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<\/p>\nBy Richard Marshall.<\/p>\n
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Stephen Burt, This Poem Is You<\/a><\/em>, Harvard University Press, 2016<\/p>\n \u2018The best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.<\/em>‘ (Hazlitt: On Poetry in General, 1818)<\/p>\n ‘The great white whale and Ahab of the American Empire has always been his centre of gravity. All the great empires have had their poets and writers capable of wrestling with its sublime, monstrous protean strength. Empires write history from victory’s veranda. The great Empire poets see the dangers, the costs, the defeated left in the wake of colossal bathos as well as the grandeur and immeasurability of powers reaching towards mortal limits of death and inevitable fall. Shakespeare is an obvious example. Dylan has been working on America’s road since the very beginning.<\/em>‘<\/p>\n I’ve been surprised by those poets like Simon Armitage who have said that they like Dylan<\/a> but he should never have won the Nobel Prize. It strikes me that what is enjoyed in contemporary American poets is also what can be enjoyed in Dylan. If you can speak about technique, content, spirit, form, about whether the work is catching \u2018the natural impression of any object or event,’ whether there’s \u2018vividness,’ \u2018imagination’, \u2018passion’ and \u2018a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it’ which is what Hazlitt was asking from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and the rest of the band back in his day, and if you can do so without it seeming not to fit, then I think you’re talking about a poet. In reading Burt’s great book on 60 contemporary American poems there seemed an easy fit between how Burt discusses them and how you can write about Dylan. If it looks, walks and quacks like a duck then its a duck. Naysayers are off the mark. Of course Dylan stresses a distinct route to his poetry in harnessing his writing to sung lyric. It’s a route that overlaps with what fellow American poet Allan Ginsberg writes about in \u2018Explanation of First Blues’ : <\/p>\n \u2018I had some kind of American Blues in my heart without knowing it\u2014I could sing but didn’t reckon it important poetically, until I met Krishna & remembered Ezra Pound’s ken that poetry & music, song & chant (and dance) went together before the invention of the printing press and long after\u2014forgotten by the same academies that forgot that the genre of American Black Blues & rags was as great a treasury of poetics as Bishop Percy’s Reliques & Scottish Border Ballads & Elizabethan song books & Tom O’Bedlam folk treasuries.’ <\/p>\n There’s a clue to Dylan’s subject matter in Ginsberg’s comment too. The great white whale and Ahab of the American Empire has always been his centre of gravity. All the great empires have had their poets and writers capable of wrestling with its sublime, monstrous protean strength. Empires write history from victory’s veranda. The great Empire poets see the dangers, the costs, the defeated left in the wake of colossal bathos as well as the grandeur and immeasurability of powers reaching towards mortal limits of death and inevitable fall. Shakespeare is an obvious example. Dylan has been working on America’s road since the very beginning. <\/p>\n It’s like a circus route. In 1922 the circus was the talk of the town. Dylan’s father was a child in a six room house on Lake Avenue. He had seen the great forest fire a few years earlier. His own father Zigman had reassured them that the fire would not reach the town. And he had been right. But there had been hundreds killed in the fire. But then the circus was in town, coming through old weird America again. Think of Jonah who was told to get to Ninevah and tell them the Truth before it became too late – and he just ran in the opposite direction. <\/p>\n So with Dylan we’ve been running opposite routes ever since. <\/p>\n \u2018Keep whatever you think is best, keep whatever you think is worst. Then you can show them the best and the worst whenever there is a need.’ Perhaps the advice of Rabbi Reuban Levi, or one of his Lutheran neighbours, but Dylan puts down this advice which means he ignores it, puts up with it and records it accurately for the archive somewhere all at the one same time. The circus came to town. The whole town went to see the show. The black trapeze artists soared across the great tent, heaven bound above the smell of roast chestnuts and the women’s perfumes and the greasy hell noises of the small-town audience. Their physical art was a hushed tension, men and women working above on the high wire, high above death and the laughter of the tumbling clowns below in the thread and fibre of the sand \u2026 <\/p>\n They hanged three of those black circus performers. Hanged them in the street of Deluth in 1922. The same crowd that had been at the circus watching their beauty earlier were now in the street. It was night and there were so many different stories. Some woman had been raped. Some man had been murdered. Someone robbed at knifepoint. There were reports that the sheriff had opened the jail to the mob when they came. That the sheriff had fought the mob but had been told by the governor that he couldn’t use his gun. That no one had been attacked. No one raped. No one robbed. There was something that shook everyone up. But it was a secret. There was a great rushing sound, like a wind that blew across the streets of Deluth as the three dead black men were hanged by their necks from street lampposts. And the crowd of crazed white people watched from a very American hell the dead men hanging by their necks, astonishingly, like on tiptoe in the invisible air.<\/p>\n Postcards of the hanging showed the dead men and the crowd of Deluth’s fine citizens. Lynching of black men was common in the South but the North was supposed to be different. But this was the far-reaching thing that Dylan’s songs and the traditions he comes into have to measure up to. This is the sign of his measure, the source of his sorrow, is the flood that supplies him with everything. That’s why he got the Nobel. <\/p>\n \u2018Minneapolis . . . I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the beat scene, the Bohemian, BeBop crowd, it was all pretty much connected . . . people just passed through, really, carrying horns, guitars, suitcases, whatever, just like the stories you hear, free love, wine, poetry, nobody had any money anyway . . . there were a lot of house parties. . . . There were always a lot of poems recited”\u02dc\u2018Into the room people come and go talking of Michelangelo, measuring their lives in coffee spoons” . . . \u2018\u2018What I’d like to know is what do you think of your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death”. T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings. It was sort of like that and it woke me up. . . . Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti”\u02dcGasoline’, \u2018Coney Island of the Mind’, . . . oh man, it was wild”\u02dc\u2018I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”: that said more to me than any of the stuff I’d been raised on . . . whatever was happening of any real value was . . . sort of hidden from view and it would be years before the media would be able to recognize it and choke-hold it and reduce it to silliness. Anyway, I got in at the tail-end of that and it was magic …it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley. Pound, Camus, T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, mostly expatriate Americans who were off in Paris and Tangiers. Burroughs, \u2018\u2018Nova Ex- press”, John Rechy, Gary Snyder, Ferlinghetti, \u2018\u2018Pictures From the Gone World”, the newer poets and folk music, jazz, Monk, Coltrane, Sonny and Brownie, Big Bill Broonzy, Charlie Christian . . . it all left the rest of everything in the dust . . .’ he writes down in \u2018Chronicles<\/a><\/em>‘ twelve years ago. <\/p>\n The doomed trapeze artists are art, music, song, lyric, balancing and swinging on high wires beneath heaven and earth, lying all undiscovered before us in power, harmony, beauty, motion, growth, both folly and madness. They are what Hazlitt wrote of poetry when he said: <\/p>\n \u2018 \u2026 poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind ‘which ecstasy is very cunning in’. Neither a mere description of natural objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the heightenings of the imagination. The light of poetry is not only a direct but also a reflected light, that while it shows us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyse the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling.’<\/p>\n It’s against this uneasy, uncontainable measurement that Dylan has made his different route. He can stand far away from his contemporary American poets, is neither one of them nor au contraire but rather has distinctions of understanding and impressions that strive to find impatient limits and then plough on over along with all the rest. He is no less a poet if he doesn’t present language true to conventionalities or point of those facts. Why? Because he conveys the impression of whatever passion makes on his mind and imagination, and his passion is a visionary America that chokes on the blood of its victims and yet still sings beauty. <\/p>\n What would you see crossing America since Dylan started his alternative route? It’s probably only now that we’re beginning to see how important the end of the counter-culture was to poetry and the arts by the 1980s. Dylan had already had two decades writing out his strange American modernism and the 80’s threatened to trash all that along with everything else. Times were indeed changing. Reagan in the USA, Thatcher in the UK, they brought in a definite ending. Everything was no longer understood. American poetry became estranged, agile, exultant, nimble and protean, its poets becoming valiant faces with levelled faces against the new glacis, capable of the bogus and the jibe, the sullen and the pose as all shipwrecked crews can and do. It was the poetry of a rainbow bursting through, black-eyed and beaten up by trade and the rattle of the time that began with politicians handing out the hoary \u2018end of society’ where society did indeed get lost, and so did whatever preceded it, including its poetry and its definitive poets. <\/p>\n Dylan, like everyone, was looking for what was left, what stayed, what got invented new. He goes hiking in New Hampshire, watching the comic book artists in Portland, noting grassland restoration and the Ojibwe language in Minnesota, surfing long beaches, long galleries and longer melancholy, catching Union fights and rounds, all these desultory energies until it became clearer, more than ever before, that you can get lost in this America gone insane. He was travelling but not as a tourist snapping the high points, but catching what might well be the main variety that gets missed if you stick to highlights. He traced interior lives tried out as our own. And made his language strange again, with the alienation that runs through songs of souls as loaded lyric. He was lighting a match in the dark so we see outlines .<\/p>\n Critic Stephen Burt says there is no single route, no single highway in post-80’s American poetry but just as there are many branches from Interstate 95, say, so this idea of trying out different poems as yourself allows him to catch up the poems all together and say how one leads to the next. When Dylan started off the 1960s American poetry was free verse paraphrased by the tradition of the confessional of Plath and Lowell. Vietnam stirred the protest currents of, say, Adrienne Rich and Robert Bly and Amiri Baraka. By the 70s things were mainly naked, unmediated, visceral and uncomplicated but there were push-backs like Richard Wilbur doubling down on European commitments. New York was unpredictable and chaotic with Ashbury first then Bernadette Mayer round the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, and then language writers working outside both voice and prose sense.<\/p>\n From the 70’s non-white poets erupted through protest movements – American-Indian poets, Chicano movimiento poets, but there were others more autobiographical and print-based. By the 1980s poets were having to handle their relationship with modernism, the avant-garde (what was left of it), the confessionals, the international lyric, the English and European past and little journals and magazines, writer’s retreats, bars and restaurants shook up the poetry scene as printing made it easier to work outside of the elite universities. <\/p>\n From the 80s to the 90s we had new formalists, neo-confessionals, free verse mainstreamers, performance and proto-slammers, post-avant gardeists. After 1990 there was a time of integration and synthesis. Some looked out to society and politics, some inward to formalism. In New York City they negotiated between anti-prose-sense and lyric and voice based traditions. Elsewhere (and there too) others enjoyed the messiness and were heterogenetic and eclectic.<\/p>\n Disasters like 9\/11 and Katrina impacted. There was the conceptualism of Tan Lin, Vanessa Place and Kenneth Goldsmith who were about repeating, reframing, reshaping non literary texts: Flarfists who, according to Drew Gardner, deployed \u2018corrosive, cute or cloying awfulness’ to attack taste. There was the Black Took Collectivists whose non-prose, non-autobiography experiment attempted to define a different sense of blackness. Arielle Greenberg and Lara Glenum’s Gurlesque poetry went to scandalous extremes to resist patriarchy. Neo-avant-gardeists went from Ali’s \u201creal Ghazal” to the Golden Shove and the verse form of Terrance Hayes in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks.<\/p>\n African American poets became central. The National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer, the Kingsley and Kate Tufts awards, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize all went to more than one African American poet between 2010 and 2015. Some whites at the same time were writing about white privilege eg Bruce Smith, Tess Taylor, Ed Pavlic, Martha Collins but it wasn’t a black or white scene anymore. Non-European immigrant heritages started writing their books looking for hybrid styles to fit their identities. John Yau and Khaled Mattawa extended\/discarded idea of tribe, inheritance and the voices of confessional, autobiographical poets. Asian American poetry flourished from networks begun in the 1990s. Native American poetry was sourced in Santa Fe at the Institute there with Arthur Sze, Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, dg nanouk okpik. But again, not all new institutions were ethnically marked. Some were devoted to modern rhyme, metred technique, eclectic choppy aesthetic, digital media, enthusiastic conversational style, \u2018ultra talk’ programmes, journalistic and documentary prose style, epigrammatic revival (Kay Ryan, Graham Foust, Pam Rehm, Joseph Massey), cool observational modernism and Objectivism and who knows what else. <\/p>\n Dylan had his finger in all these pies, and the idea that his mimic and magpie mind wouldn’t have been picking up on these various scenes beggars belief. As I read Burt’s book on the poets of this period it struck me how often Dylan has worked in the same ballparks, or at an oblique angle to them. It’s a clich \u00e9 but it’s the case that Dylan never really contains himself in his sources, and its useful just to take a survey of what else was in his hinterland. So what follows is just a brief survey to help see a deeper perspective than just the \u2018countercultural hero’ stereotype or the more sophisticated \u2018old weird Amerika’ one. Shakespeare is more than \u2018Romeo and Juliet’, \u2018Henry Vth’ and \u2018Macbeth’ and Dylan is more than \u2018Times they Are A Changin’, \u2018Like A Rolling Stone’ and \u2018Blind Willie McTell’. The counter-culture years were