Splence, a Panjandrum for Poetry

THE VIRTUAL ANTHOLOGY -Installment three

2012-02-17T19:54:00.000-08:00

Theodore Roethke's
"The Waking"

T. S Eliot's
"The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Vladimir Nabokov's
"Pale Fire"

Andrew Marvell's
"To His Coy Mistress"

and last but not least

Ezra Pound's
"In a Station of the Metro"

THE VIRTUAL ANTHOLOGY -Installment two

2012-02-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

d w, here again with installment two of the virtual anthology:

X. J. kennedy's
"Nothing in Heaven Functions as it Ought"

Sei Shonogan's
"The Pillow Book"

Robert Frost's
"Acquainted with the Night"

Peter Handke
"The Song of Childhood"

William Empson's
"Let it Go"

addressed by the emblematic moon...

2012-02-11T08:47:00.000-08:00

THE VIRTUAL ANTHOLOGY -Installment one

2012-02-05T05:19:00.000-08:00

I have found myself washed upon the island of Manhattan with much less room than Prospero had for his library. A simple 'drats' will not do... By way of solution I would like to offer 'The Virtual Anthology', a selection of poems that will, weekly, grow. Some will be more less popular, but these are the hors d'oeuvres I have cobbled into a meal. ~ d w Stojek

Geoffrey Hill's
"Ovid in the Third Reich"

Stevie Smith's
"Waving Not Drowning"

Hart Crane's
"Chaplinesque"

Andre Breton's and Phillipe Soupault's
"The Magnetic Fields"

and the final entry for today is W H Auden's,
"In Praise of Limestone"

A Dustbin Pallative

2012-01-25T15:33:00.000-08:00

So , here I am quite late to the show. Dear readers, of this blog, til now you have had William Frank's unadulterated Graces, but now I have finally committed to this thing called "blog". Such an awful word, really... Will have to work on that, won't we? It fits that my first entry will include my latest poem:

paperpink; paperwhite

…this morning I left you this note, for fear of waking you,
on a slip of pink paper
that curled up, as it was torn from a greater whole,
“because I wanted to kiss your foot, so delicate, as it dangled (so delicate)
off the bed,
but did not for fear of waking you…”

~~~~~~~~~

…and you should know that I thought of you this afternoon,
despite the hectic traffic of the pending trays, the careful crediting
and debiting in bilateral accounts…

And my sole regret was that the flowers I left with you were only half as lovely you…

~~~~~~~~~~

Thank You,
d w Stojek

Panjandrum Poetry Series: Time of Gallesbee Run

2012-01-19T08:48:00.000-08:00

Time of Gallesbee Run

The moon bets on the racing horses,
the love of a woman goes home
because he's fond of all things courses
and she with the stars sees none.

Tickets blow round all things lost
and I lean on the rail for the sky,
the dawn has the fire that the moon has first
and while I wage rush by.

Aft round the bend and larking behind
with the color and horns of the meet
the Gate now closed the ruin and blind
all speed with the run and the fleet
into the silence of the street,
the snowfall of the night.

~William Frank

The Metrical Persuasion

2011-10-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

One of the sempiternal arguments in poetry, even as authors acknowledge that poetry must be representative of all voices in order to be culturally significant, is the factional contest for the validity of the forms we use to express our ideas. Some critics, when reviewing the "mature" works of modern poets, consider traditional forms and meter as a relic, part of the writer's juvenalia, to be given up to find an authentic voice. If you've read poems like this by Philip Levine:

Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong ...

one often feels instead that the traditional touchpoints were discarded when the budding craftsman met the limit of his talent or patience. From this point, the writer often talks about the new freedom in his or her work rather than the rewarding perserverance that comes with mastering an intricate art; to preserve the notion of techné, one then will often argue for imagery as the differentiator and count peculiar line breaks as redemptive. When in defense, the argument over the techniques that at minimum establish the work as art for those who disparage traditional forms cannot help in the end feel fussy or sour.

