Sherry Chandler

Best?

Several days ago, Laurie MacKellar sent me a link to this article by David Alpaugh in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In many ways, “The New Math of Poetry” can be read as just one more diatribe against MFA programs, small magazine publishing, and the glut of mediocre poets that keep the truly brilliant out of print. I’m not much interested in that point of view. For one thing, though I don’t have an MFA, I’ve often in my life been one of the poets advised to stop writing and get a good job. Not, however, in academics. Academia kicked me to the side of the road many years ago. It was a blow that hurt for a long time but I did get over it.

But I see the other side of the argument that poets should have “real” jobs, not cushy academic “professional poet” jobs. I’m here to tell you that a “real” job takes a lot of time and energy and training. It is not easy to be a poet when you have a 40-hour-a-week job. Not, mind you, that college writing teachers have it all roses either.

So I figure that any poet, MFA trained or not, who thinks, as Alpaugh argues

that writing and performing “poetry” is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame

will soon be disabused.

Dave Bonta calls Alpaugh’s article rubbish, saved only by the refutations in the comments (of which there are, at this wriitng, 53). He points, in particular, to comment 22 which refutes this statement:

You can’t pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a “chapbook” for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of “publication.”

by pointing out that anybody who owns a guitar and knows maybe three chords can play at an open mike any time they want to but nobody’s gonna invite them to Lincoln Center. In short, comparing any open mike to a performance at Lincoln Center is just bad logic. The kind of thing I would have failed in freshman comp. Open mikes are open, whether you be a violinist or a poet. Or should that be Alpaugh’s usage, “poet.”

On the other hand, as one who has judged a fair number of local contests and read for local small publications, I’m here to tell you that there is, indeed, a lot of mediocre poetry to plow through. And a friend I have who shall remain nameless is wont to say that, while bad fiction is unfortunate, bad poetry is deadly.

This argument goes on. It’s not going to be settled by one definitive article in The Chronicle. And I have poetry to write. So, as I said, big yawn.

What does interest me, though, about Alpaugh’s article are statements such as this:

For those who protest that most of these thousands of journals can be dismissed as marginal—that we need pay attention to only a handful of “prestigious” ones, like Poetry and The New Yorker—may I suggest that there could be a few Blakes or Dickinsons swimming with the guppies in that wide prosodic sea? If a truly titanic poet were to appear, wouldn’t one of the less visible but more adventuresome journals—Retort Magazine, say (“we favor the cutting edge over the blunt of the handle, the avant-garde over backward walking”)—be more likely to be his or her publisher than would status-conscious professional journals like Ploughshares and American Poetry Review?

or this one:

Such “anthologies” are less harmful, however, than those that actually pretend to select the “best.” David Lehman and the guest editors of Scribner’s Best American Poetry (hereafter known as BAP) have been protesting for years that they are just trying to publish a bunch of decent poems. Yet year after year, their title continues to make its glittering promise, with a cynical wink at sales.

The notion that a guest editor or team of screeners would read 100,000 poems is absurd. A look at the journals BAP routinely draws from gives a good clue as to methodology. In BAP 2008, for example, just 10 of the 2,000-plus journals and magazines available for consideration accounted for 37 of the 75 poems selected—49 percent. As in past issues, BAP 2008 privileged Poetry, American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and a dozen or so other recurring publications. The probability that such a sliver of journals would continue to yield the lion’s share of the “best” American poetry year after year were objectivity in play is unlikely.

I am not much interested in the relative merits of poetry by Ted Kooser or John Ashbery (see comment 26 on elitism).

What I read here is that the old gatekeepers are no longer in control. That maybe, in some sense, there no longer are any gatekeepers. The game preserve is wide open.

For some people this concept, with its implication of chaos, is frightening. It leads them to conclude, as Alpaugh does:

Every now and then someone asks me, “Who are the best poets writing today?” My answer? “I have no idea.” Nor do I believe that anyone else does. I do have an uneasy feeling that a Blake and a Dickinson may be buried in the overgrowth, and I fear that neither current nor future readers may get to enjoy their art. That would be the most devastating result of the new math of poetry. The loss would be incalculable.

This statement strikes me as somewhat naive in its belief that in the past the best poets have always been saved. I always have to wonder, for every Dickinson saved, how many were lost?. Maybe my point of view is skewed by my feminism and the lack, until recent years, of women’s names in those great anthologies of the past that Alpaugh mentioned.

On my desk is a worn college anthology titled Seventeenth Century Poetry and Prose. Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Jonson, Marvell, Milton—all of the great poets of that century, and all of the minor ones (as well as some now considered unreadable) are represented there.

