In a message dated 97-12-23 03:02:27 EST, [log in to unmask]
writes:

> OK, you beat the drum and I have to respond.
"Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, Boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM."
_The Congo_, Vachel Lindsey, a decidely unPC poem.

>  Where is it written, except above by implication, that all expression must
>  be relevant to the less well educated among us.
Not written. I was expressing ONE personal bias relevant to a specific context
in which working people possibly were being ascribed as unpoetic. I'm full of
many shades of bird shot.

>  Poetry, or any other form
>  of expression, that is created with a referential range or syntactical
>  density that requires some work of preparation or sophistication in
>  reading, may not be for "everyman, but that does not make its author or
>  his/her audience dilettantish.
I have never understood ANY poem that I ever read in the New Yorker.
Regardless, I have enjoyed several afternoons writing trivial parodies of John
Ashbury, so there is some value of honing the tools. I keep going back every
few years to the New Yorker in order to be astounded further, and because I
like the cartoons. I refuse to believe that my lack of appreciation is from a
lack of tools on my part. Possibly I am blinded to not pick up tools that I
cannot see the use of. I did decide some time ago that if I could not
understand what I was reading then possibly I had no business trying to read
the text. I am totally astounded by Federal tax code, not in the least phased
by Joyce or Faulkner, and bored stiff by Melville & Pynchon. My personal
opinion, at least as of today, is that any text that does not get past being a
syntactic excercise is a dilettante's trinket. As worthy as collecting condom
envelopes, which could prove lucrative in the 21st century.

My personal bias, as a poet, is that I like to make a surface layer that at
least leads the casual reader to believe that there may actually be a meaning,
even if it is intangible, complex, and hides a menagerie of more complex
meanings. I like it even better, if there are several meanings that
interconnect and enhance each other, one of them making sense to every person,
another making sense to no person, one for the creator, and one for an
intended recipient.

Where is it written that all poems should be an inaccessible puzzle of
abstraction? If the MODERN means exclusive production of inaccessible poetry
with refined tools then I say bohunk to that... I'm going to do what the hell
I feel like doing, which is to try to make sense to somebody other than
myself. I've spent a considerable portion of my life trying to repress myself
against the imagined dictates of others, and now I don't give a damn. I think
the challenge of the art lies in making sense to somebody, especially yourself
if you are writing the poem. I'm convinced a lot of people who believe they
are writing poetry are confused in not realizing that at least they should
understand what they are writing (possibly we only have this problem in NYC?).
Then again, there are the emotive grunts, and the alphabet printed on a page
poems. It is much easier to look important by making sense to nobody. Wallace
Stevens makes sense to me.

>  It is not necessary, or necessarily desirable, that all of us have the same
>  cultural configuration in order for our society to be egalitarian or just.
I agree. In fact, I like a lot of diversity. I want to bang a steel drum. I
think we survive in a cultural tyranny of Democracy. Art is lost in the noise,
or the noise is art. Taking the diversity of cultural configuration a step
further - I'm occasionally in favor of elimination of the National Endowment
for the Arts for the simple fact that a vitality of culture can only occur if
we are equally forced to a realization that despite the consumerism of a
capitalist economy we are all desperate, including Jesse Helms, to have art
enhancing our lives. If the NEA suddenly imploded would there be less art, or
less garbage?

>  My life would be far less interesting right now if I weren't reading a lot
>  of Wallace Stevens. Most of my pals around here would feel equally bereft
>  if there were to be a blackout of the remainder of the NFL season. I no
>  more understand their ability to read worlds into a backfield in motion
>  than they do my peculiar reading habits, "to see a world in a grain of
>  sand", or my interest in reading anything, come to that.
I could not give a boar's hind tit for football, but one of my favorite poems
is about HS football in Ohio. I just wish the hell I could remember the name
of the poet. He was a friend of Robert Bly. I think his name was Bill, or
William. I'd like to find the poem again.

