Two attempts to reach Jeannine Hall Gailey through her web site have failed.  I can leave her a comment on a blog post, but the anal-retentive part of me hates it when the comment isn’t directly relevant to the entry it comments on.  Is that entirely batshit crazy?  But yeah, I can’t bring myself to use that forum for a personal message, or even a general, “Hey, please contact me, even though you don’t know me.”  Is writing this entry in my own blog, which of course carries the implicit message that if you know Jeannine you should e-mail me her e-mail address or direct her here that she may contact me directly, even more batshit crazy?

Other mild compulsions which I would like to overcome but cannot: I have to fold potato chip bags into a neat rectangle before I can throw them away.  If I’m at the top of the stairs and the cat is at the top of the stairs, I have to make him go down first.  I cannot write in books.

It’s Friday afternoon and I am feeling 100% snarky.  (Before you ask: no reason in particular.)

Somehow I just don’t think I’ll like my co-workers’ updates about conferences they attended any better when they’re in sonnet form: Arts conference speaker urges more poetry in the workplace

Thank God he was the only white male poet ever to experience body issues, lest we be bombarded with hundreds of poets by middle-aged men about their flaccid penises (oh, wait): Larkin: “I’m Ugly”

I don’t see what all the fuss is about since 99% of VQR submitters have never seen the magazine.  Hell, 99% of all submitters anywhere have never read the magazine: VQR apologizes for publishing reader comments on manuscripts

48% of poetry readers find poetry through television… which either means that I’m watching all the wrong television or the 9 people who admitted to reading poems for a University of Chicago survey don’t have 500 channels to choose from:  Survey takes a closer look at fans of verse

The part that doesn’t shock me is that Shel Silverstein’s verse is indistinguishable from that of a 10-year-old: KidsPost contest winners are plaigarists

After months of not hearing a single response to a single submission (I couldn’t even get responses to several queries for submissions that have been out for over a year– should I go ahead and assume they’re not taking the work?), I’ve had two responses in the last couple of weeks.  Both acceptances.

Rawk. I’m gonna send more stuff out.

I remember someone saying in a Warren Wilson class that the line has trouble sustaining itself upwards of sixteen syllables, which I found to be a curious observation at the time but which I have come to believe as fairly correct; if the line is representative of a unit of breath, one which can be subdivided with pause and caesura, the lungs get tighter and tighter after about sixteen syllables.

But not every syllable is equal; the tongue and brain have more work to do with “floral embroidered” than “I ate six whole eggs” for several reasons: the imagistic but not perfectly concrete nature, the concordance of sounds, the multi-syllabic words. Essentially, you might see most of the words in the latter in a five-year-old’s vocabulary, while the words in the former are more complex.

Most of my recent reading has involved long, long lines, either through whole poems (Lynda Hull’s Star Ledger, T.R. Hummer’s Walt Whitman in Hell) or interspersed with short lines in compact spaces (Christine Garren’s The Piercing), so I thought I would give long lines another whirl. Previous experiments with them had turned out poorly.

So, for today’s grind poem, I wrote in exceptionally long lines. Or, so I thought, but when I went back and did some counting, I found I was still nowhere near, say, C.K. Williams’s average line length.

But the lines were long for me, and I could feel them buckling even as they were being written. They look like prose on the page and I found myself fighting against a normative urge to make them sound like prose. Prose communicates meaning and, by and large, doesn’t care where the breath of the words occurs– I think that’s true for even most literary prose, which manages tone, diction, and syntax the way poems do but fails to compensate for the aural. I found myself wanting to resort to that convention in ways that I manage to avoid even working with prose poems– looking for the line break for so long, and denying it to myself, was uncomfortable and bizarre, which probably means that I should try it again, continue trying it until I can get it to click. But for now, I’ll simply say, “No sir, I don’t like it.”

I had cause to quote this poem today.  Dan Albergotti turned me on to it last weekend.  It is the first poem in Jack Gilbert’s first book.

In Dispraise Of Poetry

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

–Jack Gilbert

When successful, a short poem immediately launches into its lyrical potential; any narrative grounding happens in service to the lyric. (I don’t think there’s such a thing as a successful short narrative, at least not one in less than ten average-sized lines or so. That’s just not enough to tell a complete story in verse.) The sound and shape of the words must immediately be keener in a short poem; a longer poem doesn’t require such lyric density because there is more potential for variation and rest in a longer poem.

An unsuccessful short poem, however, can do all of those things and still fail. Where I see many short poems go awry is that they describe but never illuminate; they represent a thing but do it no service; they present truth in entirely truthful terms. Where’s the fun in that? Why represent a thing exactly as we know it all to be? These short poems fail to take advantage of trope or figure, fail to imagine their subject in a subjective light, fail to make the objective truth more accessible through the tenacity and frailty of words, or fail to recognize their own flaws as representative descriptions. At their best, the Objectivists understood at least the difficulty of getting it right in a way that was doomed to be wrong: not the thing itself, but the thing captured for a moment on the page; not the thing itself but the essence of the thing communicated in words. Such poems, even when willfully obscuring the speaker, must reveal the speaker in the details chosen to describe the thing…

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I said I’d be giving away a book? There were so many compelling arguments, but I could not pass up Allen Kromer’s. He went anagrammatical.

