Poets on Poetry
Tom Goff at Sacramento Poetry Center
Why Arnold Bax? Tom Goff, on Infinities chapbook Tintagel 2.0
In the Sacramento region, we’re lucky to have a public radio station that plays classical music, most often of the Mozart-Haydn-Beethoven variety, but with ventures into the nonstandard repertoire. Once in a while, Capitol Public Radio will programTintagel, Overture to a Picaresque Comedy, or Morning Song: Maytime in Sussex, by the neglected British composer Arnold Bax, but never a complete symphony of his.
I enjoy Tintagel whenever it airs, but it is human nature to make sweeping assumptions about forgotten figures like Sir Arnold Bax: for instance, that Tintagel was simply the very best of an underwhelming though large body of music. But I do try to veer away from contempt prior to investigation, so I have long wondered why our symphonic life, at least in the concert hall, is such a lazy one, consisting of “classics” and warhorses so over-performed that it makes most concerts a dusty “museum” or “mausoleum” experience.
By great good fortune, the Folsom Lake College library picked up a copy of Lewis Foreman’s Bax biography. The cover depicted a Romantically glowering young composer in a (1907!) color photo. Once I started on the first two or three chapters, there was no putting the book down. I felt as conductor Vernon Handley has said in an interview on Bax’s symphonies: I was enslaved straightaway.
After many listenings to many CDs, I believe that by ignoring Bax, we as a musical culture are suffering a true loss, as well as committing an historic injustice, as we do in ignoring the works of Karol Szymanowski, Ferruccio Busoni, Carl Nielsen, and many other composers. I think as does the late Maestro Handley, that Bax’s supreme musical virtue is his ability to evoke mixtures of moods that can elude capture in language. In Tintagel, a sorrowing motif in the low strings (suggesting struggles in love) regenerates in triumphal splendor toward the end, among the brass; that sort of metamorphosis by orchestration is again something Handley speaks of in interview.
Also, as I’ve gotten to know Bax’s poetry, another of his highly developed skills, I have developed a feeling, or it has developed me: a recurring elation upon finding a master spirit whose outlook on life and creativity are well worth pondering. And Bax has become a living figure in my own poetry. For what they are worth, I offer, with this Infinities, a brief sampling of the small efforts in verse Bax has inspired.
—My thanks to Richard R. Adams of the Sir Arnold Bax Website, where a longer version of this article appeared. T.G.
The Dance of Wild Irravel (Arnold Bax)
from Four Orchestral Pieces, 1912-13
“It will sound like Armageddon”—Bax, to musician friend Arthur Alexander
Pray might I have this dance of wild irrável?
This rapturous-odd waltz weaves a whirling spell;
rescued from musical Limbo, does it foretell
a waltz more famous by Maurice Ravel?
Pronounce it again for us to hear it well:
not wild irravEL—rather, irRAvel,
a Gaelic word* for delirium, its random travel:
on vision wings, now glide to Irish Vienna…
To chart irreconcilables unravels
all coherence in the story, yet
the pulsating-graceful vibrance casts a net.
Hallucinatory Dublin. Brooding manse,
within which gaslit couples dance that dance
believed illicit by first witnesses
of that erotic vulgar three-four time.
Bax’s dance accelerates much like Ravel’s,
dazed till unhinged by hemiola stress
in lightly pounded tympani, while swells
crest huge in horns and clarinets and climb
or sink dovetailing expertly. Now sex,
orgiastic and spasmodic, clenches breasts
décolletage or under boiled shirts that vex.
Convexities, concavities of skin
caressed most surreptitiously to sin,
redoubling guilt-edged all the “sweet unrests.”
Amid exuberance and dalliance,
glimmers of Daphnis on uncloying flutes,
dual-action, like the tied pipes of roving Pan’s:
mysterious evanescence, dissolute.
Pamplona-horned, hard-charging castanet.
Nothing to be called back, blast all regret.
Albeit Impressionistic, “Celtic curves”
determine Bax’s furbelows and swerves
and staggers—now, Time, soften, slow the dazzle.
What hints of Otherworld in this Irravel?
Essence of Joyce, this Dubliners’ Vienna?
Then just ahead, Ravel’s more French Gehenna?
La Valse of Ravel, prefigured in Bax’s Irravel.
What other twins felt, by vibrascope or osmosis,
the Waltz disintegrate in its apotheosis?
