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Mike Snider's Formal Blog at the Sonnetarium
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Thursday, March 30, 2006 |
I'm in Florida, for the second time in my life, to attend and help give a presentation at a User's Group meeting for TrackEye software from Image Systems in Sweden. Tonight I looked up Jonathan Mayhew's Bemsha Swing to read reports of David Shapiro's vist to Kansas. I'd expressed admiration for Shapiro's poetry in a comment at Mayhew's blog, but expressed doubt—well, I wrote he was clueless—about Shapiro's understanding of metrical poetry, and then corrected myself as a result of a short exchange between myself and Mayhew, admitting that my doubts sprang from off-the-cuff and perhaps polemical remarks Shapiro had made at a reading a few years ago, and that I really didn't know what Shapiro currently understood about metrical poetry. Now Mayhew has disappeared the post and the commment exchange.
It's his blog. He can do what he likes. But fuck him. I'm not generally one for metablogging, but one of the principal virtues of the form is as a record of evolving understanding, and serious bloggers generally correct without erasing mistakes they've made, and only delete blatant spam or unwarranted personal attacks, even then marking the deletion in some way. This isn't the first time Mayhew has chosen to lie by altering the history of his blog. Fuck him. He's a lousy poet and an occasionally entertaining, occasionally enlightening blogger who can't be trusted.
Be assured, Dr. Mayhew, that if you restore the post and consequent comment exchange, or even state unequivocally that they were deleted in error, I'll retract every word of this without deleting it, and offer my sincerest apology.
11:59:29 PM 
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Tuesday, March 28, 2006 |
My sixth weekly sonnet was requested by my youngest girl CC, and is posted here. I'm not putting it on the blog because I want to be able to disappear it after a week, so that I can possibly rework it for submission somewhere. Drafts at the Draft House. Let me know what you think, and please suggest a topic, theme, rhyme, or image for next week!
I've also changed the sample sonnet from 44 Sonnets. You can get a copy for $3 by clicking the 'Buy Now' button up on the right, or I'll take almost anything (chapbooks preferred) in trade.
And finally in this collection of fairly random (but often repeated) notes, please update your links and bookmarks! About a third of the traffic here still comes from the old address for this blog. Everything is here, even comments from three and a half years ago, and that site will probably not survive the summer.
9:52:12 PM
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Monday, March 27, 2006 |
I've spent a very frustrating three hours trying to add a podcast here. There's still something screwy with the rss feed, which has to be loaded twice in Safari and doesn't work at all in FireFox or Omniweb. But you can hear me reading the most recent weekly sonnet by clicking "Play 'For Once'" on that page, or by just clicking here. I dunno where the bad Jersey accent came from.
11:09:03 PM
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Saturday, March 25, 2006 |
One of the good things—maybe the only good thing besides the salary and challenging work, which I do appreciate—about working 300 miles from home is that every visit has a chance of being a little bit like Christmas. The last two week's mail brought a broadside version of Mary Karr's "A Blessing From My Sixteen Years' Son," books by David Graham and Chelsea Rathburn, a CD of Richard Wilbur reading, and the new Texas Poetry Journal, with poems by and an interview with Rhina Espaillat and poems by Len Krisak, Catherine Chandler, and Michael Cantor, to name just those work I'm familiar with—and they're all at The Hypertexts, where I'm a latecomer. It's wonderful to have another high-quality formal-friendly journal.
But I haven't had a chance to do much reading because, after traveling down here and getting blood work done and being teen-taxi and cook for a few days, I finally got almost all of my digital life under one domain. My poor neglected résumé still lives at the old site, as does the page for The Salamanders, since both will require extensive rewrites. But they're linked from www.mikesnider.org, and everything else, including lowres Palm Zire 71 pics of Stammer and Lucipo readings and from my walks in Ridge, MD, are moved, (mostly) reformatted, and stub-linked from the old pages. I'm beat. Now please update your links if you haven't already.
I've started a piece on scansion and the difference between musical and poetic rhythm which I hope to post early next week, and I've actually got a queue of suggestions for the next few sonnets. That doesn't mean you shouldn't send your suggestions.
9:46:43 PM
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Wednesday, March 22, 2006 |
It's posted here. This week I was stuck with Gorilla Glue because I carelessly posted this, and the last two lines are nearly word-for-word from the February National Geographic, of all things. Drafts at the Draft House. Let me know what you think, and please suggest a topic, theme, rhyme, or image for future sonnets! Thanks.
