The New Self by Steve Gehrke (reprinted without permission)

Are you or are you not of brain, matter's boss/ or its crevasse, are you the body itself,/ or more than that, immortal you, crouched/ in flesh, like a vampire packed into a bat?

The entire poem is too long to replicate here, but everything I love about this poem is in this first stanza: the music, beautiful end rhyme and interior rhyme driving the poem into unexpected places; the thought, complex without being pretentious (love crouched instead of couched).  Just great.  One of many fine poems in the latest issue of Poetry.

It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there. William Carlos Williams. (tip to Peter Case)

I try to read a poem each day.  Mr. Keillor can be of assistance here.  For me, sadly, it's often more of a professional stance, like a daily rhythm vitamin. If I can't keep my hand in, I've got to keep my ear to the ground at least, so to speak.  What is the good doctor talking about above?  I think the key word is miserably.  Men die every day.  You don't have to be a doctor or a poet to know that.  Is poetry a hand into the unknown?  It certainly is that.  Ha! But, is it that in such a practical sense as a narcotic might be?  Do those who don't read poetry die more miserably than those who do?  I am avoiding the implication that poetry could have a broader effect, i.e., make the world a better place, so that some of the miserable deaths that we inflict on each other might be reduced, although I'm not sure why I should skirt this issue.  I would say that every poem is political, of course.  Making poetry in the current climate is an act of resistance, for sure.  But, does that make poets freedom fighters?  Ha again!  It is anti-materialist (and, therefore, presumably, anti-capitalist).  I think the greatest error of our age is the assumption that the only thing that motivates people is greed.  Poetry proves that fallacy. Ha again and again! Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

Yesterday, I was sitting on the beach with my friend, the devastationalist, Philip Shelley, talking about a recent discussion I had with my wife about poetry.  It is my wife's position that poetry is peculiarly subjective, and that, as a result, the range of what passes for poetry in poetry world is completely unpredictable and wide open (or, at least, for the purposes of this post, that is what I think my wife's position is).  This bothers me a little because she is my wife, and rightly or wrongly, it feels as though what she is saying is that the thing you pour your heart, intelligence, and considerable effort into is a flighty and somehow insubstantial thing because it has no standards.  I don't really think that is what she is saying. That's my most insecure interpretation of what she is saying. I counter that by saying no, I think there are objective standards of measurement that set one poem higher or lower against another.  I agree that there are editors and writers of poetry who have closed minds, who, consciously or unconsciously, have intense predilections for one "type" of poetry over another and whose work and publications are ruled by these subjective criteria, sometimes publishing worse poems because they align with what one thinks the subject matter, diction, look and feel of a poem should be, and ignore better poems because they don't conform to one's prejudices, but that doesn't mean that there aren't poems that engage in cliche or whose music is ham-fisted or whose diction is overwrought or mere jargon, etc., or that there are not poems whose thought is startling and creative, whose music accords beautifully with the thought, and whose word choices are made not for some silly conformist reason, but to bring the music and thought together in this magical way.  What do you think?

On Learning that Wallace Stevens Was A Jerk

Jerk is the polite word for it, I think.  I haven't read the autobiography yet, which I plan to do, assuming the Portland library has it.  No reason for that to stop me from making my general point, which is: does it matter?  First, it matters to me, a little.  Stevens is one of my favorite poets.  Sunday Morning.  Gubbinal.  The Idea of Order at Key West.  The Poems of Our Climate.  The Man With the Blue Guitar.  Learning recently that he was an office tyrant and a messy drunk who picked fights with Auden and Hemingway dims my appreciation of what I identify as the essential spiritual element in his poetry.  What lifts his poetry from abstraction is what it aims at, a place where beauty matters more than anything.  Picking a fight with Auden?  Second, it probably shouldn't matter.  I don't need a hero.  I need great poetry to inform me and lift me and inspire me.  Messy drunks don't bother me so much.  I've known a "few", most of whom I've loved deeply. But, mean to his subordinates?  Inexcusable. Still, the poetry.  One must have a mind of winter

The Art of Poetry

In my mind, this post, even before I write, sounds like one of those annoying family Christmas letters, wind baggy and self-congratulatory, while taking occasional snipes at others. Oh well, here it goes.... It's been awhile, but the poetry empire has been very busy, twenty-two poems published over the last eighteen months, pulling two manuscripts together: 1) a chapbook of consistent, very narrative stuff; and 2) a book, more all over the place, but all these new poems.  Sending them out to contests.  If anybody has any recommendations, that would be great.

