David X Novak
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Goals Long- and Short-Term

4/25/2015

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I tend to think in terms of books.

My random or stray thoughts on literature or theater are not worth much. So I am contemplating a suspension of blog activity.

The long essay that I have had designs on appears not about to come to pass; in the meantime I feel aware of the larger trajectory of my "illustrious (writing) career" (to quote Richard Huttel), and that the time to leave prose altogether is approaching. At least I would wish it so.

If I can, I will take some of my essays, along with material from my blog postings, and compile a book: the nearest I have come to literary criticism. Blog posts will have to be refashioned, more or less, but given how scattershot and non-essential most of them are, it will be hard to make a cohesive whole. For me it will give closure to the experience.

My short term goals are: to finish a play I began last May, by the end of May. And to assemble what I expect to be my final prose book. (The others are not available at this time, and I may not have the time or energy to render them publication-ready.)

A longer-term goal, which may be unrealizable, will be to complete a larger dramatic project (or two) that I have in mind; and then to bid farewell to the stage much as the gentleman about whom I blogged a few days previous.

I foresee no poetry; all that I have done for a while now is incidental—commemorative of this or that occasion, public or private. This is by no means (necessarily) a "parting shot" or a saying of farewell—but thank you for reading.
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A Time for Pulling Back(?)

4/21/2015

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Time to pull back on the blogging perhaps? It has been an experiment, and I enjoy it; but I find myself caught up a little bit in the rush to find content. Prose is like that.

With personal time so choppy, it is the perfect filler or fill-in, but even to the extent that I've fulfilled my desire to dabble with literary criticism, it is not an area I want to devote much time to.

No promises, no plans, just thoughts...
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"Success Is Counted Sweetest"

4/20/2015

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Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

—Emily Dickinson. 


Possibly not "those who ne'er succeed" but those who have succeeded a little?
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(Creative) Lamentations of Unsuccess

4/19/2015

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An article in American Theatre, "If You Are What You Do, I Guess I'm Not a Playwright Anymore," reminds me of another to which I linked not so long ago, being that of a so-called "creative professional" (or would-be "creative professional"), after having had some success in their chosen field, lamenting very publicly that it was not enough.

Okay, "lament" is too strong a word in either case (lament is what I would do), but it feels like a new trend—and one which must meet with a lot of responsive sympathy given how much these articles have been linked to. Scott Timberg in his articles at Salon reported on the crisis of the creative class, and here we see evidence of some of the flotsam and jetsam.

In this case, a playwright who has had what many would consider a highly enviable career, talks about what it means that, even though he has been able to support himself in theater, it has gotten harder to do. I say "highly enviable" in the sense that he has gotten work produced at all, no small achievement in the tight-knit community of professional theatrics. (In other respects it might not be so good.)

As one observing from the "other side," I am given to wondering if Emily Dickinson may have gotten it wrong about "success [being] counted sweetest...."

My purpose is not to consider the industry, or what it means that playwrights find it hard to earn their keep (what is the use in theater anymore?), or anything of the sort. Nor to lament my own situation. Just merely—if anything—to note in passing the similarity of situations from one person to another. "What the hell are we all morticians?" as E.E. Cummings might have asked. Enough is never enough, and yet somehow we all must come to terms.


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Nostalgic Commemoration

4/17/2015

 
The media does nothing so well as commemorate anniversaries. TV always did it—especially where good footage was available—and now the common run of citizen have taken to doing the same on social media. I never saw so many postings about the assassination of Lincoln from people who never talk about him otherwise—than on Facebook recently.

Poetry commemorates.

This happened a year ago, the newspaper tells me.


Auden, Ashbery, and O'Hara at Yale

4/15/2015

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The Perils of Prizeworthiness


The incestuous nature of the PoBiz—no, I am not talking about the Jorie Graham scandal of some years back, or any other that you might be thinking of. Just a little bit of news (or gossip really) that has let W.H. Auden drop a couple of pegs in my estimation.

I'm looking at The Poetics of Indeterminacy by Marjorie Perloff—the last of her books that I intend to look at at this time (indeed the only other available to me besides her memoir or the one on Wittgenstein, which sounds intriguing, but I've had my fill... for the time being).

