The phantom phone booth in the middle of the field is gone. I guess maybe that means that someone will do something with the huge lot on 55, right next to the old C-Support building, but then, maybe it just means that whatever foreign or alien nation needed to spy on Durham, NC, finally realized that their work was done and they took the phone booth back, or they transplanted it to another empty field.

This was a long weekend, but I don’t feel terribly refreshed. I feel like I’m stuck in a longish daydream. I had incredible dreams this morning on the cusp of waking. One I’ve had before, I don’t know how many times, but as I was dreaming it I had the incredible sense that I was awake the whole time and simply daydreaming, not actually in REM sleep. I don’t know– I may not have been in REM sleep. I also cannot articulate what the dreams were about now. One was a presentation in which I had an hour and fifteen minute session but a co-worker spent an hour introducing the topic. I’m pretty sure I was talking about entrepreneurship. That was not the recurring dream.

Best spam headline of the day: Tiny Spokesperson. I could write a poem about that. It would be the perfect answer to the question “Where do you get your ideas?”

The sky is crackling. Every few seconds, it belches deeply, the rumbling so pronounced that you expect the sky is removing something. Something is being torn out, perhaps, by hands we cannot see at a height we cannot see.

I love rainy nights, the unpredictability of thunder. Do you settle into your bed at night during a rainstorm to read, and think that there’s a remote, remote, almost infinitely remote chance that you could be struck by lightning, that it could stream in through the window and strike you right there in the bed? I do. Once, when I was young, our house was rocked violently for a few seconds during a storm. My parents explained it away by saying the house had been struck by lightning.

It’s time to take a bath, to turn on all the electrical appliances in the house, to open the blinds. Rainy night. Best time to read or write.

Looks like this link is subject to change, but you’d be doing yourself a favor if went and checked out Robert Bohm’s beautiful poem “Blood Parents,” available here.

Last night: Finished some overdue thoughts about an essay in the May Poetry.

Today: June issue arrives in mailbox.

Yipes.

Tonight I’m reading: Arthur Vogelsang, A Planet. Carol Snow, The Seventy Prepositions.

I spent several days ruminating on a quote: “The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning.” This is Louise Glück, prefacing Peter Streckfus’s book The Cuckoo. And while it’s eloquent and quite wonderful, I’d like to tweak it a little, because I like the inexactness of exact opposites.

The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against sense.

Sense, you see, is just a synonym for reason, the process by which we make logical deductions about the causes and effects of what happens around us in the world. We expect things to work a certain way– if we throw a ball in the air, we expect it to come down; if we submerge the sack of puppies in water long enough, we expect them to drown. (Examples must be visceral in order to be fully understood.)

However, things continually happen that defy our expectations of sense. Despite the irreversible nature of death, people die on the operating table, and then come back to life. Chunks of ice fall from the sky without reasonable explanation. Heck, traffic accidents, which are eminently explicable, are so often labelled “senseless,” just because they’ve defied our expectations.

Within the realm of interpersonal relationships, sense is more often defied than not. For example, when I dated the harpy, I fully expected that by the time I broke up with her, she would be equally glad to rid herself of me. This was not the case. I once had a co-worker that would sit in a room full of people telling her that x=4, then march straight to the dean and tell her that the room full of people swore x=3. I used to be baffled by some peoples’ inability to act sensibly, until a good friend explained it to me in the terms I’d been waiting to hear all my life: “You’re trying to apply a rational model to an irrational behavior.”

And isn’t that what sense is all about? Rational models? And yet, at what point can any of us know with certainty that we represent the rational model, or rather, at what point can any of us be sure we don’t represent the irrational behavior? Who decides what’s rational when we, emotional creatures that we are, are running around trying to decide what’s best for our own lives?

There’s a certain lack of sense in what we do– in her essay in Poetry, Kay Ryan rightly notes that poetry “does not ‘find a need and fill it,’ as Henry Ford urged inventors to do.” And, of course, neither do we– at least not in any cosmically confirmable way. We simply order our existences in such a way that we make meaning out of our everyday lives. If the creation of poetry or the reading of poetry enters our daily lives, then there’s arguably a very well-constructed sense to it for those engaged in the endeavour, and very little sense for those not involved.

Yet, very few people who have no use for poetry will accuse poets of “nonsense,” they’ll merely accept that “it doesn’t make sense to me.”

