The Poetry Daily Critique

Statement of Philosophy

A site for exploration and discussion about verse, poetics, the aesthetic, and creative writing in general.

Because there is a profound difference between writing something to be read and writing something worth reading; and in that difference might beauty be found.

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Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Review: Poetry Magazine (Oct. 2015) – Part V: Matt Hart

The October 2015 issue of Poetry Magazine can be found here.

links to individual texts:
Matt Hart, "The Friend"
— headers to the sections are also links to the texts

the other posts in this series

list verse; more on pop-formatting; and defenses of texts

– some editing, Apr. 4, 2016

This post will cover only one text, that which comes next in the contents of the October, 2015, Poetry Magazine, Matt Hart's "The Friend." My original plan was to pair it with "Vert," by Catherine Staples, which is found farther forward in the text. Both works are of the same structure; though, each approaches the structure differently, and to different degrees (and forms) of success. However, for reasons including the length of the below, the want to gather up threads before beginning with "Vert," and a project or two that is requesting my attention, I will save the latter work for the next post.

That "The Friend" is in its base structure a list is seen in that the core of the text is constituted by a list of statements about "the friend," statements with either "the friend" or "you" as the subject of the sentence. However, that is not the only type of statement within the text: there are also statements that do not have either "the friend" or "you" as subject, and have no direct connection to that primary list; and statements (or clauses within statements) that are the repeating "him/her" motif, which first appears in lines 5-7. The motif appears twice more in the text (lines 15-16, 35-37) and is echoed in lines 32-33:

and being a friend with your hands in your pockets,
and the friend's hands in your pockets.

Before going to the idea of the list, let me give word to this motif.

They read entirely as an appeal to pop-poetic sentiment. They do not come off as clever but as a gimmick, a 'hook' in pop music terminology, a trope meant to make the text memorable (in a pop sort of way). As with all appeals to pop sentiment, their function is entirely to say to the reader, "Look, this poem does things that pop poetry does" – ergo, then says the pop reader, this is a good poem. They are, to continue with the theme begun in the previous posts, meant to be recognized, not read. Not meant to be read because when read they are revealed for the sham poetics they are. There are two interrelated reasons why the lines fail. The first is revealed in the contradiction within the first appearance of the lines.

You put your hand on her shoulder,
or you put your hand on his shoulder.
The friend is indefinite.

Saying "her" and then "his" is the opposite of "indefinite": the text is being very definite by pointing to the sex of the person, even if it is creating an ambivalence with that pointing out. Just because something is ambivalent does not make it indefinite: in fact, it makes it the opposite. A sophisticated writer would not try to create indefiniteness by offering a choice: they would create indefiniteness by avoiding any choices, by avoiding any moves to the definite, even if the result is ambivalent (or ambiguous).

. . . . Read the Full Post »

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Review: Poetry Magazine (Oct. 2015) – Part IV: Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Cruz

The October 2015 issue of Poetry Magazine can be found here.

links to individual texts:
Rae Armantrout, "Background Information"
Rae Armantrout, "Object Lesson"
Cynthia Cruz, "Midnight Office"
— headers to the sections are also links to the texts

the other posts in this series

the shape of verse and pop-poetic convention

– editing, with a little added content, Apr. 4, 2016

Continuing with my review of the Oct. 2015 Poetry Magazine, I will in this post first finish covering Rae Armantrout, with her structurally similar offerings, "Background Information" and "Object Lesson," and then reach ahead to pull in another, to appearances structurally similar work, Cynthia Cruz's "Midnight Office."