John Ashbery is a friend of Perloff—so I have gathered somewhere or another—and he does not escape her critical attention. (Certain names just keep coming up, and up, and up.)

In "'Mysteries of Construction': The Dream Songs of John Ashbery" she writes:
In 1955 both Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery entered the annual competition for the Yale Younger Poets Award. The outcome of this contest is one of the nice ironies of literary history. The judge that year was W.H. Auden, and he originally declared that none of the manuscripts submitted deserved to win the prize.
Perloff then quotes Ashbery's account of what happened next:
...someone, a mutual friend, possibly Chester Kallman, told Auden—by that time he'd gone to Ischia for the summer—that Frank and I both submitted. And he asked us through his friend to send our manuscripts, which we did, and then he chose mine, although I never had felt that he particularly liked my poetry, and his introduction to the book is rather curious, since it doesn't really talk about the poetry.
Auden wrote a letter to O'Hara to explain his "rejection" (Perloff's word): "I'm sorry to have to tell you that, after much heart searching I chose John's poems. It's really awkward when the only two possible candidates are both friends."

Leaving all undertones of gayness aside—it is only through my recent readings of Perloff that I first heard about Ashbery's or O'Hara's sexual orientation (something Paul Carroll never saw fit to mention)—Auden's original declaration then his subsequent backpedalling on behalf of friends really dispirits me. Early on, as a very young (and very isolated) poet, I compiled a manuscript—well before I was ready—for that same contest on the basis of presumed integrity because Auden had been a part.

Presumed integrity is never a good idea, at least in the PoBiz, I am given to understand—and by his own lights I suppose Auden felt he was merely helping out a friend—but one of the first ("professional") poems which ever inspired me was by Auden and I suppose as a young poet I had an idealized view of him.

Au contraire, Madame Perloff, I do not find it a "nice irony" at all.
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"Why Can't They Write Like Kafka?"

4/14/2015

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Thinking about what I posted yesterday, I'm a little bit clearer on why, as much as I find myself fond of Marjorie Perloff, I'm hardly drawn to what she's written about. Poetic License is most approachable; Radical Artifice much less so.

The sort of art, and the sort of "poetry," which appeals to her is like this, John Cage's so-called "mesostic strings":
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It may perhaps be interesting to somebody as an intellectual game of sorts. Not to me, and furthermore I don't find it enriching of my humanity. It is hard for me to relate to "Conceptualism."

In my book Sonnets, as I said, I wrote poetry in response to an exhibition of work by Horace Pippin. In contrast, I posited Ellsworth Kelly—the Art Institute has several large pieces of his (geometric "shapes"?) of which it is very proud but which have never moved me. Pippin is no Michelangelo to be sure; but then, what do we need two Michelangelos for anyhow? His art is akin to the sort sometimes classified as "primitive" or rather "folk art"; something a critic like Perloff might find not worth her intellectual rigor. And yet it holds meaning.

I mentioned his absorption on John Brown and Abraham Lincoln—so at least that aspect of his art may be viewed as an iconography of the Civil War era. Icons—insofar as they provide objects of worship or veneration, like a Buddha head—don't have to be beautiful in their technique to satisfy a devotee. The best art perhaps satisfies both aesthetics and denotative typography, though an Impressionistic landscape or Islamic filigree may be beautiful without reference to iconography.

Pippin also painted movingly on themes of the First World War, having been himself a soldier. A portrait of a family by his brush opens a window onto human possibility—nothing which is human is alien to me—and so it enriches my outlook and introspection both.

Perloff has a telling anecdote—one which made a deep impression on her as she frequently brings it up in her recorded lectures and has written about it. In her "poetry seminar at Stanford" a "perplexed graduate student" asked (presumably of their objects of study), "Why can't they write like Kafka?"