There seems to be a commonly accepted belief that nonsense is not necessarily found in paradox or the inexplicable, not in the willful bending of sense so often found in poetry, fiction, and magic shows, but in the absolute snapping of sense to a subversive end. Glück rightly noted that nonsense is not divorced from meaning– it stands in direct opposition to meaning, and willfully so.

Would it not be fair to say that we can often find the “reason” for nonsense, or the logical explanation behind its creation? But those things which have no logical explanation, no obvious inherent motivation, are merely “senseless”? The aforementioned traffic accident defies our expectation of how lives are supposed to proceed, but does not willfully lack meaning. We simply cannot determine one aspect of the causality– why it has to happen to us.

Ryan’s argument for poetry as nonsense seems to me misguided in the same way that Alanis Morrisette (I know, I promised this days ago) incorrectly argues for irony when discussing events that are merely unfortunate. And where Morrissette’s examples lack a certain sophistication, a certain black humor, Ryan ascribes the black humor where perhaps there is none. Poems that play linguistic games of hide-and-go-seek, like those of Robert Frost, or which express comic impossibility, like those of Emily Dickinson, aren’t explicitly opposed to meaning, they’re merely open to a multiplicty of meanings. That’s hardly nonsense, to me.

But really, it’s senseless to argue about it.

Continuing my obsession with the word “runcible,” I began daydreaming about becoming a “runcibility consultant” for large corporations. I feel strongly that I could, through interviews with managers and their employees, determine the degree of runcibility in any corporation and provide some specific suggestions aimed at making the company more runcible.

Of course, if you’ve been reading a little more than I have (and I guarantee: this week, you have), you’ve probably seen Kay Ryan’s essay in this month’s Poetry. “A Consideration of Poetry,” an essay whose title belies its liveliness, takes a good hard look at what Ryan calls nonsense– the “giggly aquifer under poetry.” Edward Lear, not surprisingly, plays a nice role in the second section of the essay, in which Ryan uses “To make Gosky Patties.”

I will, perhaps, say snarky things about the essay (which, despite my disagreements, I did enjoy quite a bit) soon, hopefully tomorrow. Perhaps I will draw a fantastic parallel between Alanis Morissette and Kay Ryan. But for now, the beautiful wife is home with a sprained ankle, and I must tend to her and make her milkshake. I will leave you with this thought– writers are mystified and mesmerized by bruises and swelling. Ponder it.

A few days ago, someone used the word “runcible” as an adjective in a sentence during a meeting. I remember thinking at the time how oddly pleasant and revolting the word sounded– both sensations at the same time– and how I was unable to determine if the word was positive or derogatory. But, as it was a hella-long meeting, the kind of meeting that sucks your will to live, I let thoughts of runcibility go in favor of cartoon doodlings.

Then, as I wandered into the blogosphere recently, I found the word again– this time as part of a proper name for a restaurant. My immediate impulse to Google the word was, however, suppressed in favor of further exploration of the blogosphere. Of course, nothing I found had any lasting impression on me, but I suppose that when given the choice between actual knowledge acquisition and the blogosphere, I will make the wrong decision about 40% of the time.

The word has come back to haunt me at the oddest times over the last few days– while driving, while making teriyaki beef, while meeting with an entrepreneurship group. Last night, I dreamt in runcible terms.

Only today did I finally think of the word while I had access to a dictionary, and it wasn’t in there. So I turned to dictionary.com, and found this: “Early system for mathematics on IBM 650. See also FORTRUNCIBLE, IT.” Fortruncible? I was calling shenanigans. That just didn’t seem right, and certainly wan’t adjectival. So, finally, my good friend Google saved the day– it turns out “runcible” is a term that lies somewhere between nonsense and neologism. Created by Edward Lear in “The Owl and the Pussycat,” the term started showing up in other Lear poems and soon enough, people began defining it. Some dictionaries now include it– apparently my crappy desk dictionary is not one of them– defining it thusly: “However, since the 1920’s (several decades after Lear’s death), modern dictionaries have generally defined a runcible spoon to be a fork with three prongs, such as a pickle fork, which is curved like a spoon, and also has a cutting edge.”

Hoorah, Edward Lear. You have made my day, many years after your death. Perhaps Coventry Kessler’s magnificent term “eavesreading” will last as long as “runcible” has.

I’ve just mailed off my final packet of work for my second semester of grad school. This one was relatively short– only about 27 pages total. I am at once both relieved and irretrievably sad.

