In a message dated 98-01-08 01:32:32 EST, [log in to unmask]
writes:

>  Philly Joe Jones
Who is Philly Joe Jones?
 and learned what real drum poetry was about.
>
>  I ain't against, for want of a better term, proletarian verse. It has its
>  uses, but it doesn't always fit the bill.
Agreed. I guess I'm only being cantakerous and bull headed.

> Malraux tells a story about Leo Frobenius
Neat story, thanks.

>  > 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.
>
>  My experience tells me that, mostly, working people are "unpoetic" in the
>  sense that they believe that formal verse is not a valid mode of
>  expression.
I agree with the condition you are expressing... and move on to how to find
common ground between the two PU trucks and get the passengers to hold still
long enough to listen. There does seem to be a proletariat bias in America
that poetry is supposed to be inaccessible, and I agree that it starts in
elementary school. Poetry is not the only creative instinct destroyed in
school. Avoiding poetry; language, and the creative use of language is not
always inaccessible. One aspect of the task resembles the Frobenius story.
Cultural emmersion, while retaining the intellectual tool kit, reveals the
connections between the truck beds. Cleverness, idle diversions, and a bit of
personal desire gets the attention of the audience.

If Frobenius had gone native, considering the limitations of the idea of going
native, would it not alter his connection to tools? Possibly Frobenius would
have learned to drum in a substantive manner and forgotten about sketching? He
may not have been able to fully realize his message, but if, as Pound
mentioned, the totality of a person's life message will fit on a sheet of
notepaper, we are left, if we wish to continue making noise, repeating the
same message in new variants.

One task of a poet can be to seek new variants and applying stylistic and
technical tools to the artifact/poem. I realize this borders on suggesting we
all become poetic George Plimptons, taking on a new guise as the whim or
assignment leads... but for me it is a much more fundamental task. I do not
reference my own poems as proletariat, nor as academic. My activity is
pragmatically rejected by adherents of both camps. As well, my activity is
reinforced by work/living environment and a possibly deviant philisophic
attitude toward an autodidact's means of education.

I think we need to attempt to clarify in this dialogue where we are talking
about our own individual working biases, and general discussion of literary
criticism. I feel that where we find ourselves potentially in disagreement is
a mirage, in that we are not actually very much in disagreement, only seeing
the object, at any particular time, from a different viewpoint, as well,
having slightly different tools in our kits. I do not consider myself
qualified as a critic, but hopefully I will present myself fluent as a word
artist - which is a different perspective than the critic.

I came to a personal point, in writing poetry, where the critical question was
why bother? An attempt to achieve technical proficiency was not fulfilling my
needs. Reading in public was no longer providing satisfaction... though I
thrive on connecting with an audience. Poems of prayer did not seem effective.
And publication seemed so incredibly arbitrary.. excepting in those places
where I was encouraged on a personal level to contribute. In short, I came to
a conclusion that the outward manifestations of the social role, the politics,
were not worth bothering with as they did not contibute to my essential quest
of considering and expressing the mystery of WHY. Beside that, need for an
income became a pressing concern - therefore I became involved in
construction, stonemasonry, and fixing old buildings.

Melville, I really like _Billy Budd_. My problem with Moby Dick is an unfair
one and I should recuse myself from complaining. My problem is that every time
I start to read the book I fall asleep. My narcolepsy should not be confused
with an attempt at universal criticism.

I like Charles Simic's poetry. I met him many years ago. The poets you have
read in the New Yorker, I have to agree are good poets, and that I like their
work. I must be reading the issues on off days because I have never seen these
poets in the New Yorker.

>  Ashbury... His poetry is not about "meaning", any
>  more than are the works of "Modern" artists who so very much influenced
him.
I have no problem with Ashbury doing what he does... the phenomena is ok by
me, I'm expressing that it is not one I wish to emulate. Despite the futility
of communication, I find purpose in making the attempt, while recognizing the
futility. The attempt would have less meaning if it was not futile. The
occasional illusion of transcendence into the idea that we are sharing a brief
flash of clarity with another individual I do find rewarding. The anticipation
of engaging in discourse, the potential for laughter, the idea that we are
being tickled by a cosmic joke, this, for me, is rewarding.

>  "Here come my night thoughts
>   On crutches,
>   Returning from studying the heavens.
>   What they thought about
>   Stayed the same,
>   Stayed immense and incomprehensible."
>
>  Thats the first stanza of a poem by Charles Simic, published in the Oct. 7,
>  1996 issue. I can't believe that the author of E&G finds that opaque.
Etidorpha Orgrease finds it a bit mono-hued compared to her thoughts regarding
the nightly mud-wrestling escapades with Gabriel's sleep building. Ken Follett
finds it very nice, indeed.

>  Can't argue with you on Pynchon and the tax code, but would reverse
>  Faulkner (except for his screenplays and the late trilogy)
For me the key to Faulkner is to forget about meaning altogether and to simply
let the words flood through. Sort of like listening to Polish in the hospital,
a flood of siren song without meaning, yet beconning to someplace mysterious.
Pynchon, on the other hand, I find tedious and that ruins the flow.

>  The former I find mannered and difficult due to a bad ear for what real
>  narrative language is about. Melville, for me is just the opposite. And his
>  grasp of metaphor is unsurpassed. We are all Bartleby, at least a little
>  bit, as we are also Ahab, or should be.
I'll try again with some NoDoze.

>  One man's syntactic exercise (witness above) is often another man's beau
>  ideal. I have read Moby Dick at least once a decade since I was ten, and
>  each time I discover that I am reading a different book, none better or
>  worse than the last.