Perloff elaborates:

Why is Kafka's extraordinary lucidity, the natural speech and "normal" syntax that paradoxically conveys the densest and most ambiguous meanings, no longer a viable model? There is no easy answer... but we might begin with the notion that whereas Kafka positioned himself vis-à-vis the discourses of law, of justice, and of the bourgeois respectability and normalcy that characterized the Prague of his time and place, our own contact with these discourses tends to be always already mediated by a third voice, the voice of the media. [from Radical Artifice]
This sidesteps the issue with a presumption. Of course one can write like Kafka—with his clarity—or at least attempt to. What one cannot do, is imitate his experience. It is incumbent upon the artist—to "study and do otherwise" as has been said. Acknowledging the media doesn't mean that one has to write like John Cage (in the above example) or succumb to any other mode of incoherency. The challenge is to bring coherency up-to-date.

According to the view of some critics:
Perloff... sets up a kind of "us vs. them” opposition, which is of course a favored rhetorical tool used by avant-garde schools in the past from Futurists and Dadaists to Language School poets. Avant-garde manifestos have always assumed a tone of masculine and expansionist militancy, enforcing an aggressive divide-and-conquer framework to grab the reader’s attention. Of course, this “us vs. them” rhetoric can be used to an exhilarating effect when there is a revolutionary legitimacy to that opposition, when “we” are the rabble-rousing outliers and “they” are the hegemonic majority. But Perloff sets up an opposition that’s far more disconcerting: oddly, the hegemony has become the nameless hordes of “African Americans, other minorities, and post-colonials"....
So writes Cathy Park Hong ("Delusions of Whiteness"), though not identifying the source for her last quote. My (limited) exposure to Perloff leads me to think it could not have been her, though the imputation is obvious, and explained by Perloff's alleged use of code words: "From her Boston Review essay 'Poetry on the Brink' where she lambasts Rita Dove, to countless other instances, Perloff has persistently set up these racially encoded oppositions and the sentiment is always the same: these indistinguishable minority writers with their soft, mediocre poetry and fiction are taking over our literature."

In the essay (critiquing Dove's editorship of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry), Perloff suggests that "what Penguin’s editorial team seems to be saying is that the value of Dove’s anthology’s [selection of poetry] depends not on its overall plan or on the wisdom of its selections—its capacity to satisfyingly delineate a poetic canon or make some claim about the nature of poetry in a certain time or place—but on the prestige of its editor." Moreover,
Accuracy is not this editor’s strong suit: the “serious artists” of the early twentieth century were not “affected by” modernism; they created it. The Beats did not “clear a trail” for the Confessionals: the two groups coexisted and sometimes overlapped throughout the 1950s and ’60s. And higher education may be credited with many things but perhaps not with casting a “spell” over fledgling poets. As I was reading these curious assertions, it occurred to me that perhaps this Penguin anthology was designed for Junior High School students—kids forced to study something called poetry, who would find those references to “crawling out of the wreckage of the Civil War” or to the “take-no-prisoners approach” of the Beats both accessible and colorful. “Into this disquieting age strode Wallace Stevens”: it sounds like a sentence in a Victorian children’s book. And since the editor is an undisputable star, the recipient of just about every prize and award there is, a former poet laureate, and currently a commonwealth professor of English at the University of Virginia, one evidently wants to read her anthology to learn not about American poetry of the twentieth century but about her likes and dislikes.
Perloff's charges are entirely correct. Where she falters, as did eminent critic Helen Vendler reviewing the same anthology, is in failing to suggest a credible alternative. John Cage, with his "mesostic strings" is brought into the mix.

Given the sheer absurdity of the suggestion, no wonder a portion of Perloff's critics fling themselves into an incoherent tizzy. In my essay on Claude McKay, I refrained from making the case that the poet's virtual exclusion from English Lit departments in academia is due at least in part to undisclosed racism, especially on the part of poetic Neo Formulists where their cult practice has taken root, but the case would not be hard to make. How much less difficult then in the arena of "Conceptualism" which is Perloff's forte. (I don't believe Perloff is racist.) Considering Marcel Duchamp's urinal, I could envision none other than "colonial aesthetics" of the idly wealthy as furnishing the ground. I may be wrong—but I lack the interest to investigate and the audacity to make an argument about  the case.