These works offer opportunity to explore a commonly seen genre of pop verse: a genre of visual construction, not of word choice. Hopefully it will also offer some opportunity to explore a method of analysis: taking the material and ideational aspects at first independently and then together. It is fairly easy to demonstrate arbitrary line breaks with texts of larger stanzas and relatively consistent line lengths, as with the works in the previous posts of this series. It is a more difficult task with works such as these, in which the form derives more from a convention that governs the work in its full length rather than a convention that covers but one or a few lines at a time. This convention derives from the works of writers like William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and perhaps also Charles Olson. Or, at least, when I hear this type of verse defended, it is usually through appeals to members of that line of U.S. verse.[FN] In contemporary verse, even as far back as verse in the 70s and 80s (as with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E), I rarely see reason not to say the form is conventional or artificially derived: the text, as runs the convention, is manipulated to look a certain way, not shaped out of the text itself. That is the central question being explored in this post, with these three works: is the shape written to convention or crafted to poetic ends? The answer is not always clear, and the third text will give demonstration of that. In writing problems in the text are not always – indeed are only infrequently – clear cut issues. Most of the time it is not the error itself that mars a text, but the effect the error has on a reader. It creates an issue of confidence, an issue of whether the reader can continue in faith that the text is indeed a well-written text. Related to this, it must be noted that though a work may be poorly written in terms of ideation, syntax, etc., that does not necessarily mean the form of the work was not crafted toward the ends of a poetic whole. That is, sometimes intent is betrayed by the result – which adds a second complication to analysis.

. . . . Read the Full Post »

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Review: Poetry Magazine (Oct. 2015) – Part III: Corey Mesner, Katie Peterson, Rae Armantrout

The October 2015 issue of Poetry Magazine can be found here.

links to individual texts:
Corey Mesler, "Let the Light Stand"
Katie Peterson, "Autobiographical Fragment"
Katie Peterson, "A Citizen"
Rae Armantrout, "Asymmetries"
— headers to the sections are also links to the texts

the other posts in this series

pop-poetic convention and clothesline verse

– some editing Apr. 3, 2016

In this post, part three of the survey of the October 2015 Poetry, I will examine four works that all are written in the same pop-poetic convention. I will start with what comes next in the Table of Contents, Corey Mesler's "Let the Light Stand." After, I will reach ahead but a touch and bring in the two works by Katie Peterson, "Autobiographical Fragment" and "A Citizen." Then, I will back up to the passed over Rae Armantrout and pick up the first of her three contributions, "Asymmetries," which varies enough from the norm to offer an interesting fourth example. The other two works by Armantrout will be taken up in the next post. Since I will look at the texts one at a time, I will use headers to mark the beginning of each examination.

"Let the Light Stand"

Corey Mesler's "Let the Light Stand" is written to a convention frequently seen in contemporary verse, something I call "clothesline" verse. All four works examined in this post are written to this convention to one degree or another.

Clothesline verse is verse that reads as though the various phrases, clauses, and sentences of the text were merely pinned to a line, with little more connecting them into a whole beyond that they are strung one after the other in the same text, in an order that often seems to have no more consideration than perhaps the casual impulse of grouping together the socks presently exposed on the top of the pile of wet laundry. Such texts are usually still based on the same linearity as is most unsophisticated verse. They derive their "cleverness" by removing to one degree or another the narrative thens: instead of the text running "A then B then C etc.", the reader gets only "A B C etc." with the ostensible belief that the line upon which the A, B, and C are strung will emerge as some kind of connecting subtext or implied content. Usually, however, the only implied, connecting thread is that the text follows the very commonly seen convention. Which is the nature of convention: success lies not in the text and its ideation, but only in that the text follows the convention, which is to say the text merely mimics the properties of all the texts previously written to that same convention. Sometimes other means of connection (than narrative thens) link together the parts of the text: aural, logical, grammatical, ideational, etc. Usually, however, the result is the same: the text remains little more than a string of moments that fail to make up – except for through the appeal to convention – a whole.

Defense of such works, when I have seen non-trivial defenses, are usually based in appeals to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or such writers; though, that defense tends to end at that appeal. When it does go farther, the argument usually seeks legitimacy through critical works such as Ron Silliman's "The New Sentence": an essay that is most telling in how it struggles to stay continually focused on the moment of the "new sentence" while avoiding entirely any confrontation with the resulting work as a whole.[FN] Clothesline verse these days, however, rarely show any of the considered experimentation of the verse Silliman was exploring, and are wholly and entirely the repetition of the repetitions of the convention. That full cloth appeal to convention as a measure of value is why such works tend to fail as verse in every way except in their performance of the convention; which, in turn, is why they tend to come off, if one but look past the convention and actually read the text, as ideationally empty, often as poorly composed language, and usually as badly constructed verse.

