1: Never rebroadcast since its original airing, it’s the genre-defying pilot, in which people say the word “accomplish” so many times it stops holding any meaning whatsoever.

4: In this week’s musical episode, Hal Holbrook, fresh off his Tony award-winning run as the Mysterious Stranger, joins the cast to sing about adjectives. (Originally performed and broadcast live!)

2: In this exciting episode, groundbreaking in its use of CGI, I answer the question, “What poets changed the way you thought about writing?” Special appearance by the late John Engman in a flashback.

5: It’s the shocking season finale!

To raise funds to save our gang’s favorite hang-out from foreclosure, I must perform a thrilling leap on water skis over a shark tank!

(And in the episode’s audio commentary, I talk about what I’m currently working on.)

And here is the third post in my ongoing poetry mini interview.

In this “very special” episode — animated, in homage to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — I wonder how I know when a poem is finished. Grace Paley guest-stars.

In the spring of 2021, I participated in the ongoing — and truly wonderful — Poetry Mini Interview series.

With summer upon us here in the northern hemisphere, it’s time for re-runs, where episodes of TV shows are shown out of order, so nothing makes sense!

A poem of mine, Time & Times, has just appeared at the always wonderful Selcouth Station.

[2023-06: Selcouth Station has, unfortunately, shuttered and the website is no longer available.]

“We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right — not an obligation — to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called “inner exile” in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations … resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

“So much for difficulty. Now let’s take the other aspect — overintellectuality. I have said, almost to the point of boring myself and others, that I am as a poet simple, sensuous, and passionate. I’m quoting words of Milton, which were rediscovered and developed by Coleridge. Now, of course, in naming Milton and Coleridge, we were naming two interested parties, poets, thinkers, polemicists who are equally strong on sense and intellect. I would say confidently of Milton, slightly less confidently of Coleridge, that they recreate the sensuous intellect. The idea that the intellect is somehow alien to sensuousness, or vice versa, is one that I have never been able to connect with. I can accept that it is a prevalent belief, but it seems to me, nonetheless, a false notion. Ezra Pound defines logopaeia as “the dance of the intellect among words.” But elsewhere he changes intellect to intelligence. Logopaeia is the dance of the intelligence among words. I prefer intelligence to intellect here. I think we’re dealing with a phantom, or as Blake would say, a specter. The intellect — as the word is used generally — is a kind of specter, a false imagination, and it binds the majority with exactly the kind of mind-forged manacles that Blake so eloquently described. The intelligence is, I think, much more true, a true relation, a true accounting of what this elusive quality is. I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself.”

—Geoffrey Hill, Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 80

Learning the Right Thing from the Wrong Person

Margaret Renkl, NY Times:

…we profoundly misunderstand the very nature of art when we think we know in advance what readers — or audience members or gallery visitors — will derive from it. Or, worse, when we presume to tell them what they should derive from it.

A poem of mine, Walls, has just appeared at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

A poem of mine, Demiurge, is available now in Issue 6 of Wine Cellar Press.

It’s a hay(na)ku, a poetic form I’ve been playing with since 2004 or so. (Learn more about hay(na)kus from its inventor, here.)

I’m pleased that a strange old sonnet of mine has found a home in the newest issue of the excellent Wine Cellar Press.

And be sure to click over to the second page, to read another poem, A Found Fragment in your Firetorn Books, which was written following the prosody of Old English alliterative poetry.

I’ve just finished writing two books. They’re very weird, and probably gibberish, but I suspect there’s perhaps — at most — fifteen people who might, briefly, find them curious or even somewhat bemusing. In other words: typical poetry manuscripts. Let’s see what happens next.

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space:

If we were to give the imagination its due in the philosophical systems of the universe, we should find, at their very source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want to find the essence of a world philosophy, one could give the following advice — look for its adjective.

(see also)

“The Light’s Agitation,” a poem sequence I wrote in the late ’90s has just appeared in the newest Otoliths.

Thanks as always to the irreplaceable Mark Young for giving it a home.

A very old poem of mine, called Elegy, was published today in the “inaugural expo” of Cool Rock Repository.

It’s so odd to think that this poem is finally seeing the light of day after living in my files for nearly thirty years.

Laurie Anderson, Spending the War Without You:

I have to tell you: in theses lectures, I’m not going to be explaining my work or describing who I am as an artist. In fact, I don’t care if you know who I am.

I’ve never really tried to express myself through my work. It’s more about curiosity, about how things are, what they are.

Plus, I’ve really made an effort for most of my life to just get rid of the idea of being anyone at all.