Recently I asked, "Where's the poetry?" The idea of "tearing down Conceptualism" no doubt excites the imagination of some of Perloff's critics. However ad hominem attacks accomplish little beyond an undermining of their cause. Let them consider, not how to write like Kafka, but with the clarity and relevance of a Kafka.

While I should prefer to eschew racial polemics, my attention was piqued by this passage by Cathy Park Hong.
If we are to acknowledge that there are formal choices that define avant-garde poetry such as polyvocality, hybridity, collage, stream-of-conscious writing, and improvisation, these techniques were not only used but were actually first inaugurated by African American writers or they were America's early practitioners. Jean Toomer’s Cane, written in 1923, is an uncategorizable cross-genre book that is wide-ranging in its experimentations with fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness, and surrealist wordplay. Before academic words like hybridity and heteroglossia became en vogue, Harlem Renaissance socialist poet Claude McKay—whose work inspired key figures like Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor from the Negritude movement—experimented with Jamaican dialect and code-switching in his collection Constab Ballads.
No literary scholar, I find bemusing the list of “formal choices that define avant-garde poetry.” Such techniques, though they may have been consolidated or combined by the avant-gardists into a unique distinguishing synthesis, surely have a history that predates even their use by African American writers, however creditable that may be. As Vendler critiqued Dove: significant accomplishments require no exaggeration.

McKay’s characterization as a “socialist poet” is frustratingly simplistic. The poet, who would write,
Around me roar and crash the pagan isms
To which most of my life was consecrate,
Betrayed by evil men and torn by schisms
For they were built on nothing more than hate!
and grew to become a severe anti-communist, would not have recognized himself, who boldly asserted that his art did not serve any party. His Constab Ballads—according to his biographer Wayne F. Cooper, begun if not at the behest certainly with the strong encouragement of his friend Walter Jekyll even against his own reservations (“The Jamaican dialect was considered a vulgar tongue”)—was not the first writer of dialect poems in English. As Max Eastman wrote, “In his homeland they call him ‘Jamaica’s Bobbie Burns,’ and there is some reason for this.” Paul Laurence Dunbar may provide an example closer to home.

Perloff has a markedly continental perspective that is not shared by many of her detractors (she was born in Vienna). Eurocentrism possibly becomes less and less relevant to daily life in America; yet the impress of European literary culture is irrefutable. As I say, I am no defender of her literary taste: Kafka sounds to me like an ideal candidate for emulation by tyro writers. But then so does McKay.

Neither engaged in intellectual gamesmanship for its own sake, and that keeps them relevant.
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What Do I Know of Art? Not Anything

4/13/2015

 
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What do I know of art? Not anything;
So that when passers-by declare as crude
The half of it, I have no arguing,
Because I'd rather see an honest rude
That critics, skeptics, or the multitude
Dismiss for its technique, if it affirms
What truth I've witnessed and does not exclude 
An aspect, and in no uncertain terms.
At base we mortal men are lowly worms
That have been given glimpses, though but rarely,
Of God's great glory, underneath which squirms 
The pegged soul pinned to human squalor squarely.
These glimpses call out the artistic soul
To tell the truth blood-charged, but tell it whole.

John Brown's Body

John Brown came up in conversation, and it was lamented that he "is scarcely discussed in high school history classes even to this day, and if so as a crazed zealot or fanatic". That is probably so—if my personal experience means anything, but you would think things had changed since all those decades ago.

Years ago—about the time as I was writing my Sonnets, the Art Institute had an exhibition of work by Horace Pippin which impressed me greatly. In fact I wrote a sonnet about it. Hoping to see if that poem might be available online, so that I could copy and post it, I happened upon one of a related theme which remains up at ChicagoPoetry.com. A couple more sonnets are there if you follow the link.

Pippin was much dedicated to the legacy of two historical figures in particular: John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Rightfully so. The above painting was his representation of John Brown's trial. (Actually, I liked his woodcuts even better than his painting, but I realize that they probably don't reproduce well.) In spite of what gets taught in schools—another theme of Sonnets when it comes to poetastery, as I recall—we depend on individuals like Horace Pippin in their representations to help us retain a semblance of memory.