important but they aren’t our time now, which is the world of prose. Antinomian heaven is further off and grown astronomical, times that are straight as Hazlitt found in his day: times <\/p>\n \u2018\u2026 averse to the imagination, nor will they return to us on the squares of the distances\u2026 Rembrandt’s picture brings the matter nearer to us. — It is not only the progress of mechanical knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of the fabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of wild beasts or’ bandit fierce’, or to the unmitigated fury of the elements. The time has been that ‘our fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as life were in it’. But the police spoils all; and we now hardly so much as dream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is only tolerated in this country for the sake of the music; and in the United States of America, where the philosophical principles of government are carried still farther in theory and practice, we find that the Beggar’s Opera is hooted from the stage. Society, by degrees, is constructed into a machine that carries us safely and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very comfortable prose style.’ <\/p>\n But in the world outside of prose there are still the monsters, and murders, the furies erupting, police killing sprees, wars and maniacs at the levers. And perhaps too obscurely, the poets turn Mercury’s prose into Apollo’s songs, but they do.<\/p>\n Burt starts with Ashbery who invites and evades any sense that the poem is for you. Burt starts in 1981 so he catches Ashbery’s \u2018Paradoxes and Oxymorons’ \u2013 \u2018a poem that does double duty as an invitation to read challenging, slippery poetry and as a claim about the connection between poet and reader, between \u201cyou” and \u201cme”, that all poems attempt to make.’ By then the pre-60’s poets were dead: Lowell in \u201877, Zukovsky in \u201878, Bishop in \u201879, Hayden and Wright in \u201880. The year’s a pivot: Reagan came to bring neoliberalism and end the counter-culture. <\/p>\n 1981 seems far away; small, white, dependent on New York trade presses such as Farrar, Straus and Giroux or Alfred A Nopf. No one knew what a \u2018Poetry slam’ was back then and there was no Dark Room Collective, no Cave Canem, no Kundiman, no Asian American Writer’s Worksop, no Electric Poetry Centre at the University of Buffalo, no genius.com, no poems.com, no 3:AM!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On Asberry Burt says his poems are intellectual challenges, looking ever new to puncture the illusion of speech. Asberry is intimately evasive, plays at serious paradox, in truism and at a \u2018very plain level’ teases the reader, giving us speech we never hear even though we wish we did and a supercompressed history, addressing what feeling, what basis of fact writing requires. Critic Bonnie Costello says; \u2018 writing and reading require the very silence and solitude they are designed to dispel’ which locks us into \u2018a repeated experience of embarrassment.’ Before this poem Ashbery was 1950s and 1960s, haunting a strange margin, part of New York school with Barbara Guest and Frank O’Hara, then in the 70s a weird central force among white Anglo poets, Harold Bloom’s Romantic prophet like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane \u2013 and a language poet of slipperiness. Susan Schultz lists him: \u2018 There is a meditative Ashbery, a formalist Ashbery, a comic Ashbery, a late-Romantic Asbery. A Language poet Ashbery\u2026'(\u201cThe Tribe of John.”) It’s an ars poetica, telling us what poetry is. \u2018His poems can seem like ingenious machines for making nearly any statement look faintly ridiculous, especially any statement about the principles of the poetic machine’s construction’ says Michael Clune. So you can see what my process is here: I’m claiming that whatever is being said about these poets is being said, one time or another, about Dylan. So he’s real enough, good enough and these commentaries are really about him too.<\/p>\n Tato Laviera’s \u2018tito madera smith’ comes out of a Puerto Rican semi-secret Africa America island, Puerto Rican and New York overlap and fusion. Nuyorican is a praise poem reaching back to Pindar to defend a culture against white Anglo detractors and Puerto Rican nationalists of the 70s who wanted to separate and refuse fusion. Laviera writes: \u2018I have five hats, all Puerto Rican, the Latino hat, the urban hat, the black hat, the Boricua hat, and the hemisphere hat’. It’s a poem about Puerto Rican bodies in physical space, a street legal vernacular ars poetica, whereby \u2018poetry is the incessant beauty called\/a person by an action that takes form.’ It’s a poem that tours places, languages, bicultures that serve his needs. Lower east Side to East Harlem connects Puerto Rican and black American literature where Bolitero’s run numbers, cuchifritos are fried pork, street food, Santurce is where Laviera was born and the whole performance has more to do with Eliot’s \u2018Wasteland’ than social science. Because it’s about what the poet cares about. <\/p>\n Richard Wilbur’s \u2018The Ride’ insists on historical continuities and asks what it means to keep visions breathing. He needs to be more than a craftsman, more a force from another realm close to existential despair where there really is nothing and noone out there at a time when Reagan was riding roughshod over the New Deal, Great Society America. A dreamed ride becomes a fleeting articulable inspiration, a wish that poetry really could transcend language and thought that recalls Thomas Hardy’s Christmas poem \u2018The Oxen’ \u2013 \u2018 another great poem in rhyming quatrains, by a disillusioned political liberal, about reluctant post-Chrsitian disbelief.’ <\/p>\n Lucille Clifton’s \u2018my dream about the second coming’ is compressed, demotic, approachable, comic, domestic, draws on the Black Arts Movement, free verse, older folk songs, stories, new directions for the American miniature and assembled sequences. They say \u2018\u2026 she can be hard to anthologise, since her poems gain power when they need not stand alone.’ Her Mary \u2018 asks us to take a special interest in the female body not as a site for potential autonomy, liberated from everyone and everything else, but as a locus of nurture and interdependence, a source of life that is not hers alone.’<\/p>\n Carla Harryman’s \u2018Possesion’ is a prose poem or not \u2013 it’s an experimental fiction like out of Donald Barthelme, an advanced psychology experiment, series of dream jokes and scenario for a Dada play from a San Franciso Bay area that rejects closure. \u2018The partialness of the framing is part of the art form, and an indispensible part, since this kind of art requires the audience to try constantly to categorize and frame, while never being totally successful. Things unframed gradually become framed, and through the piece there is at each moment some partiale framing\u2026 It is this partial local coherence that holds the piece together and \u2026 holds our attention.’ <\/p>\n John Hollander’s \u2018Songs and Sonnets’ is the usual title of Donne’s lyric poems about erotic love \u2013 do we forget them as empty temples, styles pass \u00e9, words of courtship \u2018hung aloft’, unreachable, unused ? Hollander takes a long breath and \u2018attempts a long view.’ Poems aren’t tombs but follies to be explored. Romantic love itself is a convention \u2013 looking at hot naked people reflects the way we have learnt to look. \u2018\u2026 we find ways to enjoy older models without trying to make any one of them stand, nakedly, for the whole history of poetry, let alone for the truth about love.’<\/p>\n Carl Dennis’s \u2018More Music’ goes to the middlebrow, defends the compromise, the affable, the conversational, settlings, muddling throughs, the middle tones of ordinary speech. Accommodation walks a way with no bones broken and refuses to make a list of what could have been better and more deserved. \u2018Writing about how we miss our lives, how we might like what we get, how we might settle, Dennis has landed on reasons we might not.’ There’s \u2018the omniscience of regret’ here. \u2018Complete satisfaction, however, belongs to the dead.’ <\/p>\n Liam Rector’s \u2018Saxophone’ repeats \u2018money’ as a trauma, includes Ezra Pound who believed in the fringe economic theory of Major CH Douglas who \u2018proved congenial to anti-Semites and fascists, including Pound himself’ so Rector asks what’s not for sale and hire when everything is. \u2018It would not be wrong to see the irregular, constant repetition in Rector’s poem a cri de Coeur, a blast of feedback, a loud protest against the experience of life under capitalism.’ \u2018We are all prositutes’ as Vic Godard sang. Money falsely represents, just like some words. Can jazz save us, a music of improv, a \u2018splitting the night’ worth blowing money on?<\/p>\n Czeslaw Milosz \u2018s \u2018Incantation’ has a grand career with Heaney quoting half in the New York Times Book review in 2001 because Heaney said the lines \u2018\u2026 express the fundamental beliefs upon which the fight against racism must be based\u2026 It is thrilling to hear the ideal possibilities of human life stated so unrepentantly and unambiguously.’ The poem projects an apocalypse, another world into this one. Americans wanted to see him as a survivor of terror regimes in USSR, Latin America, Eastern (Central sic) Europe, as some kind of witness, but Milosz in 1987 wrote: \u2018Perhaps some Western writers are longing for subjects provided by spasms of historical violent change, but \u2026 we natives of hazy Eastern regions, perceive History as a curse and prefer to restore to literature its autonomy, dignity and independence from social pressures’. So \u2018Incantation’, according to Clare Cavanagh \u2018\u2026 builds bridges between pasts \u2013 his own, his nation’s, and that of the human race as such\u2026. To change breadeaters into angels, to save the species itself and restore its true homeland, the fallen earth.’ The poem for Burt is an escape into poetic reason. It defends \u2018 philosophical idealism, a vision of the apocalypse, the idea of a truly international poetry, and unicorns.’ It’s a dignified international English the translation by Pinsky and Milosz , the sort Tom Paulin decries. <\/p>\n Robert Grenier’s \u2018Shoe From The Waves’ goes \u2018oh he got a shoe from the waves.’ A Californian writer writing out of San Mateo County beaches and Bolinas where he and Creeley and friends lived in the 70’s and 80’s, part hippie and part avant garde with Saroyan, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Joanne Kyger stealing roadsigns so outsiders couldn’t find it, he takes an anti-analytical style which is about being not doing. It slides to Taoist or Buddhist effects, or marijuana cannabis \u2018eyeballs getting baked’ poetry like one wet show not two dry ones. So if there’s a worry this might not be a poem, it is \u2018present-at-hand’ as Heidegger might say, a readymade maybe like Duchamps or Wiliam Carlos Williams \u2018This Is Just to Say.’ Say. His \u2018Sentences’ of 1978 comprised of 500 index cards with a single sentence or sentence fragment to be read in any order. His latest involves words written in his nearly unreadable handwriting that can’t be duplicated in print. A Minimalist like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Aram Saroyan, he casts attention on the featureless empty air, the \u2018negative space’ of a page. For Grenier, \u2018 the more fully and finally legible a poem is, the less compelling.’ Bolinas was for Kevin Opstedal \u2018the last holdout’ for the countercultural way. Grenier’s now in Vermont. Go to this poem, says Burt, as you go to the beach. See what others have found, and get ready for a surprise. <\/p>\n Rita Dove’s \u2018Lightnin’ Blues’ is about a daddy. He’s got to go fishing if he can help it and it roams and plays with irony and narrative brevity, has a trick ending, endures with the pastoral appeal and releases itself from the constraints of racism and race. It isn’t a blues. It’s a design that features blue. \u2018 I was playing a lot of music, everything from lightnin’ Hopkins to older\u2026 like Larry Jackson or some of the recordings that Al Lomax made of musicians\u2026 all the way up to Billie Holiday, stopping about the 50’s\u2026’ says Dove about the poem. The future is where we \u2018fixed the bait himself.’ Parodies of a new father go through. And noone will get to go fishing despite the planning, because planning makes him a \u2018paper man’ and a paper man is a jazz musician who can’t improvise. \u2018But the poem ends up sadder \u2026 since neither security nor pleasure can be reliably had: a falling tree might have crushed the car if not for the dumb luck (the good luck) of being stopped by the police; the \u201cKingfish” is a white entertainer pretending to be a foolish black man.’ America is never colour blind. \u2018Thomas and Beulah\u2026 literally have to go back home, but only because a tree blocks their road.’ <\/p>\n A.R. Ammons’ \u2018Target’ models his poems on unfamiliar, math intricate shapes, patterns of intricate randomness, \u2018a series of Cartesian-coordinate graphs’, where we can read it as a visual exercise, but that’d be a mistake because it’s about human life and death. There’s a glint of modernist poetry, Williams’ \u2018Young Sycamore’ and it works as a silent movie until the last line when suddenly the leaf dives. If the leaf is a life it’s an odd one. It’s alert to counterintuitive nature, neatly mimetic, mixes local chaos in its ordering and has more to say than its single leaf suggests. It seeks unlikely symmetries \u2018thinking like a photographer, or like the serious painter he also was.’ Suddenly there was no God in charge of things. Instead of Pentecostal, Baptist, Methodist creeds we have intricate balances. The poem \u2018has no verbs of feeling, no subjunctives, no imperatives, no verbs of anything other than the present indicative (unless you count verbal adjectives). The leaf doesn’t have the ground as its target and this let’s us contemplate our own lives, as we watch.<\/p>\n Yusef Komunyakaa’s \u2018Facing It’ is a Vietnam response, \u2018by far the best-known, most often cited American poem about the war in Vietnam.’ Elizabeth Wolfson writes about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial: <\/p>\n \u2018 Lin’s design proved instantaneously divisive. Many veterans , politicians, critics, and the general public read its refusal to explicitly glorify the war or frame the listed soldier’s sacrifice in recognizably heroic terms as an ideological statement, proof of Lin’s \u2013 and the memorial’s \u2013 purported anti-war position.’ <\/p>\n This poem defends the monument. \u2018Poem and wall together contemplate the almost frightening power of memory and mourning, the way the dead can haunt the living through loneliness, incomprehension, or survivor guilt.’ De Man thought poems erased readers, turning them into tombs. But Robert Ekiss writes that in \u2018Facing It’ the poet \u201c mistakes the woman’s gesture for a futile attempt to remake the past, but then changes his mind, and ultimately sees\u2026 an act of motherly tenderness.” It’s a defence of poetry, helping the living see one another’s faces.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Diane Glancy’s \u2018Hamatawk’ teases almost bitterly, won’t be read as lyric, as familiar American Indian old language breaking, fields shriveling, and such though of course she doesn’t deny time passing, people growing up and getting old and dying, nor that the history of the Great Plains is genocidal. But she resists that familiar narrative, pushes against the \u2018Indian’ stereotypes so she can say \u2018something like poetry is come upon when the real self connects to the otherness’ that modern \u2018America pushed out of the way: the sacredness, the horse, the animals, the land, the understanding of that place where they began.’ It’s \u2018an attitude of place located in the mind. The geography of thought\u2026’ not returning \u2018(back) to the (space) I was born.’ A defence of the unsayable, the taciturn where \u2018very old kinds and functions for lyric poetry have a place.’ <\/p>\n Lucie Brock-Broido’s \u2018Domestic Mysticism’ is where the poet \u2018becomes a dramatically feminine revision of Yeat’s \u201crough beast” from \u2018The Second Coming’, who brings a new era to a post-Christian world.’ It risks embarrassment, sharing tastes rather than confessing her biography. Wiliam Logan called her poetry \u2018haute couture vulgarity.’ She took it as a compliment. The poet as teen collector \u2013 Brock-Broido’s world becomes a kind of updated Bronte sister’s Gondor \u2013 a made-up Gothic Yorkshire world. \u2018I want a poetry which is fetishistic, a-Moral, obsessive, erotic, a poetry of Commission, a poem of pre-meditation, beneath (not above) the law’ she says. She quotes Emily Dickinson: \u201cMyself a Kangaroo Among the Beauties.’ She is 30,000 seasons. <\/p>\n Killarney Clary’s \u2018Above the Inland Empire today’ is not a lullaby, nor ironic reassurance. A friend’s cancer breaks the dactylic rhythm \u2018with phrases that have no triple feet\u2026’ Dying; \u2018there is no way to practice traveling alone.’ There’s a rejection of the Californian way of deciding what to die of. What would it mean to know that anyway? Here a kind of moral rightness and predictability is done away with in a prose poem that invites us \u2018to construct a history around an abstraction.’ It’s a party game, a psychological experiment and artful, where there’s no equanimity in dying’s event. <\/p>\n John Yau’s \u2018Modern Love’ is a sestina, his \u2018torqued, interrupted, embittered fairy tale might be the first after Ashbery to advance the form.’ Robert Creeley’s \u2018Oh’ is strange and new in its small scale arrangements \u2018which remind us that poetry comes from the breath of a person, that words may convey the spirit, and yet are also physical air.’ Charles Wright’s \u2018December Journal’ has a consistent elegance, understated confidence, quotes and then rejects large claims about nature and purpose of being, almost a maker of sermons, sound advice and \u2018more than the emotionally freighted image’, as Helen Vendler writes. \u2018\u2026 the poems of Wright that linger most may be those that repeat religious promise in undoctrinal form.’ Allen Grossman’s \u2018The Piano Player Explains Himself’ writes to \u2018the tradition of poetic knowledge to which Grossman has devoted his life’s attention, a tradition which is always dying and returning to life and being killed, as in the story of Orpheus,’ says Jamey Hecht. Miltonic pentameters and high diction give it mysterious authority \u2013 this is \u2018language in the service of the order of the world’, a poem with a severed head with a face turned away that sings. \u2018I was mute wood. Now I am dead I sing.’ Francois Noudelmann says \u2018piano playing privileges an old-fashioned or even intimate Romanticism\u2026 One has to master the instrument, possess the keys\u2026 but to take pleasure in playing, one has to submit to the piano’s mechanics and to learning a piece of music.’ Grossman thinks \u2018the world in which we live’ is \u2018like the piano in a middle class living room which no one can play and no one can remove.’ Grossman for Burt writes as a Jewish American poet for whom the Messiah has yet to arrive. Poetry does the work of religion here. It is an allegory that also poses a threat to orthodoxy. \u2018The mourners \u2026 emulate the Greek menads, who rip Orpheus apart because he does not love them.’<\/p>\n Adrienne Rich’s \u2018An Atlas of the Difficult World XIII (Dedications)’ comes from a poet who by the 1980’s was a public figure known for defying patriarchy: this poem from 1991 tries to explain to herself and her readers how she could be so many things to so many readers \u2013 \u2018mother, wife, partner, lesbian, activist, Maryland native, Radcliffe graduate, New Yorker, Californian, teacher, speaker, skeptic, leader \u2013 and still stay true to herself.’ Rich wrote; \u2018 \u2026 poetry dwells in a web of other social practices historically weighted with enormous imbalances of social power’ and her poem tracks different readers \u2018in an order of decreasing privilege .’ In the last line she was; \u2018\u2026 thinking of our society, stripped of so much of what was hoped for and promised and given nothing in exchange but material commodities, or the hope of obtaining material commodities. \u2026 that is being truly stripped.’ <\/p>\n Piotre Gwiazda says the poem \u2018 acknowledges the impossibility of speaking to two kinds of readers at once, the specialized poetry community and the general audience that is always on the verge’. Burt contrasts Rich’s first person acknowledgement that we don’t all come from the same place to Milosz’s third person universalizing Parnassian schtick. Poetry here is a \u2018vexed dialogue with the news’ is how Jahan Ramazani has it. <\/p>\n Louise Gluck’s \u2018Lamium’ comes from subtraction, psychoanalysis, confessional trauma memories, Freudian lyric and echoes of Lowell and Plath where she \u2018drills down, or cuts down, or carves away inessential details in order to present an imagined listener with the disagreeable, counterintuitive, taboo, or dangerous truth of self.’ Lamium is the plant speaking the poem, \u2018averse to hypotheses and the elaborations \u2013 grammatical, metaphorical, philosophical\u2026’ that \u2018speaks artfully, carefully, strangely, surprisingly \u2013 the poem , read aloud, requires that we read it slowly \u2013 but it also takes care to stay plain.’ These are plants that cover the ground, prefer the shade, spread aggressively, with leaves like nettles even though it doesn’t sting, cold, tolerant, toothed, arrow-headed that point everywhere \u2018like a path no one can use.’ TS Eliot connects with Gluck in \u2018the hunger for meaning and disposition to awe’ where \u2018\u2026compulsion of speech is to find and say the truth.’ Gluck is full of harsh unbearable truths. Burt puts it chillingly: \u2018 There is always more cold, more darkness, hence more to investigate, if we can bear to contemplate what we find.’<\/p>\n James Merrill”s \u2018Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker’ was published just a few years before the poet died and is about democracy and equality. It has mixed feelings about both \u2013 he’s a double-minded snob of a poet. Linda Gregerson’s \u2018Salt’ is frightening, strange and is a model to poets wanting to tell stories in verse. Kay Ryan’s \u2018Emptiness’ is wry and proverb-like and contemplates the end of promised transcendence, the limits of supposedly open space. <\/p>\n Albert Goldbarth’s \u2018A Wooden Eye. An 1884 Silver Dollar. A Homemade Explosive. A False Set of Teeth. And a 14-Karat Gold Ashtray’ tries to fit everything in rather than subtract out to Pound’s \u2018 gists and piths.’ Do the piles of stuff hold together? No, like talk, like improvisation, like shrugging away Milton wanting \u2018Paradise Lost’ to \u2018justify the ways of God to man’ in long-lined American. \u2018But it is Goldbarth’s cheerful vocation to try’ summarises Burt, making the poet a little heroic. <\/p>\n [caption id=\"attachment_82500\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"677\"] Harryette Mullen \u2018employs a ubiquitously traditional form, the quatrain or tetrastich, common to ballads and other folk poetry, and well represented within the history of English verse’, says Mullen. She sees her quatrains as \u2018women’s work,’ \u2018piecework, like quilting’. Hers is for those more written orientated than speech because she says,<\/p>\n \u2018 Any theory of African American literature that privileges a speech-based poetics or the trope of orality to the exclusion of more writerly text results in an impoverishment of the tradition.’ Stabley Kunitz’s \u2018Halley’s Comet’ is a stichic poem musing intricate use of space of time echoing St Paul’s \u2018For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face’ of Corinthians 13: 11-12. It’s a city poem bringing advice: \u2018live in the layers, not on the litter’. Poetry is a capacity for figuration, for pretending, for seeing beyond today’s sorrow. Michael Palmer’s \u2018Letter to Zanzotto: Letter 3′ works like Harryman and Mullen to resist tools used to interpret prose. He lived in the Bay Area in the 70’s near the language poets but wasn’t one of those but owes more to European poetry of Celan, Jabes and Andrea Zanzotto of Italy. He asks what can be authentic or if rather the poems are just our \u2018errors’ alone. He is also tied to West Coast modernists Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser and he says he is \u2018 a poet committed to an exploratory prosody, an assertion of resistance to \u2018meaning’ and \u2018expression’ as givens, and a radical questioning of our means of representation.’ As an aside, I think Anglo-American philosophers have done a better job in doing this than poets. <\/p>\n Robert Hass’s \u2018Our Lady of the Snows’ comes across as a rejoinder to Robert Lowell\/Anne Sexton confessionalism where \u2018the core of the self, we learn early, is where shame lives’, looking for a miraculous change and escape. Hass calls Lowell’s version of the Virgin Mary \u2018 not the god of the sorrows but the goddess of an almost incomprehensible peace, the embodiment of what can’t be embodied\u2026 She floats; everything else in the poem rises and breaks, relentlessly, like waves.’ Burnt comments: <\/p>\n \u2018Hass’s calm, sad, invitingly general conclusion shows respect for the piety of orthodox adults, respect for the boy who stood in the closet, and respect for youthful escapism. It also implies he has outgrown them all.’ <\/p>\n CD Wright’s \u2018Key Episodes from an Earthly Life’ is another poet trying to find an authentic self \u2018with the features of fracture, disjunction, and self critique that characterized the language writers and their allies.’ Lyn Hejinian the language writer talks about a \u2018compositional technique building a work out of discrete intact units\u2026 each sentence itself to be as nearly a complete poem as possible.’ Wright gets close to this ideal. Poetry for Wright gives back experienced, bodily knowledge, delight. Burnt says: \u2018That is why it should not become too clear \u2013 the intuitive mystery will slide out. Nor should it be too forbidding, too abstract. Instead, it has to come to us where we live.’<\/p>\n Juan Filipe Herrera’s \u2018Blood on the Wheel’ has unruly textures and an array of rhetorical effects and is \u2018at once public and hermetic.’ Beginning as a West Coast Chicano poet in the 70’s, Herrera picks up the traditions of protest plus European and Latin American surrealism that repudiate common sense. Anaphoria is a key device, linking him with Walt Whitman, young Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan latterly, naturally. \u2018Ezekial Saw the Wheel’ picks up Woody Guthrie. For Lauro Flores this is \u2018a game of interaction with other artistic forms (music, painting and theatre) [exceeding] \u2018limits imposed by the tradition notion of \u201cpoetry” \u2026’ We think of Ezekiel 37:1-14: \u2018in that buriel we found each other. We picked up\/the bones.’ Heed the many meanings of words, says Herrera, if things are to get better. Mysteriously. Poetry lives on the borders.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Carter Revard’s \u2018A Song That We Still Sing’ is \u2018a demonstration of ease, of extended family connections, a memorial, and a horrifying history lesson, especially for listeners who do not know Cheyenne, Ponca, Osage, or Omaha culture. It’s a ghost story, a revenge tale, a way to think about oral tradition and lore alongside the written record. Revard’s poem relies on complicated indentation. Revard’s a medievalist. He’s carrying forward cultures that are still singing. Allan Peterson’s \u2018Epigraph’ collects complicated facts and tropes in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop’s \u2018surrealism of everyday life. Zach Pickard says of Bishop \u2018\u2026 artistic discovery came from patient readiness (which she associated with Charles Darwin) \u201cto observe the conscious world.” Ditto Revard. But he’s more tacky and opportunistic. <\/p>\n Rae Armantrout’s \u2018Our Nature’ starts as a cryptic rebuke but it continues, leaving self-containment and pronounlessness behind. She now talks about her gang and how gangs grow apart. A language poet on the west Coast, she asks \u2018I do wonder how much we, \u2018language poets’, identify with and\/or objectify one another.’ Dan Chiasson says she \u2018\u2026 takes the basic premises of Language writing somewhere they were never intended to go: towards\u2026 a single individual’s\u2026 uniquely broken heart.’ She warns against the clich \u00e9 of being true to yourself. <\/p>\n Elizabeth Alexander’s \u2018Race’ works with a familiar coded story from W.E.B. Du Bois’s \u2018double consciousness’ records to Henry Louis Gate. Alexander refrains from the rhetoric of black nationalism, treason or loyalty, stays calm with out going cold and leaves us with unanswered questions, \u2018a gentle caution about what we assume when we read poems.’ Liz Waldner’s \u2018A\/ppeal A\/pple A\/dam A\/dream’ is sexy, whose \u2018concrete nouns make more sense\u2026 if we take them on a detour through up-to-date (or at least through vintage 1980’s) theories about sex, gender, and the unconscious.’ It’s about Adam and Eve in Genesis 2,3 and 4 and \u2018Paradise Lost’. \u2018Waldner joins Blake, Pullman, and C.D. Wright in rewriting the story of Eden to favour sexual pleasure and human solidarity, deemphasizing authority and sin’ in a \u2018gender-fluid way.’ It’s a \u2018set of echoes, almost like a child’s nonsense speech, repeating monosyllables, seeking rhymes, playing on the simplest of words\u2026’ <\/p>\n Kari Edwards’s \u2018>>>>>>>>Please Forward & >>>’ articulates a transgender, dyslexic experimentation. Like Kathy Acker Edwards attacked identity and categories, semantics, consecutive, logical sense etc. It’s an aggressive experiment in visual text something essential for the survival of our unstable, incomprehensible selves. The poet is here \u2018a survivor from the shipwreck of convention, a stiltwalker, an Ishmael, someone who will no longer make the \u201cbig mistake” of following a conventional order, whether in religion or in typography.’ Edwards says: \u2018 Poetry and, as far as I am concerned, writing in general needs to cut the linear language in half, create a new syntax.’ So she cuts pronouns, typography, semantics, goes over the edge of comprehension. It looks a lot like nonsense but Burnt finds also exhilaration and roughness. <\/p>\n Agha Shahid Ali’s \u2018Tonight’ comes in four versions between 1996 and 2003 and is about love, loneliness, Islamic and Western religious inheritances. It’s a ghazal, an Arabic form of lyric from medieval Iran , a form that \u2018\u2026 encompassed secular, erotic longing and (as in the work of the poet Rumi) mysticism, in which the beloved is God.’ So it links Ali with Mirza Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz and contemporary Urdu singers of classic ghazals like Begum Akhtar. \u2018Tonight’ is an ars poetica of the ghazal. Throughout, Ali is tricky, allusive, an exile, blasphemous and travelling like Ishmael in \u2018Moby Dick’. <\/p>\n D.A. Powell’s [when he comes he is neither sun nor shade: a china doll] belongs to the tradition of fulfilled visions with supernatural visitors bringing verbal power, comedy, sex, terror and inconvenience. This is the fag end of the 1990’s. \u2018A Christ who sang like France Joli would sing alto or high tenor \u2013 he would be sexy, but also sexually ambiguous: he might be a disco queen\u2026’ says Powell. Gay sex here is \u2018a little dingy’, a \u2018little sour.’ Angie Estes’s \u2018Sans Serif’ is a manifesto in defence of a Baroque of excess plus brevity and dessert. Oppose ornament and you will oppose life itself, she implies, because poem-work is play, \u2018extravagant and whimsical’, \u2018more than just colour and opulence and .. decoration\u2026’ And play is hard work. It is the sweet at the end of a meal. \u2018A gorgeous dessert also has something of a virtuoso musical performance, perfectly crafted but also impermanent and fleeting\u2026 confectionary was as much a branch of the decorative arts as it was of cuisine\u2026’ writes food historian Michael Krondl. This poem advovates the baroque and the Rococo against the straight-laced sans serif. <\/p>\n W.S. Merwin’s \u2018To The Wires Overhead’ laments the damage humans have wreaked on non-human life. Jonathan Culler thinks the lyric addresses those beings who cannot answer. But \u2018The wires trouble Merrill not because they won’t respond but because they are present, and swallows are not.’ \u2018Absent birds and silent seasons mark a wrongheaded civilisation’ in the tradition of Longfelow’s \u2018The Birds of Kilingworth.’ He knows that where things are absent their darkness remains. <\/p>\n New York’s Bernadette Mayer’s \u2018On Sleep’ is still working its ass off to change the language and not get famous. She attempts to bring sleep to poetry as a radical democratic. Catullus gave her a model for literary scandal that broke off from the society we have . \u2018I am not scared’ she writes. Donald Revell’s \u2018Moab’ comes from Utah but closes on Arches National Park with Christian faith striving with animated, animating nature like Henry David Thoreau and Gerald Manley Hopkins canceling time, doubt and death. It’s an epiphanic lyric that \u2018doubles as a father’s prayer.’ Terrance Hayes’s \u2018The Blue Terrance’ is story and song, a singular heartbreak and then everyone’s. African American strands of musical culture are all in the mix. The lonely black boy \u2018digs himself deeper into a dirter hole like a grave, and Hayes gets to do Big Mama Thornton and terza rima as in Dante and rhymes vowels but not always consonants to show a persistent sorrow, loneliness, dejection and sexual frustration. He likes bringing all styles together and has a serious music intent. <\/p>\n Jorie Graham’s \u2018Futures’ comes after we \u2018used to think that shape , a finished thing, was a corpse\/that would sprout from the ground, Easter in every heart\u2026 what do we think now?’ she asks. But even if she’d want to, she cannot stop interpreting. Graham feels guilt about Western civilization. To her this is a guilty burning world. Laura Kasischke’s \u2018Miss Weariness’ looks back to the genre allegory. She draws a \u2018clever and terrifying portrait, built up out of common American material \u2013 a folding chair, a country fair \u2013 portrays (without offering resolution) the particular problems of girls and women in a society that feminism has not yet transformed, along with the enduring problem, of any gender, of finding purpose in this world.’ <\/p>\n Frank Bidart’s \u2018Song of the Mortar and Pestle’ looks like a masochistic thing: \u2018The masochist’s wish to experience his authentic, inner reality in the company of another parallels the sadist’s wish to get outside the self.’ It’s about self revelation and surviving. It can’t be done alone. But there’s no \u2018you’ in the poem. It’s an imagination responding to destructive sexual extremes. He takes the flesh as far as it can go. Desire is a grinding, making the self live. <\/p>\n Robyn Schiff’s \u2018Lustron: The House America Has Been Waiting For’ uses the actual slogan from adverts for the prefab housing introduced in 1947. The Lustron company failed for reasons, one was federal loan fraud. \u2018Seldom has there occurred a like mixture of idealism, greed, efficiency, stupidity, potential social good, and political evil.’ Schiff updates Dante’s canzone, where each stanza reuses the same end words. It’s a poem about form, about what they let us do, what they ask. Written during the second Iraq War, wih George W Bush the Commander In Chief, she knows like Elizabeth Bishop that we could avoid all the troubles in the world if everyone just sat alone in separate rooms. With technology and advancements, the future grows claws. You cannot trade death away forever, \u2018not even with the finest gun’ comments Burnt. <\/p>\n Mary Jo Bang’s \u2018Q Is for the Quick’ begins with the shortest Standard English sentence containing all 26 letters. That and the alphabet represents Lacan’s and Kristeva’s symbolic order and discipline and she writes against all of it. But its bitter and strange: she chafes against \u2018white-shoe adults’ but also the rules of creative writing too. She rejects what anyone says about what we can grow up to be. \u2018What causes a dog?’ Whatever you say, Bangs isn’t buying it, says Burnt, \u2018\u2026 to see \u2018Q is for Quick’ as a poem about poetry, about the tradition of poetry, is to ignore its sullen, peculiar, perhaps heartbreaking charge: it is a poem about children without adults, and about adults who can’t reach children.’ It spins from Kristeva’s: \u2018From a linguistic point of view depression is characterized by a disavowal of the symbolic.’ <\/p>\n Lucia Perillo’s \u2018Viagra’ gives you uplift, \u2018light stabs at popular culture and its unrealistic worship of fertile youth to serious speculation about the meaning of orgasm and the denial of death.’ Desire suggests surrender, so it’s like Bidart earlier. Her essay \u2018Sick Fuck’ goes: \u2018I think hope shackled me to my body as it dropped like a dead weight to the floor of the sea. And surrendering hope has left me feeling unburdened, lighter, strangely giddy as I float’ and there’s <\/p>\n \u2018\u2026 an erotic component to this surrender \u2013 it comes from the self relinquishing control, throwing itself away. Then the body is offered to whatever seizes possession of it \u2013 whether the seizer be a disease or time or a human lover.’ <\/p>\n And what Burt sees is that she redirects the power of sexual symbols towards hungry women. \u2018She also relocates sexuality, at the very end, flirtatiously, provocatively, at high volume, away from the anal (\u201cback pockets”, \u201cbuttocks”) to the oral, \u2018the silver teeth and tongue’, the \u2018open throat.’ <\/p>\n Melissa Range’s \u2018The Workhorse’ inherits versions of rhyme and meter to describe a horse. She’s a Christian and works in the territory of the older Richard Wilbur. It’s a protest poem, all southern, antiwar and Christian in that the horse is a type of Christ \u2018giving up its body over and over for unworthy human beings like you and me.’ It’s Nietzsche’s horse in the Tarr film<\/a>. Joseph Massey’s \u2018Prescription’ is short and implies the sky’s weight. It’s about how we think about what we see, how we work out where we stand. Burt suggests we read it as a photograph, or a series, or mediations on what photographs can do. And what they can’t. \u2018His poetics of intensely revised and carefully arranged perceptions may take us out of ourselves, allow us to bear an otherwise intolerable weight, and calm us down.’ <\/p>\n D.G. Nanouk Okpik’s \u2018Date: Post Glacial’ looks to the post glacial, an ideal to which we might return. Okpik is Inuit, Inupiat, raised by an Irish and a German in Anchorage, writing about a period coming on that may be \u2018beyond the scope of human experience.’ Rosa Alcala’s \u2018Class’ raises Virgil’s and Milton’s questions about whether poetry is \u2018work’. She brings a blue collar perspective as well as Chican@, Latin@ and Puerto Rican to reading Milton and knows the best union lines aren’t the best poetry. There’s frustration here with poetry and labour activism both. How many of us teachers have wondered what the hell it means to say what the objective of the lesson is when we teach a book we love. There’s a gap between the measurements of bureaucracy and unmeasured poetry. Burt ends with this: <\/p>\n \u2018 Its sarcastic epigrams (what \u201cis not work”, and who says?) let us inhabit her persistent sense, somewhere between an educator’s beleaguardness and an activist’s outrage, that the US class system, the US academic system, and the US labour market, must not continue as they are.’ <\/p>\n Gabby Bess’s<\/a> \u2018Oversized T-Shirts’ links with Alt-lit and Beats, confessional poets, bloggers and fanzines. Bess presents her sadness as a case study. It’s a sadness and feeling of being a weak link, embarrassing, because so personal and like in Matthew Arnold’s, \u2018Yes! In the sea of life enisled we mortal millions live alone.’ The more isolated, the more expression is craved, like falling in love with a couple. Her generation is the generation of tweets, facebook, social media of various kinds where content is persistent, audiences invisible and contexts ever collapsing. Interactions are fleeting, but become closer to art, persisting through time and requiring we make sense of them in divergent ways. Bess’s poem plays with these features, her raw style \u2018stays with us, and with Bess still, even as she hovers above her former self, a creature from the future, in midair.’ \u2018Know that if you are a woman, your body is intimately linked to your work. Resent this,’ she says. Network writing seems to be with words that do what they desire. <\/p>\n Brenda Shaughnessy’s \u2018Hide and Seek With God’ is close to the size and shape of a sonnet, sestet and octave reversed, blank, in the not-yet-born child genre of Sylvia Plath’s \u2018Child’ and Anna Letitia Barbauld’s \u2018To An Invisible Being Expected Soon To Become Visible’. It’s about a born child with serious disabilities of communication and motion in a distraught voice: \u2018 If an emotion eludes me, a dream, a yearning for my child’s good health, certainty, adventure, and all the possibilities \u2013 I write about those things precisely because I cannot have them.’ She says. Burt comments: \u2018 her intense frightening poem of maternal love and cosmic resentment is also a memorable arrangement of language, a poem as well made, as perfect for its situation, as any we have.’ <\/p>\n Claudia Rankine’s \u2018You and your friend go to see the film’ comes from her \u2018Citizen: An American Lyric’ of 2014 which has prose as well as poetry, essays on racial stereotyping in sport, deadly racial injustice eg Trayvon Martin, Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six etc. Plus visuals \u2013 graphic work by Glenn Ligon whose text repeats Zora Neale Hurston’s \u2018I FEEL MOST COLOURED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND.’ It ends with a print of Turner’s \u2018The Slave Ship.’ Is it poetry? It is outraged by the killings of black citizens. \u2018The perception that race is not an active part of existence allows people to make the mistakes that they make against each other. From that which is systematic we detach ourselves. But some of us have drowned and coughed ourselves up.’ She says. And she knows that poetry doesn’t always get what it wants, and doesn’t always work as the poet intends. <\/p>\n Brandon Sol’s \u2018Oulipo’ comes from a Chinese American frustration, fascination, and sophistication with immigration and language, is a pseudo-song emulating sounds of the Tang dynasty poet Li Po as recited in \u201cnorthern Chinese, Peking dialect” aka Beijing Mandarin by Lo Kung-yuan on a Smithsonian Folkways LP released 1963. Li Po’s original presents exile, nostalgia and Oulipo does too. A homophonic in the line of Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s Catullus of 1969 where \u2018Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me all\/whom but me, none see say Jupiter if she petted’ is the original latin \u2018 Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle\/quam mihi , non si se luppiter ipse petar.’ It rethinks the \u2018I’ and asks: who is this? You, me, the poet, a particular group? How much has poetry changed since Li Po, since Wordsworth and Coleridge? Marjorie Perloff says of Oulipo that its \u2018 constraint\u2026 that forces the poet to give up an illusory artistic freedom\u2026has as its corollary the elimination of the ego.’ Sol writes American as if Chinese, like Milton writing English as if Latin.<\/p>\n Ross Gay’s \u2018Weeping’ lines up all the way back to the Gilgamesh’s lament for Enkidu where the recondite and the demotic mix, where Ross sounds loose and informal, is mock learned, domestic, with an eye on why poetry and what is being shared with poetry of the recent and distant past. The child is caught in the irretrievable sentimental language of Gay’s lyric poetry. Poet Kyla Marshell asked Gay what it meant for him to have written \u2018 \u2026 a book about flowers by a black man\u2026 even though you do talk about race, I wonder if perhaps you were resisting all the things you could talk about.’ Gay when talking of his teacher at Sarah Lawrence Gerald Stern says; \u2018 His heart’s really out there. And that’s something you don’t really learn how to do, necessarily, if you’re a man, or brought up in sort of a male way, or even if you’re an American.’ Passion, compassion and aesthetic success are fused in Gay where his poetry book is not \u2018\u2026 a book against anything; it’s a book imagining, or advocating, for something\u2026 I want to express a sort of wild love.’ <\/p>\n I’d say Dylan’s very much at home with this company. My point’s a simple one. There’s nothing in the language used here to describe the achievements of 60 of the best American poets around since 1980, language pivoting off the wonderfully expansive and critically nuanced book by Christopher Burt, that couldn’t be used to appreciate Dylan’s work. And that’s the only point I’m making: his achievement can be measured in exactly the same terms of these others and so yes, he really really is a poet. If you read Chronicles<\/em> you can see that he writes about himself in much the same way too. He’s our ‘Shakespeare in the alley, with his pointed shoes and bells…’, a song and dance man with one hell of a twist. I’m raising my glass to both him and all who sail with affection alongside, remembering those postcards of the hanging that always remind us of what’s really happening …<\/p>\n ABOUT HE AUTHOR<\/strong><\/p>\n Richard Marshall<\/strong><\/a> is still biding his time.<\/p>\n![\"9780743478649\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/9780743478649.jpg\")
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Harryette Mullen, 2011. Poet.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\nBut she lost African American audiences for white campus based readers and so she responded to that. Bluesy, avant-garde, allusive, she says \u2018she wrote\u2026 to bring the various readers of my work together.’ So \u2018no single reader is likely to \u2018get’ all of her far-ranging allusions. Mullen effectively short-circuits ideas of mastery’ says Elisabeth Frost.<\/p>\n![\"la-et-jc-poet-laureate-herrera-20150610\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/la-et-jc-poet-laureate-herrera-20150610-1024x576.jpeg\")
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\n\u2018The Sand Creek Massacre <\/a>is a centre of history, what Tony Horwitz calls \u2018the My Lai of its day. It fuelled decades of war on the Great Plains. And yet, over time, the massacre receded from white memory, to the point where even locals were unaware of what had happened in their own backyard.’
\nHe writes against toxic stereotyping where \u2018death gives fictional Indians their power. And Indians in fiction function as knowing ghosts whose presence alone speaks back in time to the crimes committed against them’ says David Treuer. They are beautiful, strange and walked the earth a long time ago is the \u2018baleful clich \u00e9’. <\/p>\n![\"elizabeth-alexander\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/elizabeth-alexander.jpg\")
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