(As an aside, I often feel that poems like the one cited above, as ridiculous as the catalogue of food is, could truly use the distraction of rhyme and meter so that we can for a moment forget how desperately we wish a potato and some onions all got stuck in the back of his throat.)

On the other side, I do not think it is too fine to say that there are those who consider classical forms such as the sonnet an integral and living part of an important tradition, as well as a fundamental part of guild membership to an art form, a craft (as opposed to an open party for an amorphous class of diarists). All mythologies are available and nothing in the foundation of our experience, our past, is extinct to them, even as the experience is transformed in the modern element. What is universal is a continuing experience and we find we are able to return to the lyrics of "Sumer is Icumen In" with the same felicitious expectation as the season of that first praise. Because traditionalists draw their forms and allusions from far-gone models, they are a group often associated with a specialized training, with all the responsibilities and resentments due them.

However, it must be said that those resentments are not without justification. Until the Harlem Renaissance and the work of the Objectivists, there were few real invitations available for marginalized writers. Without those bold declarations, we would certainly have no opportunity for what is most vital and free in poetry now (though I do confess that I prefer Countee Cullen as much as I appreciate Langston Hughes; and I assert that Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is as supreme a revolutionary tract as it is a work of art because it is a work of song; the same with Swinburne's "On the Russian Persecution of the Jews"...) Work from Levine and Matthew Dickman stands to speak to the proletarian quality in every person, with the idea (professed or not) that traditional poetry more often than not excludes the workman's experience and modes. The canon is a foregone elite, not in an artistic sense but in a class sense, a stain of imperial exclusion. For those who continue to see any kind of classicism or academic interest as elitist, the continuing popularity of artists like Robert Frost and TS Eliot may be less baffling if explained away more by their general availability in a traditional market than on superseding merit; it seems the battle cry is, "Write for the common man and the common man will come," though I suspect that for this group, the readership is still the same as it is for traditionalists, comprised in the majority by other poets and academics. Academics and those with academic curiosity are the only people you'll find who will drink themselves to death as well as take time to read poems about drinking themselves to death. When the common man applies to either of those groups, he joins your real base.

While I happen to side with the traditionalists in the matter, I am not willing to advocate that there is a proper approach to poetry, either in subject or form, in intention or expression. Life is at once broad and small and only the high and the low together can capture It; the high and the low require only every possibility to convoke them. I am therefore convinced that those with real talent can make a masterpiece in any form, on any subject, in any mode of expression. It is my opinion that the best poets show the best range throughout their body of work. Where poetry is concerned, we live in a time of real liberty, provided we can put away the divisive meritocracies of formal verse and vers libre in favor of the hallmarks of the art: imagination, diction, empathy, music, historicity, worship and vision. The base unit of poetry is moment.

All of this was brought to mind after reading the submission guidelines to Punchnel's:

"If you send us something sing-songy (overt use of meter and/or rhyme), we’ll assume it’s supposed to be funny, and we’ll treat it as such. Doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t publish it, though. We like funny."

Few things are as beautiful and less awkwardly humorous as Frost's "Acquainted with the Night", an apex poem where overt meter and rhyme is concerned and yet the presumption is that this poem, according to these guidelines, would be grossly out of touch. To be fair to Punchnel's, I hardly believe they are talking about this kind of achievement and are doing all they can to stave off an eagre of clotted poetry (I'm sure they've seen the worst of it); and to defend them further, they have not also said they are averse to publishing metered work. But it is interesting to me that the form is the culpable part in the matter rather than the execution as a whole (as form is an inextricable part of a poem, along with the hallmarks earlier stated.) It plays to the prejudice against traditional poetry in many circles currently prevailing and as such takes no elaboration or qualification, finishing its argument a fortiori, to wit, that form being out-dated therefore content and song cannot have any contemporary power. We do not do ourselves any favors in poetry when we dismiss opportunities or balance what we know with what we assume. How else will we ever get anything new? Or should we give up because the way is hard or our first works are not gratifying? Whatever we choose, we best uphold freedom in the arts when we assert that tradition and novelty have equal potential.