John Brown's interview in the Charles Town prison also came up in that conversation. You can find a good link to its transcription here.

Hurricane Sandy Comes to Brooklyn

4/12/2015

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I had mentioned my desire to get to New York City before the Lincoln exhibit at the Morgan Library leaves on June 7th. It looks as though it will not happen.

The last time I was in NYC—or Brooklyn actually—hurricane Sandy curtailed any number of activities that had been planned; a lot of time was spent indoors safe from the inundation but in rather squalid and unpleasant circumstances, beside listening to a car alarm go off repeatedly for more than 24 hours.

My book The Rip of Gales contains a poem that I wrote about the experience—I had thought it was included in the ample selection from that book on my poetry page but alas not.

Sandy

As we await the coastal surge
None may guess what the future holds,
Or what disasters may emerge
As this day's trauma yet unfolds.

Here in a Brooklyn flat we wait
With news upon the radio,
Telling of floods, as tides rise great
And rain pours down in ceaseless flow.

Though we may pray, the gods dispose
According to prerequisites
None may surmise—revealing doles
Or joy as some chance fortune hits.

The hurricane approaches shore
With much uncertainty to breach
As we submit beneath its roar
And hope our cries the gods' ears reach.

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Perloff's Pound: a Sympathetic Portrayal

4/11/2015

 
Marjorie Perloff is very sympathetic to Pound. Poetic License has an essay which conveys something of what she feels to be his importance to modern poetry. His influence—both personal and theoretical—was extensive. She credits him with “breaking the pentameter” and quotes Donald Davie:
It is important to understand what is involved. From Edmund Spenser onwards in English verse the finest art was employed in running over the verse line so as to build up larger units of movement such as the strophe, the Miltonic verse paragraph, or, in Shakespearean and other theatrical poetry, the sustained dramatic speech.... the grammatical unit, the sentence, is draped over the metrical unit, the line.... This is not to “break” the pentameter (or more generally the verse-line of whatever length), but rather to submerge it, by incorporating the line into the building of larger and more intricate rhythmical units.... It was only when the line was considered as the unit of composition, as it was by Pound in Cathay, that there emerged the possibility of “breaking” the line, of disrupting it from within.
Perloff seconds the notion: “Pound’s great contribution to modern prosody was his focus on the line, rather than the larger stanzaic block, ‘as the unit of composition.’”

This is so in accord with my last post about meter. Never having read much in Pound besides his anthology pieces, I was not heavily influenced. I knew that a great “shake up” had occurred; but never quite knew the nature of it—so for me (for example) using the Spenserian stanza was an available recourse for “the building of larger... [poetic] units” as Davie says. Other poets have taken refuge in the iambic pentameter—so it certainly was not broken in perpetuity.

Pound himself seems to have recognized that something was amiss—as in an anecdote Perloff reports:
Allen Ginsberg, calling on Pound in 1967, explains to the (nearly silent) old poet that he has been able to find certain works of art in Venice, say, a fountain or a fresco or “the casa que fue de Don Carlos,” merely by following the “descriptions—of exact language composed” —the “tin flash in the sun dazzle” and “soap-smooth stone posts” of the Cantos. When Pound demurs, declaring that “any good [in the Cantos] has been spoiled by my intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things,” Ginsberg replies: “Ah well, what I’m trying to tell you—what I came here for all this time—was to give you my blessing then, because despite your delusion... my perceptions have been strengthened by a series of practical exact language models which are scattered throughout the Cantos like stepping stones.”
The preoccupation is evident to anyone who has read Pound’s correspondence—as I did early on when I was still trying to get my sea legs in the world of literacy. Basil Bunting (also quoted by Perloff) gives a good sense of the breadth of Pounds influence (the essay is titled “The Contemporary of Our Grandchildren: Ezra pound and the Question of Influence”):
Pound has provided a box of tools, as abundant for this generation as those Spenser provided for the Elizabethans, and a man who is not influenced in this sense of trying to use at least some of those tools, is simply not living in his own century.
Here is a link to Perloff having a conversation about Ezra Pound, and a subsequent one about William Butler Yeats.
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