it's a Kirby

Entries tagged as ‘poetry’

The explanation of what?

October 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

beads


“If I could tell you I would let you know.”

Unfortunately, I’m not very good at “explaining” my work. I once tried to do this in a question-and-answer period with some students of my friend Richard Howard, after which he told me: “They wanted the key to your poetry, but you presented them with a set of new locks.” That sums up for me my feelings on the subject of “unlocking” my poetry. I’m unable to do so because I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry; the two cannot be disentangled. I know this isn’t going to satisfy anybody and will probably be taken as another form of arrogance from an off-putting poet. On occasions when I have tried to discuss the meanings of my poems, I have found that I was inventing plausible-sounding ones which I knew to be untrue. That does seem to me to be something like arrogance. In any case, as a poet who cares very much about having an audience, I’m sorry about the confusion I have involuntarily helped to cause; in the words of W. H. Auden, “If I could tell you, I would let you know.”

JOHN ASHBERY, Other Traditions ; Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP, 2000.

Photo: Kirby, Justus, 2009.

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Because

August 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Rene Ricard


Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony because this is the look of the truth: layered and elusive.

ANNE CARSON


Artist: RENE RICARD, But You Love Me…, 2003.

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Hard

August 7, 2009 · Leave a Comment

canon


This line is stripped of emotion.
This line is no more than an
illustration of a European
theory. This line is bereft
of a subject. This line
has no reference apart
from its context in
this line. This line
is only about itself.
This line has no meaning:
its words are imaginary, its
sounds inaudible. This line
cares not for itself or for
anyone else—it is indifferent,
impersonal, cold, uninviting.
This line is elitist, requiring,
to understand it, years of study
over esoteric treatises on
impossible to pronounce topics.
This line refuses reality.



CHARLES BERNSTEIN, from The Republic of Reality



Difficult poems are normal. They are not incoherent, meaningless, or hostile. Wellmeaning readers may have suggested that “something must be wrong” with the poem. So let’s get a new perspective. “Difficult” is very different from abnormal. In today’s climate, with an increasing number of poems being labeled “difficult,” this is an important distinction to keep in mind.

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Bastard angel

June 16, 2009 · 1 Comment

vegas_04

 
“People expect, as I did, the famous writers and poets to be just open and wonderfully giving, and they were not. They all wanted to go to bed with me.”*

The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.

HAROLD NORSE, from his preface, In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003. New York : Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003.

*Okay, maybe it’s me, but I can’t imagine anything more “open and wonderfully giving” then someone expressing their want/interest/desire “to go to bed with me.”  Thanks for the memoirs, Harold.

Photo: ChicosVegas

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It Doesn’t Get Better

April 7, 2009 · 1 Comment

“Poetry itself contains as much energy as a Hollywood industry, as much energy as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs is practitioners who are alive to bring it alive. Poetry has always been said to be a private hidden art….The reason it is not appreciated is because it hasn’t shown any dance, any guts, any moxy.” 

 


 

[The fucking brilliant] JOHN GIORNO at the Bowery Poetry Club, 28/02/09.

Thanks for Nothing

Just Say NO to Family Values

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A mouth.

March 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment

marrow-mouth

 

All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie.*

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

 

W. H. AUDEN from his elegy for William Butler Yeats

Photo: Marrow Mouth, originally uploaded by tommy forbes.

*Auden, September 1,1939

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Wild and precious.

February 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

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My promiscuous dalliance.

January 5, 2009 · Leave a Comment

straight_or_right

I have loved language more than truth, discourse more than reality, and so allowed to spread, in myself and in others, an intellectual virus that uproots the plain sense of the word.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether and totally, completely and throughly, without reservation, quibble, or question, and with newly faithful heart, abandon the false doctrine that meandering, digressive, or paratactic prose, prose that fails to state clearly its meaning, sentences that get caught up in their own rhythms and sounds and cadences, nuances and nooks, rather than in getting to the point or meat or heart of the matter or meaning or substance, as I say, I abandon and renounce the false doctrine that crooked and bent prose can have any value for truthful discourse or accurate representation. I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and aversion and the many related errors and aversions that flow inevitably as a consequence of the aforesaid error and aversion, as a baby inevitably flows from its mother or an ocean from its rivers or a false conclusion from a flawed premise or a disease from a virus or death from repeated blows with a blunt instrument or gorging from a starving child given food. Clearly written expository prose, with a delineated argument including a beginning, middle, and end, is the only guarantor of Rational Mind.

