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Mike Snider's Formal Blog at the Sonnetarium
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Wednesday, June 29, 2005 |
From the Wilson Quarterly, Arts & Letters Daily linked Miles Hoffman's "Music Without Magic." While acknowledging the quality and beauty of some 20th century atonal music, Hoffman argues that atonal dominance in serious music, because of its deliberate assault on the ways in which music gives us pleasure by organizing time in the creation and resolution of harmonic tension, is at least partly responsible for the decline in audiences for concert-hall music:
One of the more obvious reasons we appreciate music's giving meaning to time is that our supply of time is so limited. But this is also why we so strongly resent having our time wasted! If you see a painting hanging on the wall and don't like it, you simply turn your gaze elsewhere, and hardly any time has been squandered. But if you go to a concert and the program includes music you find ugly or unpleasant, precious minutes of your life tick away, lost. You could have done something else with that little part of your life, anything else, but you're stuck four seats from the aisle, and time is passing. From resentment to hatred is but a small step.
And, of course, not many people enjoy being insulted, either, or falsely accused. In a 1964 speech at the Colorado campus of the Aspen Institute, the English composer Benjamin Britten said, "It is insulting to address anyone in a language which they do not understand." And if what's said—or played—seems so often to be couched intentionally in a language that virtually nobody could understand, and yet one finds oneself blamed over and over again for not understanding. …
Hoffman notes that defenses of avant-garde music of the "relentlessly dissonant and persistently unpopular variety" often center on the notion that exposure and familiarity will lead us to appreciate what we did not at first, and it does happen. But in music, as in poetry and in the other arts, the truly great works—at least those to which contemporary audiences had access—have always been acknowledged as such from the beginning, even when critical reaction was occasionally hostile. If, after a century, the initial promise of "liberation" from tonality has largely and spectacularly failed, isn't it time to admit that, while great musicians will and poor musicians won't find a way to make good music whatever the prevailing theory, this particular theory is a very bad one that has produced, mostly, very bad music?
Not hard to see where I'm going, is it?
I'd only add that good theory won't make great art any more than terrible theory will prevent it. The difference is most important in the work of those talented artists who aren't ever going to produce great work—that is, almost all of us—who are supported by good theory and practice and damaged by bad. So neither am I being snide, Ron, when I say her poems are better than yours.
7:40:11 PM 
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Wednesday, June 22, 2005 |
There's a wonderful (but poorly edited) interview with philosopher/novelist Rebecca Goldstein at Edge, mostly about the implications of Gödel's Incompleteness theorem and its relation to logical positivism, Wittgenstein, and postmodern theory. I can't resist this rather long quote:
I like to think that the shallower aspects of the intellectual scene of the last century have played themselves out. I mean in particular the assaults on objectivity and rationality, which often take the form of attacks on science. There's nothing less exhilarating than reducing everything to social constructs and to our piddly human points of view. The pleasure of thinking is in trying to get outside of ourselves—this is as true in the arts and the humanities as in math and the sciences. There's something heroic in the idea of objective knowledge; the farther away knowledge takes you from your own individual point of view, the more heroic it is. Maybe the new ideas that are going to revitalize the arts and humanities are going to be allied with the sciences.
The current post at Verse online is the Metrical Poetry Feature from the last issue of Salt. Since the editor is Annie Finch, it's no surprise to find a truly eclectic and mostly excellent selection in technique, style, and attitude — but I didn't think I'd ever see work from Kasey Mohammad and Mary Agner on the same web page. BTW, Kasey — Thor in a poem on the Ramones? Ain't that the wrong mythology for them?
I'm off to North Carolina tomorrow, and we may head to the beach, depending on when my mandolin returns from Vermont and when my new 20" iMac arrives. Yes, I'm spending too much money — but the point is I probably won't post again until next week. Be well. Write well.
7:23:15 PM
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Tuesday, June 21, 2005 |
The last few days I've been feeling like crap — I caught a bad cold or something at West Chester so I haven't been to work, and I cut the top of my left index finger sharpening a knife so I can't play mandolin and I haven't done dishes — but I have been unusually good (for me) in one way: I sent off two batches of poems.
I know it's Summer Solstice today, but looking at and revising "finished" poems for submission while that sink stared at me reminded me of this poem, my only villanelle. I'd just begun to be interested in form and meter when I made it, and it's a mess of awkward line breaks and four and five beat lines using no particular foot. And what better day to fix it up than a first day of summer when I'm only mile from a beach and can't go there?
Winter Villanelle
The dishes are dirty and winter has come—
Neither will kill me, I hope, but I swear
That I'd rather be at the beach drinking rum.
