Vote Now

I used to only write poems like this one.  Now, I hardly ever write poems of this ilk: allusive, abstract, difficult, whimsical.  You know, New York School, y'all.  They were my teachers, after all. Is this regression?  I thought I'd leave it to a vote.  Let me know if you approve or disapprove.  Yea or nay. If the response if positive, I will not crawl about the room in despair.  If negative, meh.

Machines Made of Meat

                                    The origin of everything is nothing.

In some versions of reality,

You are reading this poem.

In others, you are still in bed.

One is led, therefore, into difficulties,

Except, of course, for Li Po.

That wily bastard is riding a surfboard,

Dangling on the lip of a wave,

Just as his cigarette dangles from his lip,

While he points at an empty space

In the cloudless sky as he sidles by,

Where the moon would want to be,

If it happened to be following along.

Everything is liable to decay.

If someone, traditionally called the observer,

Happened to be following along,

That person would be engaged

In a shameless act of poetry:

Did your friend, Chang, dream

That he was a butterfly, or did

The butterfly dream that it was he?

Nobody knows what’s behind door number three.

Keith Dunlap

You Don't know What You Don't Know

I feel as though writing poetry has been shanghai'd by people who can't write having their revenge against those who can, much in the same way politics has been taken over by people who can't think, having their revenge against people who can. (I don't really think that, but it makes a good polemic for what follows.) I think writing is intuitive, but it comes with a lot of practice and hopefully a good editor.  I know I have written a lot of bad stuff and continue to write a lot of bad stuff, but I've done it so much that I can tell when I've hit my standard at least, so that I am prepared to turn it over to someone else's set of critical eye, because, and this last point is essential, there will always be things I cannot see, good and bad.  The worst attribute for a writer is a kind of American Idol defensive righteousness about one's one work.  One needs a thick skin, of course, and some detachment from the success or failure show, but there is nothing sadder and more obnoxious than the neophyte convinced of his own posterity.  (I should know, having been that guy.)  Nothing is harder and more uncertain than good writing.

Simultaneous Submissions

I am now mostly submitting to magazines that do not accept simultaneous submissions.  Why? Not why am I submitting to these magazines (they are generally higher echelon magazines,) but why don't they accept simultaneous submissions?  I mean, really.  What's the big deal?  It is okay for writers to experience constant rejection, but not magazines?  In other words, are these magazine's egos so precious that if they accept a poem, and then learn that the writer had neglected to tell them that the same poem had been accepted somewhere else a month earlier, it is an affront that can't be countenanced?  I actually accidentally submitted simultaneously to a magazine that does not take simultaneous submissions and the magazine sent me a scathing letter barring me for life from submitting to it (because of an honest mistake).  Really?  I still laugh about that to myself once in a while.  Perhaps magazines do it to simply limit the number of submissions they receive.  Really?  Does it work?  It seems self-defeating: why would you want to limit the number of submissions you receive?  Having edited two magazines myself, it seems quite easy to eliminate (for whatever arbitrary editorial reason you espouse) about 95% of the submissions one receives on a quick read; sometimes just the first line tells you everything you need to know (sorry, the very human mind at work).  But, if, for whatever reason, (and I suspect the only real reason is because the big magazines can do it,) a magazine does not take simultaneous submissions, I think a necessary concurrent policy is that the turn around time should not exceed four weeks, six weeks at the most.  Otherwise, you put writers in the extremely difficult position of not getting poems published until years after a poem is written, if at all.  If "magazine a" takes six months to a year to respond to a submission, and then so do "magazine b" and "magazine c", etc., by the time "magazine g" sees the poem, the poet will have evolved, the world of poetry will have evolved, and a very good poem may have become stale, either in the eyes of the poet or the world.  Any policy other than accepting simultaneous submissions or not accepting them but promising a very rapid turnaround is only inconsiderate and insecure.  It is certainly not writer friendly.

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