Sarah Manguso

O! Sugar Shaman!
Mourns as agha,
sang, “Ah, amours…”
Ragas so human,
ragas so human.

Ragas, so human.

That triple repetition at the end, Kromer, was where you won my heart forever.

In patented Scott Jennings bullet-point format, here’s some miscellany:

• Travis Smith and I wore a path in the highway between Greensboro and Durham this week. On Thursday night, we went out to see Michael McFee and Michael Chitwood read; on Friday, we went to see Natasha Trethewey and Van Jordan. We had the opportunity to hang out for a while after both readings; the chance to be around poets in such high concentration, even if there’s not much talk of poetry, is tonic for the soul. Van and I talked in our last exchange about life after the MFA. Speaking of the intimate connection that the Warren Wilson structure provides to talk about poems, he wrote, “I know how dark it can be.” But I’m starting to feel that I can see what that life will be like, and it doesn’t look dark to me, not at all.
• Remember that song “If You Leave”? Amazon’s offering a free live version, which sounds pretty good.
• Miniature album reviews of stuff I have picked up in the last couple weeks:
  • The Breeders, Mountain Battles - I hope that heaven tastes like carrot souffle from Dillards BBQ and sounds like Kim Deal. If you would like to be thoroughly rocked, listen to “German Lesson.” I suspect German speakers would find their accents deplorable. Whatever, German speakers.
  • R.E.M., Accelerate - It seems impossible that R.E.M., after so many years of middling albums with a few stellar tracks should come back with a stellar album which contains only a few middling tracks. This is the stuff, people. “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” is phenomenal; “Supernatural Superserious,” despite its goofy lyrics that seem so out of place from a guy Stipe’s age, is actually somewhat moving; “Mr. Richards” just flat rocks. I bought the bonus tracks this morning… only one listen each, so too soon to tell for sure, but I think I like.
  • Phantom Planet, Raise the Dead - Disappointment. This is what mediocre pop-rock sounds like. After giving this album a few spins, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want my money back. Not all of it. About half.
  • Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts I-IV - Let me first tell you the story of how I purchased this album: Seeing it on sale for $10 at Target, I tossed it in the cart on a big shopping day with Ladybug. When I got home, I found they’d charged me $13, so I returned it and thought I’d try to catch it on sale. I found it later on Amazon’s download service for $5. Score. Worth $13? Actually, probably; it’s atmospheric, sparse at the right times, and very typically NIN. Which, you know, I prefer to, say, Aphex Twin, who is actually probably the closest comp I can think of for this album.
  • Tristan Prettyman, Hello - I had heard some of her live stuff and got suckered into this, an album which is cute and sweet but entirely overproduced. And you don’t hear me say that often.
• I’m doing my first Sequential Swap in a while.
• Ladybug and I have been working iteratively on Iron Scav 11, Chapel Hill’s most socially retarded scavenger hunt. We have about 40 people who have said they’re coming, but not one team has registered with their members’ names, which means no one yet knows the secret third character.
• Can I just say that as much as I love and support National Poetry Month, I freaking hate this “Poem in Your Pocket” thing they have going this year?  Hated it as soon as I heard the name (proof).

I’ll leave you with this poem, which I read Thursday night at Old Town and immediately took a shine to. Apparently, the publisher feels the same way: this is the sample poem on poets.org.

Among the Things He Does Not Deserve

Greek olives in oil, fine beer, the respect of colleagues,
the rapt attention of an audience, pressed white shirts,
just one last-second victory, sympathy, buttons made
to resemble pearls, a pale daughter, living wages, a father
with Italian blood, pity, the miraculous reversal of time,
a benevolent god, good health, another dog, nothing
cruel and unusual, spring, forgiveness, the benefit
of the doubt, the next line, cold fingers against his chest,
rich bass notes from walnut speakers, inebriation, more ink,
a hanging curve, great art, steady rain on Sunday, the purr
of a young cat, the crab cakes at their favorite little place,
the dull pain in his head, the soft gift of her parted lips.

–Dan Albergotti, from The Boatloads 

Dear Georgetown College in Kentucky,

You have made an exceedingly wise choice in hiring Emma Bolden. I had not previously heard of you, but now I hold you in high regard.  You clearly know what you are doing.

Kisses,
Ross White

Tonight

Dean Young reads at the UNC-G Faculty Center on College Ave. in Greensboro.  8 PM.  Dean is the author of several books of poems, including Embryoyo and Primitive Mentor.

Tomorrow Night

I’ll be reading with Ellen C. Bush, Jon Leon, Alyssa Wolf, David Bradshear, and Henry Kearney at Flanders 311, 311 W. Martin St. in downtown Raleigh.  7 PM.  Come on by and see the prints that go with the poems as part of The Illustrated Word, which runs all month at the gallery.