8:08:47 PM
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Monday, March 20, 2006 |
Back in high school, when I first started reading contemporary poetry, the three who most interested me were Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Bukowski. I still read (some) Levertov with a great deal of pleasure, and because I still remember some of his poems—"I Know a Man" is the smallest masterpiece I know—I just recently replaced the Collected Creeley that I think left with my first wife. Bukowski though, is another story. I was a grad student in English from the late 70s to the mid 80s, and Charles Bukowski just wasn't done. He wrote stories for Hustler, for crying out loud, which is perhaps one reason that despite being one of the most prolific and bestselling American poets of the last century, he isn't in any of the Norton anthologies. And what, in that era, could you say about him or his poetry in a lecture, except perhaps as an official bogeyman in a Women's Studies class? No doubt his very popularity had something to do with it as well.
In any case, until recently I hadn't read any Bukowski for at least 15 years. I've been writing sonnets and triolets and rondeax: What could he teach me? For that matter, what could I have to say about him? I'm glad that someone at HarperCollins did think I might have something to say and sent me a review copy of Come On In!, because as it turns out I think he taught me quite a lot early on—and because the book is an ample illustration of Auden's maxim that none are unjustly remembered.
Bukowski died in 1994, and these poems, edited by John Martin, are "part of an archive of unpublished work that Charles Bukowski left to be published after his death." There are few surprises in terms of subject matter: drinking, making poems, being sick after drinking, trouble with women, hypocrisy, trouble with landlords, his status as a poet, how tough he'd like to be, contempt for Official Verse Culture (which for Bukowski would surely have included Charles Bernstein), the horses. But that's a longish list, longer than one could make for, say, Housman, and few surprises is not no surprises. "old poem" begins by acknowledging almost everything that's been said against him:
what an old poem this is
from an old guy.
you've heard it many times
before:
me sitting here
sotted
again.
ashtray full.
bottles about.
poems scattered on the
floor.
But after drinking more, burning his nose lighting a cigarette butt, and returning to the typewriter:
as I hear a voice
rising from the
neighborhood:
"FUCK YOU AND THAT
MACHINE!"
ah, they've been very
patient: it's 3:45
a.m.
And Li Po sits in the middle of the poem, drinking too. That's not such a surprise, but the bemused tenderness of the address is:
hello, Li Po, you old
juicehead, the world is still
full of
rancor and
regret.
(I don't write free verse any more, I've forgotten how if I ever knew, but it seems to me there's 3 really good linebreaks in those 5 lines.)
The poems in which his wife appears are also surprisingly tender, and Bukowski (whether actually Bukowski or the character he's invented) is very aware of the burden she carries, both at home:
and my wife says Brock, for
Christ's sake,
the typewriter all night,
how can I sleep? and I crawl quickly
into bed and
kiss her hair and say
sorry sorry sorry
(from "a real thing, a good woman")
and on the road:
you're just a drunk who writes, said his wife.
that's better than a drunk who just drinks,
said the writer.
his wife sighed.
well, do you want to go back to the room or to another cafe?
(from "Paris in the spring")
There are frequent references to "the poem machine," including one where his wife's gift of a computer means it's become so easy to make the things that she doesn't see him as much, and I won't pretend that there isn't filler here. As he writes in "this machine is a fountain,"
my system is always the same:
keep it loose
write a great number of
poems
try with all your
heart
and don't worry about the
bad
ones.
(I'm not so fond of those linebreaks.)
But the saying is that you need to write a hundred songs before you're ready to write a song (is that in the book, too?), and all that writing writing writing from time to time pays off magnificently. I said at the outset that I had learned things from him long ago, and the most important of those things was an understanding that a poem must have a narrative core. Many of his poems do more than that—they tell the whole story with astonishing compression. One result is that they don't sample well, so let me finish with one complete poem, "scrambled legs," the one that made me think about my own conversation sonnets and where they came from:
we were having lunch
at Hal's diner.
"you know," he told me, "after we made love
the last time
she lay in my arms and cried, she said,
'oh my god, I miss him so!'
she was talking about you, Hank."
"that's just the way it is, Jack, with all
my women: while I'm with them they hate
me but after I leave them they love
me.
I'm never tempted to go back to them, however, I don't even
consider it."
"you don't mind that I slept with her,
Hank?"
