New Alpaugh Essay/Makuu in Korea/Great App for Poets/

David Alpaugh - Götterdämmerung for American Poetry?



Once again, David Alpaugh comes aboard as a provocative guest columnist. If you read No Money In Poetry regularly, you probably are familiar with his earlier pieces (scroll down to June 2, 2011 for) The Seven Deadly Guidelines - or the Invasion of the Poetry Editors and earlier still (March 3, 2010), The New Math of Poetry along with my own comments on the latter.

Today we have Alpaugh's undoubtedly controversial Götterdämmerung for American Poetry?
I'll begin with some meaty excerpts and then will provide a link to the entire article.

Excerpts from Götterdämmerung for American Poetry?

....Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 92; Richard Wilbur, 90; Gerald Stern and Maxine Kumin, 86; W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery and Galway Kinnell, 84; X.J. Kennedy and Adrienne Rich, 82; Gary Snyder, 81. The celebrity poets coming up behind them are already in their 70s or close to it: Mary Oliver is 76; Stephen Dunn, 72; Billy Collins, 70; Sharon Olds, 69; Louise Gluck, 68, Kay Ryan, 66.

But surely there are young poetic geniuses waiting in the wings? There are, in fact, more "emerging" poets in their 20s and 30s today than our current 2500-plus poetry journals can publish. College MFA programs are cranking them out by the thousands each year. The cream of the crop get book awards and teaching posts; but, unlike Levine and the other poets just mentioned, none is attracting many readers outside their limited poetry-writing circles.

Are we about to witness an authorial twilight of the gods? Is it Götterdämmerung time for American poetry?

To answer that question we need to go back fifty years to 1961 when our legendary Modernists were in the gloaming: Robert Frost was 87; Carl Sandburg, 83; William Carlos Williams, 78; Ezra Pound, 76; Marianne Moore and Robinson Jeffers, 74; T.S. Eliot, 73; E.E. Cummings, 67. Within twenty years they were all gone, along with younger Modernists Elizabeth Bishop and W.H. Auden.

But there wasn't a hint of Götterdämmerung in 1961 because several vibrant poetic revolutions were already underway. In 1955 Alan Ginsberg had published his controversial Howl and Other Poems, followed in 1958 by Ferlinghetti's popular A Coney Island of the Mind. In 1959 Gary Snyder imported Chinese, Japanese, and Zen models in his influential collection Rip Rap. In 1960 Donald Allen published his New American Poetry anthology which introduced readers to "The Beats," "New York School," "Black Mountain," and "San Francisco Renaissance" movements via Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olsen, Denise Levertov, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley and other strong voices busy transforming America's poetic landscape.

Nor did the excitement end there. In 1959 W.D. Snodgrass published his Pulitzer Prize winning Heart's Needle and Robert Lowell his epoch-making Life Studies and "Confessional" poetry was born. Anne Sexton joined them a year later with To Bedlam and Part Way Back. And by 1962 Sylvia Plath was at work on the poems that would appear posthumously in Ariel and Other Poems, a collection that would have as much impact as any volume of 20th century verse.

These newcomers were not writing as adoring disciples of the Modernist masters. Siegfrieds and Brunhildes on the ramparts, they were profoundly dissatisfied with Valhalla and eager to burn it down. The Modernists and their New Critic supporters didn't speak to their experience and times. They were too reticent about biographical, cultural and political matters and too constrictive and patrician in style. The new wave of poets raised diverse aesthetic hammers and smashed the Modernist mold, forging many distinctive voices, talking about all aspects of their personal lives—sexuality, drugs, war—nothing was off limits. A new generation of readers arose to greet them saying, "Here, at last, is the poetry we've hungered for."

Surprisingly, we have not had a comparable revolution in poetry since the 60s. Oh, there were and still are "the new formalists" and "new narrative" poets—but that's a reinvigorating of a past aesthetic rather than a true revolt. Some will point to the "language poetry" that began back in the 70s (now on life support); but an elitist movement limited to a tiny group of theorists is more terrorism than revolution.

Why has poetry been running in place for fifty years? Why are younger poets content to dance with the ghosts of poetries past? Why is it hard to think of poets now in their 30s or 40s who are likely to achieve the wide readership that Levine and the above mentioned poets enjoy? ....

Several More Excerpts with Comments

First of all, while the following strikes me as being Alpaugh's ongoing theme in several essays, I'd only respond that poets need to begin somewhere in order to later unleash a "New-where."

