Poetry Snark

Jim Lewis is a Hack

2007-09-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know anything about how the New York Times chooses their book reviewers. I suspect that they must have some kind of system, because randomly choosing people couldn't possibly result in the kind ineptness they consistently display.

Take for example Jim Lewis. In today's edition, he reviews Denis Johnson's somewhat anticipated new novel. I say "somewhat" because everything Johnson has written since Jesus's Son has been disappointing to greater or lesser degrees, and many of us who love that collection have nearly given up on him. I haven't read Tree of Smoke yet, but this over-the-top piece of hack reviewing doesn't make me want to.

Take for example this little gem of a comparison by Lewis. Discussing Johnson's typical characters, he notes "But unlike most books about the dispossessed, they’re original (how strange it feels to use that word these days, but it fits), and what’s more, deliriously beautiful — ravishing, painful; as desolate as Dostoyevsky, as passionate and terrifying as Edgar Allan Poe." That sentence tells you all you need to know about Jim Lewis's capabilities as a reader. First of all, comparing Johnson to Dostoyevsky is gratuitous, to say the least, but worse is the fact that his comparison equates one of the greatest novelists of all time with the author of "The Raven." Poe's stories are good for frightening children (and NYT book reviewers), but they are not remotely in the league of the big D. Anything else this reviewer says is automatically discredited after this statement.

His review has other gems, including his announcement that "I spent a long time reading “Tree of Smoke,” and as I neared the end I found myself wishing it were longer."

Such dazzling prose! What wit! What insight!

There is no point in reading this review unless, like me, you take a perverse pleasure in the writers for "America's newspaper" sucking so badly. We expect this kind of palaver in the toothless world of poetry reviews. Apparently, fiction suffers a similar malady.

R.I.P. Max Roach

2007-08-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

Max Roach is dead. Simply put, he was the most accomplished and important jazz drummer in the world. He cut his teeth as a teenager playing with Charlie Parker, where he advanced upon the work of the first jazz be-bop drummer Kenny Clarke and became widely known as the most imaginative and influential drummer in the world.

He deserved the title. Roach's most famous performance is probably on Miles Davis' seminal Birth of the Cool, but Roach played with all of the greats of his day, cutting albums with the likes of Dizzy, Cecil Tayler, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, Stanley Turrentine, and George Coleman, to name a few. Perhaps his greatest collaboration was his short lived quintet with trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown. Anything by these two is a must have. Their studio album, Brown and Roach, Inc, is a classic.

When Brown died in a car wreck in June 1956, Roach was plunged into depression and nearly drank himself to death. Thankfully, he recovered and went on to record dozens of uncompromising and relentlessly inventive albums. Some of the best work in this part of his career was with Sonny Rollins, with whom he cut many unforgettable tracks.

My personal favorite album of Roach's is his own Members, Don't Get Weary. Written partially in response to the Civil Rights movement, this diverse collection represents Roach at his most vulnerable and passionate. Ranging from lowdown grooves of "Abstrutions," to the gospel-inflected title track, to the modern post-bop feel of "Absolutions," Roach's versatility is outpaced only by religious/emotional lucidity in this unforgettable human triumph.

Do yourself a favor and go listen to some Roach today in honor of the man. It was only a few years ago that we lost Elvin Jones. Now, with the death of Roach, we have lost the last of the legendary drummers who defined rhythm for generations to come.

Postings

2007-07-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

Some clever soul with plenty of free time has decided to start spamming the comments sections of various posts with links to porn and white supremacist sites. Lovely. And oh so inventive.

I've turned off the comments until I have time to pay attention to this site and moderate the posts.

Update

2007-06-14T22:16:00.000-07:00

A short update on why I've been slacking so long on the posts.

Basically, I looked up one day, and a book-length writing project that I had committed myself to had fallen desperately by the wayside. So I decided no writing anything else until it's finished. That included Poetry Snark.

I'm getting pretty close to putting this project out of it's misery, and when I do, I'll be back.

Poetry Foundation and the New Yorker

2007-03-10T12:13:00.000-08:00

The NYT offers a misguided defense of Poetry magazine's 200 million dollar endowed Poetry Foundation, coupled with a devastating and well deserved attack on the poetry publishing practices of The New Yorker. Check it out.

R.I.P. Alice Coltrane

2007-01-14T14:45:00.000-08:00

Alice Coltrane died at age 69 today of respiratory failure. In addition to her work replacing McCoy Tyner in her husband's band, she also released numerous, underrated albums of her own, including projects with Pharaoh Sanders, Joe Henderson, and Carlos Santana. I love her harp work the most, though Alice was an accomplished pianist of course, as well as an organist and composer.

Some consider her a kind of Yoko One-like figure in her husband's life, turning John Coltrane away from more more accessible and melodic jazz toward increasingly spiritual and abstract projects. But that's bullshit, as he was already moving toward more and more progressive music already before she joined the group in 1965 (Impressions came out in '63, and A Love Supreme and Crescent came out in '64).

Her solo work is as much influenced by devotional music as it it is jazz. Alice Coltrane, or Turiyasangitananda, to use her Sanskrit name, was a devotee of the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. Her latter years were devoted meditation and study, as well as preserving her husband's legacy. She released no new music between '87 and 2004, when Translinear Light came out, her final project, one completed with her son, Ravi Coltrane, on tenor.

Ron Silliman Needs a New Name for His Site

2007-01-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

Bill Blood suggests "Cave of the Fiberoptic Octopus."

Anyone have any better ideas?

Tupelo Press and Ann Rabinowitz Sell Souls to Satan

2006-12-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

So I just got this email that seems like a perfect symbol of where poetry is at as an institution. So desperate are publishers for a return to some mythic time when poetry was a mainstream art form that (formerly) respectable presses will crap themselves at the slightest hint of mass market acknowledgment. Just a whiff of the stench of mainstream media sends them quivering away. It doesn't matter if such acknowledgment comes from the most despicable source of American "journalism." It doesn't matter if the editors themselves would never watch the program pimping their book. The slightest nod from corporate-sponsored bobble heads equals "a coup" for poetry--and those are their words, not mine.

So Fox News is trying to bring a highbrow touch to their nut-job pandering, faith-based news by trotting out a real live poet! Hmmm ... let's see, what type of contemporary poetry would be acceptable? I know (Gretchen Carlson scratches head) ... something Christmasy! Let's see, a book of Haiku about Rudolf? Santa sonnets? Maybe a book about the birth of baby Jesus?

Well, they couldn't find any contemporary poets writing those poems, so they got the next best thing--a book about the Virgin Mary! That's right, Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends" has invited poet Anna Rabinowitz to come on their show and talk about her new tome, The Wanton Sublime. I wonder if Gretchen will be able to restrain herself from asking what it's like for a Jew to write about Jesus's mom.

Tupelo Press, breathless with joy, dashes off an email that reads like a press release, informing us of the news, citing blurbs, and concluding with this statement:

"What a coup for Anna, for poetry."

Uh, Yeah. Poetry is big time now, baby ... Fox News big! Maybe Laura Bush will invite Ms. Rabinowitz to the White House to give a reading! Then we'll know that poetry is truly right with the world.

A Donald Rumsfeld Moment

2006-12-17T18:42:00.000-08:00

"Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war." --Donald Rumsfeld

Ah, that Rummy, always looking on the bright side of things. What does death have to do with war, anyway?

By the way, did you know that Rumsfeld lives in the former plantation home of Edward Covey? Yes, I mean the same Edward Covey that Frederick Douglass beat the shit out of in his famous autobiography--described as the cruelest "slavebreaker" in the area.

Sometimes reality is just too ironic to be believed.

Guess the Poet. Win a Prize.

2006-12-07T20:03:00.000-08:00

I know a game. It's called "guess who said these things at last night's reading." Wanna play?

The rules are simple. Read this post and then tell me in the thread who you think Poetry Snark heard read last night. First one to get it right gets, um, gets...

The poetry snark secret lame-ass-poet decoder ring!

With it, you can secretly occupy the imaginative position of someone who actually likes this shit. OK, not really. My ring actually exploded last night in a frenzied effort to translate the reading into something that resembles art. C'est la vie.

Let's play anyway, shall we? Anyone who was at the reading is asked to refrain from posting in this thread--that is, unless you once thought that you liked this writer and want to repent now before the muses smite you down. Then it's OK.

Alright then, here goes:

Clue number 1: Mystery poet needed to explain what a word in one of his/her poems meant because the poet assigned to introduce him/her didn't know how to pronounce it. It turned out to be made up.

Clue number 2: Mystery poet interrupted the reading to imitate the sound of the wind (I don't mean farting--actual imitation).

Clue number 3: Mystery poet felt compelled to explain every single "poem" he/she read with an introduction that exceeded the length of the poem.

Clue number 4: Mystery poet felt compelled to explain to the audience who Oliver North is. I'm not kidding.

Clue number 5: Mystery poet felt compelled to offer his/her philosophy of teaching. This is what mystery poet said, word for word (yes, I took notes): "There is a state between trance and logic where teachers rest."

Still baffled? Let's see if a few excerpts from the reading will help. All of these are verbatim quotes, without any alteration or exaggeration. Some of these are things said between poems, others are lines from poems. I'll let you try to figure out which are which:

"Caliban, besides being a character in Shakespeare, is also the name of my convertible."

"Coastal pine trees must wonder why it isn't enough just to be good pine trees."

"Rocks are like consciousness."

"At some point, I am going to turn the poem sideways, because that's what they did to the mountain."

"Teaching the epic is difficult for me because there is a lot of murder and violence in it. And I'm a pacifist."

"Be what orange? Be what orange?"

OK, gentle readers, who is the mystery poet?

On the Thirteenth Anniversary of Frank Zappa's Death

2006-12-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

I promise to get some new content up soon (yes, I read your emails).

Meanwhile, tip a glass for one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century and go watch this classic video of Frank Zappa on Crossfire. Zappa going at it with Robert Novak is a sight to behold.

On the Twentieth Anniversary of the Publication of "Howl"

2006-11-19T14:27:00.000-08:00

Who, after I had crashed a dinner party for local Buddhists who shamelessly referred to themselves as "Jewel Hearts" & shouldered pointedly through circle after circle of syncophantic xanax-eyed celery nibblers, leered with benevolent grandfatherly eyes, & hit on me.

Who refused to read good goddamn poem but singing chanting squealing mashed a ditty on his miniature accordion to avuncular iambs of topical protest doggerel, finally relenting with Wichita Vortex Sutra, interrupted to remind us referred to our own “O Street” (“zero street”), only to conclude with his wretched rhyming “Capitol Air,” later loitered in the lobby, enmeshed in cheerful boy-English majors & listened to them enthuse & hit on them.

Who comfortable & robed & horny-eyed and sober sat up chewing macrobiotic rice with mentor Galek Rinpoche that evening at local restaurant “Crane River,” was accosted by boy-English major later known as Poetry Snark, received him gracious & genially, advised “breathing exercises,” & forgetting he had met him night before at Buddhist party, again hit on him.

Who stayed & stayed, coalescing bad local poets appearing magically as if cell-phoned in that pre-cell phone world, & drank only water & waved arms majestically reliving hormonal hippy shivers with the drunks & doters & ditzes until the generous hours dwindled, a memorable court holder, quixotically erotic at 64.

(Use this thread to talk about the times when Ginsberg hit on you ... or whatever. But do check out this worthwhile piece on him in today's New York Times.)

Ka-Boom! Joshua Clover Implodes in a Fury of Theoretical Jargon!

2006-11-14T23:22:00.000-08:00

During the 2000 election cycle, I was once accosted by a Republican who, knowing a little about my politics, said to me something along these lines:

"So, I once heard you say that your politics are 'somewhere to the left of Castro.' I assume that you aren't selling out by voting for Al Gore, are you? I'm a conservative," he told me, "but I have respect for people on the left who really follow their ideals and support Ralph Nader."

I told him where he could stuff his "respect."

I later heard he had been saying similar things to others on campus who had been outspoken at one point or another with their political leanings. His intention was obvious: he was trying to elect George Bush by encouraging people with politics to the left of Bill Clinton to "follow their ideals" and not support Al Gore.

Joshua Clover, who judging from his blog knows nothing about either politics or Walter Benjamin, operates from the same playbook. From his blog:

"It is with mounting nausea that we watch poets race to cast their liberal votes for candidates more conservative than the Republicans they found beyond revulsion twenty years ago - and indeed race not just to feed at this trough but serve the slop." He goes on to chastise people for voting, which he likes to do, and equate Nancy Pelosi with Condoleezza Rice.

What a tool.

Clover has been chugging the po mo Kool Aid for so long that his brain has atrophied into a crispy little device that spouts phrases like "the endless circulation of used signs" in refence to political appointees and "open signifying chains" when discussing changes in administration. I'm not kidding. Get a load of this...

"To suggest that the staffing habits of the current administration are postmodern in their open signifying chains, unable to mean much while spastically invoking the hollowed-out quasi-meanings of past years, is only to say that we find ourselves not simply within 'postmodernism,' or 'late capitalism,' but the decline of empire."

You can't make that kind of shit up. In fact, I tried to write some snark in parody of this, but nothing I could produce came out as facile, pretentious, and intellectually bankrupt as that little nugget. With this statement, Clover epitomizes the "New Academicism" I posted about earlier--someone "whose idea of resistance to middle class values is reading Deleuze and turning over in their minds the idea that they are 'nomads.'" I've teased Cole Swenson a fair amount at this web site, including in the post I just mentioned, but Swenson, I'm told, worked her ass off knocking on doors and getting out the vote in 2004. Respect.

Clover goes on to sniff:

"If our disgust seems magnified, it's because we cherish the possibility that poetry allows forms of thought, of consciousness, which might imagine some retort other than celebrating the chance to eat shit as long as it's only the second-worst shit available."

I guess it never occurred to Clover that one can be politically active and still hold poetry to a higher standard than politics.

I don't have a lot of patience for lefties blind enough to believe that Democrats and Republicans really are interchangeable--or theory-addled enough to feel content to watch the "decline of empire" from their academic perch. But I'll give Clover his due. He has produced something I've found amusing. No, not his poetry, silly. I'm talking about this jacket photo from his first book.

Gives Good Blurb

2006-10-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

The short, unpleasant history of blurbs began on an appropriately bogus note. The first literary blurb in history was when Walt Whitman extracted a sentence from a private letter from Emerson and emblazoned the sage of Concord's words on the spine of the second edition of Leaves of Grass: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Emerson, of course, didn't mean an academic career, but his choice of words seems rather telling in retrospect.

Whitman made this move without even asking Emerson, embarassing his benefactor before his friends. It wasn't so much the actual words that caused chagrin, but the fact that Emerson's uncouth Brooklyn friend would even make the move in the first place. Those days, Americans still had some sense of rightful shame in the face of shameless self-promotion. And publishers didn't assume that readers needed to be told what what to read by a stranger.

Well, we all know what's happened since. Blurbs are now considered universally necessary as promotional moves, even though poetry doesn't sell. The blurbs themselves have evolved. Until the last couple of decades, their role was essentially to praise and describe. Now they seem more about the blurb's authors than the book they purport to promote.

Blurbing poets seem engaged in a continually intensifying contest to see who can come up with the most outrageous act of hyperbole. And where only a short time ago, poets seemed resigned to blurbs as a kind of disagreeable fact of the publishing world, poets now actually seek out the opportunity to blurb other people's books. To have your name attached to a blurb is a sign that you've hit the big time.

And now the fun part. I have before me the single most egregious example of blurbaholism ever to grace the art--the often mentioned but seldom seen blurb Jorie Graham gave to her student, Mark Levine, after picking his book for the National Poetry Series (and yes, I know the story). Anyway, without further ado, here it is, word for word:

"Every now and then, in the eventful, dramatically self-reinventing history of poetry, a new voice comes along which startles by its stunning appropriation of the music, energy, diction, and obsessions of its own immediate moment, yet which is imbued, simultaneously, with a deep knowing connection to the questions and beliefs of the tradition. A poetry filled with that energy of revolution which is born, precisely, of its tense apprenticeship to the voices of previous masters. Debt is such a book. With its brilliant play on all forms of that titular notion--from the spiritual indebtedness we call original sin, to the cultureless greed of our 'national debt'--it moves with torqued grace between the savings-and-loan fiascos of each of our crucial currencies--personal, metaphysical, scientific, historical, political, psychological, cultural, ethnic--(and enacts, at reckless and resounding speed, a holocaust upon political and intellectual and personal correctness by its stark, self-implicating dramatization of the culture of blame). Beginning with the problem of identity--self-creation? soul? the blank space known as citizenship? the number assigned to one's camp card? one's credit card? one's wrist? do we deconstruct? can we?--all the anxious terms of post-romanticism and post-modernism are acted out with astonishing precision and candor by a speaker part Jew, part Palestinian, part intellectual, part consumer, part victim, part terrorist--owner, lover, slave, child--one complex, supple, scary, moving, self-contradicting voice as much the creation of the media, circumstance, history, factuality, as--is it possible?--the creation of some late and inconceivable God."

--Jorie Graham

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career" seems rather quaint and modest now, doesn't it?

I could snark this one until the end of time, but let's do that together, shall we? Join me in the comments section with your snark, and please, if you think you can top this blurb for sheer awfulness, please post your candidate in this thread.

Check Out the Threads

2006-10-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

A friend who reads this site just told me that he wasn't aware that there was anything going on in the comments sections, and so he just reads the posts, not the threads. The comments sections at this site rock, and if you're not reading them, you're missing out. Check out the conversation going on in the post below, for example. The conversation there blows away my original post.

The traffic here has skyrocketed lately, even though I don't post that much anymore. Anyone know why? It's kind of surprising.

Poetry is for Rich Kids

2006-10-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that poetry is among the most "elite" of art forms, right up there with contemporary classical music. When people say "ordinary people don't read poetry," what they mean is "working class people don't read poetry." Nor do they write it (not stuff that sees the light of day anyway).

Yeah, yeah, every ten years or so, the poetry world throws up its sacrificial "workingman's poet." Philip Levine is the biggest name. But within a few years, these poets inevitably lose touch with whatever roots they may have had and start writing in one of the available neo-Romantic trends in post-W.C. Williams free verse, start writing poems of "ekphrasis" (the most snobbish and exclusive of all sub-genres)--or start writing historical poems or suburban meditationals. You get the idea.

