, though they do not understand art or music, nevertheless view art and listen to music but will not do so with poems. They have been convinced that a poem must be mediated by a poet, and they will not do that.
*There is a subgenre of modern poetry that I may discourse upon. It is the phenomenon of poems written by celebrities. Now that is really a marketing tool: Become a celebrity, defined as a person known for being known, and then show your sensitivity and perceptivity by penning a book of poems. )
Oh, That Lentini
Nor will I decline to ridicule myself.
Some years ago, a niece researched the history of our family in Italy. (It does not interest me. I consider my family to have begun with my mother’s parents in Montreal and with my father’s uncle in Northern New York State, who came to Canada and the U.S. in the late 19th century. My father immigrated in 1910, and thus in 2010 we have been in America for 100 years, long enough to be American and nothing else. I feel this way for the simple reason that it is impossible to discover anything about my ancestors. Or, then, I can know them from myself, my intelligence, character and behavior.)
Nevertheless, subsequently I got a sheaf of papers listing the results of the ancestral research of my niece forwarded to me by a sister. I flipped through them idly, and out of the corner of my eye saw the distaff name “Lentini.” Ahhhhh, that name rang a faint bell way back in the campanile ofmy memory. I thought, and then I had it. Well, you see, the man to whom is attributed the invention of the sonnet was Giocomo da Lentini. He was Sicilian, and my father was from Calabria, but it is only across the Straits of Messina. Besides, the Sicilians and the Calabrians are similar people, with the Calabrese being quieter, --- but with much harder heads, teste dure.
The sonnet form, I will tell you, reflects a fundamental category of mind: statement and resolution, octet and sestet.
I liked that name and its connotations. What the good Giocomo has to do with me, though, is tenuous at best. You see, genes can be inherited from five generations back and that means after five to seven generations you are potentially related to so many people that you are actually not related to anyone in particular. The complexity of the gene pool is such that each human being is unique, like each individual snowflake (so science tells me), though it does not seem so.
Ah, well – On an impulse, I checked the name online and in the telephone directory. There turns out to be many persons named “Lentini” that derives from Leontium, a city in Sicily, originally an Ancient Greek colony. There even turns out to be a family with that name in Rhode Island where I have lived for a number of years. I do not know them.
Well, but, you see: The talent of verbal facility has to come from somewhere.
*(I am happy to submit my poems to the judgment of posterity.)
I will recapitulate. You should read my poems because:
- I was born in the same city as a famous celebrity.
- My father was associated with a media fad.
- I was trained as a poet, and a war poet at that. (I am a wartime veteran, though I was not in combat.)
- My programmed poetry is vetted at the highest cultural institutions.
- My poems are filled with the names of major artists of the past.
- I’m a dissident poet of another culture.
- I’m a university professor.
- I’m a celebrity.
- One of my ancestors had the same name as a seminal Italian poet.
These items are terrifically funny, if anyone had a sense of humor about poetry anymore.
Nota Bene
You may not like the snide tone of my literary essayette. My concern is only if my allegations are true about the lack of quality of modern (contemporary, current, present-time, neoteric) poetry. I did make fun of myself, you must recall.
T. R. CATANZARITE
