The hide and seek muse, p.8
The Hide-and-Seek Muse, page 8
Poet Ron Silliman, who maintains one of the most respected and longest running poetry-related sites in the blogosphere (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com), comments that one consequence of their being “some 3,000 MFAs per year and fewer than 70 jobs available … is that the academy is becoming a much smaller part of the picture than it ever was before. I still think that the big story about writing in my lifetime lies in the demographics, from a few hundred poets to tens of thousands. The meaning of poetry in the aggregate is changing, and I don’t think any of us has a very good handle as yet about what that really means.”
A colleague of mine recently commented that he’d know it was time to retire when he grew weary of keeping up with the technologies involved. And that says something, given how universities and colleges are often playing catch-up in this regard. My friend was speaking in frustrated response, I think, to our university’s implementation of a new Sisyphean student information system, but he has a point. Though there are many within the halls of higher education, even in creative writing, who are on the cutting edge of the most current technologies, there are others, like myself, who hold steadfastly to e-mail and who do not do Facebook or Tweet or otherwise—and not out of any Luddite bully pride but because, in my case at least, I feel lucky to get my hair washed each busy week, let alone keep up with all those friends. Still, I want to stay connected, especially with new and intrepid work being done by people I do not know or of whom I’ve not yet heard, which makes me all the more appreciative of those sites which reach out in various ways to people not inclined to spend a lot of time on-line.
Of these, I’d like to mention two in particular, though there are many.
Poetry Daily (http://poems.com) was founded in the mid-1990s by Diane Boller, Don Selby, and Rob Anderson. At the time, all three were working at a law publishing company, exploring how the Internet could be used to sell law books. Boller and Selby continue to maintain this popular poetry site (depending upon the time of year, PD gets slightly over 10,000 unique visitors on popular days, and well over 12,000 email addresses are listed as subscribers to their weekly newsletter), which offers, in a kind of clearinghouse, a new poem a day, accompanied by a featured book, press, or journal, along with a list of recently received books, a weekly updated news page of current reviews, essays, and awards, a list of contests, and a splendid archive of poems. Boller writes that when she and her colleagues started the site, “the Internet was brand new … and seemed an exciting way for niche print publishers to make their work more widely known. We’re poetry readers, not poets, and did not have an academic institution as an anchor, so it was difficult for us to find out what poets were publishing where (in which journals), or even sometimes to find books by poets whose work we had already discovered and admired. We started Poetry Daily, inviting publishers to send us their publications, so that we could introduce representative poems to our readers, one a day. We were surprised and pleased to discover that there was a large audience of poetry readers who were, like us, trying to figure out which poets they enjoyed reading, and where to find their poetry.” On a Tuesday evening in November 2010, for example, a reader can find at the PD site four new poems by London freelance journalist and critic Alan Brownjohn, a note about his new book, a smart essay by Carol Moldaw about whether writing poetry is a “luxury or necessity,” reprinted from AGNI, and a host of recently arrived titles and poetry news-related pieces. For those potential readers not inclined to browse the Internet on their own, Boller and Selby send out a weekly e-mail newsletter missive alerting readers to features of the week ahead.
I have never met the poet and critic Ron Slate, but I know something of the quality of his mind thanks to the periodic e-mails he sends out, alerting readers not regularly browsing the Internet or receiving pokes and tweets to his website, On the Seawall (http://www.ronslate.com). The site serves as a homepage for Slate, but is devoted primarily to his discerning, elegant, forthright reviews of new work by others. His far-reaching and aesthetically diverse tastes have acquainted me with many poets, fiction writers, artists, and critics I would not have otherwise encountered. He periodically invites other writers to recommend new books in a kind of round-up, and in this way creates a space that feels generative and full of dialogue.
On the Seawall was launched in August 2007, on Slate’s 57th birthday. Slate tells me that he intended at first “to blog in the stricter sense — that is, to post comments regularly and generate conversation. But I discovered that I had little to say and no desire to obligate myself to say it every day. Writing about books, however, gives me enough space and time to understand the shape of my response. A book of poems (or any artwork) tries to create a place for experience. My job is to discover the place and describe the source of my pleasure as specifically as I can. William Meredith said, ‘One cannot review a bad book without showing off.’ A writer should be wary of conforming to his own tastes, so I cover a range of poetry (and other genres). I’m not interested in devoting energy to work that fails to stimulate or provoke me just to tweak someone’s nose. The Seawall is an American poets’ site—but its impulse is cross-genre and global. To admire is tantamount to being influenced—and since I take much out of my fiction and non-fiction reading, I assume other poets do, too. In sum: I maintain The Seawall to keep in touch with people, to enjoy our communal literary life, to bring accomplished writing to the attention of my following, and to elevate my pulse.”