Recently, we've seen the emergence of the supposedly "avant-garde" working class. Armed with Deleuze and Gramsci, these jokers eschew representational value altogether, promoting a poetry of theory and gesture. Nearly all have the same job teaching creative writing somewhere. Which reminds me--Ron Silliman takes a lot of shit. but say what you will, he still works a job outside of academia. As people, Silliman (and Rae Armantrout) deserves props for keeping it real, regardless of one's estimation of their work (and I admit I like Rae's work).

But back to my rant.

It seems good to remind one's self every now and then that M.F.A. programs are mostly baby-sitting limbo zones for upper and upper-middle class kids who aren't ready for a "real career" and don't have the focus to do a Ph.D. Does this go without saying? Maybe I'm wasting my time here. Is there anything wrong with it? Not from an individual point of view, I suppose. It's hard to see something wrong with young people wanting to write instead of work a 9 to 5 office job, and why not give people the chance to "find themselves" for a few more years (um, never mind that they are in their mid-twenties at that point--vive le American adolescence!)

Is there a single "major" American working-class poet? I used to think Walt Whitman is the only one. But now this new book comes out--Andrew Lawson's Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle--that convincingly demonstrates Whitman was really a member of the lower-middle class artisanal culture of New England at the time. Bummer. Where oh where / is America's John Claire?

Don't ask me. I'm a part of the problem, not the solution. Though I lived in a trailer much of my life and my dad didn't make squat, my favorite living poet is John Ashbery. What does that say about me? I like to think that I am just "reverse-slumming."

Who is the Howard Zinn of American Poetry? Do we need one? Does it matter?

If there is something productive to be done, I would think it would have to start with the M.F.A. programs. We have minority fellowships. Why don't we have class-based ones?

Lost Diary from Wave Book's Poetry Bus Tour 2006

2006-09-15T16:48:00.000-07:00

Poetry Snark recently attended a reading at a local pub called the Sanctuary. The reading sucked, but I found this diary outside the bar, just laying there on the sidewalk. It seems to chronicle the adventures of one of the organizers of Wave Book's Poetry Bus Tour 2006. Anyway, it seems like something that might be of interest to readers of the Snark, so I've included a few excerpts below:

9/3

Our poetry bus tour starts tomorrow night, and I'm really pumped. It's rare that poets get the opportunity to bring their poems directly to the People. In a way, you could say that this bus tour completes the mission started by Walt Whitman: democratizing poetry for ordinary folk. Our first reading is at Galapagos in Williamsburg.

9/5

This tour is going to be amazing. I'm told last night there were several people in the crowd who weren't poets. At one point, some guy came in off the street to ask for change, and he stayed, presumably to hear a poem or two. There he was--just this ordinary Joe--absorbing poetry. Eileen Myles read from her "Alembic Isotopes" series.

9/7

NYC was relatively safe, but now we're off to some real hinterlands: Amherst, Mass. This could get a little hairy. You could tell pulling into town that this wasn't your usual mandarin crowd. The gas station we filled up at didn't have cappuccinos! Later, I quoted Donne to our receptionist at the Hilton, and the guy didn't even recognize it (and it wasn't obscure Donne at all, either). This is strange ground we're treading...

9/10

I'm not sure we were connecting last night at the "Reading Room." Matthea was reading some of those poems of hers with no punctuation, and I myself had a hard time following. I can only imagine what the undergraduate English majors thought! I know this is a Quixotic quest, but it really feels special being on the road with such amazing poets.

We did have one spot of friction, though, as one of our lesser poets took umbrage at being referred to as my "opening act."

9/12

Last night was pretty disturbing. I was just around the corner from two of the poets on the Poetry Bus, and I couldn't help but overhear them talking about the Tour. One doubted the authenticity of our mission, and the other responded, "yeah, it's bullshit, but maybe if I flirt with Matthew, Wave Books will publish my second collection." Needless to say, I kicked them both off the bus. Tomorrow, though, Janet Holmes is reading. She edits Ahsahta press, and with my third MSS still without a publisher, this should be really exciting. All said, we've had seventeen book editors read on this tour, which is probably the surest sign that we're breaking through.

9/13

I'm a little worried about our reading tonight. It's in Iowa! I mean, we're really getting "out there." We wanted to fit in, so the whole bus stopped at a local thrift store called "Impressions." We bought some old clothes and stuff. Anselm found a John Deer farmer hat that really looks authentic. We're not "dressing down," though. We really like this stuff!

I've decided to feature Anselm more prominently in what Joshua calls our "backwoods reading positions." Anselm's poems have cuss words in them, so I think they will appeal to a non-literary crowd.

9/14

Last night was astonishing. We were worried about reaching out to the masses, so we lined up a very accessible local poet--Cole Swenson. And it was everything we could have hoped. Cole read from her new series based on the life of a 12th-century scribe named Arduous the Worthy, who used white space in his early notes. You could tell the locals were really digging it--almost like a beat poetry event from the 60s. Cole finished with a poem that uses "fractured algorithms" to chart the migratory patterns of an extinct species of seal.

Linky Open Thread

2006-08-20T14:27:00.002-07:00

Well, we haven't had one of these in a while, so why not? These kinds of posts are easy, and I'm lazy.

Here are some blogs that you should check out:

Johannes has a good blog with a lot of provocative content. This guy is probably the craziest poet I know who also has his shit together enough to publish translations and co-edit a small press. I don't agree with everything he says, but I certainly like it more than most:

Släpkoppel

This blog is pretty funny. It's a mixed bag of whacked out cultural / literary commentary:

Porky's Garden of Eloquence

And lest we forget, the funniest blogs on the web. How about some new posts from these guys?

Henry Dagger's Adventures at Sea

and

R. C. Bald's Hong Kong Journals

Use this post as an open thread for anything on your mind. Who's really sucking right now? Any major stinkers published recently? Recommendations for things that I should Snark?

Responding to Johannes Göransson

2006-07-31T14:31:00.000-07:00

Johannes Göransson -- poet, translator, and co-editor of Action Books -- offered a response to my post on the "New Academicism." I replied. Here's the exchange. If you haven't done so, you should check out the post just below this one before reading further. First Johannes:

"I think you're partially right, but it would help to bring some more specificity to your argument. Otherwise it sounds too much like the reactionary foetry jokers who are opposed to anything other than BishopLowell.

For example, what does it really mean to not get out much? These people travel quite a bit, so I assume something about pristineness, isolation etc. How is this manifested in their poetry? What's wrong with writing about the 14th century? Is it not, the way one writes about the 14 century?

What's the difference between the contemporary love of 'the silence of the white space' and the groundbreaking visual-poetic work of Mallarme and, later Appolinaire (totally different form of experimentation, but also using the visuality of the page)?

Along the same line, what's wrong with their obscurity? What's the purpose of their obscurity?

I don't think Susan Howe belongs in the same crowd as Revell. I don't think Revell is really at all influenced by Stein or Duchamp. He seems to be working on some kind of religious, watered-down objectivism.

My problem with a lot of these folks is that they propose a blatant kind of retro-Keatsian subjectivity and in the process make poetry function in a reactionary way as the keeping of pure language, pure experience (almost always classist, exclusionary, hierarchical) and the way it smothers conflict. This seems to be the core of 'academic' poetry. Whether Revell or the New Critics.

At its core I think avant-garde poetry from the 10s and 20s (Duchamp, Stein, Dada etc) is joyful, populist, anti-hierarchical and (most of all) activating (ie it is poetry that invites the reader to participate in the art, rather than asks the reader to passively admire)."

My reply:

"it sounds too much like the reactionary foetry jokers who are opposed to anything other than BishopLowell."

Is that what they like? I can't help it if we share a certain aversion to some poets. As they say, even a stuck clock is right twice a day. But I doubt the Foetry crowd would praise Duchamp/Stein for instance, so I think you're a little off here.

"For example, what does it really mean to not get out much? These people travel quite a bit, so I assume something about pristineness, isolation, etc. How is this manifested in their poetry?"

One can be pristine and isolated even when on vacation in Paris. My objection is with a lack of engagement with the violence and boredom and kitsch and excrement outside the window. Even though these poets travel during their academic breaks, they never really leave their writing desks. It is manifested in their poetry by meta-musings, navel-gazing, art about art, and art of comfort and privilege.

"What's wrong with writing about the 14th century?"

It's boring. There are more pressing concerns.

"What's the difference between the contemporary love of 'the silence of the white space' and the groundbreaking visual-poetic work of Mallarme and, later Appolinaire (totally different form of experimentation, but also using the visuality of the page)?"

You already know the answer to this question, I'm sure. First of all, it's derivative and hasn't advanced much on the influences you cite. Second, Mallarme was motivated by more than aestheticism: "figuring forth the void," while a lofty goal, is more interesting than spoon-feeding audiences big dollops of faux-reverberant "silence."

"Along the same line, what's wrong with their obscurity? What's the purpose of their obscurity?"

Obscurity is the ugly step-sister of ambiguity. It's purpose is to radiate an inpenetrable sense of the authority. Stein, for example, is never obscure, but she is often ambiguous.

"I don't think Susan Howe belongs in the same crowd as Revell."

Susan Howe is a generous intellect. Her critical writings are far less odious than Revell's. But her own poetry epitomizes what I'm talking about perfectly. She is certainly a part of the new academicism -- she's the darling of the smart establishment. As a person, she's wonderful, but that's not what I'm talking about.

"I don't think Revell is really at all influenced by Stein or Duchamp. He seems to be working on some kind of religious, watered-down objectivism."

Agreed. Though he himself claims to be a big reader of Stein.

"My problem with a lot of these folks is that they propose a blatant kind of retro-Keatsian subjectivity ..."

I think most of these poets would be better off if they were LESS fearful of their own subjectivity and negative capability.

" ... and in the process make poetry function in a reactionary way as the keeping of pure language, pure experience (almost always classist, exclusionary, hierarchical) and the way it smothers conflict."

We agree on the effect but not the cause.

"This seems to be the core of 'academic' poetry. Whether Revell or the New Critics."

Sure, maybe not THE core, but part of the core, yes...

"I think avant-garde poetry from the 10s and 20s (Duchamp, Stein, Dada etc) is joyful, populist, anti-hierarchical and (most of all) activating (ie it is poetry that invites the reader to participate in the art, rather than asks the reader to passively admire)."

I mostly agree, although Stein, for all her dazzling destructions, remained hierarchical in many ways. Of course, the current academic avant-garde often supposes an interactive approach too, but audiences must be charmed before they're going to want to dance.

---

Your thoughts, oh gentle readers of Poetry Snark?

The New Academicism

2006-07-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

(re-posted from May, 2005 at the request of a friend)

The old academicism was about old white guys defending the values of New Criticism and old formalism. We're talking poets like Howard Moss, Richard Howard, Anthony Hecht, W.D. Snodgrass, etc. These poets were academic more for how they wrote than what they wrote about. Their poems emitted the stench of bourgeois comfort. They didn’t seem to get out of the house much, and when they did, they usually walked around in their backyards and had epiphanies while studying their birdfeeders. Sometimes they wrote poems about how righteous they were for not fucking their undergrads. They were poets proud of their anapests. Many of them were foundational in setting up institutions like journal Poetry and the Academy of American Poets, crony machines that continue to this day to pass around the bucks to the same handful of aesthetic clones. They were opposed by the Beats and, more wittily, the early New York School. The academics, in turn, groused at these poets, who, influenced by poor readings of Whitman, Blake, and Henry Miller (Beats) or avant-garde continental European poetry (N.Y.S.), were--so the old academics thought--kneeling before the incorrect totem pole. This generation of academic poets did at least have one virtue: they knew they were essentially academic. They were often narrow, lame, and dull, but they were not hypocrites.

The new academicism is about tenured, middle-aged, neo-bohemians. They don’t do drugs or break laws, but they think of themselves as outside the mainstream: smart rebels whose idea of resistance to middle class values is reading Deleuze and turning over in their minds the idea that they are “nomads.” We’re talking poets like Donald Revell, Cole Swenson, Mary Jo Bang, and Susan Howe. These poets are academic more for what they write about than how they write. Like their predecessors, their poems tend to reflect very comfortable lives, and they too don’t seem to get out of the house much, however when they do, it’s not for a meditative stroll in the garden, but for a meditative stroll at M.O.M.A. They are poets proud of their “experimentalism,” however unlike really experimental artists like Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp, their poems are derivative (often of Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp). They too are associated with various crony machines (Swenson, for example, is permanent faculty at Iowa). They are big on “ecphrasis,” “white space,” and obscurity—marveling in poetry about topics like 14^th century clerics, early American captivity narratives, and minimalist painters. Sense of humor is not their strong suit. These academic poets do not regard themselves as academic—anything but! They are rebels! (Theoretically speaking of course.) They do however have one virtue over the previous generation of academic poets: they tend to be somewhat snappier dressers.

Dana Gioia's D.C. Tryst: A Photo Essay

2006-07-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

In January of 2003, Dana Gioia was made chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts...

He took what many regarded as an unorthodox attitude toward his job...

"Fuck this literature shit, got me?"

Everything was going fine, but then the rumour got out that Dana liked older women... much older women.

So Lynn "Dick Did Not" Cheney invited him to D.C. for some fun and games. Gioia was surprised when Lynn fondled him right behind her nearly comatose Uncle Larry. The aroused Gioia responded with an impish grin.

But their affair didn't last. The wives of vice-presidents can't very well leave their husbands while in office, can they? A heartbroken Gioia later mailed Lynn this sketch done by a street artist on their first tryst in Paris. She keeps it stashed beneath her undies in a bedroom drawer to this day.

"Long Gone"--A Tribute to Syd Barrett (1946-2006)

2006-07-11T19:01:00.000-07:00

Syd Barrett died last Friday, though it wasn't announced until today. Why am I posting about a rock icon on Poetry Snark? Because Syd Barrett was the true mad poet-genius of the 60s, and I have to say something. His music has meant too much to me to remain silent. If you care about Syd Barrett, please read on.

Syd Barrett was born in 1946 in Cambridge, the son of a famous pathologist who encouraged young Roger's musical inclinations. He acquired the nickname "Syd" at age 15 and kept it until his retirement as a recluse, when he reverted back to Roger to avoid publicity. Barrett's Pink Floyd was a different and far more interesting thing than Roger Waters's. The original Floyd was conceptual and truly experimental, sometimes edging into Duchamp-like challenges to what the art form was and could be. In one infamous session, for example, he brought in a new song called "Have You Got It, Yet?" and asked the band to learn it. Here's what happened (from Wikipedia) :

"The song seemed simple enough when he first presented it to his bandmates, but it soon became impossibly difficult to learn: as they were practicing it, Barrett kept changing the arrangement. He would then play it again, with the arbitrary changes, and sing "Have you got it yet?" After more than an hour of trying to "get it," they realized they never would."

Syd was also a stunningly original guitar player, though few today would know it, because according to those who heard it, his best performances were live (luckily, we hear hints on the albums). According to many, his sonic experiments exceeded even Hendrix's in pure strangeness, as Barrett explored the possibilities of dissonance, distortion, feedback, and the echo machine against the backdrop of light shows that set the standard for psychedelia in their day.

Syd Barrett's passing is currently being memorialized by countless repetitions of "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" on classic rock FM stations across the country, but it is in Barrett's own music--not Pink Floyd's--that we find the most fitting tribute to this great artist. Of course, Barrett did found Pink Floyd and wrote most of the songs on their first album, 1967's Piper at the Gates of Dawn (along with a song on Saucerful of Secrets). Some of these tunes are classics such as the terrific, funny, and ultimately pretty scary song, "Bike." But his greatest achievements were the songs on his two independent releases, Barrett and The Madcap Laughs.

Barrett created these two masterpieces shortly after his first major mental breakdown and subsequent departure from Floyd in 1968. People who are familiar only with Floyd's grandiose post-Meddle era work will be shocked to hear Syd's own music--it's the opposite of the over-produced often pretentious late Floyd. These songs--lyrical, raw, sparsely arranged, and incredibly vulnerable sounding--are immediately recognizable as genius, and have influenced musicians and bands as diverse as David Bowie, Blur, Peter Townsend, This Mortal Coil, Phish, R.E.M., and the Flaming Lips. The songs were recorded in scattershot sessions from '68 to '71, and Barrett--whether through intent or mental illness--never played a song the same way twice. Each version was a completely new experience for him, and this spontaneity surely helps account for the tunes' immediacy and freshness.

His lyrics are among my favorites by any artist ever. Alternately tragic and playful, heavy and childish, Barrett wrote songs of intense nuance and allusiveness. What appears to be a generally happy number like "Wined and Dined" reveals depths of profound sadness and futility upon repeated listening. Some songs, like "Birdy Hop" and "Effervescing Elephant" are pure whimsy, while others, like "Late Night," are heartbreaking in their immediate simplicity:

Inside me I feel
alone and unreal,
and the way you kiss will always be
a very special thing to me...

Although it's never fair to force song lyrics to stand on their own without accompaniment, Barrett's are among the few that hold poetic interest irrespective of melody or sound. I suppose this shouldn't be a surprise, since Barrett was a serious reader, and once even set to music a poem by James Joyce ("Golden Hair").

From "Baby Lemonade":

You're nice to me like ice
in the clock they sent through a washing machine.

Or from the astonishing song, "Dark Globe":

Please lift the hand.
I'm only a person.
With Eskimo chain,
I tattooed my brain all the way...

Won't you miss me?
Wouldn't you miss me at all?

I could go on. Or you can go read all of his lyrics at this site.

Like many artists so ahead of their times, Barrett suffered from mental illness. Although never professionally diagnosed (Barrett shunned psychiatrists), it has been speculated that he suffered from schizophrenia and/or Asperger Syndrome (a form of autism). Others have speculated that the sudden death of his father when Syd was eleven left indelible scars. Many have assumed his excessive use of LSD caused his insanity, but most who knew him agree that the problems with Syd went deeper. David Gilmour said in a 2006 interview: "In my opinion, his breakdown would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I'll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst."