* From rámhaille (mh = v), or “dream hallucination” (according to Bax expert
Graham Parlett)
Why Arnold Bax? Tom Goff, on Infinities chapbook Tintagel 2.0
In the Sacramento region, we’re lucky to have a public radio station that plays classical music, most often of the Mozart-Haydn-Beethoven variety, but with ventures into the nonstandard repertoire. Once in a while, Capitol Public Radio will programTintagel, Overture to a Picaresque Comedy, or Morning Song: Maytime in Sussex, by the neglected British composer Arnold Bax, but never a complete symphony of his.
I enjoy Tintagel whenever it airs, but it is human nature to make sweeping assumptions about forgotten figures like Sir Arnold Bax: for instance, that Tintagel was simply the very best of an underwhelming though large body of music. But I do try to veer away from contempt prior to investigation, so I have long wondered why our symphonic life, at least in the concert hall, is such a lazy one, consisting of “classics” and warhorses so over-performed that it makes most concerts a dusty “museum” or “mausoleum” experience.
By great good fortune, the Folsom Lake College library picked up a copy of Lewis Foreman’s Bax biography. The cover depicted a Romantically glowering young composer in a (1907!) color photo. Once I started on the first two or three chapters, there was no putting the book down. I felt as conductor Vernon Handley has said in an interview on Bax’s symphonies: I was enslaved straightaway.
After many listenings to many CDs, I believe that by ignoring Bax, we as a musical culture are suffering a true loss, as well as committing an historic injustice, as we do in ignoring the works of Karol Szymanowski, Ferruccio Busoni, Carl Nielsen, and many other composers. I think as does the late Maestro Handley, that Bax’s supreme musical virtue is his ability to evoke mixtures of moods that can elude capture in language. In Tintagel, a sorrowing motif in the low strings (suggesting struggles in love) regenerates in triumphal splendor toward the end, among the brass; that sort of metamorphosis by orchestration is again something Handley speaks of in interview.
Also, as I’ve gotten to know Bax’s poetry, another of his highly developed skills, I have developed a feeling, or it has developed me: a recurring elation upon finding a master spirit whose outlook on life and creativity are well worth pondering. And Bax has become a living figure in my own poetry. For what they are worth, I offer, with this Infinities, a brief sampling of the small efforts in verse Bax has inspired.
—My thanks to Richard R. Adams of the Sir Arnold Bax Website, where a longer version of this article appeared. T.G.
The Dance of Wild Irravel (Arnold Bax)
from Four Orchestral Pieces, 1912-13
“It will sound like Armageddon”—Bax, to musician friend Arthur Alexander
Pray might I have this dance of wild irrável?
This rapturous-odd waltz weaves a whirling spell;
rescued from musical Limbo, does it foretell
a waltz more famous by Maurice Ravel?
Pronounce it again for us to hear it well:
not wild irravEL—rather, irRAvel,
a Gaelic word* for delirium, its random travel:
on vision wings, now glide to Irish Vienna…
To chart irreconcilables unravels
all coherence in the story, yet
the pulsating-graceful vibrance casts a net.
Hallucinatory Dublin. Brooding manse,
within which gaslit couples dance that dance
believed illicit by first witnesses
of that erotic vulgar three-four time.
Bax’s dance accelerates much like Ravel’s,
dazed till unhinged by hemiola stress
in lightly pounded tympani, while swells
crest huge in horns and clarinets and climb
or sink dovetailing expertly. Now sex,
orgiastic and spasmodic, clenches breasts
décolletage or under boiled shirts that vex.
Convexities, concavities of skin
caressed most surreptitiously to sin,
redoubling guilt-edged all the “sweet unrests.”
Amid exuberance and dalliance,
glimmers of Daphnis on uncloying flutes,
dual-action, like the tied pipes of roving Pan’s:
mysterious evanescence, dissolute.
Pamplona-horned, hard-charging castanet.
Nothing to be called back, blast all regret.
Albeit Impressionistic, “Celtic curves”
determine Bax’s furbelows and swerves
and staggers—now, Time, soften, slow the dazzle.
What hints of Otherworld in this Irravel?
Essence of Joyce, this Dubliners’ Vienna?
Then just ahead, Ravel’s more French Gehenna?
La Valse of Ravel, prefigured in Bax’s Irravel.