>  Much of modern poetry is about work, but it is work of the mind, written
>  for others who have developed the tools to decipher it by also working with
>  their minds, though not necessarily exclusively.
Is this not dangerously close to a line of mentation that leans toward a
rationalization to support the production of a rarified drivel of idle
purpose? I commend you for holding the line, I agree there is a delicate
brevity between being and nothing where absurdity reigns and laughter takes to
the air. What is much of post-modern poetry in this context of work and tools
and mind?

>  My idea of  a "vacuous dilettante sport" is a bunch of guys standing around
>  the back of a pick-up truck talking about who has the best snowmobile. But
>  I don't put them down for it, I just go hang around the truck where the
>  guys are talking about Eliot.
All I'm suggesting is that a poet could write a poem to bridge between the two
trucks so that everyone realizes for a brief second that they are in the same
parking lot - sort of like Wordsworth saying we ain't got no other now to be
here in.

Instead, we have a culture that excludes the bus full of bohunks that are now
pulling into the lot.

>  The brand of poetry currently being popularized at poetry "slams", and at
>  joints like The Newyorican Cafe has its uses, but I'm a complex guy living
>  in an even more complex world and the tools I need to decode that world are
>  only sold in the bigger kit.
I like the bigger kit metaphor. I think we both need the bigger kit. My kit
includes dissimulation, memesis, morphing, crystal therapy, recursion, mind
melds, loos, and model rockets. I have a problem with the smaller kits, I have
to keep pretending that I have a smaller kit in order to socialize.

Can we agree on the size of our KITS and get on with the deconstruction?

>  Parallel to that, but more frightening and awesome is Adorno's reaction to
>  the Holocaust, that there can't be any more poetry. I can't live with that
>  either.
>  Without poetry, in the broad sense of the term, how can one survive that
>  knowledge?
Adorno? Is he the author of _Hiroshima Flows Through Us_? If Adorno says that
there can't be any more poetry then he missed the excursion boat. Another
millenialist? I prefer Viktor Frankl's reaction to the Holocaust, that we have
to reach through to the other.

>  Again, I think that you make too much of this. Connectedness is the
>  prescription to stave off the darkness. The ambiguity of meaning, as it
>  hangs in the air between us, just makes the game more interesting...
I'm not sure what it was I made too much of. I agree 100% with the remainder
of the above section.

>  You go into a butcher shop and
>  ask the butcher for a pound of lamb chops and a four line poem using the
>  word meat in the first line. He'll know exactly what you mean, won't he?
>  What's interesting is the sub-text, whatever is his unspoken reaction to
>  your request. And what you'll be thinking about is trying to guess from his
>  body language and voiced reaction what he is really thinking in reaction to
>  your request. Do it in fifteen butcher shops. Your meaning will be equally
>  clear to all fifteen butchers, but you'll probably get fifteen different
>  reactions.
I suspect in Poland I would get fifteen different poems and have reason to
enjoy all of them.

If you write one truly good poem, with surface and depth of craft, and publish
it in the National butcher's newsletter you will get more than fifteen
reactions.

This is more than I assume, statistically, for a poem published in the New
Yorker. I expect some poet's understanding that it was not their poem
published, some critics pretending to understand the published poem (but not
without the aid of an expensive poetry lexicon), and a majority of readers
skipping to the next cartoon. Someone should suggest the New Yorker do a
survey and make taste a scientific diversion.

At least the butcher may recognize a poem about lamb chops in the context of
their use of butchering language, and an intimation of something further,
worse yet, a reader armed with a big tool box may suddenly see the "other"
that is butchers. You could write a death/regeneration poem specific to brain
surgeons, crossword enthusiasts, psychic hotline users, as well as plumbers
and mollusk farmers.

>  But we do have a shared cosmology- nobody trusts anybody else (Sorry, I
>  just rewatched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre).
Let the game continue.

][<en