Sustainable attitudes / sustainable aesthetics

From an egotistical perspective, poets often think that poetry or "real" poetry or "good" poetry belongs to an elect few, an elite that is highly evolved and well educated. Sadly, often such poets will become aggressive and hostile to other forms of poetry that do not support their own particular aesthetic views. This is how many poets in the poetry world view the life of poetry, a highly competitive arena in which millions try but only a minuscule number will ultimately survive for future generations. The individual poet’s talent matters more than anything else in this schematic. The cult of genius has no shortage of followers.


From an aesthetics of sustainability perspective, poets belong to poetry, and not vice versa. This is the actual, the ego-crushing, reality. Individual poets, including the greatest ones, almost never matter very much or for very long except to other poets. And even to other poets the odds of mattering much or for long are tiny.


As Pound observed long ago, what matters is that great poetry continues to be written, and it really does not matter to poetry which individuals get to write the great work. (At the same time, however, the idea of greatness in art is necessary to inspire enough poets to be able to create the handful of greatest works for every generation.)


So what is poetry from a sustainable aesthetics point of view? It is like a large ecosystem in which there are many kinds of animals that are interdependent and which interact like different species, some as herds, some as apex predators, some as scavengers, some in symbiotic relationship to other species, some as leeches, some as highly evolved social groups, some as scum-sucking bottom feeders, some as alpine tundra foragers, some as imitative parasites, some as highly evolved groundbreakers into new environments etc. (You know who you are....)


What this translates into in human terms is that every small press and every literary magazine has its own peculiar sociology and hierarchy, or even multiple sociologies and hierarchies. So what does that mean, practically speaking? It means that the people who run the presses and the journals all write their own rules of aesthetics, and this comes largely from who they are, what they are, where they are, and when they are at work. It also comes from what they hope to be, their aspirations toward greater things. Or their aspirations toward television, mass media, and other things, which may or may not be greater things. Some merely aspire to make money and acquire fame without even trying to write great work. Some think they are trying to do great work but are lying to themselves etc. Some just want to keep their jobs, etc.


Many, many times, a press or journal or a movement is created out of a handful of friendships formed in college of at an MFA program or through a circle that forms around a particularly powerful figure like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Light bookstore gave a foundation to the City Lights Press. A lot of times, these groups form because they are unhappy with what they see around them, and they are tired of being rejected by the established presses. It’s a natural evolution for every succeeding generation.


Out of one generation, it is true that very few groups and even fewer individuals will produce work that will have enduring value for many people. What is interesting about the greatest works is that they do not happen in isolation. No great work is an island, entire of itself, etc. Even the works of William Wordsworth, called by Keats one of the most egotistical poets in all of English poetry, was deeply influenced by his sister Dorothy and his dear friend Coleridge. Their works on close reading turn out to be completely interwoven. There were lasting and profound textual interconnections that are still being excavated by scholars today. When we read a poet like Wordsworth in isolation, it’s like hearing half of a phone conversation, as one critics observed. And even the entire Wordsworth circle is just one conversation within a very powerful literary community that included many others who attained some measures of greatness. Not many remember Charles and Mary Lamb, William Hazlitt, John Thelwall, John Clare, Thomas DeQuincey et al. Many people who are not well remembered actually contributed in various ways to the works of the one who is remembered.


It’s ironic that Pound would be the guy who espoused a profound understanding of the reality of the situation of poetry, i.e. we belong to it and not the other way around. Pound was notoriously egotistical and sublimely ambitious etc. But from being so passionately involved in the poetry world, Pound realized that true inspiration is rare and precious, and the writers who can provide works that are inspiring are likewise. He supported and helped engender the works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot quite selflessly. Some critics think Modernism as we know it would have been impossible without him. So here again one sees that there may be a lot more social support and social interaction that is integral to the greatest individual works. Before Pound was a great writer, he was a great reader. He never stopped being a great reader. If he had not been so open to Joyce and Eliot, their careers may not have happened at all. Or their careers may have been very small without his help. Pound as a literary friend may have been more important to literary history than Pound himself as a poet.


So if you want to get published and “survive” in the poetry world, it is good to try to see the big picture and not waste a lot of energy feeling jealous or like this is a competition among individuals. You could also waste a lot of time by trying to become included in a group that will never let you in. You could also waste a lot of energy by trying to promote one particular brand of aesthetics that goes nowhere.


