Serfs of Psychiatry/Who To Impress/Vera Pavlova/

Review:  Serfs of Psychiatry (Finishing Line Press 2012) by Gil Fagiani

Of course, Gil Fagiani’s chapbook Serfs of Psychiatry (Finishing Line Press 2012) reminds me of Vilma Ginzberg’s Snake Pit which I published over my Round Barn Press imprint during 2010.  Each covers the terrors abundant in mental asylums.  Both institutions are located in the State of New York.  Each lays out the horrific scene.  However, Ginzberg is more therapeutic in her approach.  Fagiani simply puts the Inferno right in your face, as in the vernacular of simply “making it real.” 

The differences are those of time and place.  Vilma came 20 years before Gil. Conditions, back then, while certainly horrendous enough, pale in comparison to what they’ve become.  Ginzberg’s institution may be viewed as a harbinger of Fagiani’s.  As to place, she was “upstate” in Rockland State Hospital while he labored down the City in Bronx State Hospital.

When, 10 years after he’d worked there, Fagiani visited “the asylum” he found in “The Geometry of Misery,”  that “All the people were the same.//There was the dwarf/with the non-stop laugh/who drank coffee all day/and raced around/who is without legs now/and sits slumped in a wheelchair.”

In a powerful prose poem he recalls “Marty” who “...had big breasts and/bitty balls and would pop his cork by laying on his belly/and kicking himself in the butt with the back of his feet.” and who would say “ ‘sweet juice’ and smile sometimes after  he/washed down his meds with an extra cup of cherry/Kool-Aid.  Otherwise the only sound that would come/out of his mouth was something that sounded like/ ‘ah-coo-cha-la’ which one nurse said was shim talk for/ ‘I’ll cut your head off.’  ‘Ah-coo-cha-la’ was Marty’s/ war cry...”

Fagiani also pays deep attention to staff members working and retired like Miss Hunter, found dead, "her stroke-stiffened head/purple as an eggplant."  The story of her life is discovered in her possessions, evidence plenty enough to inspire a novelist  and tenderly cataloged  by the poet include "a framed certificate of appreciation/signed by the governor,/a large print bible/an electric broiler/two auburn hair extensions,/a wig cleaning kit,/a chrome cocktail shaker,/two packs of Gypsy Good Time/playing cards,/and a book on how to interpret dreams/for love and money."

This is gritty and nicely-crafted work culminates in a complex poem about paranoia and suicidal ideations ironically titled "My Wife Accused Me of Having Another Woman."  Throughout Serfs of Psychiatry, Gil Fagiani never goes out of his way to spare himself.  Highly recommended. Go to Finishing Line Press to order.

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Ultimately,

the person who

you most need to impress

with the quality of your work

is yourself. 

                        — Ed Coletti 

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15 Aphorisms from Vera Pavlova's  

Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook

(for full text, go to Poetry (April 2012)

• Inspiration: when I have confidence in myself.
• Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current.  This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line. 
• How do I feel about people who do not understand my poetry?  I understand them.
• Being well-known means knowing almost nothing as to who knows you and what they might know about you.
• Poetry begins when not only the reader but also the author starts wondering whether it is poetry.
• I write to equalize the pressure from without and from within, to prevent being squashed (by misery) or being blown apart ( by happiness).
• - Do you understand that understanding is impossible?                                                              - I do. 
• By giving my books as presents, I mark my territory.
• Stravinsky: "I like writing music more than I like music."
• A fisherman told me: "Writing poetry must be like digging for earthworms: you grab the critter by the end and pull.  Pull too hard, and it'll break/ not hard enough, it'll get away."
• From a letter of a young poet: "I write when I feel bad. When I feel fine, I don't write."  With me, it's the opposite: when I write, I feel fine. I feel bad when I do not write.
• An ideal poem: every line of it can serve as a title for a book.
• Reader: Do you want me to recognize my everyday world in your poems?                            Poet: No, I want your world to seem unfamiliar to you, once you take your eyes off the text.
• When a true poet dies, we realize that all his poems were about death.
• Reader: Yevtushenko claims that in Russia a poet is something more than just a poet.  Is that true?                                                                                                                                 Poet: No, nothing can be more than a poet.                                                                                  
  
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Bennett On Corso/Rothenberg On KickStart/Vonnegut On Schoolbook Censorship/

Thanks to terrific Don Wentworth, editor of the Lilliput Review for the following from poet John Bennett on Issa's Untidy Hut

Rainy Day Rag Man
John Bennett

(for Gregory Corso 1930 - 2001)

He's barking at the moon. He's barking up the wrong tree. He's tangled up in blue. He's shoplifting dialects and dangling them with hangman's rope from his crash-pad ceiling. On come the black lights, the strobe lights, the bright lights, the stage lights--let there be light! he cries out, naked as a blue jay and flat-out on the shag rug, throwing darts at the ceiling.

