Try Some Hayden Carruth on for Size

I know I've posted this before, but it's so damned good it deserves more web-time. Emergency Haying by Hayden Carruth Coming home with the last load I ride standing on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor in hot exhaust, lank with sweat, my arms strung awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform. Almost 500 bales we've put up this afternoon, Marshall and I. And of course I think of another who hung like this on another cross. My hands are torn by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended on two points of pain in the rising monoxide, recall that greater suffering. Well, I change grip and the image fades. It's been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop, but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed. Now is our last chance to bring in the winter's feed, and Marshall needs help. We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales to the barn, these late, half-green, improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds or more, yet must be lugged by the twine across the field, tossed on the load, and then at the barn unloaded on the conveyor and distributed in the loft. I help –  I, the desk-servant, word-worker –  and hold up my end pretty well too; but God, the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe. I think of those who have done slave labor, less able and less well prepared than I. Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony, her father in the camps of Moldavia and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands too bloodied cannot bear even the touch of air, even the touch of love. I have a friend whose grandmother cut cane with a machete and cut and cut, until one day she snicked her hand off and took it and threw it grandly at the sky. Now in September our New England mountains under a clear sky for which we're thankful at last begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches in their first color. I look beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills, to the notch where the sunset is beginning, then in the other direction, eastward, where a full new-risen moon like a pale medallion hangs in a lavender cloud beyond the barn. My eyes sting with sweat and loveliness. And who is the Christ now, who if not I? It must be so. My strength is legion. And I stand up high on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say woe to you, watch out you sons of bitches who would drive men and women to the fields where they can only die.

William Dickey, Parliamentary Procedure

H/t to Don Share from Facebook. This is surely a weird one.

February 1971 : Poetry Magazine

Paul Blackburn's Statement of Poetics

What do you think?



From Modern American Poetry:

My poetry may not be typically American, or at least in matter, not
solely so: but I think it does make use of certain techniques which, even
when not invented by American poets, find their particular exponents
there in contemporary letters, from Pound & Doctor Williams, to younger
writers like Paul Carroll or Duncan or Creeley.

         Techniques of juxtaposition.
         Techniques of speech rhythms,
                                                sometimes very intense,
                                                 sometimes developed slowly, as
                                                 one would have
                         conversation with a friend.

Personally, I affirm two things:
                                                           the possibility of warmth & contact
                                                                       in the human relationship :
as juxtaposed against the materialistic pig of a technological world,
where relationships are only   "useful"   i.e., exploited, either
         psychologically or materially.

                                                                 2⁰, the possibility of   s  o  n  g
within that world: which is like saying 'yes' to sunlight.

   On the matter of song:   I believe there must be a return toward the
musical structure of poetry, just as there must be, for certain people at
least, a return to warmth within a relationship.

However impractical that may seem in a society controlled in some of its
most intimate aspects by monstrous, which are totally irresponsible,
corporations, organized for the greatest gain of the most profit: and whose
natural growth, like that of any organism, is toward monopoly,
                     self-support, self-completion, self-
                                                                                           perpetuation,
                     and eventually self-competition and self-destruction.

       In a world that is so quickly losing its individuals, it can only be the
individuals who persist, who can work any change of direction, i.e. control
the machines, or destroy them.

   Machines can be very beneficent as means

                       to a better
                       (materially better)
                                                             life, as either
               democratizing or socializing agents.
But as a means to control for the limited number of men who now own them,

(but the president or general manager of the corporation
really owns nothing but his own salary  (and his power) so that
even the controlling minds of these gigantic corporate machines
are irresponsible. That is, not subject to the effects
                               of their own decisions)

                                                                       (and
                                                                             the personnel, the individuals
are replaceable, all the way to the top. The machine, the organisation, has
itself created the position and will function without the individual, has,
in that sense created the person to fill the 'p o s i t i o n'
                                                                          and its own needs) so that
when, in these upper reaches, the 'organisation' the machine itself
becomes master, it can only mean disaster, global and particular.

      I do not claim that a greater frequency of rhyme than is now made use of
in American poetry will, in time, set things right.

     Only that if a man could sing the poems his poets write

                                     - and could understand them - and if

     the poets would sing something from their guts,    rather than
     the queasy contents of same,
     then that man would stand a better
chance,   of being a whole man,   than
him who stands or sits and says but 'Yes' all day.

Enough man to stand where it is necessary to take a stand.

To give
and man enough to receive, LOVE,      
                                 when he finds it offered.

To take the sun and the goods of the earth, while it lasts.
                                                                                                                    and to
                             fight in whatever way he can
                                 the monstrous machines that try,   and will try, to

                                                 o b l i t e r a t e   him, for

                                                          $1 more.

from The Parallel Voyages, Sun-Gemini Press,1987. Copyright © Paul Blackburn 1954, 1987.

New Review of Redneck Poems

Sorry I haven't had much to say on poetry lately. I'm writing another novel, so don't be surprised if the lull lasts for the three-four months it'll take me to put together a draft. In the meantime, Sheldon Compton reviewed Redneck Poems and has some smart things to say about it, for a guy who says he doesn't talk about poetry much.

I'm not a poet. Wouldn't know a couplet from a coupling. It's why I rarely talk about books of poetry and even more rarely write poetry, but I felt a stout and strong urge to talk a bit about Rusty Barnes' REDNECK POEMS.

In this collection of fourteen poems, there is much to appreciated in as far as poetic device is concerned. I can recognize that much, but I'll go no further on that topic. Rusty moves as easily from poetry to short short fiction to longer works to editing the writing of others with equal ease and skill. MORE.