It's unclear at the time of this writing what caused Barrett's death. I've read that it was due to his diabetes and also that it was cancer-related. Since Barrett has been a complete recluse for over 30 years, living with his mother and spending his time gardening and painting, many have believed he died long ago. A mystery until the end, there is no one who influenced recent music so much about whom we know so little.

Although he has been mythologized by countless fans, there was nothing glamorous about his retreat. It was not a "statement" or a plea for help. According to his own statements, Barrett was someone who couldn't cope with the world as it is and felt incapable of communication with other individuals--someone who both enjoyed and was tortured by his necessary solitude. His madness may have led to some of his artistic triumphs, but it also robbed us of his talent far too soon. He left this world in 2006, but he left his fans in 1971, taking his mystery and genius first to his bedroom--and now to his grave.

(The photograph is of Barrett in 2002.)

Spam

2006-06-18T16:32:00.000-07:00

I had to turn that "Word Verification" feature on again for the comments. I don't like it either, but the site has been getting hit by those "Great site! Check out this link!" robo-spammers lately. If anyone has an idea for a better solution, I'm all ears.

The 10 Most Overrated Poets

2006-06-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

Everybody loves a top-ten list. Here, in reverse order, are Poetry Snark's ten most overrated poets.

I'm limiting these to Anglophones (living or dead), as I don't trust translations, and the only other language I can read is French. Obviously, this list is biased toward the living, as time has a way of doing its own job on puffed-up hacks. Also, these are overrated poets, not the worst ones. For example, I actually think that Bukowski could be pretty funny at times, but the fact that in Europe he is often considered America's best of the 20th-century requires that he be on this list.

Oh, and this is based on how I perceive their stature from today's point-of-view, so it doesn't include poets like Longfellow, Southey, or Amy Lowell, who were overrated during their time, but aren't taken seriously today. So without further ado, the most overrated English-language poets of all time:

10. Ted Kooser

He's only here because he's Poet Laureate. He's really just a blandly inoffensive barns and farms poet, suitable for use in seducing blue-haired old ladies. His inclusion here is certainly contestable, as I’m not sure that he’s held in high enough esteem to be considered “overrated.”

9. Charles Bukowski

This is the poet boys love when they are in high school. I'll say this for him--he wasn't a fake (I met him once briefly). I wouldn't even put him here if he wasn't the all-time favorite of so many, even when they should have outgrown him and should know better.

8. Bob Perelman

Does anyone really like his poems?

7. Billy Collins

Who would argue with this choice? Well, not too many from the States, anyway. Has anyone heard of this guy in the U.K.? Canada?

6. Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott won both the Nobel and the McArthur “genius” grant. It's not that he's that awful, but he is profoundly overrated.

5. Robert Pinsky

Another poet here primarily because he was a Laureate, but unlike Kooser, who is rejected by the intelligentsia, Pinsky has fans in high places. He has detractors too. I love what Jim Galvin once said about him: "Pinsky wants to dance with his poems. The problem is, he has a lead ass."

4. Mary Oliver

She may be the worst poet on the list, but her reputation has suffered as the fad for ultra-flat "prose-like" lines has waned as of late, and her most recent book, has been roundly panned, even by mainstream reviewers, who usually don't have the guts to go negative. Still, she is worshipped by many, and she is so very awful

3. Ted Hughes

I could care less what he did to Sylvia Plath. Maybe we should be grateful to him, since I suspect his infidelity resulted in some of her finest work. But Hughes was the U.K.'s Poet Laureate for fourteen years, despite the fact that the only reason he was appointed in the first place is because a far superior poet, Philip Larkin, turned it down (as any self-respecting poet should). Surrealism and being a Brit don't mix, and it's hard to say what's worse, his milquetoast attempts at "the uncanny" in his profoundly overrated "crow" poems, or his tepid early nature poems. Brother should have stuck to children's books. At least The Iron Man made for a decent children's animated film (“The Iron Giant”).

2. Lord Alfred Tennyson

Another mildly competent versifier who is here primarily because of his puffed rep. But oh how puffed it is. Tennyson is still the most widely taught Victorian poet (the fact he is still more read than Browning is one of poetry's great scandals). And yes, it's easy--and fun--to pick on Poet Laureates, but this guy's most famous poem is "The Lady of Shallot," which rivals even "The Raven" as most overrated poem of all time. One of my former teachers in Nebraska said it best: "Tennyson is like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep."

1. Edgar Allen Poe

You probably saw this coming. The jingle-jangle man was always a hack with a tin ear, yet even today, he is considered the most influential American poet on the French, and he is the third most studied American poet of the 19th century. His sense of “music” makes Tennyson look like Keats, and his verse is best suited to frightening six year olds. It should have been forgotten long ago.

***

So what do you think? These kinds of lists almost always create arguments, and I'm sure you have your own nominees who you would put on this list if you were making it yourself. Use this thread to call me on my bullshit or add your own hacks to the pile.

Get yer Whitman love jelly right here folks!

2006-06-06T22:16:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman sells shit.

On Stanley Kunitz and Michael Riffaterre

2006-06-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

In the last few weeks, we've lost two major voices in their respective fields, Stanley Kunitz, poet, and Michael Riffaterre, critic.

Now I'm going to break one of the rules I set for myself at this site--I'm going to say something nice about a poet. Stanley Kunitz was the real deal. His poems were more stylistically conservative than I usually like, but it didn't matter because he had a pitch-perfect ear, an eye for detail that rivaled Elizabeth Bishop's, and, most importantly, a vision of the world that was inspiring and rare. He was one of those few poets who saw the world in a way that was utterly different than the way I do, and who convinced me that his way of seeing the world was something I needed to learn from--something that improved my life by occupying it for the brief but intense time spent reading his poems. His poems of sympathy for the natural world--such as "The Wellfleet Whale" and the two silkworm poems he wrote late in his life--are imprinted in my mind and always will be.

From everything I've heard and read, Michael Riffaterre was an admirable man, who fought with the French Resistance in World War II, but his attitude toward literature was deeply misguided. Often associated with French Structuralism, he was one of those critics that worked to detach the human element of writing from the writing itself, arguing that authors themselves have nothing to do with the meaning created by their art (except Riffaterre would have used the clinical term, "text"). As a scholar and critic, he expressed no desire to perform the useful work that critics can do: help other readers. Rather, he wanted to tell us that the way we read is wrong and that we needed to justify meaning against a pseudo-scientific model, based on a newly-invented and highly suspect discipline: semiotics.

Riffaterre hardly started this type of thinking, but as university professor emeritus at Columbia, where he had spent his entire academic career and exerted considerable influence on American attitudes, he was one of the movement's prime enablers. We've seen the results of structuralism: a jealous search for a kind of scientific model for reading, an even more odious movement toward "post-structuralism," and ultimately a disengagement of literary scholarship from literature itself. Luckily for us, that wave has long since shored itself against these ruins, as has its post-structuralist afterthought, and only po-mo apologists and "Language Poets" find this stuff in any way relevant.

Riffaterre and his cohorts' approach denied everything that's valuable about a poet like Stanley Kunitz--or, for that matter, like Blake, Whitman, Yeats, or even Stevens... any poet for whom individual vision was important. Let's hope this kind of thinking can finally be put to rest.

A Little Present

2006-05-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

So, I'm going to let the gentle readers of Poetry Snark decide for themselves what's going on at this blog. It does have a rather fetching title: The Iowa Writers' Workshop is Totally Corrupt

Me? I think it smells like ginger...

(Thread. Discuss.)

R.I.P. Stanley Kunitz

2006-05-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

Brother made it to 100. Let's hope Billy Collins doesn't.

But seriously folks...

2006-05-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

Look, by now you've all heard about governmental efforts to allow internet service providers to regulate what content their subscribers can view... right? Well, if you haven't heard about it, you should. In a nutshell, here's what's happening: if the bill in question goes through, then all internet service providers will be able to legally guide you toward web sites that pay them enough money. Right now, we have "net neutrality," meaning, for one, that popular sites naturally rise to the top of search engine results.

The coolest thing about the web is that it is--for the most part--a true meritocracy, where sites are successful only because people actually want to go there (as opposed to almost all other media, whose popularity is determined primarily by marketing). If this bill goes through, then this aspect of the net will largely vanish, creating a "pay to play" system, where sites like this one could never have gotten popular (I know, I know, some of you probably think that in this case, that wouldn't have been so bad).

Anyway, there is still a chance to defeat this heinous bill. I've included a link toward the bottom of the left sidebar that says "Save the Internet." If you click on that, it will take you to a website showing you how to easily take action to sign their petition and contact your representatives at the same time in about 30 seconds. You can also get the code to insert the "Save the Internet" image and link into your own blog or website. Scroll down and look on the left. Then click on the link, and check it out.

Poetry Snark Starts a New Journal

2006-04-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

Announcing the formation of a new brand-spankin' new literary journal:

Crony: A Journal of Friends

Inspired by the recent "Legitimate Dangers" anthology, Poetry Snark has decided to follow suit with a similarly-organized literary journal -- Crony: A Journal of Friends. Crony will be instigating a new publishing schedule; we will be the world's first "quarterly quarterly." That is to say, we will be publishing a new issue one out of every four quarterly periods. To those who say, why not just call it an annual then, we say, poo! "Quarterly quarterly" sounds way cooler.

We will also be instigating an innovative new way of dealing with submissions. Everyone knows that wading through ever-renewed slush piles of hopelessly inept submissions sucks. Big time. That's why journals foist the job off on starry-eyed undergrads who think that if they read enough of that shit, someday the journal will reward them by publishing one of their own incompetent versifications. But we don't have any undegrads, and there's no way we'd publish their shit anyway, so we've devised a new method: we're going to charge you to submit!

That's right, just send Crony: A Journal of Friends your submission with a $25 check made out to "Poetry Snark," and I promise that one of our crack staff will at least skim the first line or two. This is a whole new deal, man, and we've found a way to beat the system! I mean, even photocopies get expensive, you know, and we've got like no money whatsoever! All of our contributors can be assured that any money in excess of publication costs will be spent on good causes: beer, pornography, and online gambling, mainly.

Also credit card debt. And unpaid parking tickets. And carmel-covered long johns. Also we'd really like to have enough money to buy a 21-inch flat screen monitor to play Civilization IV on. And if there's any left over, I'll use it for submissions checks to poetry contests for underprivileged writers (us). We're all just in it for the art.

You might think that this "pay to play" system itself stinks of corrupt poetry contests, but we've got a new twist: tiered submission fees. If you send the minimum $25, we'll read a line or two. If you send $50, we'll read an entire poem (40 lines or less). If you send a hundred, we'll read up to three pages of poetry. If you send $200, we will mail you a complementary back issue of Crony: A Journal Friends. $400 gets you a subscription and we'll add you to our masthead page, as one of the "Friends of Crony: A Journal of Friends." $600 gets you all this and an inflatable raft. And if you send us a thousand dollars, we'll actually be your friend and publish you in our journal. Can you beat that? With poetry contests, you can send them as much money as you want, and there's no guarantee you'll get published. Crony is changing all that. If you send enough money, you WILL get published, and we WILL be your "friend."

To keep costs down, we're going to be an e-journal. In fact, our journal is going to be the first e-mail journal. Basically, I'm going to cut and paste all the poems into an email and hit "send all" to our list of subscribers. A regular subscription, without us having to read your poems, costs $300. Just send me your email address and, like I said before, a check made out to "Poetry Snark." Our first issue is nearly finished. Contributors include Poetry Snark, his girlfriend, Ginger Pennebacker, his girlfriend, Agent Trochee, Bill Blood, my mom, my mom's friend Yolanda, and Bill Blood's little brother "Scratch."

So get ready poetry world, the winds of change are huff, puff, puffing, and we're going to bring this whole house of syncophancy and back-scratching down. Get ready for Crony: A Journal of Friends.

Evolution of the Poetry Wars

2006-04-20T11:59:00.000-07:00

Remember the poetry wars of old? Those were the days of "the raw and the cooked." The academic poets I described previously as "the old academicism," along with others, somewhat less academic, but still fairly refined in their aesthetics--poets like Robert Lowell, Hayden Carruth, maybe Elizabeth Bishop, and others--were set at odds with the Beats, mostly, but to some extent also the early New York School and the Black Mountain poets in a poetry war commonly referred to as "the raw and the cooked." That was the old, bullshit dividing line: poetry that mostly resisted traditional form and poetry that toyed with it, that conserved it. Never mind that some of the supposedly "raw" poets were also writing in form, just different kinds, and that the supposedly "cooked" poets also wrote in loose free verse. Form was just the most mentionable of differences. This was about other cultural divides: refined East Coasters, Bostonians, post Robert Frosters and T.S. Eliotites versus shaggy west coasters and Greenwich Village cruisers and outcasts; Whitman lovers versus Dickinson lovers; Surrealist afficionados versus neo-symbolists; would-be rock star, neo-populist romantics versus involute, Victorian romantics; dope smokers versus scotch drinkers. It was easy to see the difference, and critics like Lionel Trilling and M.L. Rosenthal reinforced the divide (predictably, they sided with "the cooked").

It's a different poetry war today, Snarkophiles. Today it’s not the raw and the cooked but the smart and the sincere. Nobody is "raw" anymore. We're all sophisticates now. And almost nobody is uninfected with the academia bug--we're all mostly nursing off the same tit (there are exceptions on both sides of course--Silliman, for example, and, until recently, our new poet Laureate, Sir Kooser). But some of us would still be known more for our brains, and some of us for our hearts. It's the scarecrows versus the tin men (the cowardly lions are both camps when they put on their "poetry reviewer" hats). The scarecrows have a little more money and a few more readers, and the tin men have more academic critics on their side and a growing insurgent youth group as allies. Geographically, the fight is decentered--with both sides scattered--though there are recognized schools of the smart (Brown, SUNY Buffalo) and of the sincere (Stanford, Wisconsin, Nebraska). Iowa, a former bunker for scarecrows has become diversified with the inclusion of Swenson (an uber-tin woman) and Dean Young (a fence sitter or throw back to the "raw" school). And what is the war over? The role of theory (or lack thereof), the role of lyricism (or the lack thereof), subject matter (or lack thereof), the role of allusion (what audience should "get it"?), poetic lineages (Whitman for the sincere and Dickinson for the smart; Frost and Williams for the sincere, Stein, Pound, and Oppen for the smart).

What a stinking load this war amounts to. Silliman likes to call the scarecrows the "School of Quietism." Gag me with a Marxist spoon--as if he and his ilk really made a damn bit of difference in the real world with their "politics." The scarecrows, in turn, have become anti-intellectual dipshits and intellectual/cultural isolationists. Can we get over it already? Why choose between thought and lived experience, lyricism and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E? You call this a war? I got a war for you Scarecrows and Tin Men: Poetry Snark versus all of your lame asses.

[Reposted from May '05--because I'm lazy and I felt like it]

Mas Doggerel!

2006-04-08T17:43:00.000-07:00

A bunch of you thought my comment about getting hired by the local paper to write satirical doggerel was a joke. That's understandable. But it wasn't. Here's the link.

Poetry Snark Exposed!

2006-04-01T16:15:00.001-08:00

Cheers.

Brenda Hillman Takes Flight in Iowa City

2006-03-22T12:14:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it begins as a small clinching feeling in the abdomen--other times, a snort and a half-restrained smile. You know the feeling. You're at a poetry reading, and the reader says something so brain-clenchingly pretentious that you have to use every milligram of your willpower to keep from busting a gut amongst the solemn masses. When such stink bombs emit in the voice of Alvin the Chipmunk, the pain is that much more terrible. Yes, I'm talking about a Brenda Hillman reading.

In the first of a two-part national embarrassment, Hillman read last night in Iowa City. Next week, it's the esteemed crew from "Legitimate Dangers" in their bid to win the W.B.A. title in "Syncophantic Logrolling." This first event was just too snarkworthy to pass up, but I wondered how I could make it through without being floored by spasmodic giggling. Then I realized it. The reading was being broadcast over the radio!

Not only that, it was being recorded for posterity and preserved on the net for all to enjoy! Some of you probably have never experienced a Hillman reading, and I wanted to spread the love with a bootlegged podcast from this site. But no need. Now you can hear the worst reading voice in the history of letters in the comfort of your own apartment, where you can roll around on the floor laughing to your heart's content. By the time you read this, the stream will probably be up. Here's the link.

Oh it was everything I could have hoped for and more. It was about halfway through that I realized anything I said would pale before the real article, so I started taking notes.

"It's kind of interesting to hear words as bird-song," Hillman averred, so ever the ideal audience member, Poetry Snark tried. Painfully however, no amount bird imagining could divest Hillman's words of the fact that they are, well... words (you know, those things we use to communicate meaning). But I’m a good sport, and I decided to play along. Lots of poets have their birdy moments. Whitman had his “mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,” Keats had his nightingale, and Coleridge had that spooky albatross thing going on in “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.”

I’m no ornithologist, but there was one feathery moment from my childhood that seemed all Hillman. Yes, I remember the sound… the whining cut-off shriek of a wren (or whatever) as it impacted with the windshield. Later Hillman announced her quest to “spell a birdsong.” Seriously. You can’t make this kind of shit up.

Next came Hillman’s main course and signature theme: astrology. Here are her exact words: “I’m a triple fire-sign. Anybody else know what that means?” Yes, I do know what that means. It means you’re a flake, Brenda. Does that shit even fly in Berkeley? I mean seriously, someone out there must actually like her poems, right? How would even the most ardent “Brenda Hillman fan” have responded to this pronouncement? “Neato! I’m a quadruple air sign. Let’s explode together!” One can only hope.

“I was thinking a lot about air in words,” we were told, and so were we: hot air. Yup, nothing smells quite like avant-garde as much as “air in words” (and its visual Tweedle-Dum, “white space”). Tasty. After sampling said air, Hillman went on to read a poem called “Enchanted Twig.” Much to my dismay however, it turned out not to be about Robert Hass.

Wanted: "Art Snark"

2006-03-19T11:56:00.000-08:00

Well, we have a pretty good Movie Snark in The Filthy Critic....

but where oh where is our Art Snark when we really need him.