What other twins felt, by vibrascope or osmosis,
the Waltz disintegrate in its apotheosis?
* From rámhaille (mh = v), or “dream hallucination” (according to Bax expert
Graham Parlett)
The Impossible Place of Poetry
By Claire Millikin
Both my parents were born into families that have inhabited the southeastern United States, in particular the state of Georgia (USA), for generations; they were European invaders reaching back to the early 1700s on my father’s side, and slightly earlier on my mother’s side. Such a background means that the history of Georgia is, in many ways, my family history. And the history of the southeastern United States is ugly, violent, and wrong. It includes the displacement of Native Americans, the taking of Native American wives, against their will, the enslavement of kidnapped Africans, the rape of enslaved African American women, and the humiliation and oppression of African Americans through Jim Crow. I was born, of course, after all these events. But they are my background. My parents wanted, ambivalently, to leave Georgia. We grew up peripatetically, living in Southeast Asia, Holland, England, and barely strung together consecutive schoolyears in America. But whenever we came back to Georgia it was always clear that this is home, this is where extended family live, where ancestors are buried, Georgia and nowhere else. When I grew up I did not feel I could, or should, live in Georgia. I disagreed with the conservative political bent of the state, and so it would have been, and would be now, hard to find a place there.
And yet, it is the only place that I am actually from, the only place where I might say, by dint of history, I belong. Does a poet need a place? Ovid, Milosz, Seferis, all wrote from exile; Anna Akhmatova stayed and suffered. I never intended to not be a Southerner. After Yale, a university for which my childhood ill prepared me, I married young and married a man from a Southern family similar to my own. The name under which I publish poetry is his last name, Millikin; I always say that Millikin is my name from before marriage because I mean it is my name from before I married the man to whom I have been married as an adult, and with whom I have a child. For reasons that even now I am unsure of, my youthful marriage raveled, quickly. By the time I shored up in graduate school in New York City, still in my twenties, the idea of the South had moved away, and I was only trying to survive. After the death of my mother’s mother when I was twenty-five, all that depth of family provided no place for me, no house where I could stay. As one of my aunts humorously put it, Claire was so smart we had to get rid of her. Of course, I am not in exile from the South. I could go back.
And, with the death this year of my eldest maternal uncle, it has started to seem to me that I should go back, that every other place is unreal, that all other places are not of my family, hence not of myself, but only of survival. Even so, survival itself is more tangible than any other longing. Faulkner suggested that the South made it impossible for Quentin to survive. And Flannery O’Connor implies, in “The Enduring Chill,” that the South is an illness that claims its brilliant young. The poems I write are often placed in Georgia, whether or not that place is mentioned. But if I were to return to Georgia, would those works evaporate? Is it the tension, and grief, of not being able to find a real place that makes the place of poetry so urgent? When my uncle died, the realness of his life seemed to surpass that of most people I know: his farm (that had gone bankrupt, but where he was able to lease some space for a few cows), his cows, his house that he built, the town where he stayed and never left or tried to leave. Compared to the professors with whom I spend most of my time, he was fuller, his world contained itself, did not look out at other people’s worlds. He was an early supporter of desegregation, a man who stood for what was right, where he was.
When my son finished middle school, this year, I decided we, as a family, would celebrate by visiting the islands off the shore of Carolina where, in childhood, my family camped each summer. I had not been back since I was fourteen years old (I left home at age fourteen, came back at age fifteen, left again at seventeen). When we got to the islands, all was terribly built-up, hideously marketed, but once I made it to the ocean it was the same: rough, merciless, the winds forty miles an hour. No one else was on the beach. My son and I, with a combined weight of two-fifty, locked arms and ran, the wind almost lifting us.
If Thomas Wolfe says “you can’t go home again” this claim is possibly truer for Southerners: the reason you cannot go home is that home never sheltered you, it was too burdened by the violence of its own past. But you also cannot leave home, the violence of it is embedded in you, shards, painful and also beautiful, not a lost place but a damaged place, wounded by its own refusal to tell the truth. The only task of poetry is to tell the truth. It is where language moves past assumption and cliché. Maybe you can’t go home again once you’ve told the truth about home. Or, maybe, the knowledge of home’s impossible place is the start of poetry.