He's seen rumors flying like wounded bats and false evidence stuck like gum to his shoe soles. He's seen dreams go up in smoke, grave conclusions dumped in body bags from hot-air balloons, fist-sized monkeys nailed to fence posts. He's grown gun-shy of false promise, mauled hope, pontifications and the fine-print of love. His soul is like an ironclad Merrimack sending volleys over the bow of a Nantucket schooner. The Lie is self--perpetrating, the dark stain is everywhere.

He's a rainy day rag man with a push-cart mind, a midnight tailor in the attic stitching pockets shut. He's the mutant love child of our unabashed sham.

He's the weather vane that tells how the wind blows, the dimpled vulva of the wicked queen, the death throe of our whacked self-importance as we prance around like wind-up toys with our chests puffed out. He's the last train to Brooklyn, the last prophet before Humpty-Dumpty takes the dive.

He has other names too if you're interested, but of course you're not, this being Sunday, a time for worship and contact sports.

-- John Bennett

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Check this out from Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion who spearheaded the recent 100,000 Poets For Change and who are continuing the literally earth shaking effort. Go to the link 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Event.

Watch the exciting video there. Consider giving anything you can!

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It kills me to read that morons in Texas who choose school text books make their decisions on the basis of non-science and religion. Were their malice restricted to the children of Texas alone, that in itself would be criminal However, the Texas choices, for some reason or other, are observed by school districts around the country. The following letter from Kurt Vonnegut on a similar subject was sent in 1973. I owe its discovery to the wonderful blog Letters of Note (correspondence deserving of a wider audience)

In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.

On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply.

(Source: Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage; Image: Kurt Vonnegut, via Everything was Vonnegut.)

November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut

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Bromige Speaks/'68 On Haight/

(ed coletti w. david bromige - petaluma, ca 2007)

Hearing David Bromige Speak His Own Words Once Again

A Tribute to David Bromige, Produced by Katherine Hastings, KRCB-FM August 26, 2009

Link to Bromige, Hastings, et al

Bromige

It rained untimely

this morning early on in June

when David Bromige disappeared.

Tonight as I attempt to sleep

the wind chime outside my bedroom window

once again and endlessly recites.

(ed coletti June 4th 2009)

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Catherine Sevenau, a Sonoma, California writer follows Rick Posner's poem "1967" with her own powerful memoir from the following year. After you read this short piece, you might consider stepping up to the plate with something (any medium at all) about 1969?

1968: Positively Haight Street 1968 was the year Eldridge Cleaver published Soul on Ice (he and his wife Kathleen banked at my teller window and had the biggest hair I’d ever seen). 1968 was the year of the SDS, the Yippies, and the Black Panthers. 1968 was the year Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, sparking riots across the nation; the day after his death hundreds of black kids from Poly High rolled down Haight in a tidal wave—smashing storefront windows and overturning cars. It was the year of sweeping anti-war protests, the Tet Offensive and the My Lai massacre—the year the Viet Nam war ripped our country inside out. It was the year Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, the year of the Democratic National Convention and the Chicago riots, the year women were branded as bra-burning feminists. It was the year the Summer Olympics in Mexico City were boycotted by thirty-two African nations, the year Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 were launched, and the year Richard Nixon was elected.

I existed in the eye of this turbidity—not oblivious—but neither overly concerned nor connected to the world's chaos. Dressed in my starched white button-downed-collared blouse and my navy blue A-line skirt, wearing pantyhose and white flats, Coral Sea lipstick and a helmet-head Summer-Blonde flip, I watched with detached interest the swirl of humanity through the plate glass windows of my dad's five-and-dime where I had worked every summer since I was 12, and then from across the street at the corner bank before I married in ‘67.

In my world, 1968 was the year the neighborhood stores closed, leaving empty shells with boarded windows. The regular shoppers were done with fending off grungy panhandlers constantly asking for spare change to feed their mangy bandana-necked dogs. They were tired of stepping over stoned fourteen-year-old runaways who looked like five miles of blank road six days in from Wichita and they'd had it with being hustled, muscled, and rudely rustled by dreadlocked junkies, spaced out punks and blissed-out barefoot bums. The regulars now hailed streetcars to Irving or took the bus over to Market—or moved out of the Haight altogether—no longer willing to deal with the potheads vying for joints, the druggies peddling bennies and black beauties, or the dealers hawking balls of black opium, balloons of heroin and bindles of coke.