Poetry Snark's New Gig, or Snoop Doggy Doggerel

2006-03-16T12:53:00.000-08:00

When I outed myself by doing an interview that was broadcast by Foetry, the last thing I expected was to wind up getting hired by someone. But that's exactly what has happened.

I expected that my friends who already knew that I was Poetry Snark would listen to the interview and tell me what they thought. That has happened. I expected my "not-friends" to listen and eventually out me somewhere, crowing proudly about their "revelation" (oblivious to the fact that the interview was in part a publicity stunt, and that I had already announced right here that I expected to be recognized). That has happened. And I expected that a certain someone obsessed with me and my site would start another flame war and embarrass himself again by coming apart at the seams publicly. That, delightfully, has also happened.

But I didn't expect that the opinion editor of the local paper would hunt me down to discuss a regular column. That's right poetry fans, an editor from the Iowa City Press-Citizen sat down with me over beers at a local pub last night, and we concocted a new feature for their opinion page: vive le snark!

I won't be snarking poets--not even Iowa City has a strong enough public market for that. Rather, I will be contributing a regular piece of doggerel verse snarking politics and current events. It seems the Press-Citizen wants something like Calvin Trillin's "Deadline Poetry" column in The Nation (except they don't want to pay Trillin's syndication fee). It may sound weird, but in ultra-lefty, poetry-friendly Iowa City, it actually makes commercial sense.

So starting soon, yours truly will be revealing Calvin Trillin to be the two-bit hack he really is, as I out-snark him with my mad rhyming skills. My first little bit of Snoop Doggy Doggerel will be printed in a week or so. I'm not sure if these things will be posted regularly on their website, but I'll try to get at least a couple of them posted so that I can link to them from here. Meanwhile, if you are reading this and you live in Iowa City, keep an eye on the opinion section, and let us know what you think. Snark away! For as W.B. "monkey glands" Yeats said in his overrated puff-piece "Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen":

Snark Snarkers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in snarkery.

Cartoon Snark

2006-02-28T13:32:00.000-08:00

Jacket has a pretty funny cartoon up at their site (hat tip to Mr Craig for the heads-up).

"Do we NEED another W.C. Williams on smack?"

It would be better than another W.C. Williams on Zoloft.

Praise Where Praise is Due

2006-02-24T14:57:00.000-08:00

One of the driving motivations for this site has always been to encourage more candor, honesty, and wit in reviews of books of poetry. Now I know that this site is ultimately just another "fart in the whirlwind of the internet," as JP put it in a recent comment here, but hey, what can you do?

So on those rare occasions when I read a review that shows some guts and goes after a stinkbomb of a book or pops somebody's puffed rep, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and I wanna share the love. Unlike Garrick Davis of the Contemporary Poetry Review, Diana Manister has delivered the goods, producing as direct and incisive of a takedown as I've read recently and gracing us with a bit of real Menckenesque snark. Her subject: the very same book Davis disliked but waffled before, Mary Oliver's brain-splittingly awful, Why I Wake Early. I have a few problems with this review (why still give Oliver two and a half stars?) but it says what it means and avoids the deadening niceties that so infest poetry-speak these days.

Her review begins with a sentence that would have made the editors of the old Edinburgh Review proud: "The poet Mary Oliver is the Denny's Restaurant of American poetry: consistent and banal." Yes! Why can't we read more reviews like this?

Other choice morsels:

"A more sanguine poet might also see that the Lord's gift to the gull was probably an infestation of parasites that caused it to scratch..."

"A. R. Ammons, walking the beach in his great poem 'Corson's Inlet' saw 'everywhere life under seige.' Compared to him, Oliver is Mary Poppins."

"Take off your bonnet, Mary, it's too late to live in the Sixteenth Century."

And Manister doesn't let up in the end either, concluding: "Only poetry that asserts the presence of goodness while acknowledging evil can bring comfort in a world where children sent to school may be taken hostage or shot. Little Mary Sunshine doesn't get it done."

Indeed. Props to you, Diana Manister, for bringing it on. I hope I can buy you a beer someday and talk shop. If you ever want to guest post at Poetry Snark, let me know.

Fixed

2006-02-19T15:51:00.000-08:00

I figured out how to move the Revell post so the link works now. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. It's not worth it.

Blood is Back

2006-02-17T11:50:00.000-08:00

Bill Blood -- from the comments section:

hello snark and snarkers and snark-fag-lollis-cum-prep

-brownies, blood sees a mountain ant-astir-- hast thou all forgotten your'n long wish of folding pink unto pink unt pummeling? there is true indecency of spirit here-- wasted zhan/zhan post-nagano stylings of mind and wasted skates-- anorexic of the norman orchard sixteen year olds grappling with baytrail kkk methods in yearbooks. blood has seen sadness shaped like a bead of silicon sealant and seen it sealing a mouth of wonder... hast thou'n all'n seen wonder so shut? has't thou'n lost your keys? Unt wass iss'st zis rigmarole ? Iss'sst iss'st nacht unt oppoortunity fur und mondscheiner key to twist zurlion flesh? I see a mountain top astir with clouds, I see a pale green horse running from the nineteen seventies monobrow, I find difficulty logging my comments, it is hard to read wavy letters and to not feel an overwhelming sense of sadness, spreading the tablecloth, setting the table calling out 1,2,3 UNT yanking the table cloth away. Here the glasses stand, the cutlery und gravy boat, the cake of butter carved into a weeping yellow swan on a TABLE not of ice but of photographed ice, a layer of spray painted ice beneath the real clear layer of ice... frauds are brushes mechanically moved, killing poor blood, sweeping his/her hair back, back unto the center of its back... dogs don't do drugs, they are already on drugs. Why must you put me in my animal head? why must you tilt my head back to see me, changling, dying

Blood chats a suck-of-deer
Sucks it all afield
Carpathians, dynastic rock
645 b.c.e

Live Audio of Poetry Snark Now Up

2006-02-10T14:57:00.000-08:00

So if you're interested, Alan of Foetry now has a podcast interview with me up at his site. As you'll hear, I tell a lot about myself, including the fact that I'm a graduate of the Iowa Death Star. Indeed, I was once christened "senior stormtrooper" in a secret backroom meeting with Jorie "Darth" Graham. My job was to hunt down and kill editors who weren't publishing what we deemed was enough work by Iowa grads. Many an editor who you may think is real is actually a clone of the original, genetically programmed to play along with the syncophancy and cronyism you've come to know and love. And I laughed as I heard them die.

Alan asked if I wanted to use some kind of software to mask my voice, but that seemed dumb. I expect some of you to recognize who I am, but I'm hoping that my friends at least will refrain from outing me in this thread (pretty please). As for my "not friends," the first among you to out me wins a special prize. Muhahaha!

What do you think? You can use the thread for this post or the one at Foetry. We cover a lot of ground--how the Iowa poetry machine works from the inside, the politics of literary tooldom, the godawfulness of Billy Collins and others, the sad state of poetry book reviews, and yes, Darth is discussed a bit.

In part two, to be posted soon, Ginger Pennebaker takes the mic for a while, and I put on my Marxist hat to offer an economic analysis of M.F.A. programs.

Check it.

Foetry Podcasts Poetry Snark

2006-01-21T00:33:00.000-08:00

Last night, Alan of Foetry more or less "interviewed" me for a podcast. Ginger Pennebaker sat in for some of it. It should be up at the Foetry website in a week or two. I'll link to it from here.

Advice to Newbies

2005-11-20T23:42:00.000-08:00

So obviously I've not been posting. I hope to rediscover the great and true heart of Poetry Snark again soon. Right now, I'm not feeling the love. And what about my fellow posters? Where are your lazy asses? Ginger? Trochee?

This post is for people who have heard of Poetry Snark and are wondering what the fuss is about. We have nothing to offer but what the name of our site suggests. Check out the list of "poets snarked" on the left sidebar.

Help

2005-10-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Can someone who knows more about this shit than me explain why all of the images on this site have suddenly vanished? Does the Blogger software automatically delete old images or something? Anyone know?

Rosie O'Donnell: Poet

2005-10-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

Some shit stinks so bad that it snarks itself better than we can. If you're looking for a laugh, check out Rosie O'Donnell's poetry blog.

Why so few posts?

2005-09-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

Every time I notice something snark-worthy passing by in poe-biz--things like the cover of the latest Fence, some really serious shit goes down like Katrina or the Roberts confirmation, and the snark just doesn't seem worth it. If only I was as persistent and mean as H.L. Mencken. Here are a few comments that seem even more true now than they did when he wrote them:

Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Nature abhors a moron.

Amen.

"Let this provision atone...": The Fury of the Contemporary Poetry Review

2005-09-08T00:36:00.000-07:00

I'm back.

Trochee's recent post describes how Garrick Davis, editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review, defended us from some accusations in one of their "letters to the editor." Trochee thanks Davis "for his support of poetry and criticism" -- by which, I take it, Trochee means to indicate Davis's willingness to entertain the virtues of our humble site. That's fine. CPR deserves some credit for maintaining their link to us after we teased them -- and after we were denounced by Exquisite Corpse; because, well, the editors of the Corpse are a bunch of incompetents who apparently don't read the submissions they post to their own site.

But let's be honest: the reviewers at CPR are a part of the problem, not the solution. Even when they manage to attempt a negative review, their timidity renders the review so absurdly apologetic that it's impossible to discern the wish from the wash. Aside from their willingness to link to us -- and let us do the work they praise as "in short supply in these days of logrolling and sycophancy" -- I have seen no evidence that they themselves want to stop the logs from rolling.

Take Sunil Iyengar's recent review of Mary Oliver's Why I Wake Early. Iyengar doesn't like this book, but he's afraid to criticize it. Before offering his commentary, he begs his readers to "Let this provision atone for any negative remarks that follow. In an era as cluttered as ours, a reviewer feels off-target to fault Mary Oliver."

"Atone for any negative remarks"? Oh sinner! Thou hast responded negatively to a poem. That will be 40 lashes, a stick up the ass, and a mandatory 60 dollar donation to the Academy of American Poets.

Let there be no mistake: Mary Oliver is an awful, awful poet. Humorless, witless, devoid of any sense of music, employing flat declarative sentence after flat declarative sentence in an apparent effort to make the prose of a third-grade spelling book appear eloquent and lively, Oliver's "transparency" of language tries to excuse a complete lack of poetic intuition and an audience of readers unable to parse sentences more difficult than "See Spot run." The fact that she received the Pulitzer is an indictment of where we're at.

I get the impression Iyengar knows this. I also get the impression he is afraid of his own teeth. Here he is at his most vicious:

(Confronting this last excerpt, one wants to retort: "Actually, we do mind. We mind that you mind. What's so audacious about the heart / daisy metaphor that we would brook dissent?")

Who cares. I don't mind. You apparently don't mind. Rather, "one" minds. Who is this "one" that minds that Oliver minds? "Daisy metaphor," "brook dissent." Why. Anyone who uses the word "brook" as a critical term in a review of poetry written in the last … oh say 50 years -- can't be taken seriously.

On Being Charged

2005-09-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

One of the letters to the editor posted at the Contemporary Poetry Review by an anonymous reader expresses dismay at Poetry Snark having been a recommended site. We are accused of "hatemongering, misogyny, racism and the like."

I say to this detractor and any others that may share such thoughts that to hate on poetry is not hatemongering. When hate is indeed the expression at hand, then know that there is nothing wrong with hating anything. Like it or not, hate is part of the spectrum of reactions one may experience when confronting any creative work. In poetry, like other arts, hating a work is better than indifference. Whereas a strong feeling like hate may cloud a person's perception, there is a still a level of engagement one is able to employ by which something might be made, improved, dismantled, discredited, et al., indifference generates nothing and leaves vacant the space where conversation, discussion, debate, instruction and other methods of communication may prevail.

Garrick Davis, editor of the CPR, reasonably states he "posted a link to it because "snark" is in short supply in these days of logrolling and sycophancy. I trust that you are not too surprised to find intemperate remarks on a website that clearly labels itself as a clearinghouse for mean-spirited gossip." His posting of our link of course does not designate comradeship or support for our words but he is certainly working in the spirit of engagement rather than indifference or censorship, regardless of what others might think of editors or anonymous writers. It is important to note that while Poetry Snark does enjoy & provide gossip, we do not label ourselves as "a clearinghouse for mean-spirited gossip" but instead hope to carry on some of the snarkier efforts of the old days of the Edinburgh Review but more importantly we are concerned with a lack of venue in which to safely express one's dissatisfaction & disdain with certain poets, books of poetry, poetry venues or anything else poetry.

Our writings are serious but should not be taken as seriously as some of our poor readers seem to do themselves. Humor, for better or worse, is a prevailing factor in our efforts. To be charged with racism is not surprising but one must consider what lurks behind the anonymity. All of us could be Chinese, so our strong statements as found in Poethnic Cleansing II would be self-loathing but hardly racist. I stand by my claim that stereotypes exist for a reason and if a certain ratio of readers continue their misguided political correctness without irony or humor, they will miss much of the point behind any form of satire and complaint.

Thank you to Mr. Davis for his support of poetry and criticism.

Stay tuned as we plan to bring you more snark as we pick up from where we left off.

Paige Morgan Destroys Maxine Hong Kingston

2005-08-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

As I've repeatedly said, the original idea for this blog was to create a community site to snark turgid verse and puffed reps. In case you missed it, Paige Morgan recently offered some masterful snark in the comments section for my most recent post. Despite this person's tame attack on our website (is that the best you can do?) and redundant, misguided grousing that we post under psuedonyms, I thought this snark was damn funny, especially the middle part, so I'm posting the short version here on the front page (If you want the whole thing, read the comments here). So thanks "Paige Morgan." But a warning to you: now that I've included you on the front page, people will begin assuming that you are really me pretending to be someone else, just as they complain that I am really Trochee and the others. Well, what can I say about that claim? It's flattering. But the truth is that I am not only Trochee, Ginger, and Bill Blood, but also Bookslut, Old Hag, Natalie Chicha, Steve Barron, R.C. Bald, Alan Cordle, and yes, even Adam Hardin. But I digress... On to the snark:

Crikey. You people run out of steam that easily? Given that you seemed more interested in people's bad 70's-era photos and fashion than actual poetry crit, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. If you keep going, try publishing under your own names, and find actual things to snark about.

But here, you can have one of my old snarks about Maxine Hong Kingston, as, despite the fact that she isn't trying to be a poet anymore, she's still nuts, and I won't ever take this back.

Maxine Hong Kingston pulled a reverse Laura Riding Jackson, back in 2002, and renounced prose for poetry. She's very open and honest about why she's decided to become (or rather, realized that she *is*) a poet :
1. Poets are always happy.
2. She won't have to plot anymore plots.
3. She'll be free to live and not write any more "longbooks."
4. Poets don't care about money.
5. She wants to be socially irresponsible.
6. Writing poetry is all gift and no labor. The muse flies overhead and drops jewels into poets' hands. All she will have to do is hold up a basket to the sky. Later, she elaborates on this last reason (and I quote): ...fly...I....sky...cry...die...why...fly...fly... All the important words rhyme. They blow out of the sky and all I have to do is write them down. (endquote)

One of the questions that Kingston asks in her poetic genesis is "Why does the muse of lyrical love poetry have a name that sounds so much like error?" (Because it's Greek, you dumbass!) However, it's an even stranger question, because "lyrical love poetry" definitely indicates Erato, and it sounds like she's thinking of Eros, who isn't even a muse. Of course, she pronounces the Latin infinitive "inspirare" as in-SPEAR-ury," so I shouldn't be surprised. But I'm being petty. Why should someone actually have to *know* about western mythology and language in order to question it?

Several poets get name-dropped or quoted throughout the book (Tess Gallagher, Alice Fulton, Gary Snyder), and their view of Kingston's new identity is carefully skirted.

I failed at the reading she gave in Seattle. Any question would have been illuminating, but I fled when it was over. It was surreal -- everyone around seemed to have bought the book, and they'd spent the reading nodding and sighing, and asking, at the end, for advice to young writers of color ("Write every day.") I wish I'd had someone else along to pitch a fit with. Listening to her was certainly interesting -- crystallized some interesting problems and questions about the way people see poetry and prose.

What she doesn't mention in the book is that she was so excited about her realization that she was a poet that she had to tell *everybody* -- so she had dinner with Gary Snyder, Robert Hass, and Brenda Hillman. In the book, quotes from poets are pretty vague in terms of expressing approval or disapproval – she's very careful about skirting that issue. When she told Hass, Snyder, and Hillman her reasons, they apparently threw up their hands and had minor apoplectic fits, and said that what she was proposing wasn't possible. She told us that she isn't going to her poet friends anymore for advice, since they've forgotten that poem, "Never was heard a discouraging word..."

Kingston wants to return to the way she was when she was a baby in order to find poetry again. Not child. Baby. She read us a little four-line poem, and confided that she feels very lucky to be publishing things that she composed at 2 years old. (I personally think that Mattie J. T. Stepanek was writing better stuff in the womb, but I'll leave him out of this--). Since she can't get no satisfaction from her poet friends, our "Poet" decided to go out to Nature, more specifically, to watch some elephant seals. "Taking the day off, I was already acting like the Poet. The prose writer of the longbook never goes on spontaneous outings."
At this point, things got a bit mysterious – halfway through what I thought was an anecdote, I realized she was reading us a poem that she'd written about female elephant seals getting "plopped on" by males, and how relieved the other female seals were because they weren't getting fucked. Oh yes, and the poignancy of the fact that the estrus scent causes massive seal rape, and that the females can't run, because they haven't got any legs (should I have asked, do you suppose, about the males not having legs either?). The subject matter was consistent with themes from women's lit courses: (sexual) oppression, female consciousness and community – I'm mystified as to why she felt this needed to be a poem, as opposed to a prose work.

After that, she read us a poem about a broccoli tree that she'd grown. It went something like this (it's very abbreviated in the book): "I saw the edges of the broccoli leaves like little flames, and I communed with the broccoli, and felt the warmth of its gaze. The broccoli and I were one." I'm not going to try to break up her lines for her.

I'm not kidding about the above phrases -- she really said that she was one with the broccoli. At the end of the broccoli poem, she reminisced about George H. W. Bush proclaiming his dislike for broccoli, and admonished us all, not to trust anyone who doesn't recognize broccoli for what it is. She gets my award for weirdest political insertion of the century, I think.

