Via Bookslut.

Wallace:

Put it this way, there are a few really good poets who suffered because of the desiccation and involution of poetry, but for the most part I think American poetry has gotten what it’s deserved. And, uh, it’ll come awake again when poets start speaking to people who have to pay the rent.

What do you think? Has poetry gotten so cloistered, so far from the people, that it’s mostly irrelevant today? Can today’s poets make a comeback? I’m curious, and concerned, about this possible irrelevance and about fiction maybe sliding down the same path. I was a poet until I had a writing professor who asked me if I could write fiction. Sure, I said. I write both. The professor told me, Write fiction if you can. Someone may actually read it someday. Write poetry and the only people who’ll read it are other poets. Is that true? And why? Should you need a MA in poetry to read it?

Now this month, Adam is doing a special project: one writer per week will do their thing. Do not miss this week’s Christopher Newgent, who has these killer poems up today. You should know that they are about lions, but not really about just lions, of course. You should also go and read them.

Have you read the new PANK and Collagist issues up online yet? Because they both kick ass. Top form and top writers in both, as usual. Check them out.

I have been reading Gerald Manley Hopkins again today. Hopkins and I have only one thing in common, as far as I’m aware: a passion for language. Hopkins was such an absolute innovator when it came to use of language in his poetry.  Light years ahead of his peers, really. If only he hadn’t become a priest and had to write every damn poem about god with a capital G. I know, I know, he wouldn’t be Hopkins without the priest thing, and probably his ecstatic love of god filled him the need for that bursting, unrestrained, joyous symphony of sound that he uses so effectively. But I do wish I could read the poems he wrote (and then burned) before he was a priest. I know he strived for a more disciplined form, like Milton. But the poor man–he had to have been a wild, burning spirit way down underneath the robes and flesh and all that.

My growing pile of stuff to read keeps growing, and growing, and yet I keep buying more stuff. Speaking of which, Hoarders: Buried Alive is on tonight. Speaking of which, although I love hoarding shows, it always pisses me off when the organizing specialists they bring in act like the books are just part of the hoarding problem. I mean, sometimes, sure, they clearly are. But these are books! You don’t need to get rid of your books! I am the first person to give or throw things away (we just did a major purge this weekend, in fact) and if Chris and I had to pack up and leave tomorrow for some reason, we would have a car filled with almost nothing but clothes and books. And the beasts, of course. And our electronics. But mostly just books. (And, okay, to be honest, there’s no way we could get all of our books into one car. But how about a very large moving truck? Yes, yes, we could do that.)

Just added to the growing pile: Annalemma (yes!), American Short Fiction (yes!) and Chad Simpson’s new chapbook (yes!) which will be at least a quick read since it is muy pequeno. But oh, so good if the rest is anything like his “Let X” story that was published in Esquire a couple of years ago. Plus it was blurbed by Matt Bell and Scott Garson (who both coincidentally have forthcoming books I have purchased and am waiting for with no little bit of excitement).

Speaking of chapbooks (are these transitions awesome or what today? I have a cold, okay? Pity me and my brain fog.) I finally got around to reading Aaron Burch’s PANK-contest-winning chapbook, and boy is that thing fantastic and solid and full of grace and nuts and bolts and familial feeling and hard-won beauty. Wow. I’m working on a more coherent version of my thoughts on it and will post it someday, but just wanted to say now while it’s fresh that this read was some read.

A kind of neat thing happened to me: I was one of the runners up for the HTML GIANT Many Books Contest. I thought this was pretty cool, since all the writers who won or placed as fellow runners up put me to shame.  I do like the story very much; it’s one of my favorites, so I’m very proud that it got as far as it did. It’s called “For These Humans Who Cannot Fly, ” and it’s going to be published along with the winner and runners’ up stories on a lovely website. So, thanks, kindly folks at HTML GIANT. You all made my weekend snazzy and sunny, despite the fact that I was hacking up a lung. Thanks!