(See all the women included? Aphra Behn?)

Or naive in its implication that somehow if there were fewer people — more courtiers maybe? — writing poetry, they’d be writing better poetry.

I’ll admit to being old enough myself to wonder whether I can ever break through the chatter and find readers.

But in fact I do have readers. And oddly enough I have influence, in a limited sphere. As Dave Bonta is fond of pointing out, he gets more readers posting his poetry on his blog than he would get were he published in many prestigious print magazines.

And just this morning, a commenter told my friend Mark Brown how grateful they were that he posted one of his poems, “Kissing the Ugly,” on Facebook. The commenter said:

Years ago when we met at a . . . reading I asked you for a copy of it, which I kept in my wallet until the paper fell apart. Now I can print it out again for my bulletin board.

Small fame, yes. And I’m sure we’d all dance like Snoopy to get into a volume of Best American Poetry. (Well, maybe not Dave.) But even BAP is no guarantee of immortality. Do we write for some mythological future or for the now?

What some of us may see as a breakdown of standards, a loss of the old gatekeepers, others of us may hear as the tinkling of the glass ceiling as it shatters.

(Yes, I mixed my metaphors but I didn’t compaire open mike at Al’s Bar to the stage at Lincoln Center.)

(No offense meant to Al’s Bar. I’ll read at their open mike.)

I’ll leave you with this quote, which as far as I’m concerned, redeems Alpaugh’s whole article:

BAP editors recognize the need to throw in a maverick journal or obscure poet or two each year to make it look like they are fulfilling the grand promise of their title. Although Scribner wants readers to believe that they are purchasing the “best,” David Orr, in The New York Times Book Review, could be describing the entire series when he writes that the poems selected for 2004 “run the usual gamut from very good to slightly dull to what-were-you-thinking.” Pinning the word “best” on such a “gamut” could win an award for Best Chutzpah.

A formalista valentine

Cover art: A Cabillero Valentine by M. Styborksi

Valentine
      (After Kate Light’s “Saf-T-Man”)

I never handed over my whole heart,
although I gave you use of one big chunk.
Indulge imagination. Let’s depart
from romantic ideals of self-sacrificial bunk,
my former Valentine: honeyed words, inside
a private envelop that cuts the tongue . . .
— Robin Kemp, from This Pagan Heaven

I confess. I wanted to talk to you about Robin Kemp’s This Pagan Heaven (Pecan Grove Press, 2009) on this particular day just so I could use a snippet of her anti-Valentine sonnet.

Robin was born in New Orleans (on Mardi Gras day, which, that being a movable feast, tells us both much and little) and I first “met” her during the Katrina disaster. I later met her in the flesh at West Chester, where she is known to hang out with others of her persuasion — a type of poet one might call post-modern formalists. Or even feminist formalists. Robin is listowner of Formalista, a list dedicated to women who work in form.

“Owning” such a list is a political move. Many strongly feminist poets think women should eschew form because of its association with the dead white European males of the literary canon. But then Robin is an activist poet and many of the poems in This Pagan Heaven are political. The title “Pantoum for Ari Fleischer” might be a give-away.

Formalista, with its overtones of subversion, is an appropriate term for Robin. She uses the sonnet to satiric purpose throughout this, her first collection, on subjects of love. politics, and “The Lady Poet’s Auxiliary.” Okay, that last one is not a sonnet, but with its rhymed couplets and triplets, it is very formal.

Meanwhile have you used your mind today?
We caught and candied it so it would stay:
Remember, you’re a girl. So write that way.

Stil the heart of This Pagan Heaven is a series of poems about New Orleans, the pagan heaven of the title, during and after Katrina. Robin is a fierce poet, she looks right at things, especially in the ten-page, nine-part jazzy free verse poem called “Bodies”

3.

yellow plastic butterfly barrettes
floating in dirty brown water
their pigtails dangling below
growing into the scalp
of a girl floating face down
at the corner of Piety and St. ______

“this is my south”

where is this baby’s mama?
where is this baby’s Officer Friendly?
where is this baby’s National Guard?
where is this baby’s America?

And I have to quote section 9:

will the last President to leave New Orleans
please leave the lights on?

For all its fierceness, the collection also contains tender poems of love, like “Dreaming of your Hair” and “Kissing in the Carwash” and tributes to nature, like “The Pelican Sonnet” and “Red Moon,” a poem about watching an eclipse of the moon.

My favorite love poem is in rhymed couplets, “Moving the Rose,” which has as its subject not only Robin’s long-term commitment to her partner but also their removal to Atlanta, an inland place where they have to learn how to live.