It’s not surprising that many of these poetry-related sites are maintained by poets: Ron Silliman, Jerome Rothenberg, Don Share, Slate, and countless others. Perhaps what’s most exciting about these sites that blur distinctions between writers in and outside of academic settings is the way they encourage us to read. Long ago, when I graduated from college, I thought: At last I can read, really read, the way I want to read, and not just what’s assigned to me, but in a way that allows the authors I encounter to lead me to new texts. If Ai read Plath, I would read Plath. Plath read Dickinson: I would read her; Dickinson read Emily Brontë, and so I’d read her next. And this might bring me round to Agha Shahid Ali, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout, and so forth, backwards and forward in time, across sensibilities and cultures. I am grateful for the ways these virtual sites invite this kind of exchange by providing a wider, more various, vital, world and mind-opening lens into poetry and poetics than I might be able to find on my own. Since so many of these steadfast, stalwart stewards of the poetry of others rarely tout their own work at their own sites, I offer below a poem by Ron Slate, which offers a richly restrained account of the death of Erik Satie, the experimental, minimalist composer and avant-garde writer. Slate’s poem considers Satie’s literal demise, of course, but also explores his death in terms of the parallel decay of certain sensibilities, or the perception of them, in one’s milieu. It’s rich to think of Slate’s account of Satie in the context of the rapidly changing landscape by which American poems make their way into the world. Following the poem is a short list of some of the sites Slate is currently visiting, a catalogue that includes Silliman’s Blog and Poetry Daily.
Here is Ron Slate’s poem:
The Death of Erik Satie
The arches aspire to a point
in the church of childhood,
a single note here and here and here.
Drafty gothic undertones, the grandiose
obscurity of the modern mind.
Cirrhosis, then pleurisy.
Hours waiting in stillness,
as in an empty cabaret.
A bell tinkles in the corridor, the viaticum
drifts toward the dying man next door.
Something long ago made the world
hostile. So of course one mocks
a style no longer exploitable.
Conversation with the nuns –
You understand, the Creator
commits technical errors, he keeps us
at arm’s length, his soiled cuff
fills us with medieval joy.
The patient rebuffs Poulenc and Ravel –
but admits Braque, Brancusi, Stravinsky,
stand there and there and there.
There is nothing left to renounce.
Choirs, music hall songs, then through the war
anyone could witness the decline.
Curses for the idiots – Mon Cher Directeur,
you are brutal, inhospitable, you are under arrest.
The Pope is excommunicated! Monsieur et cher ami,
vous n’êtes qu’un cul, mais un cul
sans musique. One must reject the obvious.
Final years, cognac and beer,
then home to a dusty room with a depleted piano,
desolate possessions, scores inscribed
affectionately by Debussy, before the feud.
Franc notes poke from the pages
of books, advance payment for final music.
The rolled umbrella clutched more tightly.
A filament of notes,
each one intended. Something long ago
created this secret sorrow. Erik Satie dies
at the Hôpital Saint-Joseph.
and Slate’s recommended sites:
Poetry Daily, http://poems.com/
Silliman’s Blog, http://www.ronsilliman.blogspot.com/
How A Poem Happens, http://www.howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/
Poems and Poetics, http://www.poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/
Squandermania, http://donshare.blogspot.com/
Poets at Work, http://poetsatwork.tripod.com/
MICHAEL RUTHERGLEN
Went Viral
It was for you
alone I wrote the song
I sang into the screen and sent
to you alone, that someone else
then saw and sent among
their friends, their friends among
still others still beyond
me, omphalos node
of a lopsided system—
new lines of transmission
bloomed askew from spreading hubs—forgotten, though
each watched me sing as if to him or her
of you, your amor fati, face
across an asymptotic gap
in time awaiting our arriving late
by planes delayed by planes delayed,
your glance’s axis glancing off of mine
across the gate, above computers closed,
exhausted from all we’d watched thereon—
crashes, water drops and bullets shot
at ten thousand frames per second,
feats of song in blurred
exurban bedrooms—overloaded
glance that turned
to gaze to blazons
sung into my screen and seen
and seen through countless eyes alike aglaze
with blazing frames of video-memes,
through minds aswarm with same,
like ours that sudden once, our addled
pleasure centers blazing gray
and out before we saw each other,
numb to wonder
among ever-doubling wonders.