If, as I have argued, dissatisfaction with existing poetry is essential for the creation of exciting new work, degree-granting MFA programs make true creativity difficult if not impossible.

The programs naturally encourage complacency rather than dissatisfaction. Young poets flock to university campuses to learn from teaching poets because they admire them, often to the point of idolatry. They want to learn to write like their professors who would be masochistic were they to suggest that their own poetry must be rejected before the difficult work of creating authentic new work can begin.

The following conclusion is extremely important

Independent poets are rarely awarded significant honors by the professionals; their poetry is seldom taught in program workshops; nor are they invited to read at university venues. They are kept offstage, away from the spotlight. Were a young independent poet to write astonishing new poetry not many would get a chance to read it.

So, alas, it may be Götterdämmerung time for American poetry. Still, we can take heart from the fact that the French Académie eventually failed to stop the Impressionists. I'm confident that sooner or later, the purveyors of mediocrity will fail. Meanwhile I'll pull Wotan and Fricka and Levine down from the shelf and enjoy their excellent verse once again. Who knows? Having just turned 70, I may still be here when Siegfried and Brunhilde come on stage and the next poetic revolution begins.

Personally, I still reserve hope of being the different savior or even an incarnation of Eliot's il miglior fabbro. Any poet worth his/her salt does. Because I was away from poetry for a full fourteen years, I like to believe that I returned fresh. Lamentably, George Oppen, who few mention these days, returned very fresh following twenty years in the wilderness.

For me, the idea of poetry movements or of a poet's recognizable style are not what make poems or poets new. I pride myself in not attempting to practice a definable "Coletti" style. I'm constantly changing.

The "new," the "different," or the "great" have little to do with line length, great ideas, or with how much white space a poem has or hasn't. The greatness or even the newness of a poem or of a poet are qualities as evanescent as poetry itself.

Thank you once again, David Alpaugh, for your rich contributions filled with the stuff of thought, reflection, controversy, and call for response.

Press here for the Full Alpaugh Article

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Makuuu Eckert

I received this wonderful email correspondence from friend and Sonoma County unique poet-character Mark Eckert currently teaching English in Korea.

Hello Mr. Coletti (or Edwardu as you would fondly be dubbed by the local bards),

I just wanted to drop a quick note from the middle of nowhere, Muan, South Korea. Think Point Reyes, Tomales Bay and Puget Sound along the southwest coast of Korea and you have some idea of my new environs. The difference here being rolling, dense forests of pine cypress and spruce intersperced with traditional orange green and blue pagoda roofed houses, burial tombs of the next of kin behind each. Throw in the ear piercing ratcheting of the yechi (cicada) and the brayings of the tofu ladies and gentlemen and you've got it.

Watch your step, Ed or you may find yourself knee deep in one of the surprise rice terraces so ubiquitous to Chungye gu as the local province is called.And should you slip up and find yourself sinking down into the mud, just start reciting some of that fine Round Barn verse of yours and some able bodied ajima (the brazen old farmer's wives who do ALL the heavy planting and lifting in Korea) will yank you out pronto!

Send Denner on over and I'll treat him to a mountaintop temple stay in Naju which is perched magnificently on a craggy Mt. Wolchusan due north of here. Then just to cover all the bases, we'll head down below to partake of the statue of the Virgin Mary that reportedly has been weeping real tears for the past year or so. Actually, that might be more for the great Italian poet saint himself,

Tell Mr. Madgelan I will be e-mailing him next. All the best to Joyce.

Annyhashimnika,

Mark (er, Makuuu) Eckert

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Wonderful App For Poets

Featured in the Sept/Oct 2011 issue of Poets & Writers, this app works wonderfully well, and I especially enjoy the category permitting searches directly by poet name, but all the features are very useful and fun.

The Poetry Foundation’s free POETRY app promises to turn your iPhone into a portable library of verse. A shake of your device reveals a random collection of poems, catalogued under intersecting themes, with various emotions and sensations—Anger, Insecurity, Joy, Optimism, and Boredom, for example—paired with topics such as Life, Youth, Celebrations, Nature, Spirituality, and Arts and Sciences. Once you’ve hit on a theme, you can call up poems by literary luminaries such as Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Pablo Neruda, and contemporary writers including Rosmarie Waldrop, Kevin Young, and Matthew Zapruder, some featuring audio of poets reading their work. A tap of the star icon below each title adds a poem to your personal favorites list, and poems can be promoted via Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail with a tap of the Share button.