Roses do not do well close to house,
our Georgia guide to gardening discloses:

. . .

We have to move the new, still-healthy rose
before it enters some corrupted phase.
You dig around the base, I hold its tendrils
stretched overhead, two green canes thin as pencils.
Teamwork, mujer. Roots settle in new loam.
Together we bear the living away from home.

Appreciation

A friend has drawn my attention to Poets’ Quarterly, and I in turn would like to point you in that direction. This recently launched online publication features interviews and reviews of books and chapbooks. From their “about” page:

Poets’ Quarterly publishes in-depth reviews of poetry books and chapbooks, recognizing new works from both emerging and established poets. The interview series aims to showcase the overall scope of work poets contribute to their society. Through these avenues, Poets’ Quarterly aims to emphasize the importance of poetic contributions to the literary community – and the community-at-large – and to recognize both the diversities and commonalities expressed through this art form.

And from their guidelines page:

Also, please note, Poets’ Quarterly has no interest in overtly negative reviews. If you don’t care for a book, there’s no obligation to submit a review for it. There are far too many quality books deserving of our readers’ attention; while we offer critical analyses and ask questions, Poets’ Quarterly prefers to only cover books we want our readers to seek out. There simply isn’t enough time or space to cover anything less than a recommended book/poet.

The current issue contains reviews by poets whose work I know, including Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Penelope Scambly Schott, Patricia Smith, and Scott Owens. And some familiar names also show up on the contributors’ list. So I think it’s well worth a look.

My friend sent me the link because she knows I write reviews and she thought it might be a good venue for me. And so it might. I certainly like their philosophy.

I have published reviews in magazines in the past (and you can find links to them in the nav bar above the header), but I’ve backed off the practice of sending reviews out. I experienced several frustrations with getting reviews published. For one thing, a number of publications limit reviews to about 500 words, and that’s constraining. And then we all know that response times are slow and most authors would like reviews of their new books to be timely. I would like that, provided I ever have a new book to be reviewed.

But the thing that really stopped me was my experience with Rain Taxi. I admire Rain Taxi and for a while I harbored an ambition to be one of their stable of reviewers. I submitted to them several times and I found them to be responsive and even receptive to my work.

But there was always a catch, and most often the catch was conflict of interest. My relationship to the poet I was reviewing was too close. My objectivity was questionable.

I admire this integrity, and thinking about it, I had to admit that the editors at Rain Taxi are right. For the most part, I don’t write objective reviews. I write appreciations of work I’ve sought out, either because I know the poet or share a publisher or a discussion list with the poet.

Like the editors at Poets’ Quarterly, I see no reason to be negative about work. I try to understand what the poet is doing and talk about where I think s/he has succeeded. In some venues, this would be looked upon as a sort of extended blurbing but it’s the way I operate.

For one thing, I’m not confident of my scholarship or my taste that I would want to go negative on somebody’s work. And for another, I know how much hard work goes into writing a book of poetry and how little reward there is in it.

And anyway, I promised myself a long time ago, when I started to put myself out in the world as a poet, that I would always practice generosity.

So I put my reviews on my blog where I can say what I want at whatever length I want and if there’s conflict of interest, well it’s my blog. That’s all about every Joe Schmoe or Jane Doe mouthing off about things they don’t really understand, right?

But go read Poets’ Quarterly.

The shape of a poem

I am taking an eight-week poetry class at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. Called “The Path of a Poem,” the class is led by Leatha Kendrickk. I take Leatha’s classes whenever they’re offered because she is not only a fine poet and a fine teacher with a wide-ranging knowledge of poetry and prosody but also because her classes always attract the best poets in the area, so the quality of the discussion is high and often technical.

All of which leads me to my point, which is that last night was my night to be critiqued and I had submitted the sonnet crown that has been languishing in my drawer in one form or another for, well, ten years if you go back to some of the root ideas.

The verdict last night was the same as always: there’s some great stuff here but it doesn’t quite make it all the way there.

I ask myself why I keep resurrecting this monster. Over the years I’ve been forced to abandon any number of poems by the knowledge that they were never going to quite make it. As William Stafford says, we have to write our bad poems as well as our good ones.

But this poem is different.

Maybe it’s just my way of running scales. Even master musicians have to do it. Maybe this is just my practice piece, the poem where I burnish up my formal chops.