1968 was the year Daddy closed the store. The Summer of Love, the riots and the changing times did my father’s business (and my father) in. I find it worthy to note that his history, albeit on a grander scale, echoed the same song some fifteen years before. The sex, drugs and rock n' roll that had then taken him down back then once again cracked my Dad’s foundation and walls. Once again he sold his stock, boarded his windows, and locked his front glass door, and—once again—left town.

1968 was also the final straw for my mother. 1968 was the year she ended her life in a small hotel on Whittier Blvd., closing a chapter on mine.

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Raven with the Buddha's Face/Cranes/Critical Silence/Ungulations:Review/ Rick Posner's “1967”/

Joyce Coletti Collages

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A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

- Denise Levertov




To a poet,
silence is
an acceptable response,
even a flattering one.

- Colette, author (1873-1954)

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1967

by Rick Posner

Otis sleeping in the deep six of Lake Mendota,
his body sinking under lead-vested loneliness,
his soul too rich for his own good.


Che laid out like a suckling pig
by the Bolivian cowards.
“ Shoot,” he said, “You are only killing a man!”

Lenny on the toilet with a needle hanging,
thinking about his next court date, all the betrayals
and all the fools and kings.
(Uncle Miltie smirking in the wings, whoopee cushion in hand.)

Who else bit the dust in ‘67?

Coltrane as high as you can get,
down on all fours ,
being whipped into submission by a raging cancer,
just when he couldn’t get any looser or free.

‘67 slugged it to them
‘67 dampened the spirits.
‘67 buried the muse
‘67 choked the chicken

Woody G. fading away…
Disowned by his old Oklahoma home,
his voice trailing the tears of ramshackle migrant misery.



Sandburg buried in his humility,
up to his neck in the arms and legs of humanness.
Left to the dogs of time,
lapping at his carcass.

Johnny Keane freed from making choices (in both leagues.)
No more Gibson glares when he came to get him in the eighth.
Bombing under pressure in the Bronx.
Breaking his heart like a splintered bat.

Spencer Tracy drenched in his drunken sweat as
Death began sawing down his tree with a wry smile.

Newark: burned and abused.
Blue-shirts beating their brothers.
26, dead as door nails.
No one knew their names.

Dorothy Parker, Claude Rains and countless naves and naïfs
Dead in alleys, dirty beds and hallways,
All swept by the tide,
Washed up like shriveled jellyfish.
Their last whines and wheezes
gasping for one more try
and zero thoughts of heaven-

Nineteen Sixty-Seven.

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Ungulations:Ten Waves(Under The Hoof) A. diMichele & Amy Trussell (Surregional Press, Slidell, Louisiana 2011)

First, the caveat that Amy Trussell is a friend of mine. Then the apology for the disclaimer. The brilliance of friends may be overlooked when familiarity breeds, not contempt, but rather an intimacy beyond which it becomes difficult to immediately notice something much bigger. However, since I became familiar with Amy Trussell's work before I knew Amy, my respect preceded my friendship, and the latter put a face and a heart on the work. I do not know A. diMichele in the same way. Therefore, my respect for him comes from this work and his association with Amy Trussell.

Ungulations is that type of poetry book which defies, even laughs at explanation. So I will be brief here and suggest that you pick up a copy and lose yourself in it. Amy Trussell is a moon worshipper who exhalts the deer and celebrates the Goddess, but far far more deeply than do those who use the term with its typical loose associations. Amy is deeply rooted in a mythology which rises above myth. She is quite literal about the moon, "0 shamanka luna,"

di Michele and Trussell open similarly to Dante with

we take armorica bread to a descent unknown
through fogs of gel and slithering
where rainbows forget the log lit fires

and the iris and the pupil are reversed

Yoking the Christian and Pagan, saint bridhe galloped sans mare.../...spare the lilith-faeries our trespasses. And Witches abound with a fleet of cauldrons hissing and i throw comfrey in the pot with some old bones.