There the sun is warm; here my nose is numb
And I'm at the sink suffering mal de mer—
The dishes are dirty and winter has come.
In the heatless kitchen I pick at some crumb
In my Playtex gloves and long underwear,
Longing to be at the beach drinking rum—
Oh, then I'd be lost in Elysium,
Far from that moldy Camembert—
But dishes are dirty and winter has come.
The suds, like the snow, seem pure and fool some,
But not people me, with our savoir faire—
We'd rather be at the beach drinking rum,
For snow becomes slush and suds turn to scum
And there's nothing but freezing and sneezing where
And there's nothing but misery anywhere where
The dishes are dirty and winter has come—
God! let me be at the beach drinking rum!
Still ain't right (that's a very loose triple-meter tetrameter), but it may be fit for company now.
Update: Line 17 edited 6 22 2005
3:30:03 PM
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Monday, June 20, 2005 |
Just before the West Chester Conference interrupted everything, I started what I promised to be a series of posts on poems by the School of Phlogiston's boogieman, Dana Gioia, and Steven Schroeder posted a call for Poetry Mix Tapes: 10 poems under about 150 lines chosen to introduce a smart newbie to the enjoyment of poetry. I'll get to Gioia, about a poem a month, I think, but I'd really like to see what other bloggers do with Steven's idea — there were several responses in comments and more at the New Poetry mail list, but I missed any blog-responses. Probably due to West Chester. Which also gave me the nasty cold I'm suffering right now.
Anywho, you'd surely give a new flirting partner a different poetry mix tape than you'd give to a co-worker or a new in-law, and for each of them it would be different depending on sex, profession, age, moodiness, politics, and so on. Since I'm an old married fart writing software for the Navy, here's a mix tape of living poets I might give to a 40ish (that's +- 10 years) techie with some rural background who'd never think of kissing me but isn't hung up on sex roles:
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R. S. Gwynn, from No Word of Farewell: "At Rose's Range"
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Kim Addonizio, from Tell Me: "Last Call"
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Ted Kooser, from Flying at Night, "Selecting a Reader"
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John Hollander, from Town & Country Matters, Sonnet 3 of "Sonnets for Roseblush"
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Timothy Murphy, from The Deed of Gift, "Eighty-eight at Midnight"
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David Yezzi, from The Hidden Model, "Upon Julia's Breasts" [audio link]
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Jenny Factor, from Unraveling at the Name, "Swing Time" [scroll a little]
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Frederick Turner, from Paradise: Selected Poems 1990-2003, "Engineers"
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Richard Wilbur, from Collected Poems 1943-2004, "Blackberries for Amelia"
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Marisa de los Santos, from From the Bones Out, "Women Watching Basketball" [scroll a little]
2:18:10 PM
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Sunday, June 19, 2005 |
I deleted more dark sites than I thought there'd be (some I'll miss a good deal) and I've added, under Poetry Blogs, in alphabetical order,
Carol Peters ablogging, Copia, The Daimonion Chronicles, Dummy, Ecce Mulier, JewishyIrishy, Unruly Servant, and Vivid / Erin Notebloom.
It occurred to me this morning that the little epigram I did versions of a few days ago could also benefit from being cast in the third person:
Interviewing
After a week of suits and ties
At last he's naked in their bed.
She shuts her book, and, stripping, sighs,
Then kills the light. There's nothing said.
Is there such a thing as a "big" epigram?
4:09:09 PM
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Saturday, June 18, 2005 |
Jonathan Mayhew has a sensible short post on craft in poetry. He's more reluctant than I to attribute the goodness of a poem to craft, but I think it's really a matter of emphasis: I'd say craft cannot explain goodness, but I'd insist that it's useful to talk about the craft of a good poem, and that there are damned few (perhaps exactly zero) good poems which do not exhibit good craft. Frank O'Hara and Emily Dickinson both wrote some wonderful poems, and both wrote a lot of crap. The crap is mostly the result of carelessness — though in Dickinson's case we have little idea which poems she thought of as finished. That doesn't mean that I always understand the craft of the poems I like, and like Jonathan, I'm most interested in the good poems whose craft I don't understand. Of course, we often disagree on which poems of the last half-century are in fact good poems, and neither of us is immortal, so even if we were both to find the same pair of very different poems technically interesting, we'd probably not choose the same one to worry at till we "got it." You pick your battles.
And craft can certainly become a tic.