I'm not familiar with the four-word poetry style that Kingston enjoys writing in; it's apparently an ancient Chinese tradition that appeals to her because "it's easier and faster than haiku." She mentioned Lew Welch's "Raid kills bugs dead," and also suggested "Poets are always happy."

Various people pop up throughout the book to suggest that poets aren't always happy. In one instance, Alice Fulton and a friend try to explain the misery that Fulton occasionally suffers while crafting her work. Here's Kingston: "What can there be that is miserable in the world of Poetry?...Such a small art!...What Poet would call another Poet shit?"

...

Well snarkers, indeed, "What Poet would call another Poet shit?" Maybe we should make that the new Poetry Snark logo.

Please, bring on more good snark, and I'll post it to the front page. Hopefully, this will help tide you all over while I'm taking my little break.

Lost Poets of the 70s: The Anthology

2005-07-26T22:12:00.000-07:00

Yup, the time has arrived. I've drawn this out long enough, I'm sure you'll agree, and now it's time to reveal the name of the "Lost Poets of the 70s" anthology. In a way, this is the book that started Poetry Snark. The original idea came when I saw some of these photos and thought it would be amusing to post them to a blog with commentary. I came up with the name "Poetry Snark" and was shocked that no one had taken it. A phone call to a friend (Trochee) provided me with enough enthusiasm to try it, and the day after the site went up, Foetry linked to us -- how they found us so soon, I have no idea. I'm uneasy about the Foetry crowd, who have sometimes tried to turn this site into Foetry 2.0. But Barron and others have said some pretty hilarious shit, and the hits that link provided really started the site. Now dozens of sites link to us and even now, in semi-hiatus, we still get hundreds of hits a day, totaling around 17,000. In about three months we've had 8,157 unique visitors and 3,532 of you keep coming back for more. I get about an even amount of hate and fan mail. I would like to keep going, and I would like more snarkers on board, so please email me with your comments. Is it worth it? Is it funny? Should I keep snarking on? It's more work than I thought, continuing to come up with snark and keep up with the rest of my life. Let me know what you think in this thread.

But you wanted to know the name of the anthology, not the history of Poetry Snark. It's called New Voices in American Poetry, edited by David Allan Evans and published by Winthrop Press. You may recognize Evans' name from this post, where we snarked his magnum opus "Ford Pickup." Yes, mistuh Evans is one of those editors who feels fit to include himself in his own anthology, which might be forgivable if he was a good editor and poet. As the "Lost Poets" posts have amply demonstrated, he's not. At all. Not even a little bit. Perhaps I owe Todd Swift an apology. This anthology -- and not his Short Fuse: A Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry -- is probably the worst poetry anthology ever.

Would you like to be the proud new owner of the "Lost Poets" anthology?

Send me your snark. You can post it to this thread, or email it to me directly at poetrysnark@gmail.com. Whoever comes up with the funniest snark, gets the anthology -- I'll even pay for the postage. Any snark received is subject to front page posting. C'mon, snarkers, there's got to be some deserving targets you'd like to nail. Bring out the hammer.

Hiatus

2005-07-24T22:46:00.000-07:00

update: MWB reminds me that I've promised to reveal the name of the anthology for the Lost Poets of the 70s. I will keep that promise in the next day or two, when I return to my apartment and my books.

I'm going on a temporary hiatus to catch up with work and take care of some personal business. I'm not sure what our other posters are up to (we live in different cities), but they're welcome to post and indeed I hope they keep things going. I may check back in from time to time, and if anything really snarkworthy comes my way, I'll be on it. Meanwhile, if anyone cares to, you can use this as an open thread to say whatever you want. Viva Poetry Snark!

Where Are They Now? Lost Poets of the 70's: J.D. Whitney's Bad Ass Handlebars

2005-07-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

Well, this may be it, folks. There are some unsnarked photos in the anthology still, but I don't know if any of them fit the bill for our "Lost Poets" series. I've been loathing posting the last of these, because it's by far our most popular feature here at the Snark, and I have no idea what I'll replace it with. Lost poets of the 80s? Anybody got an anthology with some good pictures? Anyway, on to today's bard: J.D. Whitney.

J.D. is short for Jack Daniels Whitney. He was kicked out of the Hell's Angels for tatooing a crown of sonnets onto a fellow Angel's back while he slept. They would have let it slide, but the sonnets employed too many metrical exceptions and didn't even rhyme (most bikers are "New Formalists"). Downtrodden, J.D. took a job with the cast of Lavern and Shirley as Lenny's stunt double. But the job didn't allow enough creative freedom, and Squiggy was a real dick. So Whitey quit and took to the road on his chopper with a knapsack full of verse and a bad attitude. Arrested in Boise for ripping off a liquor store while reciting Keats, J.D. wrote this poem from prision, where he languishes, reliving those halcyon days of hot poetry groupies and the long open road.

I'm counting on all our fearless snarkers to chip in on this one. Please explicate J.D.'s masterpiece for us, and while you're at it, what do you think was on his mind when this photo was taken? Or when he decided to use is as his author photo in the anthology?

Title Snark: Mark Levine Responds

2005-07-14T01:39:00.000-07:00

You produce quality snark so that I don’t have to. From the comments section of our “title snark” post. Enjoy!

How about ENOLA GAY?

It has a sort of lyrical fingering underscoring its tragic occasion.

I wanted to get across the inherent minty pellet of the apocalypse and I think I really scored. You should read this book, I broke a lot of ground, and, not to be to, well, full of myself-- but fucking EVERYONE started ripping me and MY post-nuclear holocaust poem-flavorings off.

I mean ENOLA GAY was someone's mom And ALOT of my poems are mommy poems-- dear mommy-wommy tommy ate a tomato wire and tried and tried to sing with his mouth but his mouth wouldn't open and his shirt was sewn around his army-warmies and then for the seventh night I tried to fuck a mommy-smelling girl who luvy-wuvied me-we.

My next book will be great.

It's called: THE WILDS.

Because I go wild with my poems.

Just like the title says.

WILD,
Mark Levine

Title Snark: A Brief Taxonomy

2005-07-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

I'm at a couple of friends' apartment right now, and boy do these two have a lot of poetry on their shelves. I wanted to try to sneak in some quick snark while I'm on the road, but since I don't have time to actually read some of these (almost certainly awful) books of poetry, I thought that I would engage in some of that ever-popular past-time--judging books by their cover (or at least their titles). So I've composed this list for your snarking pleasure. Check it out, and then add your own "title snark" to the list in the comments section.

The pretentious one-word title. Everybody's favorite poetry-Diva, J.G., is the great abuser of this type of title. Examples: Materialism, Swarm, Never, etc... But it's a very popular mode of poetry titling: think of a vague, one-word abstraction and let it ride! Worst example on the bookshelf here? John Ciardi's Echoes.

The unintentionally honest title. Plenty of example for this one, like Distracted by Jalal Toufic. But the best by far is the title of this anthology, edited by Libbie Rifkin: Career Moves.

The title of the ungrammatical adjective. Nothing seems to delight poets more than titling a poem with a freshly-construed pseudo-adjective. Why this is so, I haven't the slightest clue. But there are several here: The To Sound by Eric Baus, Regarding Wave by Gary Snyder, Monkey Time by Philip Nikolayev. But the worst one has got to be The Heat Bird by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge.

The title as instruction to the reader. Relatively rare, this species of title nevertheless offers some particularly egregious examples of badness. Worst example on the bookshelf? Hugh Prather's Wipe Your Face, You Just Swallowed My Soul.

Finally, I offer the "title that makes use of unusual punctuation marks." Although not as bad about this as po-mo academics, there have been some poets who've succumbed. This one is also the worst title overall, the grand prize winner, the lamest, most laughable title I can find right now: (W)holes by Cynthia MacDonald.

Can you top it?

Coming soon...

2005-07-09T20:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lack of posts. I've been traveling--will be back with some fresh snark soon.

I Never Really Liked Ezra Pound

2005-07-07T23:38:00.000-07:00

A lot of people I know like Ezra Pound. I never really liked Ezra Pound.

Albert Goldbarth's Bad Hair Decade

2005-07-04T13:54:00.000-07:00

"Maybe if I sit here long enough, someone will mistake me for 'The Thinker.'"

You know what to do, fearless snarkophiles--what was Albert Goldbarth pondering when this photo was taken?

Open Letter to the Editors of Poetry (Chicago)

2005-07-02T07:36:00.000-07:00

Dear Editors:

The wonderful thing about poetry is that there are all kinds. Different strokes for different folks. Jorie Graham in conversation with Mark Wunderlich says:

[T]here have always been different kinds of poetry written at any
given moment — what I refer to, sometimes, as an AM track and
an FM track — and a culture needs variety. Some poets are writing
an easy-listening kind of poem — it doesn’t interest me particularly,
but it does interest a large readership. It moves them. They have a
right to be so moved. And those poetries shouldn’t be constantly
compared to poetries that have other aims, other ambitions. No one
accuses rock music of not being jazz, or opera.

Even so, we still aim to raise some poetry above the rest, poetry we feel is stronger, more resonant…better. Taste is a strange beast one must wrestle often in the halls of poetry in getting from one end to the other but many of us have by now learned some tricks, some moves, some methods by which to wrestle taste. Taste, in the collective sense, is like any body of people rich with a range of perspectives; poetry’s singular audience idealistically is anyone who can hear or read but ultimately is broken down according to any number of rubrics dealing with camps, content, tone and whatnot. The worst of the bunch fall by the wayside, maybe are voiced in coffeeshops or written on high school toilet stalls, maybe published in obscure magazines or contentious blogs. We know these unfortunate poetic experiments are no good, even failures, because they lack the vigor, the excitement, the electricity that we hope to get from poetry. Even when a poem does not stun, we hope that it will surprise, interest, tickle, flirt, explain, something/anything. We, the audience, are often drawn to poetry not for its difficulty or its simplicity but because it is a heightened language, because it does more than what we do with everyday speech. We often desire poetry that cannot be written by just anyone but by that poet.

Billy Collins, a knight of the School of Quietude, has become a posterboy for much disparagement. Collins is not my cup of tea but he has written plenty of poems that I consider good, witty and energetic. I don’t know that his work will last into the ages but for now his sardonic humor and his plainspoken ruminations do a few tricks we can all appreciate in the moment. There are plenty of things to disagree with when it comes to Collins the poet, Collins the laureate, Collins the anthologist, but this will happen with any writer. Collins is a busy man and I have noticed that even for a wordsmith willing to risk dull metaphor & trite imagery, he seems to be slipping off the edge of what is good even for grouptaste and into the bin of group therapy wankery. Even Frank O’Hara worked on multiple drafts of his best work; his drawers were filled with one-offs, many of which should never have seen print but his spontaneity in the midst of a busy existence yielded a few gems; the rough edges were polished on many of them and put in volumes that many of us still praise & love even on these hot summer days. Collins seems to be too busy to polish what could be good poems, falling prey to the pressure to produce that being a populist poet laureate apparently produces. I am all for plain speech in poetry; I am all too happy to accept work that is commonplace in its approach but to serve up poetry that lacks any zip, poetry that could have been written by a ten year old (check out Ron Silliman’s blog entry on June 29 for more on this), well, that is just poor taste and bad editing. Your publication of Collins’s “Silence” in the April 2005 issue of Poetry is a fine example of lazy poetry, poetry that should not grace the pages of a journal that has been home to excellent poems like David Wojahn’s “Stalin’s Library Card” (excerpt), Frank Bidart’s “”In the Third Hour of the Night” (excerpt), even Collins’s own “Writing in the Afterlife”. In the interest of serving the readers’ interests and maintaining the quality of Poetry, I offer my own “Silence”, one that might be better or worse according to your taste; whatever the case, you will find that it is pretty much the same.

Silence

There is the rush of silence tamping
the child as he hits the pavement,
and the silence of the sniper.

The silence of the girl
after her father leaves the bedroom,
the silence of the house when it is not a home.

The stillness of the car and the driver beside it,
the silence of the bar after closing
and the mute sun passing over the dim day’s din.

The silence of the telephone
and the surrounding hours,
the silence on the other end

when you finally call;
one silence broken
with news of another —

on the news they say it was a robbery
but I know you were shot for not keeping your mouth shut,
silence a gift you did not have but were given.

AT
Austin TX
July 1, 2005

A New Body Bag for the Exquisite Corpse

2005-06-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

I was too nice in my recent comment. To be honest, I was holding back because of their link to us, but here's the truth: the Exquisite Corpse is a journal run by a bunch of has-been insider dipshits. The old Exquiste Corpse had at least one cool feature: the "body bag" section where they listed and sometimes snarked their rejected poets. They would also collage lines from rejected poems into exquisite corpses of a sort, which was a pretty original thing to do with rejected work. The poems they actually published have sucked for as long as I've seen the journal. A lot of crap by people trying to sustain their pet movements--neo-beat poetry, neo-Black Mountain School. Partisan hackery. Drivel (now with cutesy introductions beneath the inks). And t' boot--they cut their one cool feature--the "body bag" is no more.

Then there's this: remember how I said that we were listed as the top site in their "hot links" section? And I teased them--and ourselves--a little in the process? I guess they couldn't take it, tame as it was. Now, if you go to their ever-so-cleverly-named "hot links" section, you see this at the top of the list:

"Sincere apologies to those of our unsuspecting readers who followed the recent Poetry Snark link from our website and were treated to a pile of talentless and offensive dribble. We'll screen link requests far more thoroughly from now on!"

Rock! Exquisite Corpse hates us! Does this come straight from the mouth of Andrei Codrescu, or is it from some lesser crony? I wonder what they found offensive. I wish they would have told us so we would know where we're succeeding. Regardless, I'm thrilled to be snarked by the Corpse, pathetic and uncreative as their snark may be. Let me call your attention to something else: Trochee sent out a few requests to random journals to link to our site, and Exquisite Corpse took him up on it apparently without even looking at our blog! You tell me, gentle readers--has the content of this site changed that significantly in the last two weeks, when they first listed us as a "hot site?" Yeah, better "screen more closely," EQ. No wonder you suck so bad--do you even read your submissions? Apparently, you just publish (or link to) ones with titles that catch your eye.

The same day the Corpse took down the link, the far more traffic'd Contemporary Poetry Review (http://www.cprw.com) listed us as their recommended site of the month. Whatever. We also had the most visitors ever by far that same day. I wonder how long we'll last on the Contemporary Poetry Review. And also, did they check out the blog before linking to us? Do you really love us CPR? Well, whether tis true love or not, just to satisfy my curiousity, will you post a comment to this thread and just say that yes, you checked out this site before posting the link?

The Search For The Drunkest Poet In The World!

2005-06-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

"I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink." -Guy Debord

We all know that poets are for the most part notorious drunks, but who is the greatest drunkard in the history of poetry? Berryman with his besotted sonnets? How about Baudelaire? Hart Crane? You know, one anagram for "Dylan Thomas" is "Thy Soma Land." Of course there's always Poe. And I'm sure Catullus liked to tie one on now and then. So, folks, who in your mind is the worst drunk in the history of poetry, and why? Anybody from Sappho up to now is fair game. "When poets drink they surely fall, / but who's the fellest of them all?" Come on folks, this poll is easy as pineapple rum.

Gary Sange's Dissatisfied Urn

2005-06-27T16:51:00.000-07:00

What's up with these 70s poets and their deadly-flat lines? Did someone tell these people to avoid sounding musical at all cost? Is the goal for the poem to be so lifeless and boring that it countered the extravagance of the decade? The only effort at anything resembling lyricism here is "I stare / into the steaming dark I sip / and still cannot exhaust your urn." No wonder Sange and his wife broke up--If the dude couldn't exhaust my urn, I would have dumped him too. Oh wait, he's talking about his coffee cup, and he's the one who dumped her.... my bad. But for truly awful writing, try this "The cacti / on the windowsill / will need water / in three more days." May the Gods of poetry smite Sange down for such lameness. May Adam Hardin be your best reader! My Todd Swift design your website! And may your sideburns eat your chin! Use this thread to either a) curse Gary Sange and the poem he rode in on or b) attempt to write an even flatter stanza than the one I just quoted.

Poetry's Biggest Tool

2005-06-24T15:58:00.000-07:00

And the winner is (sound of a snare drum rolling).... Who the hell knows. Only about 15 of you peeps actually voted--despite my repeated pleas and the increasing traffic this blog is getting as a result of being listed as the top "hot site" at Exquisite Corpse (ooh, I feel so hot!) (Didn't that used to be a respected journal? They must have really sunk if they're linking to a site like this.) We had some nominations outside those I mentioned: Karen Volkman got a vote and Sarah Manguso got two. Joshua Clover and Todd Swift tied for the most mentions. Clover also received a comment from "Jorie" who informs us that his tool really isn't all that big (she should know, I suppose). Across the pond, it seems Mark Ford is known for toolish ways. So who knows--the competition is thick, and our readers (that's you) seem to be a pack of lazy bums.

Coming soon! I dug up another lost poet of the 70s, leaving us with two remaining. Also, a little bird has been enouraging me to snark Mr. Aaron "thanks Brenda!" McCollough. Ask and you shall receive!

New Feature at the Snark

2005-06-23T13:04:00.000-07:00

Oh we love you so much. So much that I bothered to update this blog's template to include a new feature: our handy list of "poets snarked." Want to see who we've gone after? Now it's all in one convenient list of links in the sidebar to the left.

Stunning Wankery from Canada: Todd the Swift

2005-06-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

I'm not ready to crown a winner yet for our "Biggest Tool in Poetry" jubilee (see below), but I want to pause to note some truly stunning toolishness from one Todd the Swift. I wrote about this guy earlier when I described the Worst Anthology Ever -- which Swift helped edit -- a shit-heap declaring a new generation of "fusion poets" who unite the ever-chummy worlds of Anglophone poetry. In other words, Swifty Todd and his two-bit Canadian cronies were feeling a little penis envy toward their big brothers to the south, and, in an effort to imply that their mere presence in an anthology with American poets meant they were not really big-frog-in-a-small-pond wannabes, published Short Fuse, an anthology celebrating slam "poets" side-by-side with what the editors insist on calling "flat poets"--a phrase which I initially took to refer to lady poets with tiny boobs, but which turns out to mean all poets who are not slam poets. Only problem is: the sole American poet in this turd-tome who anyone has heard of is Ron Silliman, and Ron's not exact reserved about pimping his LangPoop.