There are scholarly allusions done Irish-Indian-beautifully,

burning earthen waxforms of bran or kukulcan for
the yeats-ganesh rite, mashing persimmons in the night
in front of hestia's fireplace
smell of yeast rising from the middle of the earth

And, both despite and due to their being scholarly poets, di Michele and Trussell hold my interest all the more when their use of arcana also seems to pay homage to such more modern "gods" as TS Eliot with this echo,

yama yemaya am, i (one equals
= everyone, mounds, all-my-relations)

This book yokes world myths to present realities. A young witch who scuba dives while i can only douse my head. And the myths run from Irish to Indian to African and back again with what seems to be as much intimately known as it is researched. Arcane esoterica frames a horrendous auto accident,

she is driving but arianhod quasar is at this silver wheel
almanac

and we are bound for manonia

Such use of myth and ritual to describe present "realities" abounds. The authors connect Indian saints from the epic of Hanuman with a tether to domesticity,

now to bake orange hagiograpy cake

I now end as I began. Pick up a copy of this epic. Immerse yourself in it. Google its many exotic references. Learn as you go. Let your spirit rise with the soaring poetry. (Point of contact mesechabe@hotmail.com OR amytrussell@earthlink.net

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The Hass Beating/Poets & Songwriters/from David Madgalene/

Flash: To the Barricades, Fellow Poets and Artists

As I write this on Sunday morning November 20th 2011, following the beating of former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass and his wife by police at Occupy Cal (UC Berkeley), I am hopeful that neither was badly hurt. If Mr. and Mrs. Hass have come through this travesty relatively unhurt, then I submit that this may turn out to be a big step toward progress in the movement toward economic and social justice in this country.

Seemingly forever in the United States, we have lamented the lack of status afforded poets and artists in the political field. While in Czechoslovakia, Russia, in fact throughout Europe and Latin America, artists have been revered and frequently have changed politics and nations for the better, here we have been second or third class citizens in terms of effecting major difference.

Now we have the example of Robert Hass and a more visible doorway into the fray. Think about it and act!

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(watercolor by Ed Coletti)

From the Very Quirky David Madgalene, the Walt Whitman of His Generation

I Can't Wait Until December 21, 2012 Because...

Every morning will be Tuesday Morning.

Atlantis will rise again and so will Lemuria and Mu.

Every man will have his own personal Britney Spears robot.

Not only that, but every other sexual fantasy you’ve ever had in your life will come true and all at once! That’s right, baby! No more sex as a spectator sport! No more porn! We’ll be doing it all ourselves! Apple will release a new program called iOrgy starring Me!

Not only that, they will remove the asterisk from Barry Bonds’ name!

The police, the CIA and the FBI will all arrest themselves!

Al Queda and all the suicide bombers are going to become Sufis and the only thing we’ll have to worry about is that when they’re whirling around they might bump into us or step on our toes!

You can eat all the high fructose corn syrup and transfat you want and not get obese or diabetes!

You can drink antifreeze and live! You can cut your wrists with a razor and it’ll be like a temporary tattoo!

Sarah Palin—whoops! I mean Newt Gingrich—whoops! I mean Obama—whoops! I mean Jeb Bush—whoops! I mean Snoop Dog will be our next President (Say what you will Obama has been a failure as our First Hip-Hop President. Obama? he aint hardly busted out any good rhymes) and President Dog is going to move our nation’s capitol to South Central LA!

We’ll unlock the mysteries of the Great Pyramids and we can all build one ourselves in our own back yard in South Central!

We’ll find Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster!

The dolphins are going to crawl ashore and take over!

You’ll never have to brush your teeth or go to the dentist again (Except to flirt with the hygienist)!

You’ll never have to work again! Even in China! They’re going to say “Take this job and shove it! I want to party!”

The dinosaurs are going to be our friends!

The Beatles will reunite! And Julian Lennon will be part of the Beatles, too!

Jesus will come back again and you and all your friends will be raptured and live forever in paradise and all your enemies and the people you don’t like will go and burn in hell! It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian or not!

Poo-poo won’t stink!

Carlos Castaneda will be on the up-and-up!

Columbus will have never discovered America!

You can jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and laugh and swim away!

George Lucas will keep making Star Wars movies and we’ll keep Gene Roddenberry’s brain alive in a vat so he can ride herd on those clowns and make sure they don’t screw up Star Trek anymore!

Aleistar Crowley is going to take over, the Illuminati are going to come clean and the Rosicrucians are going to hold a bake sale—and not only that their brownies are better than Starbucks’!

You can throw away your cellphone and your iPad and the Internet and everything else, baby!

You won’t even have to talk again unless you want to!

Because we’ll all have a chip in our heads and start communicating mind-to mind!

We won’t need cars because we’ll be teleporting!

We won’t need airplanes because we’ll be levitating!

All you have to do is Google it and it won’t give you Search Results! It will take you there! Google hell! All you’ll have to do is think it aloud three times and you are there—

And, man, no more toting all that luggage around! You know what I mean? No more giving the gift that keeps on giving! Yes! We will find the cure for herpes!

All the atomic bombs and nukes in the world are going to go off at once and they won’t even faze us no more than a fart of a baby chipmunk!