From now until next January, everything I write in Little Fury will serve no purpose but to amuse me or– gasp– allow me to participate in a conversation much greater than the confines of central North Carolina. And usually both.

Perhaps tomorrow: the thoughts on found poetry that I’ve been storing up for a few days.

I propose that the Poetry Society of America was just fine for fighting against the formalism, but the new world faces new threats– language poetry, new formalism, the dastardly School of Quietude! We need a new group for poetry’s Silver Age.

Oh. My. God. I am such a geek.

The question was posed in another blog: how do we know the difference between good poetry and important poetry. This is, for most Americans, a very significant question, for we have no appartus for immediately evaluating importance, which so often requires a measure of historical perspective.

In most foreign countries, this evaluation poses no great task: poetry’s greatness is assessed by the Shatner Scale.

Bad poetry is poetry that is made pleasant only when read by William Shatner.

Good poetry is poetry that does not require a Shatner reading to be pleasant to the listener, but is improved by the Shatner reading.

Important poetry is poetry that, when read by Shatner, is no more pleasant than it was without Shatner. Only a very few poems meet this criteria.

Very little in the literary world is not made better with Shatner. There have been no important poems written since Shatner began filming Boston Legal, as he has not had time to read poems since.

I’m stewing a little bit about the concept of magical realism being different from the extraordinary. I’m not sure how exactly to couch it, and stating “I know it when I see it” won’t do.

There is a clear distinction between the magical and the ordinary, with regards to poetry and everyday life. However, in between lies a space, more difficult to categorize, but which I will call the “extraordinary.” The overuse of the word “extraordinary” has led to a diminution of meaning—how could it not, when somewhere on Madison Ave., a slick-suited advertising executive hopes to convince you that the power of Brand X cleaning solution is “extraordinary,” when it is, in fact, just a hair above “good”? If one is to carve out space for the “extraordinary narrative” as an element of craft, then a proper definition is in order.

We can quite clearly define the ordinary as within the realm of common, or everyday, experience. A poem with an “ordinary” narrative is one where the reader is introduced to a seemingly innocuous scene, made noteworthy either by the intensity of the language, the intensity of the speaker’s insight into the significance of the event, or both. Likewise, a narrative inexplicable by rational means, a poem whose chain of events gleefully defies scientific explanation, can be considered magical in nature.

A Handbook to Literature, Sixth Edition allows for the intersection of the two by defining magical realism as “a worldwide twentieth century tendency… the frame or surface of the work may be conventionally realistic but contrasting elements—such as the supernatural, myth, dream, fantasy—invade the realism and change the whole basis of the art” (304). However, the definition is necessarily limited by the need for the frame to be conventionally realistic, and so excludes narratives that make no attempt to frame themselves as realistic, but rather explore one or more of the listed contrasting elements within the context of reality. These narratives are left between pure fantasy and the simple ordinary—they are narratives that venture into the extraordinary.

These are the narrative poems that I’m looking for right now.

If you have been in need of a reason to depair over the culture of poetry blogs in America, here is one. In years to come webby winner after webby winner will be forgotten with their galleries of pithy quotes and Flickr photos. And we wll be the generation that neglected Little Fury, and our loss will be our embarrassment.

– James T. Kirk the cat, after Brian Phillips

I admit to deep-linking. These two poems (scroll down) were found in Octopus Magazine #7.

I have reserved this, my 1500th entry, for telling you just how much I think for-profit education sucks.

Suck it, for-profit education!

On a horrible, horrible message board I have recently made attempts to frequent, I asked if anyone knew of good magazines that focus specifically on one-line poems, or that make an attempt to feature them frequently. I should have known better than to pose the question on a message board full of “poets” who don’t read poetry, but frequently write poetry that they then post on message boards. (Again, this is what the dearth of good poetry message boards has driven me to.) I got no response, though when I mentioned Blink, a magazine I can’t seem to find any information for, one person replied that he had heard of Blink. I am afraid to ask him for more information– I’m almost certain he’s thinking of the Malcolm Gladwell book.

One unintended side effect of my post was that a short debate began about whether or not one-line poems are poems. This debate seems foolish to me– it may be a matter of preference, but if you can argue for the existence of the prose poem, you can argue for the existence of the one-line poem.

One poster said that one-line poems are not sufficiently fleshed-out to be poems, which is a complaint I have heard before. I’ve also heard the complaint that Kay Ryan’s lines aren’t long enough, so I’ve stopped listening to complaints about relative length: I have come to embrace possibility in poetry, provided that the poem is an encompassing whole.