I'm not kidding about this shit: go look at the book yourself. Well, now it turns out that Todd the Swift has a second anthology of Fusion poetry called Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poets. Oh great, just what the poetry world needs: more "fusion" with Canadians. But there's one thing that publishing anthologies full of crap will do for you, which is earn you friends in low places. Like Salon.com, for example, where Swift has a piece of spoken word voiced-over music, which harkens back to those halcyon days when beret-clad, proto-goth rebels would chant their verses over equally loathsome bongos and sitars. If you want to hear something that defines new depths of pretension and melodrama, go check it out.

But what's really stunning is Todd's website. This came up in our "Biggest Tool" thread, but I want to promote this on the front page so none of you miss this truly vomit-wrenching display of self-aggrandisement. It's called the "Official Web Site of Todd Swift" (where are the unofficial ones?) First of all, you know those little banners that news sites use to promote headlines? These are the things made to resemble ticker tape, where top stories or stock quotes will scroll by for your perusal. Well Swift has one to greet us at his site, and it reads: "'Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas and Paul Muldoon rolled into one' -- Kevin Higgins." Yup, it's nice to know Todd has such a modest regard for himself. And who the fuck is Kevin Higgins? Somewhat below that, he has a moody-looking picture of himself clutching his hair with the caption "Portrait of the artist as a young man." At the top of the page, is another picture, this one apparently intended to remind us of the kind of genius Swift resembles: it's that famous picture of Orson Wells chewing on his pipe as he stares us down. On the left side of the page, we find links to pages of totally unknown people saying incredible things about his books. He manages to find flunkies to compare him to Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg, and he has the gall to publish the quotes from total unknowns in long catalogues on his site. But Todd's a poet, so at least it's all for art, right? Lest we think Swift has anthing in mind but poetry, I'll leave you with this quote, also found on Todd's site: "Swift is at once both [sic] charming, witty and brilliantly razor-tongued, and would make the ideal radio guest or print media interview subject. Book him while you can!"

Don't forget to vote in our poll below.

Best One-line Snark Ever...

2005-06-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

For sheer panache, Oscar Wilde has to hold the crown for the greatest single line of snark ever. Sure, he's only snarking interior design, but he gets major, major points since these were the last words he ever spoke. Oscar Wilde's final utterance:

"Either this wallpaper goes, or I do..."

Don't forget to vote in the poll below.

Who is Poetry's Biggest Tool?

2005-06-17T12:52:00.000-07:00

Everyody likes a good poll, so here's one from Poetry Snark, to you, with love. Who is poetry's biggest suck-up? I'm not talking about the Power Brokers but the power-broker wannabes, the aspiring next generation of fingers-on-the-pulse academic cronies, puffing the pipe of worshipful conformism in the name of an inflated career. So who is the most snivelingly pathetic, butt-smooching, over-ranked young playa in poe-biz? I'm going to suggest a few contenders below. Vote for one of these, or suggest your own in the thread for this post. We'll crown the lucky winner in a week or so. My suggestions for the throne, in no particular order:

a) Brian Henry
b) Todd Swift
c) Aaron McCollough
d) Joshua Clover

Your choice? Your alternate nominee? Your tale of horror?

Babylon Ron

2005-06-14T23:19:00.000-07:00

Update: If you haven't done so already, you really need to check out Bill Blood's "comment" in the thread for this post. Seriously, you won't want to miss this one...

Ron Ikan is sad sad sad... and so are we! Ron is our second-to-last Where Are They Now? Lost Poets of the 70s feature here at the Snark. I've been saving a good one for last, and then we will announce the anthology from which I stole these and propose a contest to see who will win it! Meanwhile, here's poor Ron Ikan, who has endured those sideburns since the age of 4, when his big sister, Lon Ikan, glued them there as a joke. The torture that ensued from the hazing he received from his preschool playmates turned Ron into a poet -- in time, a working man's poet -- full of mind-numbingly unmusical declarative sentences and ire toward the film industry. Well, you know what to do... I expect some good snark on this one, as there is only one left to go: what's the big R thinking in this photo?

Guess Can't Gallop

2005-06-13T11:52:00.000-07:00

The devolution of the example of Gertrude Stein is a sad thing to behold. Where Stein's work manifested a constant meditative attention to language and the nuances of its polysemy, today's Steinophiles present us with mechanical parades of puns. Where Stein's sense of humor was always more sexy and snarky and subtle than anyone around her -- recall her famous description of Ezra Pound as being "a village explainer, excellent if you are a village, but if you are not, not" -- today's Steinians come off as minor court wits, unwilling to offer anything vaguely threatening or pointed for fear that it might offend the ruling powers behind hiring committees and grant applications. And where Stein's poems ranged from the compressed gems of Tender Buttons to sprawling testaments to her endlessly generative imagination like The Geographical History of America and Stanzas in Meditation, today's Frankensteiner's are one-trick ponies riding their little rocking horses o'er the plains. Now along comes Brenda "squeaky" Hillman's pick for the New Issues Poetry Prize, Heidi Lynn Staples, and her book, Guess Can Gallop -- another Language Schoolish wet kiss to Stein's sense of wordplay and linguistic phenomenology -- but this horse don't run; the "guess" here plods instead of gallops. We get poems of substitution not concentration, of jokiness not real wit (that is to say, intelligence accompanying language), and the imagination at work is a tepid wallflower of safety and routine.

Heidi Lynn's staple device in Can't Gallop is a simple one: take a normal, dick-and-jane sentence and substitute homonyms or sound-alike portmanteau words for the original ones, then line up said substitutions in arbitrary sequences. So we get groaner after groaner like: "Somethings he forgets what is a Fish; / The others joke that he is hard of Herring." We get faux metaphysics: "The zero was where anyone is. None by none, / worlds grew off, and that should have told me / somebody." And we get a monotonous stream of colloquialisms put through the wringer of cookie-cutter sound associations like: "coming up for err," "it was her whirred against mine," and "our father who arts in thieving." I'm not kidding -- her linguistic "play" is that obvious and simple-minded. Yet Joyelle McSweeney at The Constant Ass-kissing calls Staples' technique in these poems "Shakespearean," Deanne Lundin claims she "skirts the unspeakable," and LangPo's least amusing hack, Charles Bernstein, heralds her "relentless pursuit of swerving meaning." This is what poetry criticism has come to in this country: somebody manages to publish her extended poetic knock-knock jokes in a book, and we're told to compare it to Shakespeare... Yeah, right. "Skirts the unspeakable," "Shakespearean." Gotcha.

Heidi's lint staples can't even hold down the dust. Too right in this tile is a Pisa cake. You jest-steak sum words an you no watt two due: change them too wons that sound like the wands you had be fore, butt which mine different things.

So here's to you High-D Ho! As a poet, you are a tedious pun-pusher, but I'll say this much for you: I'll bet you would make a formidable player of corny word games. May I never cross your path in a Mad Lib tournament. You would kick my ass.

Live Snark: A Brief Look at Heckling

2005-06-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

Whenever people discuss poetry slams, they most often talk about the mediocrity &/or freshness of the poets, the scoring system and how slams have opened up the medium to a wider audience. No one really gets on about the hecklers, some of which are better than the poets they heckle at one liners, inventive metaphor and performance. So, here is a little something for the hecklers, those snarling dogs in the audience.

One reason there may not be much talk about the hecklers is because often the audience cannot hear them nearly as well as the poet on the stage can and very few poets are going to recount what sort of punishment they have been given. Also, despite slam's supposed encouragement of heckling, most audience members still have the dated notion that all poetry readings should be quiet and respectful. It is as if people in general have forgotten that poetry can be exhilirating like the chanting of "more, more, more" at Ginsberg's reading of "Howl".

The best hecklers riff off the words of the poet/performer on stage, turning their words against them in witty retorts or caustic challenges. There is an art to heckling that the white-caps and the dullards do not understand, a quality that goes beyond booing, barking, guffawing and insult. Much like the art of the come-back, heckling requires a quick trigger and a boldness.

It is difficult to capture the essence of live snark. Imagine reciting a poem on a stage with a couple of beers in your gut before an audience of about 60 people and someone throws out a line that is funny and better than one of your important lines. Can be a pretty soul-crushing experience. A good slam poet will either improvise or keep going though some people turn tail and run, which is part of the reason for allowing heckling. It gives the audience the opportunity to rid themselves of something that is not worth their time. A great moment is when a slammer will abandon their poem to direct their poetic chops at a heckler much like a comedian dueling with an audience member. In this sense, slams and comedy shows are not much different.

Please use this thread to tell us about any live snark action you have witnessed or engaged in. In the future we will have more reports on this phenomenon.

Peter Cooley is an Intense Little Dude

2005-06-08T11:46:00.000-07:00

This guy is just "famous" enough to not qualify for our "Where Are They Now?" series, which is to say, I have at least heard of him. I have no idea what his poems are like, except for the ones in this anthology, which seem to be about mummies and grizzly bears. Whatever. We at Poetry Snark think Peter Cooley is an intense little dude. What's behind that stare? Use this thread to tell us what you imagine is going on inside the mind of Peter Cooley.

Giving Samuel Menashe the Fork

2005-06-07T23:28:00.000-07:00

The Library of America is well-known for putting out travesties of collections such as their selected poems of Ezra Pound as well as work by poets that may seem to be of some interest to some folks who read poetry but mostly for the wrong reasons. Coming October is another waste of paper, the selected poems, edited by Christopher Ricks, of Samuel Menashe, as if a living poet unheard of, excepting but a handful of poets, needs a collected and at least a couple of selecteds. If he lives long enough, he will become the only one of two writers to be published by the LOA when alive (the other was the infinitely more talented Saul Bellow).

Sam is an old poet and has lived in New York City for most of his life. It is refreshing to note that the man does not use a typewriter or a computer but writes by hand with his trusty pen. Indeed, an NY Times article from October 2003 expresses the temptation to "regard Mr. Menashe as an heirloom from a more colorful era." But what good is an heirloom if the whole family is dead? One of the last of the poets who fought in WWII, Menashe is most definitely a fossil but hardly one worth saving. Even when the lightness of his verse delves to address headier subjects like Judeo-Christian mythos or the nuances of simple living, his poetry is as inspired as the classroom assignments of stoned middle schooler. Here is an example taken from the current issue of Poetry, that fortress of mixed emotions and questionable taste:

Descent

My father drummed darkness
Through the underbrush
Until lightning struck

I take after him

Clouds crowd the sky
Around me as I run
Downhill on a high---
I am my mother's son
Born long ago
In the storm's eye

Let us take a look at this poem. It would seem this is an Oedipal poem about birth and sex. The father has sex with the mother until conception. Either the speaker takes after the father by pursuing the mother or that he at least gets it on, and as he gets down, he gets high as in he's in the clouds. The poem ends with a reminder that we are born by "descending" (coming down the ancestral tree through our parents or as a fertilized egg from momma's ovaries) from the clouds of the storm where daddy's hammer struck.

What a load of shit. This story was better when it was called Greek mythology in all of its glory. Unfortunately, Menashe's poetry often harks back to a simple clarity of word & sound in the hope that it might be forgiven for its hackneyed subject matter, its poor unimaginative attempts at metaphors (metaphors beautiful captured by the world's many mythologies). Samuel Menashe is a hack. It is little surprise that the two champions of dumbed-down poetics, Dana Gioia and Billy Collins, sing his praises. Without a hint of irony, Menashe is self-described as "an accidental bohemian", which Gioia eats up, claiming that Menashe is "a throwback, preferring not to teach or to work at a literary publication," as if that makes one a bohemian. It just means Menashe prefers other kinds of work (though he did teach briefly) which is true of most poets despite what so-called current conventional wisdom would have you believe. If being relatively ascetic (poor?) in a small apartment doing odd jobs is bohemian, then students, indie rock kids, not to mention entire enclaves of select minorities and a good percentage of the urban middle class are bohemian.

Menashe is another example of a forgettable poet that won't be forgotten, not just yet. But here's to sticking a fork in this guy, hoping that the dreaded bad poetry hydra is fresh out of sprouts.

Agent Trochee Presents: Tribute to the Snark of Lord Byron

2005-06-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

George Gordon, better known to us as Lord Byron, self-published his first book, Hours of Idleness, in 1807, when he was 19 years old. This early collection was given a dismissive (some would say, savage) review in The Edinburgh Review (click here for an excerpt). The masterful snark penned anonymously by one Henry Brougham (who, in 1816, was the equivalent of Lady Byron's divorce lawyer) begins:

The poesy of this young lord belongs to a class which neither gods nor men
are said to permit. Indeed, we do not recollect to have seen a quantity of
verse with so few deviations in either direction from that exact standard.
His effusions are spread over a dead flat, and can no more get above or
below the level, than if they were so much stagnant water.

That is some good hearty snark.

Byron at the time was working on a satire entitled British Bards but the review got him hot and bothered - he renamed and reworked what was to become his first major poem, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. This spectacular example of [counter-]snark, with great force of wit and vituperation, takes shots at a large number of contemporary and past poets and critics including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander Pope (who was his poetic hero and model) and Robert Southey (whom he despised). Let me leave you with an excerpt from the poem:

Next comes the dull disciple of thy school,
That mild apostate from poetic rule,
The simple Wordsworth, framer of a lay
As soft as evening in his favourite May;
Who warns his friend "to shake off toil and trouble,
And quit his books, for fear of growing double";
Who, both by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose,
Convincing all by demonstration plain,
Poetic souls delight in prose insane;
And Christmas stories tortured into rhyme,
Contain the essence of the true sublime:
Thus when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of "an Idiot Boy";
A moon-struck silly lad who lost his way,
And, like his Bard, confounded night with day,
So close on each pathetic part he dwells,
And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the "idiot in his glory,"
Conceive the Bard the hero of the story.

More Lame Snark: The Chronicle's Hit Piece on Foetry

2005-06-02T22:13:00.000-07:00

OK, it's not really snark--it's trying to be serious criticism--but it is lame. Two people who I've never heard of have taken it upon themselves to make this pronouncement about Foetry in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "we need to carefully consider how we arrived, as a culture of creative people, at a moment in which a Web site as reprehensible as Foetry would find an audience at all."

Give me a fucking break. Oh, we're such a "culture of creative people," let's feel really superior now as we contemplate how reprehensible Foetry is. Oh that foul beast! I sniff upon Foetry and their recommendation that poetry contests do the same thing we are recommending they do! The careers they've ruined! The sterling reputations they've cast into utter disarray! How will these contest judges survive such ignominy? A pox upon Foetry! The Chronicle of Higher Education hath uttered its decree.

And I thought Foetry took itself too seriously. Foetry is guilty of some things: occasional self-pity and whinyness are two that come to mind. But at least Foetry doesn't ponder a question as stupid as why a site exposing fraudulent contests has gained an audience. Let me give "Casteen the Fourth" (that's his real name!) and Genoways a clue about why Foetry became popular: because cheating people out of their money sucks ass! Asking why Foetry found an audience is either staggeringly naive or snivelingly pompous, depending on whether these two really believe in what they're saying. A far better question than why Foetry is widely read is why officially-sanctioned academic outlets like the Chronicle are only now acknowledging the stench that's been under their noses. Maybe if organizations like A.W.P. and the Chronicle of Higher Education had been doing their jobs in the first place, Foetry wouldn't have gained the audience that so astonishes these two writers.

Where Are They Now? Lost Poets of the 70s: Elton's Meat

2005-05-31T12:17:00.000-07:00

Mmmmm... Oh Elton! What a fine feast thou hast for us! Your "meal piece" makes my mouth dribble! And you look like such a sweet boy. Sure, Sam Cornish could have kicked your ass, and Mark Strand got more action, but you are the Lost Poet of the 70s who we would vote "Most Likely to Star as an Extra on the Brady Bunch." And your poem? I'll let our fearless snarkers decide in the comments section of this post.

The Philosophy of Poetry Snark, Part II: On Anonymity

2005-05-29T21:59:00.000-07:00

I saw some peeps talking about Poetry Snark on this message board, and there was some back and forth about anonymous blogs. So I thought I would go over this one more time.

First of all, anonymity has always played a vital role in the blogosphere. Many, many bloggers use pseudonyms. This is nothing new. Anonymity on blogs is, of course, in many ways an outgrowth of the medium: the fact is, in the vast majority of cases, you can't really tell if someone is telling the truth about their identity anyway, hence all the concern about pedophiles, etc. If I wanted to, I could easily make up a "real" identity behind Poetry Snark and announce it. As long as I didn't use someone's real name, there would be no way of knowing the difference. In fact, when Silliman told us he wouldn't post a link to this blog unless I provided him with a real name, I thought briefly about sending him some random name. I decided that would have been lame, so no link for us...

Secondly, as one commenter on the message board I just mentioned put it: "There's a sort of art in itself to the pseudonym." I don't pretend to any of the pseudonymical genius of Robert Frost, Henry Dagger, or R.C. Bald, but their blogs are fucking hilarious and make brilliant use of the media's fundamental anonymity.

Finally, as Trochee discussed in a previous post, anonymity can be a healthy corrective for what I've elsewhere called the "cult of niceness" infecting American poetry. It is only in the 20th-century that signing one's name to literary reviews became the norm. If you take the time to look back to previous eras--times when poetry enjoyed a healthier relationship to public audiences and a more prominent cultural role--you'll find that many, many reviews were anonymous. In some of the snarkiest and best journals, like the Edinburgh Review (our favorite), most reviews were anonymous. Also, the stakes are pretty low here: nobody sitting on a tenure committee or with their hands on the grant money is going to take a blog like Poetry Snark seriously. And it's not like we're making serious accusations or attacking peoples' ethics or their fundamental characters. We think the poets we snark can handle it just fine, and it they can't, that says more about them than it does about us. As anyone reading our comments sections can tell, we welcome all snark and delight in all the snark you all have heaped on us (and that we here heap on each other). So snark on, snarkers, for as Yeats once put it, "we traffic in snarkery." (Hmmm, something tells me ol' "monkey glands" Yeats wouldn't have liked this blog...)