Whether we like it or not, and whether we like each other or not, we are in this “ecosystem” or big unhappy family together. You could say that poets of any generation are sort of like a very large, extended, and unhappy family.


(Incidentally, I am sure that it was with this or something like this family metaphor in mind that Sharon Olds once told me at the end of my time at the MFA program at NYU, "Welcome to the family." It was a warm and funny moment.)


But just being aware of the common ground and the common purpose of poetry can prevent a lot of wasted energy, time and talent. We all have our parts to play, and all of them may matter in ways no one can foresee.


In the poetry world especially, a little sanity goes very far. And even a handful of literary friendships can help an aesthetic revolution to be born.


I think John Ashbery was both kidding and serious when he wrote in "Hotel Lautreamont," a pantoum, that:


Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society
working as a team. They didn't just happen. There was no guesswork.
The people, then, knew what they wanted and they got it.
We see the results in works as diverse as "Windsor Forest" and "The Wife of Usher's Well."


Yes, he is making fun of academics who have deconstructed individual geniuses and stressed socio-cultural-political-cultural-historical contexts ad nauseum etc. But by the end of the pantoum, he seems to be quite serious when he reiterates this theme and what it means to a poetic genius:


You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society;
Only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:
the people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.


In the end of the sixty-four line poem, Ashbery as a great and acknowledged genius himself, seems less and less sure of his position in relation to the people. He is no longer mocking the idea that society got out of any genius what it needed, almost regardless of a genius like him. This is a great recognition, an awakening out of the nightmare of self-obsessed and ego-driven consciousness. It represents a significant ego-surrender, and a coming into the fullness of the reality of our situation in poetry. It's so much bigger than any one could be.

Nostalgia for Newark

[here is a relatively new poem (i.e. in drafts for a few years) forthcoming in an NJ anthology. wrote this when i lived in CO.

most of the line-spacing has disappeared here, but you can get the rough idea anyway here....]




Nostalgia for Newark



off the plane it hits you stark as the plains:
you’ve landed in the new-
ark of one of every kind of human on earth

even at 5 a.m. after flying across the West

the Afro-Carrib, Afro-Am, Latina/Latino, Indian, Asian
Black-Jewish-Italian Token Mutt

now i have to sober up
harsh coffee under the influence of
great lakes of lights of east coast cities
torching horizon to horizon
in predawn-dusk

touch down i skid out of a dream

the 6 a.m. terminal’s hordes

clog the rail link station

a post-industrial-battleship-gray hole

with a London-in-the-blitz feel

of brown grays, light grays and the darkened
yellow warning strip that grips your soles
with vulcanized
crisscross dots rubbed past faded


dazed still from 0.5 hrs sleep on the shuttle to DEN
3+ hours midair
(2+ hours awaiting the train to PHL)

the 777-sized diner in Newark International
lavish smells eggs sausage grease coffee urns treats

and what have I learned from five years in the West
aside from what cowboys are
is that I have missed the eastern seaboard
in entirety

even its crossing x-shaped I-bars under great compressor tubes

its scuffed aluminum doors

its brushed metal graffitoed waiting rooms

its narrow escalators/descalators of grime

its strings of jets hovering above the NJT taking turns to land

its landing jets racing cars along the NJT

its congregated seagulls on corrugated steel
rooftops slanted refracting early morning sun

its ocean-heavy winds

this deciduous forest down the line to Metro Park

I must be an acrobat to talk like this and act like that

bracing gales of—

back in the world so briefly
far from high deserts of TARGET microdunes
WALMART tumbleweeds CONAGRA-pesticidal air
the treeless brown of grasslands and cows

if the word for world was forest once
I am back in the wold
so many shades of bark, brush and dark umber
branches scritch their words into sky

these prolific red/orange ochre leaves of autumn

papery-as-dust confetti-ing siding rails

the iced over lakes black glass block buildings

the sudden Raritan River running by Rutgers, New Brunswick
its bright orange brick faces aglow in sun
its white clock tower amid tall trees

i’m halfway home—

a re-post from 2005: my first acquaintance with Li-Young Lee

[Written on 03/13/2005 about 03/01-02/2005 in Greeley, Colorado]


Li-Young Lee visited UNC eleven or twelve days ago, i.e. 03/01/05, and I was very lucky to be the guy who got to pick him up at the airport and drive him around and introduce him to the audience. He was a lot more casual and friendly and down to earth than I expected. In fact, I liked him right away. I don't know why I thought he might be anything else, maybe just because of his fame and how other famous poets are sometimes. It took me a little while to find him at baggage claim though I got there early and went looking for him whenever trainloads of passengers flowed up and out of the escalators from the underground rail. He was in a long coat and had on sneakers and just one small bag. He was easy to recognize; we spotted each other, and after I introduced myself he called home to say he had a ride.



