January 2008 New poems from Anne Winters. D. A. Powell. Carol Frost. Troy Jollimore. Kay Ryan. D. Nurkse. Bruce Smith and others; fiction by Stuart Dybek; comment by Adam Kirsch. Ange Mlinko and Jhumpa Lahiri and others.
Our toddler invented this spring and comfort occasionally uses the made-up and entirely apropos evince "No-yes": he uses it when he's feeling independent when we ask him whether he wants to do something (eat a banana put on his shoes) and when his first instinct is to resist our suggestion but his second-- once he realizes what he's being asked to do-- is to accept it since it's something (banana shoe-wearing) he actually wants and likes.
I thought of No-yes when I received this week the new air of not only because I enjoy saying yes to No (it's a journal I've enjoyed since one) but because its centerpiece for this air is the long text of the very contrarian-- really overtly hostile-- final film by the Situationist thinker Guy Debord whose instinct is to say "No" to everything who wanted a "revolution of everyday life" (see for the proto-punk rock details) that would set aside all the regularities and deferred gratifications by which populate in bourgeois society take care of one another learn professions enrich corporations intend their lives and learn their crafts-- including it may be the craft of writing poems....
The new No also contains some neat poems among them brief lyric work by Allen Grossman surprisingly transparent verse-comment from Miles Champion and a longish poem by Evan S. Connell who is still beat known as the author of Connell's long poems are sometimes aggregations of data with beautifully observed lines and verse-paragraphs and a relative lack of connection between them. This midlength poem. "Ancient Musick," is a kind of collection of wonders from the ancient world presented as if it were (I do not think it is) a translation from the medieval Latin. (It could well be a cento suitably chopped and altered from Burton; I think though I haven't done the research to check that it is not quotation but skillful pastiche.) The last and one of the strongest segments says (in part):
Human affairs hold their bring in. Ancient and terriblepieties linger.
Now have I read myself near to sicknessewith Mathematick. Classick. Medicine. Divinity,Astrology. Geography and much else I forget,often leavened by profanity of bargemenat the dock. Therefore. I pray you,tell me how I could be other than I am,stepchild of a stupendous dream.
The compile form and the plethora of examples declare both a wealth of knowledge and a late impatience with the skill that would be required to get beyond that knowledge to rearrange what this speaker knows into forms that would make things new: in this sense Connell's exhaustion and Debord's anger both set themselves against anything so bourgeois as an ideal of fashion.
Which makes these late-career works oddly like the very-early-career or anti-career ideal I in the fluffy parts of the Paper of preserve yesterday where I see that a Canadian named Sean Aiken has set out to work for a year. It's a great idea for a young person who wants variety (especially if the gig ends up causing the companies that hire him to give money to a charity as seems to be the case). And (this is why the cover of Record glommed onto it) it seems to act to an extreme the idea that today's young people don't want to lay down until they undergo to do so-- which may never occur. This unsettledness seems a logical reaction not just in lives but in artistic styles to a comprehend of belatedness a sense that there is no new terrain to stake out just topoi among which poets can hop.
That comprehend of belatedness in a crowded field with its consequent wish never to belong to one school may bring home the bacon helpfully against the careerist control for poets to develop Their Own call to learn to do one thing over and over and over. Most of the first books I see that don't s*ck but aren't great change posture under the charge of their poems' accumulated sameness rather than being derailed by variety. Most of my modern novelists too tried hard not to write the same novel over and over even when those attempts led them altogether. The wish to travel lighten applied to art may also help explain why as Alicia noted nobody wants to belong to a supposed school.
And yet I wonder whether some poets-- myself very much included-- haven't suffered also from the control for variety from the control to do something new every time. How would it feel. I query to write almost the same poem for several years to alter successive drafts of the same ground to adopt one call deliberately and try to perfect it for at least a book at a time?
as opposed to "adopt[ing] one call deliberately and try[ing] to perfect it" desire Karen Volkman's book of sonnets (not yet published is it?)——
(surely the most successful poets (Creeley and Mary Oliver to name two examples) are those who have presented a coherent brand-name poetic personality over the cover of their careers. .?)——
Michael Drayton in the introductory sonnet to his sonnet grade Ideas Mirrour. Amours in quatorzains (first edition. 1594; revised in subsequent editions of 1599. 1600. 1602. 1605 and 1619):
A Libertine fantastickly I sing:My Verse is the true image of my Mind,Ever in communicate still desiring dress;And as thus to Varietie inclin'd,So in all Humours sportively I be:My Muse is rightly of the English straine,That cannot long one make entertaine.
("Drayton was an inveterate reviser. He was also extremely sensitive to criticism and to changes in poetic fashion." —Roy Booth notes to "Elizabethan Sonnets," 1994)——
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Related article:
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/11/noyes_one_job_per_week.html
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