I was wrong, I apologize and recant. I altogether abandon the false doctrine that ambiguity and irony are anything more than sophistry. I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and apostasy, which I have lapsed into again and again, like an habitual drinker seeking his five o’clock martini, or an erotomaniac seeking nonprocreative sexual experiences, or a worker idling on the job, or a habitual truant passing notes in class.

I am with regret filled and by errors o’erwhelmed, having chosen the broken path over the righteous, the warped over the erect. I cant and recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that advocacy or partisan positioning has any place in poetry and poetics. Poetry and poetics should be reserved for those who look beyond the contentions of the present into the eternal verities, the truths beyond this world that never change, as represented in the Books of the Accessible Poets. I further stipulate that I recant, categorically, that poetry is an activity of the intellect and herewith and hereby declare and proclaim that true poetry is an affair of the heart and only the heart.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. Like the black sheep who strays too far from the adoring flock, or like the drunk with a pale green beret who, deep into the night, and desperate for one more abinthe before closing time, babbles uncontrollably to the deaf and crippled barkeep, I embraced an elitism that puts me out of touch with the sentiments, feelings, convictions, beliefs, preferences, perspectives, and dyspepsia of everyday, ordinary, run-of-the-mill people, the Johns and Joans and Janes and Jills, the Billys and Bobs, the Shirleys and Toms, the Frans and Fritzes, Millys and Moes, not only thinking I was better than John and Joe, Mary and Harry, but that their sentiments, feelings, convictions, beliefs, preferences, perspectives, and dyspepsia did not matter. I spent my time hunting for thoughts rather than hunting quail. My solipsism overcame me, so that I wrote, and professed others to write, words that communicated to no one, that meant nothing, that defied the laws of meaning and fundamentals of grammar; praising—over and above clear sense and good syntax—the incoherent, the nonsensical, the aberrant, the foolish, the deformed, the contradictory, the awkward, the frivolous, the ungainly, the self-indulgent, the infantile, the stubborn, the phony and fake, the prevaricating, the disorderly. In my promiscuous dalliance with affect rather than emotion, I cast my lot with the excessively cerebral and the cerebrally excessive. I recant this cant. Now I stand before you to repudiate and abjure, to cast away and revile, this stiff-necked arrogance in order to dedicate myself to the freedom in right thinking.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN, from Recantorium (a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka)

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Fiction/Imagination is an unveiling of what we didn’t know we knew.

November 20, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Distance is light, as long as you keep in mind that there are no limits. We are distance.*

It is true that all poetry stripped of another life in another time is threatened by a
quick dissolution in the present. True that poetry carries its own future and is al-
ways being reborn. . . . But it is as true that no poet can put off for later, in
some other place, the here and the now. In our time of storms it is a matter of the existence, the vital energy of poetry. . . . To give life to words, to give
them back the water of life, can only be by way of bringing back the sense
of living. And all search for sense is a search for the essence which confounds
itself with our questioning of the intimate and the universal, that interrogation
which makes poetry possible and indispensable, that questioning which has
as consequence that the search for sense is also a search for freedom.

MAHMOUD DARWISH

Breyten Breytenbach, Mandela’s Smile: Notes of South Africa’s failed revolution

*Edmond Jabès

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Current Events

September 19, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I know she can’t hear me, but I
tell her how the Simpson trial
turned out, how the
towers collapsed, how
the subways exploded,
how he got re-elected,
how they let her out
of prison, how
the tsunami victims
couldn’t be identified,
how the shuttle disintegrated,
how the prime minister lied,
how I want to have a child,
how the insurgents are winning,
how the lights went out, how
the dictator liked Cheezees.
I tell her that after she died
we found the note, we
found the note, we found
the note.

The Last Ride

The paramedics strapped him in.
I sat beside him and
stroked his arm. He
gave names to all
the streets.

Respiration

The hallways are
lined with gurneys.
The light is orange.
The loadspeaker doesn’t
stop for sleep.

From a room:
a breath.

STUART ROSS, from Dead Cars in Managua

Toronto Poetry Slam @ The Drake, Saturday, September 20, Doors 7pm $5.

Photo: NYTimes

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