(I had wanted to borrow a cell phone so that he could call me from baggage claim, which is how I picked up Sharon Olds the previous year, but this year no one in the dept. had one they could spare.)



Of course, I had heard him read in Chicago at AWP last year (when he shared a reading with, among others, Mark Strand), and I was happy to help him get to the Greeley Guest House. As we started off, he didn't really talk about himself at all. That was kind of a nice surprise. Instead, he was very curious about me. He asked a lot of questions. When he learned I was a poet, he said, "You're a rare bird," meaning, an Asian-American in poetry. He asked me how my parents felt about it. "They thought it was a catastrophe," I said. I mentioned how even just a few years ago my mother had tried to get me to go to law school depite fifteen years in teaching. "My mom wanted me to get a real job."



We had to take an airport shuttle to the parking lot to my car. During the long drive from Denver International Airport, we talked about a lot of things. His parents hadn't been thrilled with his career either, it turned out.



"Wow," I was impressed by how unimpressed Asian parents can be about artistic achievements.



We also talked about poetry recordings and some things that are happening with poetry audio and studio work. He was working with some studio, and he was surprised to learn how expensive it could be. Another thing we talked about was Sharon Olds. He had seen her the previous week at a party, and we talked about her a little. I explained how she had been my advisor and what a great teacher she had been for me. It turned out that we both had experience with meditation, and he had even helped to start a school for it. We also talked about art; it turned out that he had a strong interest in visual arts also. And his brother Li-Lin Lee had work in the Art Institute of Chicago. I said how I thought that was the greatest museum I had ever visited, and I've seen some pretty great ones.



I mentioned how many of my students really loved his work, and he was interested in knowing about them and how much experience they had had with poetry. He was curious about teaching and what it was like at UNC. I said the students were really nice and intelligent, but there was very little diversity.



Anyway, near the end of the long drive I stopped so he could grab some coffee (he drank twelve cups a day, he said), and I gave him my latest book and said I hoped he'd like it, and in a little while he was at the Guest House. Later that afternoon, I picked him up to take him to dinner and the reading in the evening.



Li-Young was curious about who was coming to dinner. I wasn't sure about who might be coming, so I was surprised to see the provost of the university and his wife, the Dean David Caldwell, and the other poets on the faculty, Lisa Zimmerman, and my friend Bob King. Li-Young was glad, I think, to be able to talk to the provost and his wife in Chinese, and he seemed pretty happy with the steaks at Potato Brumbaughs. I asked him towards the end if he needed a little time to relax by himself before the reading, and he said he really didn't. But when we got there with just a little time remaining he thought that maybe it would have been better after all if he had had a few minutes to himself.



A lot of my friends and students were there, and that made me feel good. Many of them had come 60 miles or so from Boulder, and it was wonderful to see them there. The crowd was very big but not as huge as people had anticipated, so there were many empty seats in the great hall. I did the intro very briefly, just saying welcome and thanks to the provost and the generous sponsor Mr. Rosenberry, a quick plug for the UNC litmag, and then the brief intro for Li-Young. I was nervous in a way that made me uncomfortable and unhappy (actually), and this is a new phenomenon for me.



As soon as the reading started, I was really intrigued by the style and substance of the delivery of the poetry. He really had the audience completely with him right away, and he really took some interesting chances out there, saying new poems and rough drafts, and even sharing things that had originated in improvisational settings. It was great to be lifted into the realm of poetry for a while, especially when it was coming from someone who was able to understand some things about me that may not be obvious to a lot of other people.



After the reading, he was signing books and talking a little to many, many of the people in the very long line. Meanwhile, some of my female students were telling me how they were so infatuated with Li-Young and how gorgeous he was etc. They were asking me how old he was as though they were considering running away with him etc. I thought this was kind of amusing. Then Li-Young was doing an interview with a student from the UNC newspaper, and finally I got to take him back to the Guest House.



He seemed a little tired, so I went there the quickest way. We talked a little along the way. Somehow it came up that when we both started writing, there were no Asian-American poets in the Norton Anthology, so it was a kind of a transformative moment for me when I realized I could write about things that had to do with my real inner life as an Asian American. Li-Young said it was like we were pioneers in this new literature.