I think, however, that length is at the crux of the argument against one-line poems, and perhaps against all manner of short poems. Some poets want complexity in everything they encounter, and feel that just a few short lines cannot possibly hope to contain any complexity. I tend to disagree, as would, I think, the folks at Bartlett’s, many of whom are well-aware of the great philosophical paradoxes that Yogi Berra was able to craft into just a few short words.

The desire for complexity seems reasonable if the demanding poet will admit that the complexity is an aesthetic preference on her part and not a necessary component of poetry. One of my favorite poems on Earth is Yeats’ “Politics,” which I don’t find to be terribly complex. It certainly isn’t a long poem. And no one has yet argued with me that “Politics” lacks the “fleshed-out feel” of a poem. Does the presence of a rhyme scheme constitute sufficient complexity? Or must there be, in addition to the rhyme scheme, a sufficiently pleasant pairing of words before the requirement is met?

I think you see where I am going with this– at what point does something pass through the gates of POETRY? Is there a quantifiable moment at which a set of words becomes a poem? I don’t tend to think so. I think perhaps that any set of words presented as poetry qualifies as poetry (and I believe you flarfists out there will agree with me); there may just be a moment at which a set of words goes from BAD POETRY to MODEST POETRY or GOOD POETRY. And once we start adding those qualifiers, we acknowledge that the interpretation of any poem is left to the subjective tastes of the reader.

I do, however, demand that the poem be “an encompassing whole,” and I am flexible on the definition there, as well. I find that “good” one-line poems are complete and still expansive, all in one line, though usually with the context provided by a title. I am as moved by an effective and precise one-line poem as I am by the whole of, say, “Ozymandias,” in much the same way that I would be as unmoved by an ineffective and imprecise seven-hundred line poem as I am by poorly-executed, greeting-card haiku. (I mention poorly-executed haiku because that seems to be the preferred mode of expression on the aforementioned message board.)

If some poets have become immune to the charms of the one-line poem, could it be perhaps that they have been subjected (as I have, on the aforementioned message board) to random lines of poetry masqerading as one-line poems, when in fact those lines do not communicate a thoughtful approach to the whole of the poem? I think the one-line poem is terrifically difficult to execute well; I would, in fact, put it on par with many other difficult forms. Thus, I think there is a need for the finest in one-line poems to be displayed along the finest more-than-one-line poems; the abundance of examples of fine sonnets has afforded readers the opportunity to study the form and readily identify bad sonnets, but there simply doesn’t seem to be a good collection of fine one-line poems.

Ahh, yes, thank you, Tony Hoagland. Meanness is at a premium right now.

I am staring three incomplete poems in the face. Well, not literally: they don’t have eyes. But if they did, they’d probably have faces, too, and these faces would almost certainly be sneering at me.

I am staring at two computer screens, side by side, on which I have three unfinished poems. I look from one to the next to the next and then back to the first. From time to time, I close two of them and stare just at one.

Each of these poems is resisting being finished. It must be resistance, as I have the time and the inclination now to finish one or all three. So why aren’t they being finished?

I tried two nights ago to combine them. Isn’t that the logical next move? “Well, this seems incomplete, and that seems incomplete, so they’ll be like Jerry Maguire when they meet and gush, ‘You complete me.’” This was, of course, a spectacular failure. As was Jerry Maguire.

I also tried working backwards, as I’ve been told that about one in twenty-three poems reads as well with the lines in reverse order as it does with the lines going forward. None of these poems were in the lucky twenty-three. I did, however, get one naughty bit out of the exercise.

I have the sense that Johnny Cash would not have had any trouble finishing one or all of these poems. Wouldn’t you like to have a Johnny Cash who would come to your house and finish what you’ve left unfinished? Not the Johnny Cash, but a Johnny Cash. Not only could he finish your manuscript, he’d finish the dishes and the vacuuming. And when you thanked him, he’d warble something mysterious like, “We all have our ways.”

Truth be told, the Johnny Cash thing is a cute fantasy but it doesn’t address the simple fact of the situation: I should put these three poems aside for a while. I should work on revising something older, one of the other unfinished pieces of jetsam that has piled up over the years.

Johnny Cash would already have made hit songs out of them.