. . . . Read the Full Post »

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Review: Poetry Magazine (Oct. 2015) – Part II: Eleanor Hooker, Franz Wright

The October 2015 issue of Poetry Magazine can be found here.

links to individual texts:
Eleanor Hooker, "Nailing Wings to the Dead"
Franz Wright, "The Raising of Lazarus"
section headers are also links

the other posts in this series

breaking lines vs. writing lines

– editing and an added footnote, Apr. 3, 2016

This was slow in coming. In part, I have been in that peculiar situation of being in a bout with an illness whose medications create more and more severe symptoms than the illness. Though, also, there is that this is yet the beginning of the project from the writing side: as such, there is not only the exploration of the texts but also the search for the ideas and themes will be carried forward through the project. Hopefully, the tempo will pick up after this, as the texts in the issue are used more and more as examples to points already made than used to the much longer effort of establishing the points.

I am exploring two texts from the October issue in this part. Since Eleanor Hooker, the author of the first, "Nailing Wings to the Dead," is another holdover Irish author, I want to add to it the first text by a U.S. writer, "The Raising of Lazarus" by Franz Wright. The two also create a usefully contrasting pair: the first is loosely formal verse, the second free verse; as well, the second is a much stronger piece than the first.

The primary effort here will be toward the groundwork for exploring lines and line breaks in the texts to come: it is one of the greatest weaknesses in contemporary verse culture, and perhaps the most tell-tale sign of writing sophistication – or absence thereof – in contemporary verse. For the moment I set aside the question of a work's being ideationally dead or living and focus on technical issues. Though, with both works, I will also look at some moments in their construction. I will start with examing such issues in "Nailing Wings" then turn to such in "Raising Lazarus." It is in the latter I will turn to the exploration of lines, carrying that exploration back to "Nailing Wings."

Yet, the central thesis of this exploration of an issue Poetry Magazine is that contemporary verse, unlike Leavis's description of the popular verse of his time, is not merely dead but indeed bad, so I will begin – as I generally will throughout the project – speaking to the quality of the works. In keeping with the thesis of this blog, however, the approach will remain exploratory, from the viewpoint not solely of a general reader but also of a writer.

Eleanor Hooker, "Nailing Wings to the Dead"

I start, right at the start, at the first word, with a very common event in contemporary verse: the incorrect use of connecting words: here, "since."

Since we nail
wings to the dead,
she calls ravens
from the sky
to inspect our work. "For flight,"
they say, "first remove their boots."

Using the wrong adverb or conjunction or using one where one is neither needed nor wanted is a common error in writing, verse or prose. (It is one I have to constantly watch for in my own writing.) Either the trend has been increasing over the years or I have become more and more alert to it, for it seems the mis-use of such adverbs and conjunctions has become sloppier and sloppier both in speech and in the writing of persons supposedly intelligent and alert enough to catch the event. The worst is with the word but. On television, especially live, in news broadcasts, sports channels, and commercials, you will very frequently hear the word but used where there is no 'but' relationship, where either an and or nothing at all should have been used. I am sure that most of these errors exist by way of spoken speech habits invading the drafting of texts. Frequently, the words are used as filler material, something similar to ums, a means to connect one thought to the next without letting any silence appear in between. Though, I also believe, considering commercials and most broadcasts are not free-wheeled but scripted, that they are also, simply, symptomatic of a lack of attention and poor language skills on the part of writers: poor skills because they are exactly the type of thing that good editing would catch.[FN]

. . . . Read the Full Post »

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Review: Poetry Magazine (Oct. 2015) – Part I: Introduction; Matthew Sweeney, Guillaume Apollinaire

The October 2015 issue of Poetry Magazine can be found here.

links to individual texts:
Matthew Sweeney, “Five Yellow Roses”
Matthew Sweeney, “Dialogue with an Artist
— headers to the sections are also links to the texts

the other posts in this series

Introduction

– some editing, Apr. 3, 2016

If you at all have read this blog you might know that I am more than willing to take shots at Poetry Magazine, the touted flagship of verse journals in the U.S. But, then, I have always been far more puzzled by than impressed by the magazine. Never in the many years that I have looked between its print covers have I considered its contents worth the price of possession. Even with it now in electronic format, I have never found it worth the price, counted in time, of reading. Even its reputation has for me, over the years, become less and less impressive. The more I come upon references to Poetry Magazine in the history of U.S. literature, the more the supposed stature of the magazine within U.S. literary culture has become more myth than reality, a myth based primarily on popularity and after the fact branding than on any actual, positive effect the journal may have had upon literary culture. As example, if perhaps an easy example, take this moment from John Tytell's biography of Pound:

By summer [of 1913] Pound was back in London and beginning an involvement with a new magazine. He had already experienced difficulty with Harriet Monroe: her taste had to reflect that of her backers, who were mostly wealthy businessmen or their wives who preferred inconsequential light verse to what Pound regarded as real poetry, so each issue was a balancing of the inane and the more serious. Pound objected strenuously to what he called the 'rot' in Poetry and wanted a magazine in which he would have more control. (Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (1987): 89)

For as long as I have been picking up and putting down the magazine, "inconsequential light verse" has been a more-than-apt phrase to describe both the output and orientation of Poetry Magazine. Though, "inconsequential" may be too kind a phrase, for as equally, and perhaps more and more in the last years, "incompetent" has become a necessary adjective.

*************************
[FN] It should be said that I have never given Poetry any extended consideration before these last few years; in those years only because it has been available on-line. As implied above, I refuse to pay money for a magazine of valueless verse, verse that rarely prompts thought beyond that of "why would anyone consider this worth publishing?" Because of this, any observation by me of trends across time can only be casual. Though, I have generally found Poetry Magazine unimpressive if not pervasively uninteresting.
*************************

It is my observation that Poetry Magazine has always and only been a flagship of pop-poetry in the U.S., never a standard bearer for intelligent literature, for literature qua literature. If Poetry wants to be the Hollywood pulp of the literary world, that is fine with me. However, where I cross swords with the magazine is in the pretense that it is something it is not, whether that pretense be created by the magazine itself or created elsewhere and never by the magazine denied. When Poetry Magazine publishes barely competent pablum, when it publishes incompetent shamwork, it holds that shamwork up – simply through association to the magazine's own banner, its own history and importance (however mythical) – as meritable verse. In that, Poetry Magazine offers only detriment and progressive deterioration to literary culture – to its values, its standards, its intelligence. Literary culture in the U.S. today is dominantly pop-lit: I say dominantly to distinguish it from majorily pop-lit, which is and always will be the case in any culture. It is not merely, today, that pop-lit is the majority of what is published and praised, it is what defines what is published and praised. In that lowering of standards, in that eliminating of standards, we have created a culture of literature, a culture of participants in verse, be they writers or readers, incapable of intelligent discernment of what is merely competent verse, what is incompetent hackery, and what is genuinely meritable literature.

. . . . Read the Full Post »

Monday, September 28, 2015

The Intellect and the Internet

In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
— Emerson, "The American Scholar"

an FB comment

I have been the last couple of days pondering a passing comment on an FB post:

"The best hope for poetry may be the Internet, which can bring scattered people together from the far corners and create semi-coherent groups."

Once, the essentially optimistic part of my being would have agreed with the possibilities in the idea. However, I have in the last years come around to wholly disagree with the sentiment. For I remember a couple of decades back when the internet was still young being able to find discourse on literature that was intelligent both in the level of discourse and in the approach to the discourse itself. But over the years those sources of discourse have become harder and harder to find, primarily because of that fundamental nature of the internet: openness; the willingness to have and permission for everyone to participate. Indeed, the death of many of those sites and sources were caused by just that very openness. Over the years, it is not the above, wished for potential of the internet that has been observed. Rather, what has been demonstrated – and if we are honest with ourselves we should also say what should have been expected – is that the fundamental energies of the internet is toward the quashing of intellectual possibility by the overwhelming voices of populist participation.

Which is also to say: by anti-intellectual participation.

. . . . Read the Full Post »

My Method
This is meant to be a site of discussion, not argument and proof. This is not criticism of an authoritarian, didactic nature, of the kind where you are told what a poem "means," what you are supposed to read out of a poem, but criticism as means to provoke thought about poems, poetry, and literature; criticism as a means to develop discerning thought about poetry; criticism as an attempt to develop an aesthetic conversation about poetry that serves also — if not primarily — the writers of aesthetic literature. Indeed, this project was begun after finding a profound absence within the web of just that kind of discourse.