The next morning, I got to take him to my morning class, and he was very relaxed. He had been thinking of a poem while going to sleep, and he had been working on this new poem early in the day. "That's exciting," I said. He smiled at that.



Some things he said that morning were really very profound. He talked about the poem being made of words but crafted out of silence just as architects work with material but what they shape is empty space. He talked about the poetry being embedded in silence, the silence being embedded in the psyche, the psyche being embedded in the person, and the person in the world, and the world in the cosmos. One of my students who was too shy to say her question aloud wrote on a little piece of paper: "What do you get from poetry?" Li-Young said it was a buzz, it was like drugs, it was exciting, it made him feel alive etc. That was a great answer. He was so totally at ease with everything; it was a real pleasure to watch him interact with people.



Then I returned him to the Guest House. It was sad to be leaving him there and returning to the regular grind, so to speak. He asked me if he would see me later before he flew back to Chicago. Sadly, I was not able to come back. He was so enlightening and so kind. He said that he loved my poems, and that I should let him know when I'm passing through Chicago. He knew the best place for won ton.

excerpts of Li-Young Lee interview online

I was working at Muhlenberg last spring 2008 teaching a bunch of literature classes and ran into an old colleague who, it turned out, had interviewed Li-Young Lee on the WMUH radio station.

He asked if I was interested. I was very interested and listened to the interview. It was very enlightening, I thought.He talked about working with at-risk youth in Chicago, ensouling the world, writing as a yogic path, the ecstatic nature of the real self, art as a religion, Taoism, and much else.

You can find it at http://mmminc.org/

Or go straight to:
http://www.mmminc.org/mmm_online/index_2009.htm


The Interview with Li-Young Lee by Alec Marsh, which is forthcoming in entirety in MMM Vol. IX.

what’s always real, part 1

what’s always real

12/24/2008

1.
this is where the circle starts
inescapably in us

The U.S. Airforce bombers
overfly Taiwan’s neutral shores
in March 1944
—no threat’s there—

The drone of giant locusts
wide as the sky but invisible
over Tainan, the city of scholars.
Then whistling screams
higher, louder,
then bombs splashed
solid houses into waves
like circles in water,
but water on fire.
The city blazed into black spires,
shockwaves pounded the air
shaking even the narrow mountain road
where the little girl my mother was
watched over her father’s shoulder
as he ran with terrorized crowds
hoping the bombers would pass
but listening through the engine roars
for the very first blast—

it rained black fire,
broke her eardrums
as they fell together in the ditch
where he shielded all of her,
not hearing but feeling
what exploded near his bones.
Even dust caught fire—
trees were half-painted red and black
with blood, parts of people—
the sooty shells stank
of burning metal.

The quietest sounds were the screams:
“Are we dead!? Are we dead!? Are we dead!?”
Shouting, she couldn’t believe this was Life....
But her father knew, covered her eyes,
and shouted, “We’re alive!”

Where did all the tragedy goers go?

How rare is tragedy is American pop culture? Why has tragedy disappeared almost entirely from the American drama? Why is American film mostly afraid of tragedy?

There are great exceptions, of course, but here are the top 10 grossing films of 2008, so far:

530,258,989 The Dark Knight (2008)
318,298,180 Iron Man (2008)
317,011,114 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
227,946,274 Hancock (2008)
223,641,119 WALL·E (2008)
215,395,021 Kung Fu Panda (2008)
159,066,369 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
154,529,187 Horton Hears a Who! (2008)
152,637,269 Sex and the City (2008)
143,704,210 Mamma Mia! (2008)

Where did all the tragedy goers go to?

A small percentage of people still see tragedy regularly by attending the opera, where dead heroines and heroes are the norm. I could be wrong, but I think classical ballet also features a lot of dead heroines and heroes (Giselle, Petrushka). Even so, these audiences would be a small percentage of the total cultural audience.

It’s stranger than you think that tragedy is missing most of the time. A lot of the most important and even lucrative films and film sagas have been tragedies: The Godfather, The Deer Hunter, the entire Star Wars series (Darth Vader, the chosen one, dies after serving the evil emperor for most of his life and almost kills his whole family in the process). If you scan Time’s top hundred films of all time, I think you’ll see more tragedy is represented there than is usually the case. http://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/the_complete_list.html

This is, I think, even more true if you look at the 100 greatest films list from http://filmsite.org/
http://www.filmsite.org/momentsindx.html#100greats

Of course, since I am a poet and writer, I want the answer to be that the people who craved tragedy and all the great things it does for humanity to have found it in great books of fiction and poetry and other genres. But is that happening? If you look at the 100 Best novels as selected by The Modern Library, it may be true. At least it looks more serious than the films, perhaps. (I’ve only read and seen a small percentage of both lists).