Links for books by Claire Millikin:
Television, Unicorn Press 2016 http://www.unicorn-press.org/gallery/#expand-jump-MillikinTelevision
Motels Where We Lived, Unicorn Press 2014 http://www.unicorn-press.org/gallery/#expand-jump-MillikinMotelsWhereWeLived
Tartessos and Other Cities, 2Leaf Press 2016 https://www.amazon.com/Tartessos-Other-Cities-Claire-Millikin/dp/1940939429
After Houses-Poetry for the Homeless, 2Leaf Press 2014 https://www.amazon.com/After-Houses-Poetry-Homeless-Millikin/dp/1940939305/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496949460&sr=1-3&keywords=after+houses+poetry
Museum of Snow, Grayson Books 2013 https://www.amazon.com/Museum-Snow-Claire-Millikin/dp/0983860386
In 2013, Tiger's Eye Press published Claire Millikin's chapbook, The Gleaners. It has remained one of our favorite chapbooks, and we will be offering a reprint in September, 2017. Copies can be pre-ordered from Tiger's Eye Press, P.O. Box 9723, Denver, CO 80219. Please include a check for $10, which includes postage.
The Impossible Place of Poetry
By Claire Millikin
Both my parents were born into families that have inhabited the southeastern United States, in particular the state of Georgia (USA), for generations; they were European invaders reaching back to the early 1700s on my father’s side, and slightly earlier on my mother’s side. Such a background means that the history of Georgia is, in many ways, my family history. And the history of the southeastern United States is ugly, violent, and wrong. It includes the displacement of Native Americans, the taking of Native American wives, against their will, the enslavement of kidnapped Africans, the rape of enslaved African American women, and the humiliation and oppression of African Americans through Jim Crow. I was born, of course, after all these events. But they are my background. My parents wanted, ambivalently, to leave Georgia. We grew up peripatetically, living in Southeast Asia, Holland, England, and barely strung together consecutive schoolyears in America. But whenever we came back to Georgia it was always clear that this is home, this is where extended family live, where ancestors are buried, Georgia and nowhere else. When I grew up I did not feel I could, or should, live in Georgia. I disagreed with the conservative political bent of the state, and so it would have been, and would be now, hard to find a place there.
And yet, it is the only place that I am actually from, the only place where I might say, by dint of history, I belong. Does a poet need a place? Ovid, Milosz, Seferis, all wrote from exile; Anna Akhmatova stayed and suffered. I never intended to not be a Southerner. After Yale, a university for which my childhood ill prepared me, I married young and married a man from a Southern family similar to my own. The name under which I publish poetry is his last name, Millikin; I always say that Millikin is my name from before marriage because I mean it is my name from before I married the man to whom I have been married as an adult, and with whom I have a child. For reasons that even now I am unsure of, my youthful marriage raveled, quickly. By the time I shored up in graduate school in New York City, still in my twenties, the idea of the South had moved away, and I was only trying to survive. After the death of my mother’s mother when I was twenty-five, all that depth of family provided no place for me, no house where I could stay. As one of my aunts humorously put it, Claire was so smart we had to get rid of her. Of course, I am not in exile from the South. I could go back.
And, with the death this year of my eldest maternal uncle, it has started to seem to me that I should go back, that every other place is unreal, that all other places are not of my family, hence not of myself, but only of survival. Even so, survival itself is more tangible than any other longing. Faulkner suggested that the South made it impossible for Quentin to survive. And Flannery O’Connor implies, in “The Enduring Chill,” that the South is an illness that claims its brilliant young. The poems I write are often placed in Georgia, whether or not that place is mentioned. But if I were to return to Georgia, would those works evaporate? Is it the tension, and grief, of not being able to find a real place that makes the place of poetry so urgent? When my uncle died, the realness of his life seemed to surpass that of most people I know: his farm (that had gone bankrupt, but where he was able to lease some space for a few cows), his cows, his house that he built, the town where he stayed and never left or tried to leave. Compared to the professors with whom I spend most of my time, he was fuller, his world contained itself, did not look out at other people’s worlds. He was an early supporter of desegregation, a man who stood for what was right, where he was.
When my son finished middle school, this year, I decided we, as a family, would celebrate by visiting the islands off the shore of Carolina where, in childhood, my family camped each summer. I had not been back since I was fourteen years old (I left home at age fourteen, came back at age fifteen, left again at seventeen). When we got to the islands, all was terribly built-up, hideously marketed, but once I made it to the ocean it was the same: rough, merciless, the winds forty miles an hour. No one else was on the beach. My son and I, with a combined weight of two-fifty, locked arms and ran, the wind almost lifting us.
