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POETIC CORRESPONDENCE
Received from Denver via Time Tunnel
Dear Dr. Omed,
Last St. Patrick’s Day, a sunny Friday, in the evening after work, I strolled down to Larimer Square where I found our mutual friends Ant Crabby and Dr. Nahum Pilaster sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside the Market. With them was a young poetess with red blond hair: vaguely cute; vaguely freckled; vaguely recognizable; whose name I never quit caught. I got an iced cappuccino at the espresso bar and joined them. I’d been practicing origami in my copious slack time as copy slave for a large Denver law firm, a skill I picked up a couple of years ago from a children’s book; so I origamied all three of them, using stolen bond paper cut to size. The jeune fille already knew how to fold paper, and quickly gave me the bird, origami-wise. Soon she departed, leaving us, three old silver backs, grunting and hooting over our twigs and shoots. Ant Crabby then quoted me the lines:
"The temple where the crow worships
walks in tall black grass..."
And asked me what I thought of it. In truth, I didn't think much of anything about it, other than the lines reminded me somewhat of a short crow poem of my own. Ant Crabby, of course, wanted me to respondez like a trained seal to his little conundrum, but I was decompressing from hours of boredom in a windowless room, and couldn't be bothered. Which, since I wouldn't catch the ball on my nose and slap my flippers together, on command, pissed Ant off. As he subsequently revealed the lines are the opening words from a poem by Linda Hogan, of which he showed a crumpled xerox copy. They make perfect sense in the context of the unified conceit of the poem. Which of course was the point of Ant Crabby's little parlor game-He'd been tramping around like Diogenes handing off the lines to one poet after another, to see if anyone of them could make sense out of the lines without further input. Unsuccessfully. This in turn was a well-gnawed bone of contention between Ant Crabby and a certain poet, let's call him Duncan Hines, one of the sort who vomits Cream of Mixed Metaphor into your lap, and expects you to admire it. Duncan selects one from column A, one from column B, chews, swallows, urps-and splat-another masterpiece. For Mr. Hines a poem is a Dionysian orgy, a rout, and maenads tear you to pieces at the end. For Ant Crabby a poem is like a Nuremberg rally; and he's Albert Speer and Leni Reifenstal rolled into one. Every turn of phrase is elaborarely choreographed, and all the metaphors, like Mussolini's trains, must arrive on time. Any simile that can't lock into march step, gets gassed. What do you make of those lines? Herr Doktor Crabby has ways of making you talk. Can you make a sensible whole of it, a proper jack-booted high-stepping fascist object d'art--did you find it to be a charming little haikuzoid, a bit of flotsam, spindrift flung off the wavefront of the inscrutable Tao? Put on your Zen mind, contemplate the Ko-an, and tell me, which do you bow to; the Gestapo Buddha; or the Vomit Buddha? If you show me your Buddha, I'll show you mine. (Send your cards and letters, pilgrims).
Poor Duncan Hines doesn't know what he's started, by reading his sloppy but metaphor packed (to use Ant's term, Dense Imagist) poetry to Herr Doktor Crabby, one day at St. Mark's. All he knows is Ant read him the prosodic riot act. As I've said, wharever goes splat upon the page is a masterpiece to Duncan. According to Ant Crabby, he burbles like a babe sitting in his own shit, at the mere act of creation, of voiding his imagination on paper. This infantile attitude towards the art and craft of poesy infuriates Ant, of course, who probably suggested that Hines needed remedial tutoring in English as a second language. Poets of this ilk offend me too, to be perfectly honest, but I avoid confrontation by never going anywhere near a coffeehouse or any other place in town that attracts such vermin by hosting open readings.
I'm in the precise same pickle, vis-a-vis the local poetry scene, as an old friend is in relation to AA.: He's remained sober for over a decade, but he no longer goes to meetings, and hasn't for a long time. He's grateful to A.A., knows working the program saved his life. But he no longer attends meetings because he can't stand the boredom of listening to the same old bullshit over and over again from his fellow alcoholics. I'm grateful to the scene, I'm glad it was there when I needed it, it helped make me what I am as a poet (I never would have met Ant Crabby, for one thing.)- But I'm bored to death of the poetry of the playpen. Thus, I have composed the following
MODEST PROPOSALS CONCERNING THE OPEN POETRY SCENE
Booze, dope, and bad manners are not a holy trinity of stigmata guaranteeing elevation to street-sainthood or poetry-godhead.