Mine cyclycal read is Plato's _Republic_, Milton, and William Blake. I like
Karl Jaspers, but again, I get only so far and fall asleep. Refelecting on it,
I fall alseep while attempting to read a lot of books. I think it may derive
from too much churching in childhood.

>  The author that most moves me to know what language
>  can do, Nabokov, insists that all his work is nothing but syntactic
>  exercise.
Good recommendation. I don't think I have gotten to Nabokov.

>  Or so you think. You are the only reader of THAT poem. The poem you wrote
>  that someone else is reading is a different poem that becomes his poem with
>  different routes running through it that you can't even imagine.
Oh yes, yes, yes... isn't it wonderful?

>  Try "Large Red Man Reading" by Wallace Stevens.
OK.

>  I think that you are waxing rhetorical. No one except grandstanding
>  rightwingers trying to cut the NCAH budget ever defined MODERN poetry as
>  "exclusive production of inaccessible poetry". And it has never been
>  written, as far as I know, that "all poems should be an inaccessible puzzle
>  of abstraction"
I identify the myth of poetry as abstraction the result of public school
teachers who do not have the intelligence to appreciate poetry and therefore
expressing to their students that the reason they (both the teacher and the
students) cannot understand a poem is because they are 1) supposed to
understand, and 2) will never understand. The resulting conflict, I believe,
is a feeling of being duped by a bad joke. I commend the reading and writing
of poetry in schools, but fear the forces of anti-play and the high-serious
betray the task.

>  But, as I discovered with my classroom readings and the
>  discussions that followed them, even the most apparently lucid and directed
>  poetic statement will allow for different meanings for each  of its
>  listeners.
I've been working on this problem for a long time. The attempt has always been
to communicate. The frustration has been in many years of being taken as a
kook. I used to read on street corners, shouting out the poems. It came very
close to my behaving like an insane screamer. This was before they started
consciously talking about performance art. This is the role of mimesis... if
it even looks like communication is occuring then I am happy, the message is
ancillary.

>  Again, as with Ashbury, I think that you are presuming in thinking that
>  poetry must have "meaning", in the sense that one understands an expressed
>  argument developed by the rhetoric within the poem.
No. Not quite on target. I'm expressing that I want my poetry to look as if it
has meaning, to look as if there may be an expressed rhetoric within the poem
- while recognizing the impossibility of expressing the unspoken. I'm not
looking for any more meaning than possibly Ashbury is. I'm a chameleon, a
trickster, a coyote shaman.

>  Often the form can speak volumes even while the text appears to say little.
Possibly I'm saying that I want the form to speak volumes while the text
appears to say something? Or is it that the form says nothing while the text
appears to say something?

>  There was a movement of poetry in NY back in the 60s called FLUXUS which
>  formed in part around the idea that the way the poem appeared on the page
>  had as much potential meaning as what it "said". I often found the wit and
>  style of these poems as objects quite delightful. At the same time there
>  was an offshoot of the younger members of the "NY School" of poets who
>  offered us long diary-entry-like poems describing the quotidian passages of
>  their days. Nothing obscure there, and often the language was quite
>  expressive, but, my feeling, who gives a shit about their taking a shit.
Agreed on all points.

>  I know dozens of literate people who would have used Stevens as a prime
>  example of just what you are railing against.
I guess I'm screwed up?

>  I guess what I want to do here is SHOUT- Why one or the other. There is
>  room in this world for Robert Service, Robert Bly and Robert Kelly. If the
>  audience for Bly is less than that for Service, and for Kelly less than
>  that for Bly, then, once again we need to recall that the beauty of our
>  system is that it strives to protect the minority from the tyranny of the
>  majority. I read poetry all the time that has profound meaning to me that
>  would provide no handhold for 99% of the population. Its not wrong to want
>  to devise a poetic that attempts to attract the hostile masses back to the
>  genre. The Newyorican poets and the poetry slam movement are doing that,
>  and I'm thankful that they are. Neither is it wrong to accept the fact that
>  sometimes ideas and feelings have been expressed poetically in a manner
>  that is only accessible to a handful of people willing to make the effort
>  to get into the work. Which is not to say that all difficult poetry is
>  good. Most of it is shit. But sometimes...ah.
Again I am caught out. I like Bly and Kelly, and Dorn. When I was living in
Washington, DC I was very involved with several poetry groups and enjoyed the
scene. NYC turned me off. I met a lot of people who professed that they were
poets, who took themselves too seriously, and were basically very poorly
equipped to either write, read, or present poetry. I got sick of the mess.

For a while I was involved with creation of the Writer's Union, working on the
poetry greivance committee. I got to do some neat things, but for the most
part I felt the scene was a farce. The idea was to boycott small press
publications in order to argue for quality of life issues, recognizing from
the start that you could not argue for money. Writer's groups generally piss
me off with their niggling arguments over who has the mailbox key or their
mundane sexual perversions.

>  First, as with preservation, we need to get poetry back on the psychic map.
Yes, now, for a serious question. How does this dialogue on poetry relate to
historic preservation?

I have some ideas. I would start with the concept of psychic maps as you
suggest above. Is there a rhyme, a sympathetic vibration, between the
topography of both worlds? Is an appreciation of language akin to an
appreciation of the environment? In what ways do we find the environment an
expression of poetry? How do we perceive structure of the built environment
relating to structure of the wilderness; then relating to a poetry of rhyme,
metre and stanza or the emotive expression of chaos or pain. Is the
intellectual labor of poetry akin to the physical labor of fine building
craft? Can the poet engage, go native, in the world of the stonemason and
woodworker and survive?

I'm also hungry. I'm getting out before we exit the butcher shop.

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