In Praise of Good Snark On Some Bad Snark

2005-05-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

In the most recent issue of The Nation, Lee Siegel laid into Camille Paglia's newest barnstormer, Break, Blow, Burn. His article, Look at Me, is a magnificent blast of snark against the self-maligning agitation that Paglia seems to fall more & more victim to.

In her newest book, she tackles poetry and attempts to make the claim that contemporary poetry is no longer ambitious and that poets no longer hope to nor are able to speak for & about their generation(s). Well, this is one of the book's premises. Paglia always struck me as a diminished & corrupted version of Susan Sontag. Sontag brilliantly utilized her intelligence in polemical fashion, always keeping pace with the literature of her day while harking back to the past, all the while provoking the rest of us future participants in the life of culture to act. Paglia once had some of this spirit but has resorted instead to attempting to pursue that mythical quality of balance, always trying to find some kind of bridge by contrariness to all things. I don't usually care for reconciliation or compromise but any critic who cannot look to the present to speak of the present has no business shovelling shit on my plate and calling it steak. Especially when it delves into self-snark, something that is noted by Lee Siegel:

"[...] Paglia's Emersonian pronouncements on the inestimable value of the individual began to sound as adolescent as Emerson at his most solipsistic. And celebrity started exacting its usual toll on Paglia in the form of self-exaggeration and self-parody. The thoughtful gadfly became a performing gabfly; her provocations declined into insults; her once-gratifying affirmations of individuality, imagination and incalculable experience began to sound like playground shouts of Look at Me. Paglia's vituperative ranting against hate-speech laws now seemed like arguments for why they should exist. She seemed to be precisely the kind of old-fashioned bully who had given rise to the new fragility and its search for protection, and for its own sources of power."

Paglia's new book makes the claim that "poetry was at the height of prestige in the 1960s. American college students were listening to rock music but also writing poetry. [...] [O]ver the following decades, poetry and poetry study were steadily marginalized by pretentious 'theory.'" Oh, if only this was true. The truth of the matter, despite all the talk of LangPo, to pick on one example, there is a good deal more poetry written outside of the parameters of 'theory', a fact duly made clear by coffeehouse readings stuffy with sonneteering Beat-inspired drek, slam poetry competitions with their WWE atmosphere of witless bawdiness & clunky politicizing, and countless zines running the fence along formalism and experimentalism, all poison, all lacking in notions of precedence and innovation. Paglia seems woefully trapped in the 1960s without a hint of irony that the waves have already crashed and the tide receded, to paraphrase the late Hunter S. Thompson, and so she turns to some of the great poems of the English language of the past. This irony is wonderfully articulated by Siegel:

"Writers and lovers of poetry would be aware, too, that the situation Paglia is describing is a figment of her publicity-deprived imagination. For one thing, her golden age of the 1960s, far more than our own moment, shook with mandarin anxiety that poetry, and high culture in general, was being snuffed out by the counterculture. For another, if a "crisis" exists in poetry, it's the same trying circumstances that prevail in the world of art in general.We live in a prosperous society that offers plenty of free time for the coddled children of the middle and upper-middle class (and beyond), a society where there are more college-educated people than at any time in modern history. And so there are now more people than at any time in human history who are, understandably, seeking to escape the primordial curse of uncreative human labor by--usually thanks to their parents' financial support--trying to make various kinds of art."

Siegel does not stop there however; and here is perhaps the height of his anti-Paglia snark (my italics):

"The result is an expanded market, a huge inflation of artistic output, and a sharp intensification of competition. There are probably no fewer worthwhile poems, novels and paintings now being made by gifted people than there ever were. But there's a vast increase in desperate, ego-driven shit, of which Paglia's book happens to be a good example. Overproduction makes it harder for good work to get noticed, and thus harder to find. And because the old aesthetic criteria have been relativized--or marginalized--by new conditions that we can barely understand or articulate, it's also more difficult to recognize real art when we do see it."

I will let you read through the article to read the delectable bits Siegel picks out of Paglia's books and puts under the snarkoscope. It is not only, unfortunately, believable that such poor, misguided criticism should find its way onto so many slaughtered tree-guts but it is also terribly sad that Paglia clearly lacks the imagination she attempts to stir in us readers, falling back on variations of freshman-paper tropes such as claiming that "Shakespeare's mobile eye prefigures the camera" without even realizing that the eye is a natural camera; if only she had listened more carefully to her own times so that she might have learned from the prophet McLuhan and realized that the camera is an extension of our eye, that one's eyes cannot prefigure a camera but rather a camera is made to aid our eye & memory while Shakespeare's timeless treasures do the same with much less equipment and good deal more imagination unlike our poor Camille Paglia, hag and saint of her own travesty.

My friends, Lee Siegel not only has done a commendable job but he has also exposed one of the great problems of people addressing poetry: a complete lack of awareness of the subject. Rather than take oneself to task, one like Paglia prefers to make a fuss, to invent a crisis, which in the end, only makes one look stupid and pathetic. Siegel 1, Paglia -1

The Stick Up David Smith's Butt

2005-05-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

If the stick up David Smith's butt was this big in the 70s, you can imagine how big it must be now. Use this thread to suggest what Mr. Smith was thinking while this photo was being taken.

Worst Anthology Ever?

2005-05-24T19:47:00.000-07:00

Have any of you seen this anthology with the dangerous, dangerous title: Short Fuse: A Global Anthology of New Fusion Poets? It’s got to be the worst anthology in... well, you decide. The cover sports what looks like a mob of pissed-off Wobblies raising books in the air—presumably of “fusion poetry”—in what I assume is a march upon the ivory towers of academia… or something. This militant air of faux rebelliousness foresees its contents. One might reasonably ask what (besides putrid verse) is being “fused” by this newly-invented school of “fusion poets?” Well, according to the introduction it’s two things: a) slam poets and “flat” poets; and b) the international anglophone poetry community. Let’s pause a moment to snark both of these endeavors, shall we?

Reading it, I wondered how this anthology could be so truly, odiously bad until I read the introduction and realized that half of the wankers I had been perusing were slam poets being put into print. Big names like Bob Holman get slapped together with nobodies, and you know what?—it’s impossible to tell the difference. Bob Holman is a big, NYC-class hack. He has a tin ear and an adolescent's sense of metaphor. Think bad prose with line breaks meant to be read loudly to dumb, upper-middle-class hipsters. And to have to actually READ these things instead of hear him shout them at you while you are at least drunk (you hope) is a nauseating experience. Here's what he says of himself in the anthology's bio: “Bob Holman has been a central figure (as anthologist, apologist, emcee, and impreario) in the reemergence of poetry in contemporary English-language culture.” I kid you not. If this is poetry’s “reemergence,” then somebody kick it’s scrawny ass hard enough to make it crawl back into whatever hole it was in before Holeman came along. Let it die in peace. And more importantly, quiet.

But what I’m really wondering is who came up with this term: “flat poets." Is this a coinage of these editors (Todd “not so” Swift and Philip “like the other anthology” Norton)? Or is ol’ Snark so out-of-the-loop that I don’t know that this is a widely-used coinage? Hacks like Holman and his band of East Village syncophants don't deserve to be read—and the notion that their "work" makes other poetry look flat by comparison would be funny if they were kidding. They're not. Somebody pinch me and tell me to wake up. Or at least tell me in the comments section of this post that people don’t actually use the term “flat poets” at the Bowery Poetry Club or wherever these carrion feeders roost.

Then there’s this fusion of the “anglophone poetry community." To which I say: what fucking community? Bringing together English-language poets from across the pond? Right. Like that’s really going to happen. American poets don’t give a flying fuck about British poets (the reverse may also be true; I have no idea). Some have a residual respect for the Irish, but contemporary British poets aren’t even on the map over here. So you have some guy named Simon Armitage who sells books like a popular novelist? Never read him. Does he suck as bad as Billy Collins? And Canadian poets? We’re about as impressed by Canadian poets as we are by Canadian movies. Or painters. Or beer. (etc.) Don't believe this “Anglophone community” thing. But pick up Short Fuse: A Global Anthology of New Fusion Poets—don’t buy it! But pick it up sometime at the store and read a few pages. Then come back here and tell me if I'm not right.

Use the Snark, Bald

2005-05-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

The Snark is all around you. This post is written for R.C. Bald, who is now feeling its strength, but really, it is here for all of us. It has always been here waiting for you to come to it, to know it, befriend it. Listen to Bald:

"Friends ... I feel an odd imbalance lately of a most peculiar nature that seems to be infecting the very marrow of my bones. Yes, yes, the more I wax discursive on the subject of that most beloved figure in the attic Pantheon, yes, friends, I speak of Poetry, the more I feel roused to formidably establish her defense from would-be defilers. I have odd & heretofore foreign compulsions to verbally bludgeon, if you will, those that would make a Jezebel of her. All of this snarking business in which I have lately played such a fervent role seems to be tinting the nature of my critical eye, yes, so much so that where I once saw compassion & the slow & gradual obligation to aid the uninvested towards poetic salvation, I now feel compelled to whip them, to throw the lash of vitriol across their obstinate backs until they break, squawking out..."

Hear me, Bald. You must learn to use the Snark. It has powers you can only dream of. There are things that the lyric can never teach you. Only the dark side can save your beloved muse, young master. Soon Lord Snark will prove victorious over this Kosmos. Join us, Bald, and there shall be peace and justice throughout the land. Only with the power of the Snark can you save your beloved, Poetry.

Where Are They Now? Lost Poets of the 70s: Smoking Sam Cornish

2005-05-19T17:27:00.000-07:00

For those of you reloading the page every few seconds in anxious anticipation, here it is: this week's installation of Where are they now? Lost Poets of the 70s! The font came out a bit small today, so click on the image for your reading/fashion enjoyment.

We admire Mr. Cornish's suit--we really do, and his hairstyle has endured better than most of his 70s counterparts (certainly better than Marvin Bell or Thomas Brush). But man, what's that dude smoking in this picture? Check out those eyes ...

His poem isn't as bizarre as our last installation, but it does feature a thirteen-year-old "wondering if he had the special knowledge / that women wanted from men / endured the pain she moaned / the odor between her breasts" Pew... I wonder what Agent Trochee's gonna say about this one.

Geoffrey G. O'Brien: "speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick"

2005-05-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

Ask and ye shall receive. Our First Book Poet Poetry Snark winner is …. (sound of drums rolling) Geoffrey G. O'Brien! While there have been many worthy contenders already listed in Tuesday's post (keep 'em coming), O'Brien was listed first in your comments, is among the better known names provided, and has the most pretentious jacket photo. So O'Brien it is!

The Guns and Flags Project is a book relentlessly, brutally self-conscious of its poetic lineage, which is that old mainstay: Stevens>Ashbery>Less Talented Suck-up. This is a book that seems preconceived to jolt Harold Bloom into pre-orgasmic alert status or lull John Koethe into blissfully-hypnotized self-absorption. So Stevensian/Ashberian is it that the poems are indistinguishable. At any moment in The Stuns and Drags Project, we could be waste-deep in a milquetoast and truncated version of "Clepsydra" or B-grade Stevens like "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War." O'Brien's titles are so Stevensoashberian as to be hilarious: "Observations on the Florida Question," "Standing Before Paintings," "Two Philosophers," "Reverent Estimations," "The Truth in Italy" (I could continue). The first word that comes to mind when one thinks of Runs and Brags is "palaver." That is to say, these poems go on and on, in a blandly homogenous, all-too-loose five-stress line that is terrified of statement yet hobbled by the unconscious urge to assert. For example: "Far be it from me to say that you've an ocean / in your throat, as you don't maintain it is so…. Far be it from me to say of your inner / surfaces that they're visited with marine qualities…" And so it goes. Well, far be it for Snark to say that O' Brien's career looks to be less than promising, but Shuns and Lags is one of the most boring books of poetry I've ever read. We have to agree with O'Brien when he says "it's not the sex of [my] clouds but their muteness that hangs, / sourceless, talentless, above the manic ground." Or almost agree: sexless, mute, and talentless--yes, we see that part--but sourceless? Fraid not, son. Your sources are painfully obvious. As our old friend Francis Jeffrey once said, "this will never do."

The Philosophy of Poetry Snark, Part I: First Book Poets

2005-05-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

The standard operational procedure with reviews is to leave bad first books alone. The bad stuff will be forgotten on its own, the argument goes, and it’s not particularly helpful to be discouraging to young poets. As you might have guessed, we here at Poetry Snark disagree. Some young poets could use a little more discouragement. Many are doomed to a dismal life of failed expectations—the decades-long wait to climb out of the obscurity of a benefitless, low-paying adjuncting gig; the discovery that second books, because not as broadly funded by contests, are often more difficult to publish; and the sheer anonymity of being one of the great mass of contest-sponsored first book poets to be shored against the ruins of academia—these things must be hard for a young person to endure. Poetry Snark would spare them the agony by letting some particularly odious first book poets know that they really ought to pack it in.

But it is more than just charity to these young versifiers that motivates us to thrash their fledgling collections. The other reason why we will be instituting a series of first book snarkings and roastings relates to our philanthropic desire to heal the tepid atmosphere of contemporary critical reception. If we don’t tell the truth when poets lay a rotten egg of a first book, how will readers know when a real golden hen has arrived? How, in short, can we trust discourse that holds “niceness” as its highest value? If everything is good, nothing is truly good.

What few bad reviews are actually written these days are done so out of mere partisanship. An “experimental” poet aligned with this or that herd of avant-gardists may, on occasion, lay into their ideological opposite. Likewise, Adam Kirsch or one of the white guys at Poetry may occasionally lay the strap to someone they deem too obscure or post-modern. This is nothing but another form of the mindless trench warfare that I described in a previous post—the lame resurrection of poetry wars of the 50’s and 60’s. As always, we here at the Snark are a strictly non-partisan operation. If a “new formalist” drops a stink bomb, we will snark it; if a denizen of cave LangPo crawls out to plop a turd, we will snark. Agent Trochee has a particular aversion to new confessionalism and multy-culty charity cases, so we’ll probably sick him on those toadies. We promise to move continually between approaches and schools, and if we seem to be showing one particular bias, we are counting on you to keep us in line in the comments section. Use this thread to suggest first books that you’d like to see us put to rest.

Mark Strand: Poetry's Pimp

2005-05-14T13:58:00.000-07:00

Hey there pretty lady, wanna come sit on my absence?

Piling It On Adam Hardin

2005-05-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

Who is this Adam Hardin, and why is he such a tool? In a comment to my last post, he wrote "Diagruntled [sic] MFA students? Some yes. But I was smart enough not to attend a [sic] MFA program which is [sic] for people who ca not [sic] read taught by people who can not [sic] write. We need snark frankly. American Literature is dead, and the Literati don't even know it. Wake up."

So you are lecturing a blogger named Snark who hosts a site called Poetry Snark to "wake up" because "we need snark." Gotcha. Maybe you want me to change the name of the site to "Really Snarky Poetry Snark" or "The Snarkiest Poetry Snark Snarking Ever!" Our wacky pal r.c. bald had this to say about Mr. Hardin and his proud shout-out:

"I say, dear chap, I have made use of that trapdoor of ubiquity, the google search engine, indeed, & in doing so discovered your membership in the Underground Literary Alliance, which, so far as my eye can discern, seems to base its cosmologies on the Truman Show & its poetics on the work of Charles Bukowski. Certainly, friends, the fodder for proclamation of the death of literature as we know it! I for one am a staunch disciple of such fervent leanings, & yes, yes, friends, I garner en masse my worldview from the great & insightful works of Jim Carrey (I think namely of the startling glimpses into the soul of man provided in "Ace Ventura" & "Dumb & Dumber") & base all of my literary inclinations on the life work of a frighteningly hirsute wart of a man whose words spilled out of him like so many drops of Milwaukee's Best Light (such lyric passages as "I'm drunk & I farted/ Pass me a whiskey"). No wonder, I should say, this chap feels only lifelessness when his fingers are on the pulse of such literature. How could anyone hope to surpass such brilliance?"

And an anonymous snarker added:

"Adam you are a broken fucking record.... American Lit is dead is dead is dead!...Go bury American Lit in the backyard. Or better, go write the revival. You foetry creeps just sing the same tune over and over again. You scenesters you."

But not even the foets will have anything to do with the mighty Adam Hardin. Foetry writes:

"Adam Hardin is a half-cocked blowhard and a buffoon, taking credit for the work of others. He should slink away and read some of his Neoshakespearians such as Don DeLillo and leave the real muckraking to the real writers."

Snark agrees, and as far as the Underground Literary Alliance goes, we think they should go a little further underground. What can you say about a group that feels the need to proclaim itself to be "controversial" at every opportunity? That they have a really ugly web site? Well, yes, that.

update: apparently the quote I cited above wasn't from foetry but from someone posing as foetry. The link is here (scroll to bottom of page). Anyone know who it was?

New York Times Hit Piece on Jorie Graham = Lame Snark

2005-05-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most widely agreed upon sentiment among the M.F.A. grunts of today's poetry world is that Jorie Graham sucks. Indeed, saying snarky things about Jorie Graham has become a kind of cottage industry in today's poetry world. We here at Poetry Snark have no desire to defend Ms. Graham (we don't do that sort of thing), but we do have a desire to promote the standards of quality snark, and the endlessly repetitive, humorless grousing about Graham and her obscure poems and contest cronyism strikes us as the lamest, safest, most boring and conformist snark around. I mean, you know an opinion about poetry has reached a new height in unthinking dogma when the opinion itself becomes a news item in the New York Times. The New York Times, which recently stopped reviewing poetry altogether, apparently only finds poetry valuable enough to comment upon when it realizes there's a market for its story among disgruntled M.F.A. students and losers of first book contests. So David Orr took it upon himself to summarize the findings of the M.F.A. echo chamber in a story that comes to the shocking conclusion that Jorie Graham's poems are "poetic," "thinky," and "fuzzy." Holy shit, now I get it David! What insight you have! But Orr is too much of a coward to even really lay into Graham--instead he hedges, informing us also that "the point isn't that Graham's a bad poet--she's not…" This isn't snark; it's pandering to the masses of unpublished first book poets who have become convinced that the reason they lost the Podunk Review Poetry Prize has nothing to do with the quality of their work. No, it's Jorie Graham's fault … that's why. Somewhere in the dark, inner sanctum of the Iowa or Harvard poetry death-star war room--where the secret cabal of Jorie Graham's storm troopers plot their evil machinations--a deal is being cut to personally cheat you out of that $20 submission fee.

