bindithoughts 7

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Today is the one-month anniversary of my heart surgery. All in all, I feel fine

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As I carry out my required regimen of walking, I’ve taken to carrying a camera with me, so I can shoot scenes of my neighborhood. The real purpose of these photographs, though, is to provide a backdrop for a series of 999 poems I call Phyllotaxis. After writing the poems, I find a somehow or somewhat suitable photograph and attach the poem to its face, thus merging the visual with the verbal.

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In my continuing goal to understand Robert Creeley, I checked a Lannan Literary Video entitled Robert Creeley out of my local library. One of the memorable parts of this video was how he spoke: often choppily, interrupting his own sentences, a little uncomfortable in his skin (before an informal audience, but comfortable before a formal audience), rocking in his chair, eyes downcast. There’s something of his own poetry in those mannerisms—especially the syntactically dense poems in For Love and Words. Our creations, of course, can never be anything more or less than extensions of ourselves.

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Back at “Harriet,” the blog of the Poetry Foundation, the conversation on the poetics of space continued with a little comment humorously criticizing something I had said:

How meet and sweet would it be to have a visual poetry that is “sometimes” at once neither visual nor poetry — that would clear everything right up, or at any rate alleviate any further concerns...
Posted by: Philip Nikolayev on April 1, 2008 8:10 PM

The next day, I responded:

Philip,

The intermedial arts are often difficult for us to accept, since they do not slip into the neat categories we have created for the world. I accept the knowledge of humans and the art they produce to be deeply intertwingled, incapable of being perfectly segregated into categories, so this confusion of terms is of no concern of mine.

But I’ll note that rare are the complaints that prose poetry isn’t really poetry, looking more like prose and functioning precisely as prose functions. And never have I heard anyone complain that a tone poem is not really a poem at all. Language is essentially illogical, based on accrued history, chock full of idioms, filled with unnecessary words and lacking in necessary ones. It seems to me the poet's job to work with that mess and make something of it.

So, yes, not all visual poetry is poetry, but some is. And, yes, no teddy bear is really a bear, but the reference to the bear, no matter how tenuous, is still there.

I hope I don’t feel the need to quote any more comments I leave on a blog somewhere.

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Nancy and I saw the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light on Sunday. It started out auspiciously enough, with grainy black and white footage of comical miscommunication between the Stones and director Martin Scorsese. It looked as if it might make something out of the film besides a concert film. My hopes for that were soon dashed.

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Maybe Creeley’s best line in the video was a line he said about himself, a line that probably applies to quite a few writers: “When everything else falls apart, writing is what you hold onto.”

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The other day, Nancy and I were discussing our poems, and I claimed (as I always do) that her poems, though certainly fewer in number, were better than mine. I used her poem “shift” as the proximate example. She then asked me, “How do you measure the value of a poem.” Easy, I said, “I have a poemometer.” And with that our conversation ended.

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Today a friend accused me of being “occasionally binary” in my blogging—which, I suppose, is better than being simply a zero. He suggested that I would posit my point of view without noting that it was simply and only my point of view. And he suggested that instead of saying something was done “unsuccessfully,” I might say it was “incompletely successful IN MY VIEW.” My response, which wasn’t given at all in anger, may have lacked a bit of grace:

You gotta be kidding? This is the kind of nonsense I ignore with pleasure. I tell people to imagine that I am always giving my opinion, leaving it to others to present their own. Geez. Your solution would require people to add that phrase to simply every opinion they hold.

If something is unsuccessful, it means it failed, and Blyth’s translation fails as a piece of poetry. “Incompletely successful”? Oy, no way am I going to say that kind of goofiness. I’d sooner say “the not un-blue sky.”

I like comparing the change in register of my writing over the course of a day.

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The one problem with Shine a Light is that Scorsese did a great job controlling the camera, cutting the filming, even slipping in quite interesting little scraps of interviews from the 1960s and 1970s—but the Rolling Stones, despite their obvious continuing energy, are not what they used to be. Mick Jagger can barely sing. I thought he couldn’t sing at all until Keith Richards sang stunningly badly, so badly that Scorsese intercut Richards’ big song with old interviews with the band, just to reduce to the pain to the audience.

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Too much reading can lead to strange discoveries, can engender unexpected connections. Thinking, as I continue to, about William Carlos Williams’ “A Love Song”, I ran into “The Edge” within his book In London. I was startled by the audacity of the echo—reminding me of a line from T.S. Eliot about great poets and what they do—but it’s hard to read Williams’ poem—with its muscularity, its vividness, and its intangible cryptic quality—and not think Creeley’s words a poor imitation, a steal not worth the snatch.

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I haven’t read any of William Bronk’s poetry in a long time, and the man was born about an hour from where I sit, so I decided to check his book Death is the Place out of the library—mostly because of its attractive design. (It is a North Point Press book. There is a press whose death I mourn.) These poems Bronk wrote on the approach to death, and they have a little darkness to them, but not much. In general, these are short and simple poems focused on big topics like reality, art, death, and poetry, but I was surprised by the conversational tone of the poetry, or I had forgotten it. The worlds in the poems were generally simple, forcing Bronk to work more actively with syntax and content and linebreaks, as in this poem:

Vicarious

Except from our
mortality
how should
infinite
eternal know
how beautiful
the brief world
is to us?

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There’s an old saying in Hollywood: “Never work with children or animals or Buddy Guy.” Buddy Guy, an old-timey bluesman who’s probably older than any of the Stones, comes on stage playing his guitar with depth, beauty, and a dearth of frills. Captivating. Then he sings with his deep rich blues voice, making everyone else on stage sound tinny and weak. Finally, he looks great. A beautiful round face, filled with an angelic smile, and topped with a bowler, he sometimes just stops and stares, taking in the scene, with a grace that is overpowering.

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Creeley at one point in the video, while answering a question from a student, says, “The emotion of life can make a possibility for writing a poem.”

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I used to feel like the youngest 47-year-old around, but now I feel more like an 85-year-old man. Until a few days ago, my afternoons would always give way to a nap, often a two-hour nap. But I’ve fought against that oversleeping and feel fairly fine. I can still get tired more easily than before, but I’m learning how to keep myself from getting too tired.

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Bronk’s poems were contemplative, not lyrical, even when their contemplations were simple, as they were in the beautiful little poem, “Somebody Wolff Knew,” which he wrote in the American demotic and which is impossible to quote from and still capture its beauty, but I don’t want to play it in full, so I encourage you to find it.

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I am not impressed by size, but weight, in poetry. Or maybe it is that I am impressed by wait.

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The obvious problem with Shine a Light is that Scorsese made the film thirty years too late. If he’d made it in 1978, when I was graduating from high school, then this film would have some resonance, some relevance. The Last Waltz, a film about a lesser band (The Band)—even with its schmaltzy waltzing at the end and the panoply of guest singers—was a better film. (I saw it only once, in the marines’ residence in Mogadishu, Somalia, and it has stayed with me for the past quarter century.)

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Near the end of the video, Creeley quotes what a friend of his had soon before said to him on the telephone: “I kinda think poets are like harmonica players: Terrific, but not a great demand for them.” To which Creeley added, “What are you gonna do? If you like playing the harmonica, you keep playing.”

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ecr. l’inf.