Sorry. Let me be more articulate. I haven’t come across anyone whose poetry I admire so much in years. If someone were to crawl into my brain, poke around in there and come up with an exact poetry for me, that poetry would be Lyalin’s poetry. It’s so cerebral, so centered, so language-rich, and yet so strangely jagged and unsettling at the same time. It dances around meaning and causes havoc inside the word factory.

Lyalin probably does it for me because I love poets who make language work harder, who twist it up, who force it to do things it wouldn’t normally do and go places it wouldn’t normally go. And Lyalin does that. Teeth have stars. “Jobs Trending” is a proper name. The Loch Ness monster waits for sonar. Strawberries and horses become buttons. And every once in a while, too, a clear and exact statement that aims dead and true and is all the more devastating in its plainness; in “There are Four Chambers of the Heart,” Lyalin writes, “I wanted to tell them, we do not need a/country. We can destroy ourselves here.”

And yet none of this is gamesmanship, or nonsense, or random, or for show. A pattern emerges in the poetry; language obscures but also clarifies meaning. Something is hidden in these poems–a submerged something that dulls in the eye next to the dazzling flashes of perfect prose. In Pink and Hot Pink Habitat, Lyalin has produced coal from diamonds.

The poet loves the world, and the prose writer wants to create an alternate reality.

I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think that although my prose writing fits that statement, my poetry does not. I think my poetry generally tends to be about the things that suck in this world. I do love the world, honestly I do, but you wouldn’t know it from my poetry.

I sort of wonder if Karr has this idea about poets because she isn’t one? Or if I don’t agree because I’m not really a poet, either–just a prose writer who sometimes writes poetry? Or maybe the moral of the story is this: generalizations about writing never work out. Not sure, but I thought about this quote for a long time, so I thought I’d share it and see what other people think.

There is a certain kind of D.C. chick I really despise. The ones just fresh out of college with Ann Taylor pantsuits and no makeup but new, smaller noses from Daddy and $700 highlights pulled back into a severe ponytail. They’re usually staffers for some shithead conservative southern Senator who would take away all their reproductive rights if he could, and on that crappy salary, they live in an apartment I could never afford and spend all their spare time networking at lame happy hours.  I hate those bitches.

I just started, and am almost finished with The Anthologist. Which is beyond wonderful. I want to find Nicholson Baker and hug him and tell him that I, also, love W.S. Merwin and yet also rhyming poems.What a fantastic book. I know almost no Mary Oliver, and have read not nearly enough Louise Bogan, but will have to investigate further.

D.C. is apparently the second most literate city in the country. Whatever. All people here read is blogs and newspapers. I did read today that Barrelhouse is going to start a reading series here in D.C. Nothing would make me happier. We need more literary events here–we’re starving for them. Well, at least I am.

I like the Beatles. I do. Does that make me lame? I don’t care.  A good melody is kind of like rhyming poetry. It will impact more people and stick in your head forever, which is its own kind of artistic importance.

Many times, I think I should go back to school and get a job teaching history. Except that my friends who teach tell me how impossible it is to get a job teaching anything, especially in the liberal arts.  So maybe not.

I think I will spend New Year’s Eve with just my husband this year. I am tired, tired, tired of people. I have been around people for too many weeks, now, and I am just exhausted. If I am with my husband, it’s like being alone with another me, so it’s just as good as being alone. In fact, better, because I probably couldn’t finish a bottle of wine by myself (well, shouldn’t) so two is better than one.

War poetry has always been a mixed bag, both because of its necessarily overtly political themes and because of a natural tendency toward the maudlin or the jingoistic. But perhaps due to the nihilistic view of the War by those who lived it, and perhaps also because of a surge of interest in poetry among young students at the time, and probably most of all because of the rapidly changing style of poetry, World War I produced a more abundant and talented crop of poets than many other wars to precede or follow it–even as it quickly mowed them down.

Now I’ve discovered a resource of particular interest to anyone with a brain like mine. It’s the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, and in addition to collections of letters, poetry, and other writings by some of the finest poets of the era, it features WWI-era photos, film, audio, and publications.

I love the internets.