If Thomas Wolfe says “you can’t go home again” this claim is possibly truer for Southerners: the reason you cannot go home is that home never sheltered you, it was too burdened by the violence of its own past. But you also cannot leave home, the violence of it is embedded in you, shards, painful and also beautiful, not a lost place but a damaged place, wounded by its own refusal to tell the truth. The only task of poetry is to tell the truth. It is where language moves past assumption and cliché. Maybe you can’t go home again once you’ve told the truth about home. Or, maybe, the knowledge of home’s impossible place is the start of poetry.
Links for books by Claire Millikin:
Television, Unicorn Press 2016 http://www.unicorn-press.org/gallery/#expand-jump-MillikinTelevision
Motels Where We Lived, Unicorn Press 2014 http://www.unicorn-press.org/gallery/#expand-jump-MillikinMotelsWhereWeLived
Tartessos and Other Cities, 2Leaf Press 2016 https://www.amazon.com/Tartessos-Other-Cities-Claire-Millikin/dp/1940939429
After Houses-Poetry for the Homeless, 2Leaf Press 2014 https://www.amazon.com/After-Houses-Poetry-Homeless-Millikin/dp/1940939305/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496949460&sr=1-3&keywords=after+houses+poetry
Museum of Snow, Grayson Books 2013 https://www.amazon.com/Museum-Snow-Claire-Millikin/dp/0983860386
In 2013, Tiger's Eye Press published Claire Millikin's chapbook, The Gleaners. It has remained one of our favorite chapbooks, and we will be offering a reprint in September, 2017. Copies can be pre-ordered from Tiger's Eye Press, P.O. Box 9723, Denver, CO 80219. Please include a check for $10, which includes postage.
Infinities Chapbook #9
Canyon
Rodney Nelson
Publication: February, 2017
MEMO TO A YOUNG POET
Let poetry come first in your life, and it will come to you.
If you take on a home and mouths to feed and the pleasant onus of having the same bed mate every night, let poetry come first.
Poetry has to do with everything. Avoid teaching it and writing or talking about it.
There is no need to write at a set, regular time; but you should be set to write whenever a poem is there.
Read a lot of poetry. Do not edit it or blurb it.
Do a public reading only on invitation and for listeners that already know your work.
You—face, body, voice, and résumé—are not your poetry.
The joy is writing poems, the job is to make them public.
READING IN SILENCE
In age, after longtime diligent pursuit of his craft, the American poet begins to cut back on the verse and enjoy what he has earned: recognition. He’s good and gray now, a patriarch in the harvest moon; and it is time to write blurbs, do interviews and readings and workshops free of charge, and encourage the young that are to succeed him.
I’m getting old, but it’s not that way with me. After an extended nondiligent span of life, I restarted as a poet not too long ago (had just cut off my white whiskers because they made me look patriarchal). I used not to mind editing magazines and reading in public and meeting other poets. Now I’m indifferent. The poems are new and many. I work at them and in seeking publication for them, and at both efforts I do okay. Except for being outside on foot, that’s all I care about.
I wish someone would invite me to be “laureate” or writer in residence or guru at a July retreat. I’d enjoy refusing and would do it at length and in public. No one can guess the depth of my indifference. I hope that my lack of indifference to the craft itself shows in what I write.
And another thing: readings. They said I had a good voice, so I used it live and on radio (KPFA Berkeley, Minnesota Public Radio) once in a while. This was in the wake of the Beats. But how could I go on subscribing to the notion that the essence of poetry was oral when my best times with it happened alone and in private? I write as one individual to another, not to a crowd, and read a poem in the same manner. Public oral reading is an attempt at theater (or worse, when some prattling academic takes the classroom to the coffeehouse), a diversion for those that like to avoid the subtleties of word craft and focus on a poet’s voice and body instead. Silent reading began to emerge only during Augustine’s era. One statement of his: “A word, when it is written, makes a sign to the eye whereby that which would have used the ear can enter the mind.” It’s the mind’s ear that takes in the mind’s voice of the poet. This is how subtleties get through. An actual raised voice in a crowded room doesn’t let them. Actual silence is where I live.