If you're still missing this tiny book of mine, why? It's free.

Alaska Poet John Haines Dead

He was a sane man. He left much of society behind in favor of homesteading in Alaska's interior, and he wrote great poems about nature. I say that to differentiate great nature poems from great poems about nature. There are writers who show the natural world in all its magnificence (Mary Oliver, sepia-toned) but I find Haines more, well, real. Oliver's poems seem to glorify while Haines tends more to describe, and let you draw your own conclusion. This quote is from a lengthy article in the Contemporary Poetry Review.

John Haines is well known as a writer who has communicated not only his rare experience of homesteading in Alaska, but also a view of modern society as seen from the perspective he gained there. Ever since I discovered Haines’s poetry in an anthology in the late 1980s, I have returned to it many times for its sane values and contemplative intensity. Recently I read for the first time his prose memoir The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (more memoir pieces are in the earlier Living off the Country). I was taken with his economical, clear depictions of hunting, trapping, building, and surviving in Alaska, where he lived on and off for twenty-five years, of the land and the plants and animals around him, about which he seems to know every feature, habit, and use. What a fascinating, enviable life he led at the Richardson homestead, north of Fairbanks. More.

Modes of the Lyric Poem/Matthew Zapruder

Hanging 'round the internet poetry world as I do (usually without saying much) I love to find little trails of commentary that give me new ways to think, in this case, about the lyric poem. A little gift Sean Patrick Hill at Bookslut gives us before he reviews Matthew Zapruder's Come On  All You Ghosts, this brief discussion frames Zapruder's work as a tension between two modes of the lyric poem. Since I'm not a critic nor interested much in poetics yet, I read this with great interest, since I see this essay more as the by now ages-old discussion between what gets discussed first in poetry (call it the main poetic mode) as opposed to discussion of what passes for experimentation. And curiously, it's an essay that doesn't seem to take sides (bravo!).

In the 21st century, the lyric poem has found itself in quite the quandary. But much of this depends on who you ask: if one considers the general poetry readership to be represented as a typical subscriber to The New Yorker, Poetry, or The Atlantic, the lyric poem maintains a kind of allegiance to the type of poem we’ve come to rely on for at least the past three decades, an utterance at once confessional, imagistic, narrative, or a combination of any of these modes. Of course, minus a few exceptions, most of these poets are usually numbered in the older generations, if by “older” we mean anyone prior to Generation X, though The New Yorker’s readers are typically treated to poets as far-ranging in generations as W.S. Merwin and Jack Gilbert down to Matthea Harvey and the Dickman twins.

But the young are working at their own translation of the lyric poem -- not all of them, surely, as the new return to “surrealism” testifies, imperfectly -- though it can be argued this poem has largely followed lockstep, at the very least, with the general historical trend of the lyric poem: the brief, songlike expression of the self, its world, and its feelings: the old Romantic notions of importance. We see, too, its reliance on the mid-to-late 20th century mode of incorporating images of the common life, or cultural icons, which certainly dominate the poetry of, say, the '60s on up, a poem which can incorporate Coke bottles as easily as strains of agony.

Nevertheless, the lyric poem has found itself split, a kind of dual personality that incorporates both everything that came before as well as the new (old) fascination with surrealism, as well as newer trends such as the interest in the Russian Absurdists, and postmodern language theory, to name a few. Interestingly, the elders among this generation, Matthew Zapruder for one, often leans close to a kind of poem that acknowledges the tradition in a more obvious fashion (sometimes a poet like Joshua Beckman also reaches after this tradition in a way both self-conscious and ironic, but at the same time equally serious), whereas a younger poet like Julie Doxsee or Joshua Marie Wilkinson relies less on concrete “sense” in favor of music and suggestion of emotion as the presiding vehicle.

And on another note, here is the poet himself discussing his concerns at the Poetry Foundation.

Once, in high school, I met a girl who liked very strange music. She was in art school and lived in the city. She gave me a record, and when I went back to my room in the suburbs and put it on, it sounded like a garbage truck backing up over a giant bag full of aluminum bagpipes and dead robots. I played it over and over, until the music finally made glorious sense to me. Listening now to “White Light/White Heat” by the Velvet Underground, I can’t remember what it was like to be the person who couldn’t hear that music. 

What is the purpose of literary criticism? Among other things, to guide the reader past his or her resistance. Most art, subtly or aggressively, resists the familiar. Poetry in particular suffers from this resistance, because poets take the material that we depend on to operate in and make sense of the world (language), and bend it to other, often seemingly obscure, purposes.
Readers, sophisticated and beginner, need critics to explain why and how poets are using language for these different purposes, and what those purposes might be. Our attachment to familiar language is powerful, and understandable. Without critics, we will hold on to the familiar and be unable to accept that there are other uses for language, that there is new and exciting poetry all around us. 

Critics can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people. The second is to write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader. Only then can the reader grow to meet work that is unfamiliar, that he or she does not yet have the capacity to love. 

Today, in American poetry, very few critics take it upon themselves to examine the choices poets make in poems, and what effect those choices might have upon a reader. As a consequence, very few people love contemporary American poetry. Many more might, if critics attempted to truly engage with the materials of poetry—words and how they work—and to connect poetry with an audience based on an engagement with these materials.

This is fun stuff to read and edifying. And it made me buy the book. It's the perfect poet-consumer nugget, all laid out for you to just click, purchase and enjoy.

Live Nude Poem--New Draft

*poof*