"did she cook you a good breakfast afterwards,
Jack?"
"I don't remember."
"well, I'll tell you: she didn't."
"is that the reason you left her:
because she couldn't cook
a good breakfast?"
"I never eat breakfast, Jack."
"then what happened?"
"too often, after we made love, she
began crying in my arms about how she
missed some other guy."
"well," he said, "I'll be a son-of-a-bitch."
"don't be," I said. "just pass the salt and
pepper."
6:07:28 PM
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Thursday, March 16, 2006 |
Tonight a long business dinner with some folks whose software we're buying and tomorrow night a last-minute St. Patty's gig at the bar across the parking lot, so my promised anomaly will have to wait till Saturday. Meanwhile, I've been thinking a lot about het-met lately (hope the Bush administration doesn't figure out that sonnets are homometrical) and there's been loose talk on a mailing list about loose iambics, so I'll continue my recent morbidity with a heterometrical loose iambic poem about a churchbell-ringer and gravedigger from Thomas Hardy:
The Sexton at Longpuddle
He passes down the churchyard track
On his way to toll the bell;
And stops, and looks at the graves around,
And notes each finished and greening mound
Complacently,
As their shaper he,
And one who can do it well,
And, with a prosperous sense of his doing,
Think's he'll not lack
Plenty such work in the long ensuing
Futurity
For people will always die
And he will always be nigh
To shape their cell.
8:55:10 PM
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Wednesday, March 15, 2006 |
The following sentence appears on page 44 of the February 2006 National Geographic:
A good sex life can be as strong as Gorilla Glue, but who wants that stuff on your skin?
That sentence is only slightly less likely in its context than what will appear here at the Formal Blog tomorrow.
It would have been tonight, but I'm too upset by the fire today on Solomon's Island which destroyed, among other things, Bowen's Inn, where I play music every other Thursday. No one was hurt, and the land there is so valuable that, as long as everyone's insurance is in order, there shouldn't be any unexpected financial losses to property owners (insurance companies expect them, and expect them to be less than the premiums paid), even to those whose boats were tied up at the marina. Dishwashers, barkeeps, cooks, and waitstaff are another story, though the tourist season is about to begin and I hope things turn around soon for them. Their problems will in any case be much worse than mine, but I can't help but say that I'm gonna go nuts with no place to get loud for a while.
And I hope no one wants that stuff on my skin.
And if you don't want a sonnet about Gorilla Glue (should I have said that?), please suggest a topic, theme, rhyme, or image for next week!
6:41:47 PM
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Monday, March 13, 2006 |
My fourth weekly sonnet, with, as suggested by Mary Anne Stout (my friend for 44 years!), coffee as my jumping off point, is posted here. Actually, she suggested the line between too little coffee and too much, but you'll see that I've continued in my morbid mood—maybe I'll do another chap one day of "Farewell Sonnets." I'm not putting it on the blog because I want to be able to disappear it after a week, so that I can possibly rework it for submission somewhere. Drafts at the Draft House. Let me know what you think, and please suggest a topic, theme, rhyme, or image for next week!
I've also changed the sample sonnet from 44 Sonnets. You can get a copy for $3 by clicking the 'Buy Now' button up on the right, or I'll take almost anything (chapbooks preferred) in trade.
Over on the left is a new-to-me blog, John Baker's Weblog. How can you resist a blog that follows a post on Willie Nelson with one on Samuel Taylor Coleridge? Alas, no permalinks (that I can find).
And finally in this collection of fairly random notes, please update your links and bookmarks! About a third of the traffic here still comes from the old address for this blog. Everything is here, even comments from three and a half years ago, and that site will probably not survive the summer.
7:50:39 PM
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Wednesday, March 8, 2006 |
I've got a suggestion for the next sonnet via email, so you folks are off the hook—but send them anyway! May be a drought one day. Tomorrow it's 9 hours of work and 5 hours of driving so I can get to a doctor's appointment at 8:15 am Friday, but I'll be back here this weekend with the sonnet and a surprise. Be well, write well!
9:20:46 PM
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Tuesday, March 7, 2006 |
My third weekly sonnet, with, as suggested by Mary Agner, Carnival as my jumping off point, is posted here. I'm not putting it on the blog because I want to be able to disappear it after a week, so that I can possibly rework it for submission somewhere. Drafts at the Draft House. Let me know what you think, and please suggest a topic, theme, rhyme, or image for next week!