Any Hummers left out on the road are going to shrivel up and die!

O. J. Simpson will find the murderers!

And no more sidekicks! Only equals! It’ll be Tonto and the Lone Ranger! Kato and the Green Hornet! Robin and Batman! Number One Son and Charlie Chan!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer won’t slay jack! Vampires rule!

And Linda Blair’s gonna tell the priest “Exorcise this!”

We’ll find out that Harry Potter was really named Larry Potter !

And remember how I said that we’re going to keep Gene Roddenberry’s brain alive in a vat? Well, it gets better than that! Star Trek is real, I mean Star Trek is going to be for real! And I'm going to be the Captain of the Enterprise! And Captain James T. Kirk will be my bitch!

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My Favorite David Alpaugh Essay

by David Alpaugh at scene4.com

October 2011

In Finishing The Hat, Stephen Sondheim zeroes in on the essential difference between the art of the lyricist and that of the poet: "Poetry doesn't need music," he writes, "lyrics do." Poetry is the art of "concision," written to stand on its own; lyrics, the art of "expansion," written to accommodate music. And yet, the line between song and poem is not as firm as Sondheim suggests. William Blake called his greatest books of poetry Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Walt Whitman called the opening poem of Leaves of Grass "Song of Myself." In both cases, their work straddles the line between the genres. Blake's Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me practically begs to be set to music, and has been by more than one composer. Whitman's great elegy, beginning In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash'd palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing… is one of the loveliest "songs" in the Kurt Weill / Langston Hughes musical, Street Scene. Perhaps the most significant divergence between these sister arts today is the way in which poets and songwriters imagine their audiences. Whereas poetry is aimed almost exclusively at a limited number of fellow poets, hundreds of millions of men and women listen to songs on ipods and smart phones and millions more sing them in showers, kitchens, and karaoke bars. And almost none of these song lovers have ever written a song in their life. Regrettably, too many poets are proud of their tribal isolation. Songwriting, they believe, is a commercial enterprise, aimed at the masses; poetry is the high art of the super-educated (formal poetry); super-sensitive (confessional poetry); or super-intellectual (language poetry). Poetry has always been and is at its best, they argue, when it is "caviar to the general." Poets who reject such snobbery and want to achieve wider readership might consider the qualities that attract so many intelligent men and women to their sister art. Here are three that strike me as crucial: 1. Songwriters wholeheartedly embrace the obligation to entertain. They know that even the most serious, melancholy song must delight the listener; that the core emotion, even when the subject is loss or grief, is never depression, always joy. Unfortunately, the word "entertainment" makes most poets shudder. They think there is something cheap about delighting readers and listeners. Because wit, humor, and satire are undeniably "entertaining" the prejudice against them is widespread. I have heard Billy Collins badmouthed by "serious" poets who have difficulty selling more than a few dozen copies of their own books! Yet no less a poet than T.S. Eliot defined poetry as "a superior amusement"; and William Shakespeare, who delighted audiences that included both noblemen and groundlings, is our greatest poet and dramatist (as well as a brilliant songwriter) not despite being entertaining but because of it. Poets, like songwriters, should embrace the fact that they are entertainers. The only question is whether or not they are successful ones. We must (to re-phrase Auden) "love the reader or die." 2. Song lyrics usually minimize the specific individual in favor of a more generic, user-friendly, singable voice. Is there a single person on earth who cannot "remember April"?; who doesn't want to be danced "to the end of love"?; who wouldn't like to tell the powers that be that "the answer is blowing in the wind"? Emotion in songs is actually heightened by generalization. Pete Seeger's "When will they ever learn?" would be far less powerful were it "When will George Bush (or Anthony Wiener or Muammar Gaddafi) ever learn?" Poetry used to be written from one human being to another. Too many contemporary poems are written in the voice of the poetry specialist speaking to his or her colleagues. Many poems are overburdened by trivial autobiographical details that discourage outsiders from reading them in the study, let alone reciting them in the shower. A poem should be as easy to "sing" as a song; but when I hear that narcissistic, self-absorbed, "poetic" voice, muttering to itself, I find myself shouting, "Hell, no, I won't go!" 3. Last, but first in importance, the primary mission of the poem should be the same as the primary mission of the song. Is it to educate? to describe the human condition? to make you laugh or cry? to make things happen? to change your life—or the world? Songwriters know that it is none of the above. Though a song may accomplish all of those laudable deeds it can do so only after first achieving its primary goal: to make the listener want to hear the song again and again! Click here for entire essay Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. Log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

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

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. Log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.


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

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. Log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

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.

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. Log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.