I’ve replaced White Noise as the main blog on my site with Little Fury. Little Fury will be solely a po-blog, and I am hoping that getting it started may get me a little more involved in the world of po-blogs, since no reasonable discussion seems to be available through conventional discussion forums. (Just to see if I can piss people off, I posted that I am absolutely aghast at the lack of discussion about books and working poets on Absolute Write. I wonder if anyone will take that bait, or better, rise to the challenge.)

I’m going to start a blogroll and see if I can get some reciprocal link action.

In his blog today, Ron Silliman discusses margination, and the curious tendency of the Internet-age poet to keep to the left-hand margin. Says Silliman:

One wonders what the longer term implication of all this might be. It’s conceivable that in ten years’ time the web will prove as resilient and easy to set type with the sort of point-by-point variations that Paul Blackburn adapted for his late work, but right now, frankly, it’s a pain & one cannot guarantee that what looks good in Firefox will look the same in Internet Explorer or Opera or what else have you. So younger poets are doing what seems obvious enough, which is returning to the margin or else never thinking really about departing therefrom. I sometimes have the sense of a generation of swimming students, afraid to let go of the edge of the pool.

An interesting theory, to say the least, but one has to wonder if Silliman has identified the cause of the return to the left margin, or an interesting outlier. It’s certainly true that formatting work for the web is no small frustration– even an experienced web designer can be driven to fits by poems that don’t avail themselves of Dreamweaver’s four text justifications. Add to that the relative inexperience of many editors and publishers who have chosen the web as their medium, settling on a free service like Blogger as their engine for delivery, and you’re certain to see a reticence to publish poems that leap away from the margins.

Still, that has less to do with the creation of poetry than the publication of poetry, and while working poets do think about publication, I like to think that there is a sense that the cart must not come before the horse– in this case, the horse being the art of the poem. Is the vague sense that unjustified poetry (and I love the term “unjustified poetry”) might be less publishable really driving it to extinction?

Perhaps Silliman has touched on the root cause not by looking at poetry’s present, but by looking at the recent past:

The New American poets – from Olson to Ginsberg to Duncan to Whalen to Blackburn to Snyder to McClure – were the ones who really moved away from the margin. A poet like Larry Eigner is unthinkable without the typewriter. To center his poems on the page, Michael McClure (and along the way a volunteer typist or two) had to count out the characters in every line and count backwards from the center space. Today, that’s a simple Control-C in Microsoft Word, so simple in fact that the practice appears to have declined in recent years.

Let us consider that poetry is often subject to what is fashionable at any given time (Tony Hoagland’s essay in the March issue of Poetry covered this very eloquently with regards to narrative). The New American poets were certainly driving each others’ work to new levels of experimentation, rejecting a number of the “staples” of the previous generation’s poetry. If the pendulum swung far to the left for them, perhaps we are seeing the correction in contemporary poets’ faithfulness to left-justification– a swing back to the far right.

This suggestion is borne out by print publications, and I don’t think there’s any arguing that print publications still cast far longer shadows than internet publications. We dream of seeing our poems in print, and merely accept their presence online as a means of distribution. And left-justification is the primary mode in most major print magazines right now. Flip through a copy of last year’s Best American Poetry and tell me what you see. Given that formatting text for print has, as Silliman notes, become a relatively easy task, one might expect to see an explosion of poems that eschew the left margin; yet, few have been welcomed into the ranks of today’s finest poems.

The relative ease of formatting may also have something to do with current passions. When centering text is as easy as Ctrl + C, it is easy for the modern poet to dismiss centering a poem as gimmicky. In fact, given the relative ease with which we can play linguistic games– we have programs to count our words, to count our characters, to inspect our grammar, to easily manipulate margins and styles– the appearance of gimmickry is difficult to avoid for the modern poet who dares experiment. We cannot share in McClure’s obsessions with counting characters, because it is difficult to obsess about a simple, automated process. Simply put, what poets of the previous generation saw as a unique and difficult challenge, contemporary poets see as province of the word processor, not the province of the artist.

What was I thinking going into business? I said repeatedly that as soon as improv began to feel like work, I wouldn’t want to do it any more. And sure enough, I don’t really want to do it any more. I must seriously have a personality defect, because every time I really love doing something, I start thinking that there’s a way to make it bigger than just a hobby, and then it spirals out of control, and I never end up happy about it. Why can’t I be like normal people and be happy to just have a little fun?

This is self-destructive behavior. Bad, bad self-destructive behavior.

I need to breathe.