But why bother with form? Part of the reason is explained by this passage I ran across this morning reading in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones. Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). The question was: Would you be offended to be called a formalist?. The answer, in part:

I wouldn’t be offended but I think it would be a mistake. “Formalist” to me sounds like a kind of doctrinaire position. I totally believe in form; but quite often, when people use the term, they mean shape rather than form. There’s the sonnet shape, fair enough, but it’s not just a matter of rhyming the eight lines and the other six; they happen to be set one on top of each other like two boxes, but they’re more like a torso and pelvis. There has to be a little bit of muscle movement, it has to be alive in some sort of way. A moving poem doesn’t just mean that it touches you, it means it has to move itself along as a going linguistic concern. Form is not like a pasty cutter — the dough has to move and discover its own shape. [p. 447]

If you think about that — you don’t impose a sonnet shape on a poem, you write a poem that discovers its shape as a sonnet.

Sounds mystical but it’s a matter of running the scales until your fingers bleed and then, if you also have some talent (not necessarily genius), you can improvise, you can be free-form within the form.

I think that’s why I keep worrying at my sonnet crown. Every time I ratchet it up to the next level of competence, I discover a level beyond that.

If I can get it right, maybe I’ll have become a poet.

Which, when I think about it, will never happen. If one practices poetry, one is always becoming. That’s part of the deal.

Stuff

From Boing-Boing. Link complements of Donna Rhae Marder.

“You Should Write a Poem About That!” Anybody ever say that to you? They’ve said it to me and, like Robert Peake, I often find I want to say, “No, you should write that poem.”

Owing to its frequency, it gets old. But apart from that, the response also intrigues me. It is different than the response comedians complain about, where, upon learning of their peculiar profession, new acquaintances will fold their arms and scowl, “Oh yeah? Then say something funny.” Instead, the “you should write…” remark is approving, a kind of conspiratorial wink-and-nudge. It is as if, through our conversation, they have stumbled momentarily in to the head-space where I, as a poet, must constantly reside—a land tinkling with musical profundity and linguistic charm. Alas, that ain’t always where I’m at.

Good news: Dodge Foundation Reverses Decision to Cancel Poetry Festival

Watermark asks “Been to an emergency room lately?”

I asked: Why? Why are you seeing so many more patients?

Because, I was told, so many more people are without insurance, and have nowhere else to go.

Do you think health care reform is irrelevant to your life?

Twitter Poetry on the Plinth in London

The connectivity of the Twitter poetry is sort of the opposite of the solitude celebrated at Windows Toward the World with a quote from Thomas Merton:

All I know is that here I am, and the valley is very quiet, the sun is going down, there is no human being around, and as darkness falls I could easily be a completely forgotten person, as if I did not exist for the world at all. (Though there is one who remembers and whom I remember.) The day could easily come when I would be just as invisible as if I never existed, and still be living up here on this hill. . . .And I know that I would be perfectly content to be so.

Items

A big shout-out to my Scrabble-playing buddy Ruth Bavetta, whose visual poem “The End and the Aim,” made the top fifteen most view poems on Rattle.com

Why Do Poets Say “O”? Dave Bonta wants to know.

There’s some hate speech going on in Chicago poetry circles. Turf wars are not uncommon in poetry circles, but I’d say you’re losing if you have to stoop to calling your opponent fat. “They don’t really like you better than me, they just feel sorry for you.” Convincing argument, huh?

Via Poetry Hut Blog and then via Modern Americans, check out American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson

Via Silliman’s Blog, Billy Collins thinks people don’t read poetry because we have no good poets. My question, is the ability to make Patrick Moynihan cry the mark of a good poet?

My friend Nancy Fletcher Cassell pointed me to Karla M. Huston’s Burying the Red Shoes: Conversations with Four Poets at Margie. The four poets are Denise Duhamel, Naomi Shihab Nye, Shara McCallum, and Stellasue Lee.

Annie Finch, who is blogging at Harriet, on Why I Am a Woman Poet

Some recommended reading

I have some off-line reading to do today, so I’ll recommend some links for your online pleasure and enlightenment.

Poem of the week at The Guardian’s Books Blog is Wilfred Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” I am an Owens fan so I like this one:

The story of how Abraham, in obedience to a direct command from God, almost sacrificed his only son, Isaac, is one of the most perfectly written short narratives in the Old Testament. This is the story that Wilfred Owen retells and revises in this week’s poem, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.

Owen, you’ll notice, keeps close to the language of the King James Authorised Version. He also restrains himself rhythmically, conforming to the trudge of iambic pentameter. We like our war poetry, whether by Homer or Owen, to convey authenticity and guarantee its integrity by raw images and rough-hewn reportage. Owen can give us raw and rough-hewn, but in this poem he stands back from his subject matter: he is here to preach. And his matter is serious and specific enough to justify that technique.