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Bryant & Coletti/Stupid Poetry Book Contests/iNVASION OF tHE pOETRY eDITORS/

Following a review by "Maggie" at Amazon.Com of my new book of poetry When Hearts Outlive Minds, I wanted to check out the work of William Cullen Bryant. I did so, and, in addition to Bryant's amazing "Thanatopsis," I found the following poem which somehow, in both theme and color reminded me of my own poem"Backyard Appeal."

To the Fringed Gentian by William Cullen Bryant

Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,
And colored with the heaven's own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night.

Thou comest not when violets lean
O'er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o'er the ground-bird's hidden nest.

Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue--blue--as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.

I would that thus, when I shall see
The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.


Backyard Appeal by Ed Coletti

Bluest sky moment,
I paint you as words
spring maple yellow.

Photinia bush
redden my flesh, be my sun,
rain memory has fled.

Mirror of sea,
sky unblemished blue,
sing your song.

Copper fields slip
green to cyan,
oxygen’s funny magic.

Black dog come to me.
Tell me what you fathom
beneath this our common ground.


Published in Blueline (2007)

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Poetry Book Contests

Jack Crimmins hipped me to this very interesting Huffington Post article by Anis Shivani about poetry contests. By the way, my non-poet friend and reader Duncan Lee offered the following reply to my recent publication of the dismal statistic regarding the problems older poets encounter in poetry contests,

Is it necessary for a poet to win? I can see that winning a contest can add to a resume, but does a poet need/want a resume? I'm not for or against entering contests, I do all the time in my favorite pastime (auto racing). Perhaps it's just a necessary evil, how else does a poet get recognition?


Poetry Book Contests Should be Abolished: Why Contests Are the Stupidest Way to Publish First Books by Anis Shivani

Huffington Post 6-2-11

In the May/June 2011 Poets & Writers, there's a feature on writing contests. Editor Kevin Larimer (all credit to him for asking the right questions) interviews four poetry first book contest administrators, Stephanie G'Schwind (director of the Center for Literary Publishing and editor of Colorado Review), Michael Collier (director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference), Camille Rankine (program and communications coordinator at Cave Canem Foundation), and Beth Harrison (associate director of the Academy of American Poets and administrator of the Walt Whitman Award), discussing issues of fairness, impartiality, process, revenues, and results. (Full Disclosure: I've been published in Colorado Review and consider G'Schwind an excellent editor; and I know Collier from Bread Loaf).

The contest model means a poet submitting a manuscript with a fee of around $25, and being part of a pool of anywhere from a few hundred to more than a thousand manuscripts judged "blindly"--we'll see soon what that means in poetry contest parlance. The winner gets about a thousand dollars along with publication, and publicity in cloistered academic poetry circles. The 999 losers print out another copy of the manuscript and write another check to yet another contest, never giving up hope.

Poetry contests are about the only remaining way to publish a first poetry book. And that's one way poetry is being killed in this country, reduced to consensus-by-committee, stripped of individual vision, yielding vast parchments of conformity and mediocrity, worth only as means of boosting resumes and securing academic jobs. Our poetry is haunted today by a blind adherence to lack of ambition--and the poetry contest model is part of the problem.

Is this the best way to discover new poetry talent in the country? What happens to editorial judgment, consistent aesthetic vision, commitment to particular values, building a movement, advocating for a particular style, and creating a critical mass of new writing if the contest model is allegedly based in "impartiality" and "blindness"--in other words, pretends to be the exemplar of democracy, egalitarianism, and disavowal of values? Has institutionalization gone too far? Would we all be better off--far-fetched as it sounds--if the contest model were eliminated and consistent editorial judgment were allowed to enter into the process of first book publication again? Read the full Shivani article here.

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Katherine Hastings sent along this amusing to-the-point piece by David Alpaugh. Take a look.

THE SEVEN DEADLY GUIDELINES

or
The Invasion of The Poetry Editors


1. We can only consider submissions during our reading period--July 1st to July 15th. Poems received on June 30th or July 16th--or any of our other (hallelujah!) 348 non-poetry-reading days will be tossed into our dumpster unread. (Editors have lives to live, places to go, pot to smoke; and no one can expect us to read scores of crappy poems 365 days a year!)