ALLOWANCES
As a poet, I have managed to contrive a good life in America—one of writing poetry and being outdoors. (The latter abets the former.) I got to it late but not too late; time had not yet taken the needed wherewithal. I know and love other parts of the world. However, I have chosen to hang on in my out-of-the-way native region. Both its mundane presence and its history have an added benign effect on my writing. I did not want to teach and have never done so. The notion that a poet should be a “doctor” at the call of ignoramuses in an institution not only did not appeal, it seemed anti-artistic. I had to feed my body, though—there are no direct money wages in poetry—so I took up hit-and-miss other means. It was hard, but I got through. Even so, I think I was right (a claim I make without smugness). I could not be doing what I do now as an “emeritus.”
But looking at the muted landscape and the pages and pages I have gotten out of it may lead to resigned complacency. “I’ve made the best of very little to work with,” I can tell myself, forgetting certain realities that have threatened poetry since the very onset of American culture, realities I used to dwell on and bemoan. I am reminded of these—and of the ways I once tended to think—by Elliot Weinberger’s introduction to Reversible Monuments, an anthology of Mexican poetry in translation, which was published in 2002. Here is one long section:
Poetry is news in Mexico. Every day in the papers, and frequently on television, there is something about poetry. If you publish a book, if you start a little magazine, if you give a poetry reading or have a panel discussion, if you win a prize, if you make an appearance abroad, if you get into some sort of literary dispute, it’s likely that it will be covered by most of the newspapers and television networks and include a long interview. Poets are routinely publicly asked their reactions to political developments. They personally know—or at the least have been in the same room with—major politicians, including the president, who is sometimes on hand to award an important literary prize. Poets often write what we call the op-ed columns, and all of the major newspapers have weekly cultural supplements that publish the kind of intellectual and stylistically idiosyncratic essays that, in the U.S., would be relegated to little magazines. These supplements are joined by various monthly intellectual magazines—unlike anything in this country—which publish political and cultural analysis, fiction and poetry, and which are widely read. In Mexico, a poet must make an effort to remain a private figure.
Moreover, poetry is supported by an enormous and complex government bureaucracy, which has all the problems of an enormous bureaucracy, but which nevertheless gives vast amounts of money to poets through grants and prizes and supports the publication—or, even more remarkably, is itself the publisher—of countless trade books, pamphlets, and scholarly editions of poetry, literary criticism, and translation. There is rarely a single book published in Mexico that is not in some way supported by the state.
Mexican poets generally do not teach; they are not quarantined with creative writing students. According to a survey some years ago, 90 percent of them work in what is called “cultural diffusion”; as editors at publishing companies; writers or editors at newspapers or magazines; writers of scripts for movies, television, and radio; writers of art catalogs; and as workers in the cultural bureaucracy. This means that the poets are essential to all aspects of the cultural life of the country, and that their expertise in things other than poetry ultimately nourishes their poems.
This does not mean that Mexico is a nation of poetry readers. Mexico, after all, is a huge country with a large peasant population, overwhelming poverty, and widespread illiteracy. The poets—with the exception of a vibrant poetry scene on both sides of the frontera, and an emerging movement of poets writing in the indigenous languages—generally come from a middle or upper-class educated elite that is mainly concentrated in Mexico City (and, to a lesser extent, in Guadalajara). They inhabit a small world, but one that strikes me as larger than the world in which American poets live. American poets are more diverse in their geographical and economic backgrounds, but they tend to live in a cloistered universe of other poets, poetry readers, and writing students. Mexican poets, as members of a specific class in a specific place, are necessarily related by schooling, friendship, and their traditionally large families to the educated elite of the other professions. They are intellectuals—a class that does not exist in the U.S.—in a segment of the society that takes a nationalistic pride in intellectual accomplishments. Quite unlike the situation in the U.S., educated people who are not poets would be embarrassed to admit they hadn’t read an important poet’s work. At the least, they are familiar with the poets through interviews and prose writings in the newspapers and magazines.
You could quibble that the situation in Mexico seems attractive to an American poet only in that it is postcolonial, reflective of its European antecedents. You could utter the place name Juárez. You would have a point. Weinberger’s observations are accurate even so and a worthy reminder. Confinement in academic institutions has stunted the poet in experience and outlook. “And how else could he or she have a middle-class life?” you may argue. Again, point taken. Mine would be that poetry has to come first or it doesn’t.