~William Frank

What is a Splence?

2011-09-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

Today we tackle the fundamental question: What the Hell is a Splence? Here are the available definitions according to cryptophilologists:

1. n. Policeman's cant; the deceased body of one ejected through the windshield of an automobile (or windscreen, chiefly British) involved in a collision; applies to the corpse as a whole or any of its detached parts. Ex: "What have we got?" "A splence, 35, caucasian, a real mess. Sgt Marson has the head..."
2. n. A contorted, bouncy gait. Ex: "What's with the splence? Did you lose your bicycle seat again?"

3. n. A two-headed hammer with a trailing claw that is affixed by a decorative ribbon or braid at the base of the handle; used as part of jocular ceremony to indicate the rank of a Poet.

4. v.t. To make a smooshy, jelly sound when falling, crashing or making a hard impact.
5. v.t. To be jilted; to be bested in an amorous conflict. Ex: "I wouldn't talk to Rodney, he was splenced by Udina at lunch."

In this blog's terms, specifically applied, Splence Press is a publishing press not so much in factory but in the spirit of independent thinking, a fraternity of sorts with self-publishers like Walt Whitman and William Blake who recognized that traditional publishing cannot serve all of the Art's needs and the individual artist is the best driver of innovation. It is very obvious that innovation in poetry is constrained by market forces and as such, the scope of poetry is shrinking to a few similar voices. Because the margins for poetry are so small, many publishers cannot take financial risks with unknown commodities, either unrecognized authors or approaches to poetry that are contrary to the prevailing styles. This, however, breeds in turn a malaise within the industry, both in terms of a disinterested reading public who has low expectations, if any, and a pool of new authors who write in the same styles as successful writers, knowing what the industry can tolerate. Without risk, imagination or innovation, financial margins do not improve, the incestuous process is self-fulfilling and spins eternally the loop of safe choices and small losses.

We are in an exciting time when it comes to publishing and putting work out there. Print-on-Demand (POD) publishers like CreateSpace and Lulu do a great job of providing professional, low-cost services that open up the market to independent voices while providing a very environmentally sound and economically sensible distribution program that avoids the problems that come with warehousing or margin management (since a book is only created when requested by purchase). It is true that POD also opens the market to poets who have little skill or imagination (a product of the program of validation that comes with treating poetry not as a craft, like operatic singing or ballet, but as a democratic privilege that is anti-academic, anti-elite and not Darwinian. In arguing against a canon, they begin with the premise that poetry can have limitless interpretation (and therefore needs no expertise, creating it or reading it) and that poetry cannot establish a real system of merit) but it is also true that we should not dismiss the whole outlet because the percentages do not favor it. All it takes is one new idea, one exquisite work to inspire a whole new energy and direction, a fantastic tangent or a great complement to what is now being written. It would be cynical at best to say that it is not worth the effort; and we must remember that even the best poetry is not by design published to dominate the market but to contribute to a rich and varied tradition.

William Frank

An Inauguration of Sorts

2011-09-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

With only a little fanfare, we will be slowly adding to the grander sketches that are currently shaping the great conversation that is Poetry, sharing experiences from our ongoing and past poetry readings, trading our ideas about both Publishing and marshaling an audience and commenting on the poetry world in general, all this from two strangely eclectic classicists who do not necessarily mean to be iconoclastic but sometimes end up with a lot of broken furniture. Though we have more than twenty years of poetry writing, publishing and public readings behind us, we have yet to write our own blog so we will begin with a small spark and eventually work our way up to something florid and coruscant (I still have to tell my fellow Poet he's doing this with me, so let's just start with a little thimble of tinder.)

As we progress past the quiet meadows, feel free to get in the tumbrel and come along, wave to the gallow-birds on the way and raise a cry...

William Frank (and with faith, d w Stojek)