2. We do NOT want to see meter or rhyme. Rhyme because its huge popularity via rap, rock, slam, cowboy poetry, light verse, greeting cards, and advertising (ugh to all that shit!) might attract the great unwashed, whereas our goal is to provide 'caviar to the general' (and we don't mean Petraeus). Meter because it asks us to approach poetry as a quasi-musical composition, whereas we all know that it is merely a sub-species of prose where the 'poet' imposes an arbitrary line and stanza structure to make boring personal anecdotes look like stuff remembered from Norton Anthologies back in Freshman Comp.


2A. We ONLY want to see meter and rhyme. If you are writing antiquarian verse on stock themes--'Love,' 'Time,' 'Death'--using predictable end-rhyme and dee-dumb-dee-dumb pentameter that make your 'work' a footnote to stuff written by dead white guys centuries ago--send it along. (All we ask is that you know the difference between an anapest and an amphibrach!)


3. We adore ghazals, pantoums and other faddish imports--anything without a track record in English (faux form always raises the non-Emily-Dickinson-hair on the back of our non-poetic-necks). We abhor native forms that have produced 'The Best Loved Poems of the American People' (please, no couplets, quatrains or--heaven forfend!--sonnets). Poetry being 'what gets lost in translation,' we love to see poets like Rumi, Rilke, Neruda, Hikmet disappear in a puff of prose!


4. Before submitting, be sure to check our web site for the upcoming THEME. Our Spring 2011 issue will be devoted to Poems about Spiders. Send us a poem about a flea or tiger, and we'll return it nine months later with a note scrawled across your cover letter that WE'RE ONLY READING POEMS ABOUT SPIDERS, STUPID! (If you don't have a poem with eight legs write one!) We wouldn't know a great poem if it bit us on the ass, but, damn it, we know a passable spider poem when we see one! Besides making our job easier by cutting down on submissions, telling poets what to write allows us to piss on our bete noir--ORIGINALITY. (The theme for our Fall issue will be 'My Summer Vacation.')


5. Short poems have a much better chance than long ones. To be candid, we are not so much publishing poems as accrediting poets. Send us a superb multi-pager--a 'Howl' or 'Prufrock' or 'Mauberly'--and you are, in effect, asking us to accredit one poet versus three or six or ten. (Who the hell do you think you are?--John Fuckin' Milton?) Publication is about something much more important than readership! That job at Cuckamonga Community College or reading at the Bonky-Bonky-Bo Book Shop may depend upon it! In order to accredit as many poets as possible we frown upon 'long' poems (which we define as any piece of chopped prose that exceeds 36 lines).


6. We do require a short bio with your submission. Only a few contributors (and their Facebook sycophants) will actually read your poem--but all will want to compare their credits against yours. Did YOU win the Conkerman Prize? Spend a week at the Daughters of Robert Bly Writer's Retreat in Northern Idaho? How many of the 75,000-plus Pushcart Prize 'nominations' have you arranged for yourself over your career? (Lyn Lifshin has more than 200!)


7. Speaking of prizes, we urge you to enter our poetry contest. You can't expect us to cover even a fraction of our production costs via our seventeen subscriptions (and no one is crazy enough to waste money advertising to a half dozen or so community college adjunct instructors who supplement their incomes by waiting tables at The Olive Garden). If you and 1000 other wannabes fork out a measly $25 you'll each have a chance to win $1000 and publication in our prestigious journal--and we will gross $25,000! That should allow us to pay the winner and grand prize judge; print 1000 copies of a 60-page 4-color paperback for distribution to the 999 losers; and still have $10,000 to remunerate our editorial staff for their tireless efforts on your behalf. Everybody wins! (except the losers--but, hey, y'all have much better odds with us than with Powerball!).


© David Alpaugh 2011

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Rothenberg Interview/diGiorno Collages/Age vs Success/Coletti Book/Art Exhibit

Ed Coletti Interviews Michael Rothenberg founder of 100 Thousand Poets for Change


Q: Michael, how did you dream up this ambitious project?

A: Two months ago I was chatting with a friend on Facebook, complaining about the world, and I said in desperation, "There ought to be 100 Thousand Poets for Change!" My friend replied, "That's a good idea." So I created an event page on Facebook asking my Facebook friends if they would be interested in a demonstration/ celebration of poetry to promote serious social and political change?

Q: How many countries are now involved in staging poetry events on (what's the date?)?

A: So far 170 cities and 44 countries have signed on to organize events on September 24. Nearly 100 events in the USA!

