I hate poetry readings. The obligatory hush, the penny-ante cultish aura, the strenuousness of it all: I don’t believe in performance, performance poetry, stage v. page, any of that.
I love poetry readings. They have re-tuned my ear, engaged and moved me, invited me to reconsider poets and poems, welcomed and propelled me into new acoustic and cognitive zones.
I am in this, as in most things, ambivalent!
To hear for the first time (years ago) William Carlos Williams’ high-pitched reedy voice was for me, as it has been for many of my students, a shock. One realizes in retrospect—or rather I realized in retrospect—that I had imagined a voice deeper, more anchored in the body, perhaps rougher, not a piping albeit engaging instrument.
The historicity of voices: its own rich territory. How strange that Wallace Stevens sounds almost contemporary, while (for example) Edna St. Vincent Millay sounds irrevocably historical.
Victorian and modernist sound studies could help us with this. And scholars of declamation, sociologists of coteries, historical phonologists. But here I will not turn to the scholars and historians; I will let the untrained ear listen.
“Now I will do nothing but listen”: Whitman.
The compilation of Williams’ 1951 readings is a treasure trove not just for specific recordings of poems but for his brief, impassioned, near-aphoristic statements on poetics. I came early and I came late to Williams, and he remains a teacher. He is not obsolete. He has not even arrived in some precincts of the Anglophone world, most notably mainstream English verse. A contempt for Williams bespeaks a contempt for life. This does not mean, of course, that Williams is some kind of artless transcriber of “life,” some primitive ephebe of the frontier, some barbaric yawper. Nor does it mean all of Williams is “good.” I will spare you my further screed. But do as he says:
“Listen! Never mind... don’t try to work it out; listen to it. Let it come to you. Let it... Sit back, relax... Let the thing spray in your face. Get the feeling of it; get the tactile sense of something, something going on.”
“Don’t attempt to understand the modern poem; listen to it.”
I don’t even agree with Williams here—yet I find his dictates thrilling. I think he is calling us to tune up our inner ear as much as exhorting us to read poems aloud, attend readings, or listen to recordings of “the real,” which as we know post-Lacan is a phantasm anyway. Williams teaches us—in his writing—how to listen to him. He is like Stein: “If you enjoy it, you understand it.” Williams: “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.”
And both chime, from a certain angle, with Wallace Stevens: “The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully” (“Man Carrying Thing”).
Those modernists—what a great gang!
On Williams’s “spray in your face”—he is clearly thinking (so I think) of Whitman’s infamous scene of orgasmic group jetting in Song of Myself, the “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore” passage: “They do not think whom they souse with spray.”
Oy corporeal poetics.
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William Bronk—an apparently little-read poet, someone appreciated yet not much invoked; I read a few of his volumes in the 1990s and found them weirdly arresting, their pithy awkward short bursts, the fierce quality of mind, the commitment to what Pound would call logopoeia. A kind of philosophical wrestling, carefully lineated, spaced. He sounds here quite somnolent, intent.
The gravity of his voice channels perfectly, so it seems, the remorselessness of his attention. His technique foregrounds the willfully awkward repetition, a kind of Hardy-esque clunkiness for the free-verse era:
“I think always how we always miss it / How the dead have not been final. / And life has always required to be stated again/which is not ever stated.” (“The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox.” Note—throughout this piece, I am transcribing these lines as I hear them—not checking them against published work.)
“I think always how we always miss the real.”
Those alwayses are carefully, brutally measured and placed, bricks in implacable sentences.
Sometimes one wants from a poet the Big No, his or her own peculiar affirmation of difficult truths, of “the terrible world/where hollow catastrophe hangs, wherever” (“The Bach Trombones at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania”). No vatic salutations or compensations here.
And yet—the adverbial pivot: “The nevertheless of joy/The nevertheless, the yet.”
I do not “like” Bronk but find him impressive and a tonic.
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Fanny Howe: a poet I have long admired and, over the past decade, have gotten to know. To hear her voice, both familiar and estranged, is a queer thing—intimate, loveable, yet singular, astringent, generous, and remote: Fanny. What Roland Barthes called the grain of the voice: Fanny’s rasp and humor and biting lyricism are all there. Hearing her “Forged” (a poem I had not known) made me wonder: how many poems of expectant grandmotherhood are there in the world? It would seem very few. One thinks of Adrienne Rich’s poems about her grandmothers; rarer, the self-portrait as a grandmother. Unfurl the explanations: you know why.
Howe is an existential raider of the given, her lines little latches onto the material yet possibly transfigurable world. Her notations are flares from a blazing mind en route:
“computers chiming cheerfully without appetite”
“London’s seven prisons for seven sins in seven days”
In England, awaiting the birth of her first grandchild, she offers a neo-Wordsworthian meditation, thinking (I think) of her daughter and the imminent birth: “Her guest is coming as a child from grey railroad clouds/through weak sprays of cherry flowers/whose transport in a closed position/is an entrance folding over/into mobile images copying plates on evolution.”
Trailing clouds of glory through “grey railroad clouds”: the child, to whom one might later turn to share the transport. “Forged” is Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” re-done in the cadences, through the mind, of a twentieth-century American woman poet, his questions of belief and faith (“not for these I raise/the song of thanks and praise, but for those obstinate questionings/Of sense and outward things”) transmuted into her terse “Did I believe or was it hope?” One notices too that, for all the saluting of the child in Wordsworth, what is effaced is the mother: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”—a forgetting of the mother not least. Here we get Howe’s girl, and a nearly Blakean inquiry into blossoming amidst the muck: “Is a rose already pink inside its idiot dirt?” Here too we encounter Howe’s mordant lyric stance, its existential bite as she surveys this earth where we all stand “a little like one of the ones who were invited to life.”
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Can I say I just love Dorothea Lasky? Or I love, at least, her Poetry is Not A Project. I love it because I love poetry projects and I hate poetry projects. I love it because it thrashes the notion of “the project” yet keeps alive the possibility of experiment. I love its neo-Wordsworthian exploration of the distinction between Poetry and Science. I love the girlish voice and the laugh that sounds like my friend Lizzie Skurnick’s. I love the stance of brilliant naivete which is the naivete of a profoundly engaged sophistication. I love it for itself and as an antidote to militant treatises advocating Conceptual poetry. I love its negative capability. It is a funny manifesto, a program against programs, apparently more raw than cooked, yet deeply thought. How will this sound in twenty, fifty years?