Cursor on a Chinese Poem
Steady liquid
crystal ictus.
Exiguous
calligrapher.
Beacon in the branching.
Interstitial
to glyphs
in a winter epistle,
serifed dædal
shadow-tracks
on a snowfield’s face.
You trace-
lessly retraverse
or erase—
There are no birds.
Snowblind under
summits, a hermit,
I drift
awaiting—what?
You blink in place.
Stone, fingers, charcoal, wax, blood, ink, spray paint, bridge girders, vellum, quills, clay tablets, sticks, wolf hair, rice paper, papyrus, styluses, lipstick, mirrors, indelible markers, thighs, printing presses, typewriters, mimeograph machines, keyboards, cartridges, pixilated screens—writers require some sort of space/surface on which to make their markings and a means by which to make them. In the way that sipping gin from a glass martini saucer is a different experience from enjoying it out of a red plastic cup, the technologies with and by which we write alter the nature of our relationship with those processes and with manifest text. Writing is itself, of course, a technology (
In some ways, of course, this is what happens with all love poems, even the most personal, once they make their way to readers. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare asks, and we think he is speaking to us. Rutherglen, however, is interested in pressing beyond this obvious ruse and into the ways in which the promiscuous privacy of cyber dissemination can affect our capacity for intimate speech and intimate listening. Interestingly, he withholds the original song—the one meant for the “you” and seen by everyone else—from this poem. Nonetheless, he is determined that the intent of his blason (part anti-Petrarchan love poem, part complaint) not be lost. Whatever romantic ardor may have inspired the original, private poem, its meaning has been irrevocably changed by the fact of its being now “seen / and seen through countless eyes alike aglaze / with glazing frames of video-memes, / through minds aswarm with same.” Do our cultural “feats of song in blurred / exurban bedrooms” (infiltrating our most private space through television, news reports, YouTube, iPhones, even radio, all of our communications) overload us, making “real” face-to-face meetings asymptotically impossible by interfering technologies, “your glance’s axis glancing off of mine / across the gate, above computers closed, / exhausted from all we’d watched thereon— / crashes, water drops and bullets shot / at ten thousand frames per second”? Lest we too easily read in this an indictment of the forces of technology, however, Rutherglen brings us back, at the conclusion, to the romantic passion that began the poem, to that “sudden once” of ecstasy that may have been the initial inspiration for the poem that “went viral”: “our addled / pleasure centers blazing gray / and out before we saw each other.” Perhaps, the poem puts forward, the risks of truly becoming one with another person are, finally, transient if not impossible. Private ecstasy, like communal ecstasy, might prove fatal if sustained without dilution, leaving us “numb to wonder / among ever-doubling wonders”—ever the paradox of Eros, in body, in text.
“Cursor on a Chinese Poem” possesses, visually, the intricate exactitude and syllabic artfulness of an ideogram. Several layers of text and meaning shimmer from the vertically reticulated, scroll-like strokes/strophes, as Rutherglen shows us a computer cursor (
At this point the cursor is making meaning in the poem; it has become part of the text, with the unique capacity not only to trace (like the brush-strokes, like the eye, like the strokes of syllables) across snow of the screen/page, but to “trace- / lessly retraverse / or erase,” as well. By the time the poem gives us the lines of the Chinese poem—“There are no birds. // Snowblind under / summits, a hermit, / I drift / awaiting—what?”—the reader, too, like the speaker/hermit, is lost in the snow of the page, the poem. With “You blink in place,” Rutherglen reassembles the reader/writer/translator/text contract, but not without leaving us, too, blinking in wonder, transformed by the thrilling transgressions and textual/temporal crossings and liaisons made possible by the poem’s many ghosted incarnations and by its summoned, foregrounded electronic technologies.
