So, its only 11:00, I've got four hours to answer this one.


Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM."
> _The Congo_, Vachel Lindsey, a decidely unPC poem.

UnPC, and accessible; a childhood favorite until I listened closely to
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.

(I don't know why but your quoting Lindsey in this context reminded me of
something which is only tangentially Germane, but fits the whole subject of
discourse. The famously unPC colonialist temple robber Malraux tells a
story about Leo Frobenius, the seminal Anthropologist, who had a typical
European's view of African cultural development, and how he got turned
around. Frobenius had attempted for some time to get permission to observe
a particularly obscure and private initiation rite. After a good deal of
hassle and bribery he was finally granted the privilege, and was escorted,
on the appointed day, to a clearing deep in the woods, many miles from his
camp. Just hours before the ritual was to begin he discovered that he had
left at camp the bag containing all the tools of his trade, his sketched,
drawing pencils and writing tablet. Like all of us, he was exceedingly
dependent upon his tools, and was bereft at their absence. There certainly
was not time enough to return to camp and get back for the ceremony.

His agitation was readily apparent to his escort and interpreter who
inquired after the cause. Upon being told of the missing tools the guide
turned to one of  the drummers and spoke to him in the local language. The
drummer began to beat his tool in a peculiar unrhythmic manner, which was
followed by a repetition of the drum pattern from some point distant in the
jungle, and then further distant. A runner appeared with the bag minutes
before the ceremony began.)


> 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. Dylan songs (often, pretty damn obscure, no?) yes; Poe, even,
no. Its cultural conditioning more than any thing else. I used to go into
local schools and read poetry, mine and others, to students from the third
grade up. Acceptance was widespread until  the sixth grade when it just
stopped being a possibility that I could connect with any but one or two
kids. This was the case no matter what I read for children at all age
levels.

> I have never understood ANY poem that I ever read in the New Yorker.

I don't believe that. They have published, among others, Philip Levine, who
writes in clear terms about his experience as a factory hand and Donald
Hall, who writes clear little poems about his country life.

> Regardless, I have enjoyed several afternoons writing trivial parodies of
John
> Ashbury, so there is some value of honing the tools.

I believe that I mentioned earlier that I had had a book published under
the auspices of a well-regarded poet who seemed to understand my poems in
an entirely different way than I did. That, of course, was Ashbury. He is
easy to parody, for sure, but I, at least, often find his language
paintings wonderfully expressive. His poetry is not about "meaning", any
more than are the works of "Modern" artists who so very much influenced
him.

 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.

"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.


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.

Can't argue with you on Pynchon and the tax code, but would reverse
Faulkner (except for his screenplays and the late trilogy) and Melville.
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.

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.

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. The author that most moves me to know what language
can do, Nabokov, insists that all his work is nothing but syntactic
exercise.
>
> 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.

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.

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

No one says that you have to be obscure. Rather, that it ain't the end of
the world if you are occasionally. Sure there are poems that appear to be
unambiguous. 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.

Reading Eliot's "The naming of Cats" to a bunch of 9 year olds will
generate as much discussion as reading it to 30 year olds. I have even
witnessed bar arguments  about the meaning of certain subtexts in Casey at
the Bat.

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?).

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. We accept that direct
expression is not wholly or even partly necessary in other art forms.
"Programmatic" music represents only a very small part of the canon. Modern
art is rarely expressive of its meaning through conventional development of
an image. Modern dance is ungrammatical in telling its story. Because the
idea of  text presents itself as susceptible to lucidity doesn't mean it
has to be any more than music has to be "programmatic, Art traditionally
iconographic or narrative, dance grammatical. Often the form can speak
volumes even while the text appears to say little.

> 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.

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.

Wallace
> Stevens makes sense to me.

I know dozens of literate people who would have used Stevens as a prime
example of just what you are railing against.

For example, from An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:

The imaginative transcripts were like clouds,
Today; and the transcripts of feeling, impossible
To distinguish. The town was a residiuum,

A neuter shedding shapes in a absolute. ....
>
> >  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?

The problem with the failure to support the NEA is a whole different
discussion. Given the economics of transmission of the created work the end
of the NEA will probably mean the end of much [performing art in this
country, especially in the boonies. That's where the lion's share of the
money goes. Some other funding sources would probably develop but probably
never enough to make it possible for us here in Maine to easily see Ballet,
Opera, Theater, and Serious Music (caps intended) of a professional
caliber, if we so choose, as a surprising number of us do.

Killing off the NEA tomorrow won't mean one less poet, or painter, and
certainly won't effect the argument about the accessibility of their work.

> >  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?

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.


> 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.

First, as with preservation, we need to get poetry back on the psychic map.
I can write a poem that would tickle the fancy of the guys around the
pick-up bed, but they would be gone before I delivered the first line. How
do you get around that?

And, assuming that's accomplished, what is the common ground between the
Football pick-up bed and the Eliot pick-up bed that, once I've got the
attention of the former, won't cause the latter to wander off?
>
> >  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.

I don't remember what, and I deleted your post.

- and that's a line of post-modern poetry if ever there was one.

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

Bruce