Well-nigh endless auto-bio-epics declaimed in a "cool" whining monotone may indeed be intensely and consumingly fascinating to the author thereof; but to a listener it has about as much interest as a fly buzzing on the ceiling, and constitutes trial by boredom.
What happened to you and your friends on the bus on East Colfax yesterday is not a story of mythological proportions deserving of a treatment comparable to Wagner's Nibelungenlied. It is your life, just live it.
Brevity and wit are not illegal. You will not be arrested if you employ them.
Any person who claims the title of poet, and who gets on stage on the basis of that claim, and who recites his or her "pome" in public, ought, in interest of fairness, to open a book at least once, and read one. If they can read.
Claiming victimhood does not make anyone's work interesting. As Annie Dillard says in Living By Fiction, setting your novel in Buchenwald does not give your work moral significance. You do. You can not borrow meaning from the cruel world like a cup of sugar from the next door neighbor: You create meaning.
A cult of personality does not equal a body of work. I.e., the “Buk” is not God, and Charles Bukowski is not His Prophet. Charles Bukowski is a writer. Further, Jack Kerouac's middle name was not Gautama; Ginsburg is not the incarnation of the Buddha; Beat writing is not holy writ, even when the word “sutra” is used in the title, and poetry should be full-bodied, not disembodied. Read the work--no need to worship at the altar.
Listening to poets on stage, one often finds the poet's explanation of a poem more involved and entertaining than the poem itself. If your explanations are more interesting than your poetry, why are you writing poetry and not explanations?
Pray for me, Dr. Omed, I cannot find the way.
Yours truly,
Vilya Potemkin
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Dear Vilya,
Strange that you should mention A.A. in a poetic context, gospodin. The Dromedary Syndicate has developed its own Anonymous program, for poets.
THE TWELVE STEPS OF POETS ANONYMOUS
1-We admitted we were powerless over verse-that our lines had become unmanageable.
2-Came to believe that a prosody greater than our own could restore us to syntax.
3-Made a decision to turn our journals and manuscripts over to the care of the editor as we understood him.
4-Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our vocabulary.
5-Admitted to our editor, ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our plagiarisms.
6-Were entirely ready to have our editor remove all these defects of narrative.
7-Humbly asked him to remove all our solecisms.
8-Made a list of all the poets we had backstabbed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9-Made direct amends to such poets wherever possible, except when to do so would hurt our chances of publication or winning grants.
10-Continued to take personally all invective, and when we were backstabbed, promptly squealed about it.
11-Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our social contact with our publisher as we understood him, praying only for assurance of his good will toward our work and his power to print it.
12-Having had a rude awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to poetasters, and to practice these principles in all our literary affairs.
SERENDIPITY PRAYER
"Muse grant me the serendipity to accept the words I can not change; the courage to change the words I can, and wisdom to know the difference."
THE TWELVE TRADITIONS OF POETS ANONYMOUS
1- Our common language should come first: Personal recovery of a simple prose style depends upon P.A. unity.
2-For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority: A sympathetic publisher as he may express himself through advances and royalties.
3-The only requirement for P.A. membership is a desire to stop rhyming.
4-Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting the issuance of fellowships, grants and publishing contracts to P.A. as a whole.
5-Each group has but one primary purpose: to carry our message to the poet who still suffers- anonymity.
6-A P.A. group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the P.A. name to any publishing house or other outside enterprise unless money, property, or prestige can be diverted to serve our primary purpose.
7-Every P.A. group ought to be totally self-serving-declining only those contributions which fail to promote our group ambitions.
8-P.A. should remain forever non-professional, but our agents may employ any means to extract fat royalties and advances.
9-P.A. as such ought never be organized; but we may create editorial boards or publication directly promoting those they serve.
10--P.A. members have opinions on all outside issues, hence the P.A. name ought to be thrust into every public controversy that can be turned to their advantage.
11-Our public relations policy is based on promotion rather that attraction: We need always maintain publicity at the level of press, radio, and film.
12-Anonymity is the material frustration of all our ambitions, ever reminding us to place personality before principles.
Go forth my son, and rhyme no more.
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