In my extended youth I ran away to Mexico, unaware of what Weinberger would describe, only sensing some good “down there” and devoting more time and energy to attacking the extant American cultural order. Others had revolted before. Ezra Pound attained world notoriety not as a poet but as a “traitor” to his country. Allen Ginsberg became famous because of an obscenity charge and went on to act as publicist for the so-called Beat Generation and its offspring. Robert Bly got headlined in 1968 when his book The Light Around the Body won the National Book Award and he gave the money to the antiwar movement, not for the poems in it (enhancing his reputation with the later prose preachment Iron John). Poetry in itself does not bring the kind of fame or infamy that American culture permits. Starving for attention, poets have done antipoetic things. Here he or she is a figure of fun that goes on using archaisms like o’er and e’en (do a crossword puzzle sometime).
My own recourse was to accept the realities, which has meant living as an imposter and never telling others what I do, receiving no respect and giving none back, and in general staying out of the way to do the work. I, too, marched against the Vietnam War; but the times’ ardor did not find a home in my pages. I like what the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting said back then: “There’s not a soul who cares twopence what I or any other poet thinks about the war. . . . We are experts on nothing but arrangements and patterns of vowels and consonants, and every time we shout about something else we increase the contempt the public has for us. We are entitled to the same voice as anybody else with a vote, no more. To claim more is arrogant.”
He was tired of being asked for a comment about the war. However, it was not journalists or any “soul” but other poets that wanted to think people cared. Kenneth Rexroth wrote that there was no place of any kind in American society for a poet of any kind. I agreed and still do. A national or state or regional laureateship is only a neutralization payment from nonshareholders in poetry. All such putative honors are empty.
I would not be invited to take on a job in the U.S. Department of State unless I had prepared for a career in diplomacy, gone to the right universities, and all that and kept any poetry way to the side. This is not Chile or Mexico. But in fact I am almost glad that no one will ask. I enjoy being left alone and having no public role or even face or body or voice, just a byline. American democracy has let this happen. I like it here.
RN
Poetry books and chapbooks by Rodney Nelson
Mere Telling 2009
Metacowboy 2011
In Wait 2012
Bog Light 2013
Sighting the Flood 2013
Mogollon Picnic 2013
Hill of Better Sleep (prose) 2013
Fargo 2013
Felton Prairie 2014
Words for the Deed 2014
Cross Point Road 2015
Late & Later 2015
The Western Wide 2016
Ahead of Evening 2016
Billy Boy 2016
Winter in Fargo 2017
Infinities Chapbook #10
Horrific Punctuation
John Reinhart
Publication: February, 2017
Anyone will tell you, punctuation can be horrific. As an English teacher, I run across more horrific punctuation than the average Joe. This is both to be expected and ultimately positive: by failing we can begin to see alternatives, or by failing we can create unexpected unimagined beauty. School is a wonderfully safe place to fail, and I encourage my students to do so.
A lot of my work focuses on speculative themes, so it was a natural progression to find myself writing horror and sci-fi poetry about teaching English. Actually, I find the semi-colon horrific in its nature, so that subjecting it to a slow roast while prodding it with mockery was joyful. Actually, so are parentheses, disgusting, unnecessary clutter marks. Actually,...best to stop before my cold war on punctuation gets hot.
My poetry tends to three directions: autobiographical, with a focus on my family and the people who encircle me; speculative, which is broad enough to cover many of the social issues I find important and work to illustrate through unexpected scenes; and experimental/visual/word art. To date, I have one experimental collection (invert the helix - Pski's Porch Publishing, 2017), one autobiographical (encircled - Prolific Press, 2016), and one speculative collection available (broken bottle of time, Alban Lake Press, 2017) in addition to Horrific Punctuation.
In all these cases, my efforts through poetry are to bring light to subjects and objects we normally see only monochromatically. Poor Dorothy, stuck in Kansas, could not perceive color until she merged herself with the light of Oz. Only as the horizon brightened, could the earth bear color into the world. Technology has great potentials for nuancing our experience of the entire spectrum, but it can just as easily distort our pictures as the viewmaster card cycles round and round the same images. We stand in dire danger of losing sight. Of losing our perception of color. A world of white is no world. A world of black is no world. Before the beginning, there was void. If we avoid, we invite the vacuum, and there's nothing that sucks so much as a vacuum. So I write poetry.