This excerpt from Reginald Gibbons's "Hour" (which appeared in the December 2004 Poetry and which we looked at in the workshop at West Chester) displays an interesting effect created mostly by typography and line breaks:
… An ache
of be-
ing. An ache of
being,
over love. An
ache of
being over
love. …
In this particular poem I think this works very well, and it's worth trying in other contexts. But not too often — like Sharon Olds ending lines with the definite article, it would get old quick — and remember Eliot's admonition to steal rather than to imitate.
It might seem that this effect would be hard to manage in metrical verse, but let me steal some examples from the first chapter of Tim Steele's wonderful All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing of how moving a monosyllabic word in and out of stressed positions in a line can do very similar things. (repeated words are in italics, metrical stresses are bold, but please don't think all metrical stresses are the same — some stressed syllables get less speech stress than some unstressed syllables):
True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up
Robert Browning
All men think all men mortal, but themselves
Edward Young
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honor'd, self-secure
Matthew Arnold
9:39:10 PM
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Thursday, June 16, 2005 |
I'd persuaded myself that the half-rhymes here were good enough:
Interviewing
Two days I've suffered suit and tie
And now I'm naked in my bed.
My wife lies reading next to me --
Turned away and fully dressed.
But Chris Wiman pointed out that epigrams must be, well, epigrammatic:
Interviewing
After a week of suits and ties
At last I'm naked in our bed.
She shuts her book, and, stripping, sighs,
Then kills the light. There's nothing said.
Joe Green's blog, Lisping the Lucid Light, is over on the left now.
6:33:27 PM
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Wednesday, June 15, 2005 |
I've added Bachelardette to the blogroll and finally fixed the link to Jilly Dybka's Poetry Hut Blog. This weekend I'm going through the list and deleting anything with no posts since April 1st.
7:19:28 PM
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Showed this to Chris Wiman at West Chester — he suggested third person and ensured I'd pay attention by mentioning Auden:
First Revelation
At school they beat me up, a skinny fart
Who'd shit his pants and tried to hide the turds
Inside his desk, and even worse, was smart.
No good with feet or fists, I fought with words —
And magic words were what I found at church.
I still remember how to change the wine
To blood, know the words to make God search
My soul for sin or cast demons from swine.
Most magical of all, I learned that girls
At church would listen to the words I made
With loosening hearts and thighs and give me pearls
Of great price, thinking it to be fair trade.
God knows I was a wicked boy. A beast.
And I decided to become a priest.
Among other things, there's no conflict in the new version, below, resulting from the knowledge that I, in fact, did not become a priest. I think it led to some more interesting lines in the second and third quatrains, as well.
First Revelation
At school they beat him up, a skinny fart
Who'd shit his pants and tried to hide the turds
Inside his desk, and even worse, was smart.
No good with feet or fists, he fought with words,
And magic words were what he found at church —
Not just the incantation changing wine
To blood, the rituals that make God search
The soul for sin or cast demons from swine,
But cadences and tones for pretty pious girls
Who listening, blushed, then laughed, then sighed and prayed,
Then loosened hearts and thighs and gave him pearls
Of great price, thinking it to be fair trade.
God knows he was a wicked, boyish beast.
And he decided to become a priest.
Edited 2005 06 15 8:41 pm
7:11:14 PM
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Tuesday, June 14, 2005 |
Jake Adam York points out (and reflects on) a response by Anthony Robinson to a remark on craft in poetry by Jonathan Mayhew (see #8). At first glance it's remarkable that none of them actually pointed out any examples of craft or attempted any definition beyond some vague relation to "style," especially "period style," or that a well-crafted poem is one which embodies the "suppositions and realizations" which generate the poem — which isn't much different from "well-crafted is what I like." But, in fact, it's very hard to talk concretely about craft in the dominant free verse mode of contemporary poetry, and there are poetics, such as flarf, which deliberately reject any notion of craft in the punk spirit of no more guitar heroes.
In poetry, painting, carpentry, pottery, saxophone-playing, or basketball, craft is merely the set of technical skills which allow a practitioner to achieve some desired end in the chosen medium. It is what allows competent work, and has very little to do with artistic excellence, which is nearly always mysterious. That's not quite true, of course: when Homer nods it's his craft that keeps things moving.
But just what are the technical resources of the English language free verse poet? All the tools of rhetoric (though they are unjustly despised by too many, especially those leery of any "statement" in poetry), various sound techniques shared with all poetry in our language, and, pre-eminently, the line break (I love many things called prose poems; poetry they ain't). But getting line breaks right is damned hard, and damned hard to talk about.
Traditional meters and forms (including their rhyme schemes) provide an additional layer of technical skills — craft — which can support the poet's work. They are eminently teachable, and flexible enough to accommodate all the period styles you can shake a stick at. As Christian Wiman said in the workshop I attended at West Chester last weekend, they should be the default mode of poetry because of the additional craft support they provide. It's possible to write a good sonnet with far less genius, in the old sense, than one needs to write a good free verse poem.