I've also changed the sample sonnet from 44 Sonnets. You can get a copy for $3 by clicking the 'Buy Now' button up on the right, or I'll take almost anything (chapbooks preferred) in trade.
9:55:00 PM
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Sunday, March 5, 2006 |
In my case at least, this weekend has shown that intestinal distress is incompatible with sonneteering. I'm feeling better, and I will squeeze one out the first part of the week. That is probably an unfortunate phrasing, but the last couple of days has left me feeling nasty—I did manage to take out some frustration on World of Warcraft monsters.
Since I can't think, I'll just natter on for a while. One of the poetry mailing lists I subscribe to has been preoccupied with sestinas, villanelles, and pantoums, and the discussion led me to reread Anthony Hecht's "Sidney and the Sestina," reprinted in Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry. A good deal of the essay examines the static quality of most sestinas, suggesting that it is almost a necessary consequence of the form, and then he says this:
Indeed, something about those compulsory repetitions seems to
prohibit the possibility of a sestina developing in the way other
kinds of poems do. A familiar lyric freedom is curtailed, richly
detailed descriptions are pretty firmly excluded, narrative
development, above all, is difficult to accommodate. The resources of
the sestina seem astonishingly circumscribed.
But if these seem to be characteristic limitations imposed by the
form itself, we are entitled to to be the more delighted, impressed,
and gratified when we find some poet intelligent and ingenious enough
to overcome them. And such triumph over the form has been attained
not once but twice by Elizabeth Bishop, in two sestinas ["A Miracle
for Breakfast" and "Sestina"] which otherwise bear very little
resemblance to each other.
This struck me because the topic of sestinas had been introduced to the list with, among other statements, the claim that they were peculiarly suited to narrative. Did Elizabeth Bishop create that possibility, or at least discover it, or are her poems nearly sui generis? Or was Hecht simply wrong, and it only needed some sufficiently skilled poet to try?
Similar things are often said about the sonnet: Richard Wilbur reports that Frost said "if you have something you'd like to say for about eight lines and then want to take it back for six lines, you're on the verge of writing a sonnet," and Wilbur goes on to say
Most of the time the ideas that come to us have no business at all being thrust into the sonnet form. If we did start behaving that way, it would be true that the form would be directing us, would be making certain demands. But if one chooses form rightly, one is not submitting to the demands of the form but making use of it at every moment.
Peter Davison replies "Shakespeare was able to do it about 150 times."
Now, IMNSHO opinion Frost, Wilbur, and Hecht are by leagues the three greatest American poets of the last century—and Wilbur still our greatest living poet—and I hate to pick a fight with them. But it seems to me that, outside of the very short forms, such as the triolet, and especially the comic short forms such as the limerick and double dactyl, "some poet intelligent and ingenious enough" can find a way to treat nearly any theme, use nearly any organizing structure, in nearly any form. That is one of the subtexts of my weekly sonnets—not that I think I'm that one intelligent and ingenious poet who will forever expand the scope of the sonnet, but that there is an element of professionalism in being able to write to task, as musicians compose and play to task, as painters work to commission, as set dressers and camera operators and actors do their jobs while they make art.
I talk about the muse, but I have little time for inspiration, and little patience for artists who claim to be unable to work under constraint because it interferes with expressing their inner being. I did that this weekend.
7:27:58 PM
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Wednesday, March 1, 2006 |
I've said before that I don't every day read every blog listed on the left, but I am, or was, in the habit of spending my lunchtime at my desk reading what I could. Now that I can't get to my websites from work anymore, I don't have the URLs and can't visit except through referrals, which I can still see. And by the way, I've found out that it's not because this blog is being censored: it's a combination of technical and financial problems causing the Navy to have to constantly shift its gateways to the commercial internet. One day I'll meet Eileen Tabios for lunch again, though she won't know it unless she's checking her referral logs.
I did manage tonight to figure out that not only has Kevin Andre Elliott moved Slant Truth, he's got a second blog at Folk Say. No doubt there are other changes I'll pick up this weekend.
Meanwhile, it's Wednesday again, Carnival is over, and I've had no suggestions for this week's sonnet. If you think sea turtle footprints led to some obscure verse, wait till you see what I can do on my own.
6:51:02 PM
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© Copyright 2008 Michael Snider.
Last update: 6/26/08; 9:31:47 PM.
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