Japanese Royals Fill Palace With Poetry
There Are No Poetry Police in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Saw some bloggers talking about tables of contents and laughing over their "best" titles...or rather, the titles that sounded most intriguing sans-poem. My titles are generally pretty minimalist. Sometimes I even refuse to have articles in them, so that a poem is just called "Ring" rather than "The Ring." But I looked through my backlog in search of intriguing titles and I think the top five attention callers are thus:
1. "The Bleeding Edge of Kink"
2. "Mama Lama"
3. "Amor en la Casa Robotica"
4. "Huey Lewis Hive Mind"
5. "Zombie Work Song"
Mused today on whether I have a voice, but no form. Some people write rather consistently in one form. I don't. I write about half-and-half free verse and some type of formal -- a mixture of set forms like sonnets and, more often, rhymes on forms I set myself. I was looking through some poems and noticed one whose form was very like Jorie Graham's, another whose form was much like Charles Wright's, and one that reminded me of Kay Ryan, which I rather like because when I first read her stuff I was just enchanted, but couldn't produce anything in the same vein at all. Then, a couple of years later, I just sort of got into anglo-saxon three-to-four-stress per line meter, and one came out on its own. At the same time, while these mimic-form poems look on the page rather like their prototypes' work, I think the tone and sensibility is completely different, and the aims, too. So that's it; I'm a form cannibal. A ghoul of forms, digging them out of their graves and putting them to my own nefarious uses. . .
Remember, great poets steal.
And some sell out, I suppose. Nikki Giovanni dreams of having her own shoe, a la Air Jordans. Air Giovannis. "I want The Giovanni," she mused, in full ego-tripping mode. "I want you to be able to go into Foot Locker — all you writers out there — and say, 'I want The Giovanni,' and then buy a $500 pair of my shoes."
Actually, that would be pretty funny. Got that link from Fishblog, btw.
Wood's Lot today had a bunch of links on Lorenzo Thomas, including this transcript of a speech he gave many years ago at the Poetry Project, which made me think about the way poets use language. When I first learned about language poetry, it was presented to me as a way to break down the framework of language and rebuild it. Language had become a sort of official newspeak, and the authority it conveyed was itself indicative of corruptive and entrenched power. Destroy and rebuild, like Picasso or a Russian novelist. But it was always more attractive to me that language already had the ability to channel power. Like Thomas in the speech above, I thought of the use of poetry in language as a deliberate attempt to grasp power for your own and to channel the reader into your way of thinking. Poetry was a persuasive art. Any art, for that matter, is a persuasive art. To take the person who experiences it and to mold them in your viewpoint. So if you had something revolutionary to say, say it in the language of power, and thereby take out the power from the inside.
I suppose language poets are doing that though; channeling the reader by disrupting the reader and rebuilding. It's a different method, one that I can appreciate (at least theoretically; it's not every piece of language poetry that I can sit down and read and respond aesthetically and intellectually to in a meaningful fashion). I'm not sure it's a method I can take part in myself; I'm thoroughly grounded in syntax and grammar and enjoy wielding words to make specific, discrete points, rather than to fulfill a larger theoretical construct. Maybe my communications are thereby more surface-bound and less pervasive. I'm not sure.
I could be snooty and say that at least by operating in the confines of official dialogue, I have a better chance of someone reading one of my poems all the way to the end, whereas they might just say, "What is this?" to some language poetry and drop it halfway through. After all, you have to be pretty dedicated to read all of Tjanting. Maybe you're not even supposed to read all of Tjanting. (That's kind of what I feel like with language poetry--I'm not sure how much I need to read before I'll be purged of the corruptive influences of mainstream language. It's like taking my medicine, when I guess it's supposed to be more like an invigorating futurist bath of the now and beyond).
I feel like i'm in the same dialogue I had with activist friends in college. I thought it was better to try to change from within the system, even though you risked being co-opted. They thought it was better to stay outside of it, and protest from beyond the borders. Seems like I haven't changed my mind since then.
So if I become an evil, oppressive poet, you'll know why. And remember kids, war is peace. Mmm-hmm.
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