Q: How many total venues.


A: I estimate the number of venues at around 200 venues to date. In Cincinnati there will be a "crawl" down Main Street from shop to shop, an hour poetry reading in each shop. So there might be 8 venues in Cincinnati but I am not counting those! In the Bay Area there are 10 venues.

Q: What are some of the more surprising examples? (I'm going to say something like only Jupiter and Saturn not staging events)

A: Yesterday I signed on a world famous bookstore Al Kotob Khan in Cairo, Egypt. We have had very positive response from African nations, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and South Africa. And the Slam community is into the event in a big way. They are calling their events SLAM FOR CHANGE, participants include Oakland Slam poets, Austin Poetry Slam, Hilo, Hawaii slam, Boise, Idaho, Spokane Poetry Slam and Thess Poetry Slam in Athens, Greece. I expect there will be many more.

Q: Most heartwarming response?

A: I received a video in my email from Limerick, Ireland. It was a recording of a gathering of The Whitehouse Poets where they announced their decision to participate in a global movement, 100 Thousand Poets for Change, and expressed their desire to be the center of this movement for all of Ireland. I also liked to hear from a group in Canada who are not poets but want to read poetry about political and social change on September 24. And I am inspired by the planned gathering of the most famous poets in Bangladesh, Nirmolendu goon, Joyonta deb, Aditto anik, and Syed Shamshul hoque in Bogra, Bangladesh for September 24.


Q: Funniest response or reaction thus far?
Someone told me they weren't interested in the program because they liked to keep their poetry and politics separate.

Q: How are you coping? Are you sure you're doing enough?

A: Sigh. It is inspiring and exhausting. I am drawn in by the enthusiasm of others. I never feel that I have done enough.

Q: I was joking. I admire you for the amount of effort you put into helping poetry count both with this and your previous Katrina projects.

CORE SAMPLE 2


We want to live like movie stars

We don't trust politicians but still

Let them run our lives

What's another landfill of radios at 20 ft

Computers at 10ft. Poetry at five

Polyurethane embryos and vinyl blood

Take a sample, smear it on a slide

Bombard it with laser, atoms, literary criticism

Snow falls in Sierras 3 inches per hour

Chains required on major passes

Too late to turn back

(Michael Rothenberg 1999)

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The Joy!

Bay Area Poet Geri diGiorno also is a wonderful portrait collagist currently being featured at Big Bridge. Here's the link to Geri diGiorno collages.


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The Horror!


Check this out from Poets & Writers study "The Anatomy of Awards." Of 1,064 contest winners, 129 won prizes resulting in the publication of a full-length book. Of the winners aged 65+, a mere 4 percent prevailed! What do you conclude?





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In case you missed this on the P3, I'm very proud of the book and will repeat this here in "No Money in Poetry."


Coming Out in June!!!

Double-Click on Cover to Enlarge (so you can read review blurbs)



















June Painting Exhibit

Double-Click to Enlarge
























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Patrick Dunagan's Gustonbook/Jack Foley on Money in Poetry/Henry Miller Too/Indispensable Donald Hall Essay/

Unconnected Snippets from SF Bay Area Poet Patrick James Dunagan's marvelous and curious new book There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk: A GUSTONBOOK

A hand moves
eye starts
words go
***
Forget order
impose nothing
onto things
***
Pulling things up
rooted resemblances
of what
***

Pilings of stuff
tangled roots
early Zephyr surf team
cutting through
pillars of burned
out Santa Monica
pier late '70s
California

When shit gets petty
get petty
right back

(for Ted Berrigan
& Alice Notley
'81-'82)
***

One makes the world
of the poem
making the world
of words the poem makes
***

Language is color
the medium resists
***

there are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as
mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of
***

A sudden brilliance


& then
***

Ideas acquire years
***

It cannot but be
***

More than
willing
this

happens
to be
just

notes that
any one
so might

accrue
of their own
asking



What's meant
isn't
***

I did this thing
I did
in the dark of light
I dig

this thing I did
***

just being here
touching me
other one
here, here
just touch
***

You would be certain
of that brick
***

bits incomplete
echo any interest
***

I am so jealous of color
***

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Now back to the title of this site No Money in Poetry

But is there poetry in money?? Check out Bay Area poet Jack Foley's humorous take followed by that of Big Sur's Henry Miller

“NO MAN BUT A BLOCKHEAD EVER WROTE, EXCEPT FOR MONEY”