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html

But tragedy as a genre came from poetry. So it would seem natural to look for the greatest poetry books and consider what they look like. I just looked for them with Google, and there is NO LIST of greatest poetry books that I could find except for a blog by Janaka Stucky, and it is for 2008, and you can find it at

http://notellpoetry.blogspot.com/2008/11/best-poetry-books-of-2008-janaka-stucky.html

Thanks, Janaka Stucky!

Well, the absence of a list of 100 greatest poetry books is a glaring indictment of the lousiness of the American educational system I have to say; it proves the folly of teaching greatest poems in anthologies! (But I’ve said before that the one-stop shopping method of teaching poetry is destroying poetry as a genre, killing diversity, enriching multinational corpocrats blah blah etc.)

Speaking, to fully disclose everything, not as a reader but as an editor/publisher of a small press, I have to look back at what I have published since 2006. Patrick Lawler’s Feeding the Fear of the Earth, Anne-Marie Cusac’s Silkie, and Susan Settlemyre Williams’ Ashes in Midair. I think there are tragic elements and actual tragedy in these books. Speaking as an author of a few books, I think there are some tragic elements in my work. Tragedy is, after all, ultimately uplifting and affirmative. It is about whatever wisdom we have been able to gain through life; it is about the things that make life have meaning.

When you feel free, it’s contagious

Today I gave a reading at Robin's Bookstore with the poets Brian Brodeur and CAConrad, and it was a really enjoyable event. And it was even better that it was pretty well attended. I think the audience came out for the other guys, mostly. One of my students from West Chester University came too, and she brought a friend. A long-ago past student and present friend did the intros.

As usual, I said a little about Many Mountains Moving and presented the latest issue and the MMM Press books to the audience and mentioned teacher discounts and review copies etc.

Not long ago, I heard Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche over a world-wide webcast talk saying that we all needed to embody the changes in the world that we would like to see.

I think about the most sane people that I have known in my life, and I know that this must be true. Sakyong Mipham has written about how even a small amount of sanity makes a big difference in the world.

I was a little under the weather, fighting a cold since I woke today. So I knew it might be tough to keep the energy up. But Brian’s and Conrad’s readings were very solid, entertaining, and inspiring. Brian's work was very beautiful and insightful. He had a deadpan sense of humor and irony about himself that was nice. Conrad’s reading was very funny, raw, angry and edgy. A lot of very deep, raucous and cathartic laughter came from the audience.

(Conrad’s humor reminded me of something sort of like an early Lenny Bruce but without the undertones of optimism. I still think of Lenny Bruce as one of the true and great comedians who could have moments with a power like poetry but with jokes that made you laugh so hard it hurt.)

So Conrad actually helped me pick myself up.

It was very surprising and wonderful to see an old acquaintance in the audience as well as to see many new faces out there. It was also great to see a few old and new friends out there, including a few who actually helped me to revise a poem that has just been an albatross around my neck for years.

I knew things would be okay when the audience started laughing right away during the first, lighter piece that I read, "The Poet's Mother's Deathbed Conversion." I read five more things, most of them pretty short and upbeat or elevating: "Sex Ed Blues," "peace valley elementary school during the vietnam war," "fluke exposure to another eastern meditation tradition in 8th Grade," "Kindling Hope, Incidentally, in South Philly," and "The Path." I could feel that connection subtle, electric, elastic dance with the audience throughout most of the experience. After it was over, many of the people remarked to me how it was a great reading and so on. I’d actually had a longer line-up of work in mind but switched to a shorter list as the reality of my struggle with a cold reared its head.

I have read with a lot of great readers, and I know that this is a good thing to do for many reasons. The best reason is that it forces you to bring your game up to par. If you read with people who are mediocre with the audience, then it’s easy to get lazy and go for the easy hit.

There is an even better reason to perform with people who are great; it is sort of an exercise in staying on center and in focus instead of feeling jealous and insecure or whatever else people can do to stop enjoying the experience. You have to—in a way—forget your ego and your sense of competition. Then you can feel free to just put out there whatever you have. Then the work can speak for itself, and then the audience can enjoy whatever it is without having to feel any pressure.

When you feel free, it’s contagious.