It’s not until the imagery of “fire and iron” (Abraham’s implements were simply fire, wood and a knife) that we see the parable to be constructed. Owen’s modernising tactics become increasingly clear. The Old Testament Isaac was simply “bound” to the pyre, but here we have “straps and belts”, and then, unmistakably, “parapets and trenches”.

. . .

Owen’s poem chimes for me with Barack Obama’s recent speech in Cairo, in which the command of conscience is to kill the ram of violent extremism. Obama’s fundamental subject, too, I think, is “the pity of War.”

On the subject of health care reform, I recommend this post by Avedon Carol:

Let me put it another way: Bearing in mind that in the time I’ve lived here the value of the dollar to the pound has ranged between about $1.55=�1.00 to $2.00=�1.00, �30K a year is a pretty comfortable salary here. One of the things that makes it so comfortable is that you already have, regardless of who you work for or if you even have a regular job, a completely portable deluxe healthcare plan that doesn’t cost you any extra money when you see your doctor or go to a specialist or get tests or have surgery or endure a hospital stay. You have pretty much full coverage (excepting your glasses and dentistry) for free delivery of healthcare at the point of use, with no argument from some insurance industry hack. If your doctor thinks you need an operation, there’s no arguing with insurance agents about it – your doc just refers you to the hospital specialists, you see them, they do what’s necessary, and no one sends you a bill. No paperwork, no desperate phone calls, no deciding you can’t afford vital treatment.

And why shouldn’t Americans have that kind of care, too? After all, you’re already paying for it – in taxes. Every time you pay taxes, regardless of your own healthcare plan, you also pay for someone else’s healthcare – Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, NIH, SCHIP, whatever – you’re paying for government health services and research (which, by the way, is also a subsidy to the commercial medical industry that makes use of the research and development at bargain rates) – only you’re paying for a lot of it more expensively than you need to because so much waste is involved in servicing the myriad different commercial providers who have their fingers in the pie. And then when you get your own commercial healthcare, you pay extra for the very fact that someone has to ask you to name your insurance company and give them your insurance details. No one ever asks me my insurance details here – they already know them, because they’re the same for everyone.

And A Waiting Room IS a Line by Lance Mannion:

I’m in line right now.

Not sure how many people are in the line with me.

Lots, probably.

We can’t see each other because our places in the line are widely separated.

Some of us are in an actual line at the reception desk at the doctor’s office.

But some of us are in line at home. Some of us are in line at work. Some of us are in line in our cars. Wherever the phone we’re hoping will ring any moment is, that’s where our place in line is.

We’re all in line, waiting to hear back from our insurance company.

Eventually, assuming the insurance company gives us permission to have the operation or the procedure or the test we need, we’ll all get into different lines.

We’ll wait in other virtual or actual lines to make an appointment to see the doctor or the specialist or the technician.

After we get out of that line, we’ll wait in another line for the day to come when we can go to the office or hospital or the lab where we will then wait in another line to see the doctor or the specialist or the technician who will perform the operation or the procedure or the test we need.

And after we’re finally out of those lines, there are still other lines—at the pharmacy, back at our doctor’s office for the follow up, by the phone again to argue with the insurance company because somebody’s decided that the operation or the procedure or the test we were told was covered isn’t covered.

Of all the objections to national health insurance, the silliest and most baffling to me is that it will mean we’ll all have to wait in lines to see the doctor.

Helen Losse and Dave Bonta have poems up today that I would definitely recommend you read.

__________
P.S. Here’s another Mannion missive to the world you might like to read:

[Louis] Menand [in the New Yorker] is reviewing a book by Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing , a literary survey of the last seventy or so years that attempts to trace the effects of creative writing programs on the shape, direction, fads, and styles of American fiction. Menand, though, seems more interested in the questions, can people be taught how to write and if not (the answer he leans towards) what good are workshops?

. . .

Students at creative writing programs are learning from each other all the time. But what are they learning?

According to Menand, they aren’t learning to write well. They are learning to write what is fashionable well. This is what McGurl’s looks at in The Program Era, what has been fashionable and how fiction writing programs have responded to and shaped those fashions.

I went off to Iowa full up to my eyeballs with the works of Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Herman Melville, only to find that just about every other fiction writer there was only interested in what was in the New Yorker that week. . . .
Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason were the literary heroes of the day.

Minimalism was the fashion.

You’ll notice that among my literary heroes of the time there’s nobody who could be by any stretch described as a minimalist.

The upshot of this was that one of the lessons I learned at Iowa was that Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason were my mortal enemies.