Poetry, so says the English teacher, as fire, so says the arsonist, has the power, so says the powerless, to connect, so says the father/husband/son/friend/neighbor/colleague/friendly-guy-who-says-hello-at-the-bus-stop, if only incrementally. But increments can mean the difference between a bridge that carries traffic from one end of the world to the other, and that bridge's collapse into fear, pain, dislocation, white, black, as words can incrementally approach truth if we let them, no matter that they all too often create distance.
words
betray my thoughts
and gird my feelings
with immobile concepts
on immaculate parchment
where borders separate
refined citizenry
from illiterate rabble
farming the outskirts
unchecked by the guardians
of knowledge, never denying
the facts, but swimming
freely in the warmth
between yes and never,
unconstrained and unbetrayed,
coloring a life beyond
the quill that lives
only on black and white
- John
John Reinhart
http://patreon.com/johnreinhart
https://www.facebook.com/JohnReinhartPoet
New! "encircled" chapbook - https://prolificpress.com/bookstore/chapbook-series-c-14/encircled-by-john-reinhart-p-170.html
Juniata County
We asked Thomas Patterson to share his thoughts on the process of writing his new chapbook, Juniata County, recently published by Finishing Line Press https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/juniata-county-by-thomas-patterson/
Tacked to the wall in my den, I have ten poems from this chapbook in various stages of editing; only about four of those poems made it to the final book, which was probably nine years of on-again, off-again work.
At first, I thought I was writing a book about the magic of childhood in the small central Pennsylvania town; slowly, through several years more of work, something else was emerging: a book about loss,
about the strength of the human sprit and, most of all, about forgiveness.
I waited much too long to come to grips with the emotions and the truths in this book, and finally doing so was difficult, to say the least, but, like the iris in the hallway in “Room With a View,” the book has become my own,“prelude to forgiveness.”
I can now move on from “Juniata County” and have completed a new chapbook, “Village of Doomed Women”
Time to turn the page!
Tom Patterson
We asked Thomas Patterson to share his thoughts on the process of writing his new chapbook, Juniata County, recently published by Finishing Line Press https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/juniata-county-by-thomas-patterson/
Tacked to the wall in my den, I have ten poems from this chapbook in various stages of editing; only about four of those poems made it to the final book, which was probably nine years of on-again, off-again work.
At first, I thought I was writing a book about the magic of childhood in the small central Pennsylvania town; slowly, through several years more of work, something else was emerging: a book about loss,
about the strength of the human sprit and, most of all, about forgiveness.
I waited much too long to come to grips with the emotions and the truths in this book, and finally doing so was difficult, to say the least, but, like the iris in the hallway in “Room With a View,” the book has become my own,“prelude to forgiveness.”
I can now move on from “Juniata County” and have completed a new chapbook, “Village of Doomed Women”
Time to turn the page!
Tom Patterson
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Boomerang Girl
Sometimes it starts with a title. Sometimes it’s just a word you know you have to use--something around which to build a collection of poetry. Then, days/weeks/months/years later, there in front of you sits a complete manuscript. Those of us who are lucky will see it through to publication. Those of us who are not will try a million more times if need be. In my case, it was 41 times total: 41 submissions of several different manifestations of the Boomerang Girl manuscript before someone said, “Yes. We want this.”
The earliest draft was sent out into the wild in January 2012. In December 2014, Colette Jonopulos sent me an e-mail to tell me that waiting for someone to recognize the potential of this chapbook was a thing of the past. After nearly three years, I had reason to celebrate.
Across those three years, many things changed. One thing that remained constant was my determination to see Boomerang Girl in print. I tinkered with, rearranged, and dropped some poems--those things we do to our writing when it isn’t working. This final draft, though, feels right. At the heart of it is the poem “Laurinburg III,” from which the title is taken: a piece I believe is the crux of the narrative here. For me, it captures themes found throughout the manuscript, such as anger, obsession, and even a bit of hope that someday the cycle will end and things can start anew, or at least that life will inspire another poem.
In her song “Elastic Heart,” Sia sings, “And I want it--I want my life so bad; / I’m doing everything I can.” As for me, I want my writing so bad that I will continue to fight for it, all the while hoping that I will be able to hit a vein of precious ore and construct a new collection that I love as much as Boomerang Girl. After all, I wouldn’t be that boomeranging girl if I didn’t come back to poetry again and again.
Caitlin Johnson
2015
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