—Dr. Johnson

why would you want to

tra la tra la sang isadora

publish a book

as she danced

if you didn’t want

in practically

to make money from it

nothing at all

why would you put

mi chiamano Mimi

money into it

says the pretty young girl

if there were no money

in the opera written

to be got out of it

in the hope of gaining

why would you want to

fame &

write a poem

money

if you didn’t want

you gotta eat don’t you?

to make money from it

“consider the lilies of the field”

why would you want

not everybody has a heavenly father

to paint a picture

or as we say in the theater

why would you want to write a song

a sugar daddy

(are you crazed? do you think you’re a bird?)

or golly a sugar mommy

if there were no money in it

or even a sugar nephew

why would you want

don’t be a diabetic sweetie

to do anything at all

you need something

anything at all

to put in your coffee

why bestir yourself

or your coffer

why get thee out of bed

before you get put

why make something beautiful

in yr god damn coffin

whoo the old moola

so go out there swinging

if you don’t want

shake that thing

wow the green stuff

but don’t be too bohème honey

to make money

when you show em your legs

(gimme the coin I want that sweet)

make sure they show you

why would you

their credit cards

anything

you want to be kempt

if you couldn’t anything

but you gotta be “kept”

why would you money

“better to go down dignified

publish money a

“with boughten friendship at your side”

money if you money

a poet said that and he made lots of it

didn’t money

want to money

money

(why?)

money

Make

money

money!

Money!

- Jack Foley's recent bio = Balding. "Ubiquitous." Tap dances. Writes. Erases

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I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, and defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money. Money, money everywhere and still not enough! And then no money, or a little money, or less money, or more money but money always money . and if you have money , or you don't have money, it is the money that counts, and money makes money, but what makes money make money? - Henry Miller

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Indispensable Essay by Donald Hall

When I read this, I wondered what poet could live without it. Then, putting it on here, I couldn't imagine abridging it. However, since it's "longish," I'll provide it's beginnings here and add a link to the full essay. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing!

Poetry and Ambition
by Donald Hall

1. I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

An ambitious project—but sensible, I think. And it seems to me that contemporary American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition—a modesty, alas, genuine ... if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense. Of course the great majority of contemporary poems, in any era, will always be bad or mediocre. (Our time may well be characterized by more mediocrity and less badness.) But if failure is constant the types of failure vary, and the qualities and habits of our society specify the manners and the methods of our failure. I think that we fail in part because we lack serious ambition.

2. If I recommend ambition, I do not mean to suggest that it is easy or pleasurable. "I would sooner fail," said Keats at twenty-two, "than not be among the greatest." When he died three years later he believed in his despair that he had done nothing, the poet of "Ode to a Nightingale" convinced that his name was "writ in water." But he was mistaken, he was mistaken. ... If I praise the ambition that drove Keats, I do not mean to suggest that it will ever be rewarded. We never know the value of our own work, and everything reasonable leads us to doubt it: for we can be certain that few contemporaries will be read in a hundred years. To desire to write poems that endure—we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it.

Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!"

But I just called high ambition sensible. If our goal in life is to remain content, no ambition is sensible. ... If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

3. But for some people it seems ambitious merely to set up as a poet, merely to write and to publish. Publication stands in for achievement—as everyone knows, universities and grant-givers take publication as achievement—but to accept such a substitution is modest indeed, for publication is cheap and easy. In this country we publish more poems (in books and magazines) and more poets read more poems aloud at more poetry readings than ever before; the increase in thirty years has been tenfold.

So what? Many of these poems are often readable, charming, funny, touching, sometimes even intelligent. But they are usually brief, they resemble each other, they are anecdotal, they do not extend themselves, they make no great claims, they connect small things to other small things. Ambitious poems usually require a certain length for magnitude; one need not mention monuments like The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queen, Paradise Lost, or The Prelude. "Epithalamion," "Lycidas," and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" are sufficiently extended, not to mention "The Garden" or "Out of the Cradle." Not to mention the poet like Yeats whose briefer works make great connections.

I do not complain that we find ourselves incapable of such achievement; I complain that we seem not even to entertain the desire.