In that workshop, basic metrical craft was assumed, and we focused on line breaks. Wiman explicitly noted that metrical poets need to pay as much and the same kind of attention to line breaks as do free verse poets. We looked at poems from Lorine Niedecker, Robert Lowell, George Mackay Brown (I've got to find more of him), James Schuyler, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, George Peele, Thomas Gray, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Kay Ryan, Thom Gunn, Louise Bogan, W. H. Auden, and more — in four hours! — with the general rubric of thinking of the poem's structure along a continuum between sentence-based and line-based. It's a fascinating way of thinking about my own practice, which I've already begun to incorporate in to new work and revisions of old.
7:44:24 PM
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Monday, June 13, 2005 |
Despite having to spend an unexpected $400 on my car on the way back from West Chester, I'm going to be high for a month. The readings were wonderful and the panels I saw were stimulating — Rhina Espaillat was wonderful on the Religion and Poetry panel, but afterwards Annie Finch correctly commented that it should have been called Christianity and Poetry. Christian Wiman's workshop on Poetic Line was wonderful not just because he liked some of my poems (yippee!) but because of the quality of discussion with Deborah Warren, Cathryn Essinger, Bill Byers, Alfred Nicol, Myrna Stone, Charlotte Innes, Chelsea Rathburn, Gretel Claggett, and Cindy whose last name I can't find. I met Annie Finch and she's read this blog — "Oh, you're the Mike Snider!" and then, again correctly, called me on some unfair things I was saying to Dana Gioia about Ron Silliman. I saw old friend Fred Turner for the first time in 27 years; I spoke a little with Rafael Campo, Tony Barnstone, Marisa de los Santos, Alicia Stallings, Robert Shaw, B. F. Fairchild, Moira Egan (who knows both Cary and Ridge!), Tim Steele, Dick Davis, R. S. Gwynn, and Rhina Espaillat; I played music with Kim Addonizio, David Yezzi, Rachel (Aumiller?), and Austin (MacRae?); from blogland, I met Steve Schroeder and spent some time with Robin Kemp and Mary Agner; I met David Anthony and Terese Coe from Eratosphere; I met and talked a good deal with Bob Cumming, who runs Iris Press; I caught up with old West Chester friends Robert Abbate, Arnie Johanson, Mike Riley, Robert Darling, Wendy Sloane, Richard Attanasio, and Len Krisak — and I need to stop and say this isn't remotely an exhaustive list of the amazingly talented and almost overwhelming company there. But I am exhausted. In the next few days I'll try to say more useful things about the conference, but it may be the weekend before I can do say much more than "wow!".
And I missed Anthony Hecht and Michael Donaghy terribly, as did the whole gathering.
9:28:23 PM
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Tuesday, June 7, 2005 |
Except for the long weekend I spent with my wife, our two teenaged daughters, their three teenaged female over(several)night guests, the teenaged boy we've somehow acquired, and a twenty-one year old boy en route to his grandparents in Indiana, I've been frantically busy the last couple of weeks trying to get ready for West Chester and trying to get my development team at work set up for the time I'm gone. That long weekend almost seemed restful.
And tomorrow I'm finally off for the conference, and I have no idea what kind of net access I'll have. Maybe there'll be a wifi hotspot somewhere this time, but last year there were only a dozen or so computers in the Student Center the 300 of us could use. If anyone's still reading after the light posting lately, look for me back here the following weekend, after I've decompressed.
6:45:16 PM
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Sunday, June 5, 2005 |
I finally got around to adding new links over on the left: new under POETRY BLOGS are litwindowpane, nice guy syndrome, nolapoet: orleanian, american, exile, The Real Paul Jones, RELI(E)ABLE SIGNS,
Sturgeon's Law, and Via Negativa; POETRY SITES & ZINES gets CRANKS&NDLURKERS; and RESOURCES now includes New Pages: Guide to Weblogs. I haven't tried to cull blogs gone dark — they keep popping up again.
What I did do is clean out a closet and find things I'd thought were lost since December, including poetry from Stuart Eglin and a mailing list from and poems from participants in last year's West Chester conference. I feel like Lucy: I got some splainin to do.
One more thing — if you've been getting to this blog via my old website, stop it. I'm changing ISPs and that site will disappear in a few weeks. I've cloned it here.
5:26:30 PM
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© Copyright 2008 Michael Snider.
Last update: 6/26/08; 9:24:31 PM.
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