Okay, on to the meat.  It occurs to me that my aesthetic is very simple.  Try not to write poetry that sounds like pretentious poetry guy poetry: the two main traps (for me at least) being abstraction for its own sake and choosing a "poetic expression" when an ordinary one will do.  This is not so easy as it seems, because one still wants to write what the world of readers of poetry will recognize as poetry.  Think about it.   Along those lines, I put up two new poems below.  The first, The Departure Lounge (censored for the internet), fits exactly into the DMZ of my poetry.  This is a political poem.  This is my voice.  I create a persona, a situation, etc., but spend a long time making it "poetic" enough without, straying into that weird Poetry-Land that "poems" inhabit.  I think this poetry that I write is unique.  I don't see it anywhere, (and I spend a lot of time reading poetry.)  I think that my poem's novelty, if that is what it is, makes it hard for editors to get it.  Both the subject matter, and what appears to be the artlessness, could be off-putting.  Frankly, when editors kindly take the time to comment on my poems in the course of a rejection, they almost always say the same thing: we really liked it, but didn't think it was poetic enough.  Okay...  That explains the second poem, To An Anonymous Critic, a sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, that rhymes. I pay very close attention to the music of my poems, but work very hard so that music doesn't seem so carefully orchestrated or aesthete.

The Departure Lounge

A woman beats her frantic child curled

On the floor of the Ladies’ Room

At the airport in Birmingham, Alabama

With the buckle of her unloosed belt,

Screaming “Don’t you ever sass me again,

“You ****ing little wh***, you ungrateful b****,”

Herself unloosed in a blind and bitter rage.

I tell her if she doesn’t stop, I’m going to call the cops;

But she looks at me as if she doesn’t know what I mean.

Staring at me, belt in hand, glaring at me

As if I’m the one who doesn’t understand.

It makes me old again and weary,

Too old to return home on this flight,
My bones all out of joint on the vinyl chrome-armed couch,
And the earbuds of my i-pod
Drowning any wisdom or compassion out.

Instead beneath the strains of Joni Mitchell’s “Little Green”

A mass of static hisses its secret name

And, as the practiced announcement booms around me,

Echoing across the lounge: attention passengers,

We are now boarding people who need assistance

And families with small children, my attention follows

The same sniffling child dragged to the gate without resistance.

Keith Dunlap

To An Anonymous Critic

“How sad it was to envy Pyle.”  Graham Greene

When you are young and bold and full of wit,

And have graduated and found a job,

With your cleverness intact, never stoop to think

That, because you have read some books about some other books,

Your estimation of another’s work has any merit.

Because the girl to whom you cannot give your heart

Laughs with deprecation at your snarky patter,

Because like-minded friends still find you interesting,

Despite the fact you cannot write a thing

That stands alone without your description of it,

Because the one thing you cannot bear is any trace

Of any sense or feeling, you needn’t worry:

You are as silly as I am, and your confusion

As profound, and happily, you might just get the allusion.

Keith Dunlap

The Administrative Side

I have to admit I find the administrative side satisfying.  Sending out poems, keeping track of where I have sent poems, noting where poems have been rejected and accepted.  I have now pulled together a chapbook size manuscript from the poems I have written over the last few years (a number of which have been published).  The trick is not to be seduced by that, to think that being published or, better, being organized about being published is an art.  It is not.  It cannot, but will attempt, to substitute itself for the necessary idleness and grace. I don't want to wrap myself in duct tape and think that I have created something..

Sometimes the Poems Just Write Themselves

Other times, not so much.  I like "found object" poetry, poetry that takes a snatch of familiar language, a cliche, an advertising slogan, whatever, and makes it unfamiliar in a pleasing or unsettling way.  Speaking of which, I find it very disturbing how undisturbing most poetry I read is (and I read a fair amount of poetry).  For me, poetry is one place where the profane is the sacred, where language is free to draw on the grotesque, the violent, the taboo.  Not saying any of that is happening below, but it needs to be said.

Erectile Dysfunction

Ask your doctor

If your heart

Is strong enough

For sex and what

Comes after

The exhalation

And the contemplation

Of all the day’s

Little plans and

Jealousies

And the almost

Invisible incline

Compacted

Of coincidence

And stubbornness

Which I suppose

Led your faithless

Heart to this bed.

Keith Dunlap