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Jim Spitzer/Jack Crimmins/Coletti's Heart/Miles Frode/

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man,
and he is only completely a man when he plays.
Friedrich Schiller



http://www.jimspitzerart.com/


Jack Crimmins Poem in Lilliput Review

The Sea Is Near Us

Always we are made
of what is lost.
Fractures in the soul
heal as we age.
The kites tread the air
near the vultures.
I still dance and chant
sometimes before the moon.





http://www.flickr.com/photos/edcolettipaintings/


what else?

when this body is gone

gone

when any body is gone

even gone

by its own hand,

even when it’s rotted

from cancer or burned

like a witch in the fire

it’s gone

as when my father’s ashes

on a shelf in the closet

appropriately weighing

twice as much as

my mother’s ashes

next to his

on that same closet shelf

merely simulate

presence

what else

I wonder

what else?

-- ed coletti (2010)

milesfrode@gmail.com






















Poetry Azul Flier by Ray Swaney
tedateamerica@gmail.com

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Mehrhoff PoemVilma/Vilma Ginzberg's New Book "Snake Pit"/Caged Mentally Ill Also in California State Prisons/

That snap in the air,
some other poet
has broken the language.

- Charlie Mehrhoff in Lilliput Review


New from Round Barn Press and Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg



















where the scar is

touch me where I’m tender
touch me where I yield
touch me where you mustn”t
there the scar is

touch me where I’m hungry
touch me where I hurt
touch me where you mustn’t
where the scar is

touch me where I’m lonely
touch me where I weep
touch me where you mustn’t
where the scar is

touch me where I’m frozen
touch me where I cringe
touch me where you mustn’t
where the scar is

touch me in the never
touch me in the not
touch me in the nowhere
touch me touch me not
where the scar is


touch me when I trust you
touch me when I ask
touch me when I’m ready
where the scar is



touch me with your kindness
touch me where I know
touch me make me tougher
where the scar was


To obtain an autographed copy of Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg's Snake Pit. send a check for $10. to Vilma Ginzberg at 316 Cypress Circle, Healdsburg, CA 95448

Some Previous Round Barn Press Chapbooks

Richard Krech - Some Global Positioning Dharma
Rychard Denner - Calendar of the Moon
Ed Coletti - Peace Planters, Family Matters 
     and Jazz Gods
David Madgalene  - Kali
Justin Adkins - Dream Climber
Bill Vartnaw - Postcards

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comments of others too. Log in under "Name" or "Anonymous"
if you like, but please be sure to sign some facsimile of your name.
Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at
edcoletti@sbcglobal.net if you have difficulty.

• 

Therapist Daniel Tennenbaum plays guitar during a prison therapy session.… (Rick Loomis, Los Angeles Times)

Objections raised to caging inmates during therapy

Prisoners with psychiatric problems must be treated, and the therapists must be protected, but many question the state's approach.

December 28, 2010|By Jack Dolan, Los Angeles Times

Before group therapy begins for mentally ill maximum-security inmates at California prisons, five patients are led in handcuffs to individual metal cages about the size of a phone booth. Steel mesh and a plastic spit shield separate the patients from the therapist, who sits in front of the enclosures wearing a shank-proof vest.

When the lock clanks shut on the final cage — prison officials prefer to call them "therapeutic modules" — the therapist tries to build the foundation of any successful group: trust.

During a recent session at a prison in Vacaville, psychologist Daniel Tennenbaum, wearing a herringbone sports coat over his body armor, sat just out of urination range of the cages with an acoustic guitar, trying to engage the inmates with a sing-along of "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay."

About a decade ago, a federal judge ruled that it was cruel and unusual punishment to leave mentally ill prisoners in their cells without treatment. Since then, state prisons have spent more than a billion dollars delivering care to an ever-growing population of inmates diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other psychiatric problems.

State officials say they have not tried to estimate how much of that cost is attributable to the caged therapy. The value of the sessions, however, is the subject of heated debate among mental health professionals today.

"Those cages are an abomination. They train people that they're not human, that they're animals," said Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist in Berkeley who served as an expert witness on treatment of mentally ill prisoners in the case that forced California prisons to provide psychiatric care.

"It's bizarre, it has a Hannibal Lecter quality to it," said H. Steven Moffic, likening California's procedures to the measures used to contain an incarcerated serial killer in "The Silence of the Lambs."

Moffic, a psychiatry professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, has written about treating patients in prisons under less imposing restraints. "I'm not quite sure what the clinicians think they are going to get out of it," he said of California's method.

Prison officials say they're doing their best to comply with the court order, which requires them to offer treatment to all mentally ill inmates, no matter how dangerous.

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