(From Pt 1: The River @ ±7m 30–50s)

In the months since writing my response to this interview question, I’ve seen several references to extremely similar writing prompts – a typically synchronistic example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

In the Kenyon Review (from 3/2021), Michael Montlack speaks of Dorianne Laux & Joe Millar’s method of “making a list of words, throwing in a quote or fact or phrase, and taking an hour to write a draft.”

And in the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter (from 10/2020), Valerie Coulton describes Edward Smallfield’s process that “consists of a personalized postcard with four words and a quote. He used to pass these out in workshops, and then everyone would write for 15 minutes.”

I’m not surprised to see randomness and chance being integrated into writing prompts, but now I’m curious to find out what the provenance is for Rita Dove’s exercise, which I’ve been using on and off for about twenty years.

Here is the last part of my poetry mini interview.

It’s the shocking season finale! To save our gang’s favorite hang-out from foreclosure, I must perform a thrilling leap on water skis over a shark tank. And in the audio commentary, I talk about what I’m currently working on.

The fourth part in my poetry mini interview is up.

In this week’s musical episode, Hal Holbrook — fresh off his Tony award-winning run as the Mysterious Stranger — joins the cast to sing about adjectives. Performed and broadcast live before a studio audience!

(This reply was part of a conversation on Micro.blog in January 2019 about whether poetry is a skill that can be taught. I’m re-posting it here as a matter of storing it on my own server rather than letting it fade into the haze of replies at Micro.blog. See also this essay, originally written in October 2020. And also this interview.)

The drive to write can be due to the need to express oneself, but I’ve found that over-reliance on “expression” as a motivator plays into the mystical idea that poets are supposed to be “inspired,” which all too often leads to stasis and frustration.

If you wait to be inspired, you’ll be waiting a long time. And when you finally are inspired, you’ll have had no practice, and the product will fall far short of the ideal in your head. No one thinks they can simply be inspired to write a song and, never having played before, just pick up a guitar and boom: a song. So why would writing be any different? Well, I believe it’s because we think we’re practicing all the time, by virtue of using language to, well, talk.

That is, many of us think that writing is the same as talking — and, even more so, that writing is the same as communicating. But poetry isn’t exclusively about communication or expression. (Of course, neither is speech, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

A poem is an event made out of sounds — sounds which just happen to be human language. A writer makes words do things beyond their usual scope, and this takes practice. It also takes a lot of research — that is, reading — to see what other writers have managed to do with words.

If you learn to work the raw materials, you’ll be better prepared for when you are inspired. And you may eventually discover that the joy of working the raw materials is enough.

And here is the third post in my ongoing poetry mini interview.

In this “very special” episode — animated, in homage to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — I wonder how I know when a poem is finished. Grace Paley guest-stars.

The second installment in my five-part “poetry mini interview” has just been posted.

In this week’s exciting episode — groundbreaking in its use of CGI — I answer the question, “What poets changed the way you thought about writing?” Special appearance by the late John Engman in a flashback.

What if you asked me a question and I just asked another question in reply? Or a bunch of questions? Would you find it annoying? Why would I do something like that? To be clever and rhetorical, or coy and evasive?

Here is the genre-defying pilot, in which I say the word “accomplish” so many times it stops holding any meaning whatsoever: part one of my poetry mini interview.

I answer one question a week for the next five weeks.

The third series didn’t last. After an extremely promising first few days, I discovered the source text was problematic; I kept landing on passages that needed way too much massaging to render them usable.

So I’ve settled on a different text and it’s been so much better. I even did five in one sitting the other day, just for kicks, which caught me up on the days I’d missed while looking for a new text.

I had to remind myself of a similar stumble before the second series, where I cast about for over two weeks, trying out three or four different source texts to see if they’d work. Something that looks like it’s going to be great can often present problems that make the chance operation more cumbersome or annoying than it’s worth.

Maybe I’ll talk about what I’ve found to be good and poor source texts some time.

Also, there’s something I’m trying to do differently this time. The poems in the earlier series each stood very much on their own. They all felt like they belonged together, of course, by virtue of the source texts setting the tone, so to speak; but they were each quite self-contained, at least to my ear. This time, I’m holding the idea that they are stanzas in a longer work.

Are they all by the same “speaker”? Are they parts of an ongoing dialogue of some kind? Not sure. If I continue my habit of not looking back at earlier days’ poems, then there won’t necessarily be any explicit through-line from one poem to the next any more than in the earlier series, since it will be yet another exquisite corpse, of sorts. But sometimes, simply “holding an idea” can be enough to alter the trajectory. We’ll see whether that’s true for this project or not.