Where Are They Now? Lost Poets of the 70s: "Stoked with Stokesbury"

2005-05-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

Tie on yer feed-bags Snarkers, because this is most certainly the best Where Are They Now? Lost Poets of the 70s offering to date, and it's going to be hard to top, you will agree when you read Leon Stokesbury's astonishing bit-o-verse. In case you are wondering, all of these are real poets and their real poems that I dug up from an old anthology (to be disclosed at the end of the series). Read this poem, and please, somebody explain to me what Stokesbury did to that "2-by-4 stable boy" with his "refried banana." Email this one to your lists poetry peeps, this snark is for the ages.

from the desk of Agent Trochee

2005-05-09T00:57:00.000-07:00

Dear Snarkville,

Lately we have received a good deal of email expressing joy over our coverage of the poetry world's missteps and misfortunes. We have even more email from readers out there on the interweb who think we are "low slinky beasts and that we should keep our heads in the shit we produce." That is some good snark. But there was also concern and constructive criticism.

For example, why anonymity? Well, that is simple. Anonymity not only carries on a tradition by the Edinburgh Review but it also ensures honesty. You see, snarking is not for us but for everyone. Just like the museum is not just for the rich or the educated but for everyone and for the preservation of our histories, so too is Poetry Snark for the preservation of poetry and for everyone. Everyone is entitled to an opinion and sometimes those opinions are strong. Because readers are sometimes unable to express themselves properly when righteously disgusted by mediocrity and ineptitude, they may be embarrassed by potentially sounding crazy, stupid or some other shameful adjective. Well, fear no more, Snarkville! Here at Poetry Snark we hope to provide varied coverage so that you may make comments of your own.

This venture applies equally to readers and writers. After all, writers sometimes want to talk shit about their friends but don't know how to. Well, here you can do just that. Or maybe you are into cronyism and politics, well, we won't hold that against you too much so long as you are honest. Hell, you can lie to us. We don't care. You probably suck anyway.

So, remember kids: this is not for fame and glory. No, this is for some righteous corrective action. Poetry Snark is for poetry and snark, two glorious arts working together to keep humanity on course.

Writers and readers alike, we are calling you out. Get it together or get out.

AT

The Raw and the Cooked is now the Smart and the Sincere

2005-05-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

Remember the poetry wars of old? Those were the days of "the raw and the cooked." The academic poets I described previously as "the old academicism," along with others, somewhat less academic, but still fairly refined in their aesthetics--poets like Robert Lowell, Hayden Carruth, maybe Elizabeth Bishop, and others--were set at odds with the Beats, mostly, but to some extent also the early New York School and the Black Mountain poets in a poetry war commonly referred to as "the raw and the cooked." That was the old, bullshit dividing line: poetry that mostly resisted traditional form and poetry that toyed with it, that conserved it. Never mind that some of the supposedly "raw" poets were also writing in form, just different kinds, and that the supposedly "cooked" poets also wrote in loose free verse. Form was just the most mentionable of differences. This was about other cultural divides: refined East Coasters, Bostonians, post Robert Frosters and T.S. Eliotites versus shaggy west coasters and Greenwich Village cruisers and outcasts; Whitman lovers versus Dickinson lovers; Surrealist aficionados versus neo-symbolists; would-be rock star, neo-populist romantics versus involute, Victorian romantics; dope smokers versus scotch drinkers. It was easy to see the difference, and critics like Lionel Trilling and M.L. Rosenthal reinforced the divide (predictably, they sided with "the cooked").

It's a different poetry war today, Snarkophiles. Today it’s not the raw and the cooked but the smart and the sincere. Nobody is "raw" anymore. We're all sophisticates now. And almost nobody is uninfected with the academia bug--we're all mostly nursing off the same tit (there are exceptions on both sides of course--Silliman, for example, and, until recently, our new poet Laureate, Sir Kooser). But some of us would still be known more for our brains, and some of us for our hearts. It's the scarecrows versus the tin men (the cowardly lions are both camps when they put on their "poetry reviewer" hats). The scarecrows have a little more money and a few more readers, and the tin men have more academic critics on their side and a growing insurgent youth group as allies. Geographically, the fight is decentered--with both sides scattered--though there are recognized schools of the smart (Brown, SUNY Buffalo) and of the sincere (Stanford, Wisconsin, Nebraska). Iowa, a former bunker for scarecrows has become diversified with the inclusion of Swenson (an uber-tin woman) and Dean Young (a fence sitter or throw back to the "raw" school). And what is the war over? The role of theory (or lack thereof), the role of lyricism (or the lack thereof), subject matter (or lack thereof), the role of allusion (what audience should "get it"?), poetic lineages (Whitman for the sincere and Dickinson for the smart; Frost and Williams for the sincere, Stein, Pound, and Oppen for the smart).

What a stinking load of horseshit this war amounts to. Silliman likes to call the scarecrows the "School of Quietism." Gag me with a Marxist spoon--as if he and his ilk really made a damn bit of difference in the real world with their "politics." The scarecrows, in turn, have become anti-intellectual dipshits and intellectual/cultural isolationists. Can we get over it already? Why choose between thought and lived experience, lyricism and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E? You call this a war? I got a war for you Scarecrows and Tin Men: Poetry Snark versus all of your lame asses.

My Fellow Snarkers Suck

2005-05-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

Simple message to my fellow Snarkers: get your lazy asses in gear, or you're fired--especially you, Bill Blood--not one post from you. Unless, perchance, you are really r.c. bald... What the fuck is up with that guy? Hong Kong expat poetry? I thought Sebald was a dead fiction writer obsessed with the holocaust and old photographs.

update: I Googled "R. C. Bald," and it appears the dude is real--either that, or he has stolen this other guy's name. Shockingly, Bald seems to be a successful, well-published scholar--which means he is also either a nutjob with too much free time on his hands or that he is doing a hell of a job acting like that's the case. Hats off to you, crazy Hong Kong dude. We've added you to our elite list of linked sites. (If this doesn't make sense to you, read this guy's whack comments in my recent posts). Oh and in case you missed it: David Allen Evans, it turns out, is the Poet Laureate of South Dakota. Go figure. Shumway's fate remains undetermined. Anyone know? Any speculation?

Next week, in addition to our "Lost Poets of the 70s" series, I will be snarking Mark Strand (photo accompaniment), and I will describe the philosophy of the snark. Stay tuned...

Where Are They Now: Lost Poets of the 70's

2005-05-04T17:41:00.000-07:00

Chow down, chil'ens; its that time again. Time for Where Are They Now: Lost Poets of the 70's. This week's feast is Mary Shumway. Don't let those glasses fool you, this little poetess is naughty. But it wasnt her skills between the sheets or her trendsetting fashion sense that rocketed Mary to her five minutes of fame. It was lines like these, lines that give new meaning to Keat's remark, "there is no hell like the failure of a great object." So click on the image to enlarge and follow Mary down "River Road" to see what that smile has in store. What say you?

The New Academicism

2005-05-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

The old academicism was about old white guys defending the values of New Criticism and old formalism. We're talking poets like Howard Moss, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Howard, Anthony Hecht, W.D. Snodgrass, etc. These poets were academic more for how they wrote than what they wrote about. Their poems emitted the stench of bourgeois comfort. They didn’t seem to get out of the house much, and when they did, they usually walked around in their backyards and had epiphanies while studying their birdfeeders. Sometimes they wrote poems about how righteous they were for not fucking their undergrads. They were poets proud of their anapests. Many of them were foundational in setting up institutions like journal Poetry and the Academy of American Poets, crony machines that continue to this day to pass around the bucks to the same handful of aesthetic clones. They were opposed by the Beats and, more wittily, the early New York School. The academics, in turn, groused at these poets, who, influenced by poor readings of Whitman, Blake, and Henry Miller (Beats) or avant-garde continental European poetry (N.Y.S.), were--so the old academics thought--kneeling before the incorrect totem pole. This generation of academic poets did at least have one virtue: they knew they were essentially academic. They were often narrow, lame, and dull, but they were not hypocrites.

The new academicism is about tenured, middle-aged, neo-bohemians (or in the parlance of James McPherson—“bo-bo’s—the “bohemian bourgeois”). They don’t do drugs or break laws, but they think of themselves as outside the mainstream: smart rebels whose idea of resistance to middle class values is reading Deleuze and turning over in their minds the idea that they are “nomads.” We’re talking poets like Donald Revell, Cole Swenson, Mary Jo Bang, and Susan Howe. These poets are academic more for what they write about than how they write. Like their predecessors, their poems tend to reflect very comfortable lives, and they too don’t seem to get out of the house much, however when they do, it’s not for a meditative stroll in the garden, but for a meditative stroll at M.O.M.A. They are poets proud of their “experimentalism,” however unlike really experimental artists like Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp, their poems are derivative (often of Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp). They too are associated with various crony machines (Swenson, for example, is permanent faculty at Iowa). They are big on “ecphrasis,” “white space,” and obscurity—marveling in poetry about topics like 14^th century clerics, early American captivity narratives, and minimalist painters. Sense of humor is not their strong suit. These academic poets do not regard themselves as academic—anything but! They are rebels! (Theoretically speaking of course.) They do however have one virtue over the previous generation of academic poets: they tend to be somewhat snappier dressers.

post-lang po meta-jack bruce said...

2005-05-03T01:20:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't want to post a comment in a post that meta-critiques meta-language and meta-bullshit, but...

"Faith in the idea that faith in text that critiques some snark that asks a series of rhetorical questions about a post that meta-snarks with regard to the proposition that meta-language and rhetorical questions are bullshit is total fucking shit, wouldn't you agree?"

New Peeps at the Snark

2005-05-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

Welcome to our two new Snarkers, Ginger Pennebaker and Bill Blood. Yadda, yadda, yadda...

Double-Snark: Meta-language is meta-bullshit, Lame Rhetorical Questions are certainly bullshit

2005-05-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

Speaking of vacuity, how about Words About Words and Lame Rhetorical Questions? Mix them together and you've got a recipe for some snarkable quasi-spiritual post-LangPo tripe. Red flags: overuse of the words "word" and "page," combined with the rhetorical question formula "What is [X]?" I'm reminded of a line from J. Graham: "What is / the past?" Um, like, history? Come on, people, I've read so many terrible rhetorical questions lately in poems I may never ask a question again. From now on it's all statements for me. The St. Bernard chewed his rotting meat, etc. Oh, and regarding this meta-langauge issue... Company of Moths (M. Palmer's new offering):Notes for Echo Lake::laundry soap:cocaine. Snark that, post-everything theory junkies!

Off-topic Topic Snark

2005-04-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, this is a little off-topic, but lyrics are almost poetry, right? (OK, not really.) Well, it's language. Or, at least, it involves language. OK, I give up, this has nothing to do with snarking poetry, but it is--I promise--the funniest thing you've seen in a long time. Everyone reading this should go to the following site to watch this "patriotic" video. You will be stunned by its awfulness. Flabbergasted, you will spit your coffee at the monitor. You will destroy several thousand brain cells just watching it, but it's worth it: imagine Michael Bolton singing with Whitesnake as his back-up band in a video directed by Phil Collins with lyrics written by Tom Delay. Well, actually, that's being a little too kind. And this is no joke. It's "real." Here's the link: http://www.americawestandasone.com/video.html

update: Mark Morford at the San Francisco Gate offers some in-depth snark.

2005-04-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

Don't blink poetry fans. That's right, it's time for another installment of Poetry Snark's exciting new series, Where Are They Now: Lost Poets of the 70's. This week's feature poet is David Allen Evans (click on the image to enlarge). Completing our "Sideburns Diptych" with Thomas Brush, Mr. Evans has more turtle-like hair, a more penetrating gaze, and, oh yeah, this poem.

Use the comments section to coax out the genius of his verse, or to tell us where David is now. David, you out there? What the fuck are you staring at in this photo?

Karen Volkman - Vacancy's Ambassador

2005-04-27T16:19:00.000-07:00

American poetry is crazy about the prose poem. Even more than your drippings of Billy Collins or beefsteaks of Albert Goldbarth, the prose poem, big or little, is showing its twisted ass all over the dance floor. As if doing the literary equivalent of that spazz-dance of Elaine's from Seinfeld were a good thing, the prose poem insists upon its significance by becoming the it form in contemporary poetry. If only its convolutions & permutations were of Pootie Tang proportions. Sure, there are some prose poets I might keep from clubbing with my cane but each and every one will get it sooner or later.

Karen Volkman is one of the many poets endeavoring to slip us the mickey of prose poetry in high hopes we might be intoxicated by its lilting dumbness. Everyone who likes her book Spar must be on the same drugs though they all seem to be on different terms about how fast the books moves; slow? fast? Reminds me of those stoners in college with their Keith Jarrett LPs (yeah, you too Mr. Brush, i gots yo numba) who think it's good shit no matter what speed the record spins at. Unlike Jarrett, Volkman is no genius of improvisation or even of practiced hoodwinking. When an entire book of untitled prose sections is a winding road of cliche and prepackaged illumination, you can be sure little to none of it is memorable. Volkman is the "prevalent predator" of good intentions in prose poetry's empty enterprise. At least with Gertrude Stein I get the impression of bohemian silliness, a hint of absinthe tomfoolery. With Russell Edson I get to relive my mushroom days but Volkman's serious attempt at materiality, at humor, at innovation, is, well, I'd rather be shaving with a hot coal.

Volkman even comments in an interview about how prose poetry and her poems sometimes struck her as "impermeable, hideous bricks"; she drags Rosemarie Waldrop in the mix by mentioning how Waldrop calls working with prose poetry's inner disjunctions as "gap-gardening". Oh, for heaven's sake. If by gap one means nothing and by brick we mean a good solid piece of shit, well, then Karen Volkman is "vacancy's ambassador", harbinger of nothingness (I just hope the boy in this story has a luck dragon at his side and the good sense to say "I love you" when the time comes or we're all screwed), her voice "a song that is stranger than wind", a foul foul wind, no Mama, that ain't no sun coming out that ass, it's Karen Volkman and her brick factory.

Collage Poetry is Bullshit

2005-04-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

How many times have we heard that collage technique is the signature method of post-modernity? Let me translate: "I can’t think of a very good line, so I’m going to steal somebody else’s shit. Then I’m going to lionize my theft by thinking of it as post-modern. I’m going to recycle somebody else’s novel or poem or whatever 'discourse' and benight it under my Barthesian halo."

The whole “culture of belatedness” routine is a theoretical contrivance. All of the noise about the “death of the author” and the “death of literature” and the “death of the notion of originality” is a load of apocalyptic camel dung. These people remind me of those Fundamentalist stormtroopers prophesying the end of the world, only instead of being evangelical Christians, they are evangelizing the latest-greatest French post-whogivesafuck. Every generation of artists has had their faction that felt like they had arrived “too late” to produce work the way their predecessors did—and so had to find some new method. That’s fine, if it really produces a new method. Your computer’s cut-and-paste function ain't it.

Equal Opportunity Snark

2005-04-26T01:19:00.000-07:00

We here at Poetry Snark are committed to diversity. Prove it you say? Here's the deal: this is an open invitation for anybody reading this post to become a front page contributor here at the Snark. We get three gazillion hits a day--that's two and a half gazillion more than Silliman gets. That's not much for a porn site, but it rocks for a poetry blog. This is your chance to get on board before we make it bigger than Salon, Dailykos, and Vaginabot combined. I don't care what you snark--any writer, any school, any time period. Whoever sends the tastiest snark wins. Me, Agent Trochee, and our new friend, T. Brush, will judge. Email me or post in the comments section. You have two weeks. I'll announce the winner and post the winning snark (along with any worthy runners up) two weeks from tomorrow. Send to: poetrysnark [AT] gmail [DOT] com

Thomas Brush Responds

2005-04-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

Apparently nonplussed by the honor of being Poetry Snark's first "where are they now?" poet of the 70's, Mr. Brush posted the following comment to my previous entry. I thought Mr. Brush deserved the further honor of front page air time, so I am repeating his comment here (if you haven't already seen it, you will want to scroll down and read the previous post first) :

"I, Poetry Snark, am Thomas Brush. And if you think this is humor--posting a dated photo of me along with a rather sentimental snippet of my verse--then you are a comedic milksop. First of all, that was no soft verse of whimsy--that was a poem about my brother, Keith Brush, and his brush with death at the hands of the VC. His face was nearly removed, not by LSD--like mine--but by bloodthirsty vietnamese whores. When one of them demanded more money than they'd bargained for she pulled a razor-blade out of her ear (where she'd been hiding it) and tried to slice the smile from Keith's countenance--forever! If this is to be snarked at-- you're insane! I should command the tigers of my verse to pulp your brains, Poetry Snark!

I only came upon this site because I was googling myself to find out how I did at the greater Oregon taffy festival-- for those of you who are my TRUE friends and admirers, and whom I have lost touch with, I may as well let you know--from the horse's mouth, as it is-- how I am doing and what I spend my days working on: I am a taffier, primarily, and a poet secondarily. Star Horse and I have been married 21 years and Brian is heading off to Oregon State next year to study environmental databasing. I live a quiet life. I carve, I taffy, I canoe and hike and moonlight as an amateur granola alchemist. I keep busy. Star Horse writes her boondoggles. We're getting into back-rubbing. Jogging is out--knees. I relax, I think. Lately Brian teaches me computers. They're fascinating. Brian is great. I'm working on a long poem about my family. I don't know what shape it's gonna take but it's shaping up. I like to think of poetry like a tree made of sugar--or my brain like that sugar tree, melting in the sun, taffying all of Oregon with a pale ribbon of nonchalance and impromptu synergies. If the Poetry Snarkers have a problem with that, too bad for them and I hope they can be happy in life. I really do.

Bon chance everyone,

Thomas Brush