T D Carroll

 

Since publishing "Is there a poet in the room?" I've identified additional material that may be apposite or relevant there, but hesitate to interpolate any new material into that established post. Below is a selection of that material, offered here as a set of interrelated fragments for possible elaboration later.

 

From an essay in Public Culture by Ryan Boyd: "Money for Nothing: Finance and the End of Culture" (2.11.2025). Boyd's essay is an extended discussion of a book by Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, with reference also to a more recent book (2024) by Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. The reference to "Insta poetry" caught my eye:

 

More ominously, his conclusions are relevant to fields of cultural production, distribution, and consumption that he doesn't have space for: Why is short, anti-intellectual Insta poetry most marketable now? Don't ask critics or poets—ask Wall Street and what Kornbluh calls "algorithmic culture." Kay Ryan is still alive, but most new readers prefer Rupi Kaur. "In the extremity of too late capitalism," Kornbluh observes, "distance evaporates, thought ebbs, intensity gulps. Whatever. Like the meme says: get in, loser.

 

Bringing Eliot into the discussion is interesting, which for my purposes will resonate with Renee Gladsmith's "brown fog", and more generally with the underlying argument of the previous post:

 

Reading Derivative Media's account of the popular-art industries, now subject to finance instead of Fordism, I kept thinking about T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which had its centenary three years ago. Part of this pertains to Eliot's subject matter: Published in 1922 amid endless wars and just after a brutal pandemic, his modernist assemblage of allusions and texts imagines the West as a hellish necropolis, where civilization lies in fragments: "Unreal city, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many."

 

Boyd winds his essay down with notes toward possible solutions, as identified by deWaard:

 

Derivative Media concludes with a bold-faced set of pragmatic, social-democratic ways to break the grip of finance. We could, for example, tax billionaires more, or fight like hell for unionization, or close the "carried interest" loophole that only benefits hedge-fund and private-equity managers, or actually enforce antitrust legislation that is already on the books. (Indeed, under the Biden administration, Lina Khan was doing that at the Federal Trade Commission.) We could, deWaard writes, have "a less capitalist, more democratic organization of society [that] could be modeled in how we collectively allocate culture, in both how we access media and the labor that goes into making it."

 

This discussion touches on, or maybe is directly related to, recent writing on the heretofore largely unexamined valorization of economic over social priorities in late capitalist society and culture, or as Michael Hofmann has written:

 

In the 1980s we were just through being told that life was impossible. We were beginning to worry about ecology and overpopulation. There was a working class, but that went by "middle," or "lower-middle," and it was threatened by the coming of automation and robots (which in another language means "work"). The word "society" had just been withdrawn and replaced in general use by the word "economy." Unions of all sorts had fallen into disrepute…Television – the media – was proliferating, well, like frog spawn, and our overexposed rhetorics of persuasion and introspection were looking distinctly shopworn.

 

(Hofman's piece was published in the New York Review of Books, a version of the introduction to his new translation of Markus Werner's The Frog in the Throat.)

 

In closing, returning to Gladman and my discussion of color in the previous post, there's a striking passage from Mountainish, an experimental fiction by Zsuzsanna Gahse (recently translated from the original German by Katy Derbyshire). Gahse's book is made of a series of brief numbered passages, 515 passages altogether, reaching 160 pages:

 

111

 

I recently heard about a yellow world.

 

Sour-lemon world and honey-yellow sunrise through fog, acrid yellow all around the world.

 

112

 

Four people in the fog, on a wide road, all of them little more than shadows. They are standing fairly far apart, three of them barely moving; the fourth, at the front right of the picture, strides slowly towards the viewer and transforms into a dark-red rectangle, or in fact is immersed in dark red, while the other three are contained in an unsettlingly foggy yellow-red. At the back this yellow-red, at the front dark red.

 

Has Ghase been reading Gladman? Or Gladman, Ghase? Or would synchronicity or zeitgeist or possibly even the fragmentarium be at work here? (on the latter see my October 13. 2024 post)

 

Meanwhile, more on yellow-red...at some other time.

 

 

 

 

Is there a poet in the room?

 

I've been 'reading' Renee Gladman's Prose Architectures recently, a book I've found increasingly interesting, and absorbing. Gladman produced the word drawings in the book during the time she was working on her series of Ravicka novels, which comprises four books to date. I have those books on my shelf, have read the first one, and have begun reading the second book, called Houses of Ravicka. My reading has stimulated some thinking, focusing initially on Gladman's deployment of the color yellow in Event Factory, the first book in the series, where the air is yellow, and where the ecosystem itself has been conditioned or deeply affected by that color. The novel begins as a stranger arrives in the city:

 

From the sky there was no sign of Ravicka. Yet, I arrived; I met many people. The city was large, yellow, and tender.

 

And later:

 

The yellow air of the city when its sun is at its highest point in the center of the sky and all residents have retreated for what they call their "wrapaway" -- an hour-long meal followed by an hour-long nap -- this air vibrates around the foreigner in the street.

 

The city is besieged, however, by an unnamed, scarcely identified threat:

 

A city should not glow this strange brown. The man wanted to talk to me, but I could not stop for him. There was no air. And taking in his glassy eyes and dirty apron --well, it was not a horror film I was living. I walked until I found a clearing, a space in the sky that was yellow.

 

Yellow.

 

Taking leave of Renee Gladman for the moment, my reading of Event Factory, that first Ravicka book, coincided with my reading Pierre Michon's 'novella', 'The Life of Joseph Roulin'. Roulin's portrait (along with all Roulin's family members) was painted by Vincent Van Gogh, Michon touching on Van Gogh's use of color, especially yellow in its various iterations with side glances at the artist striving to capture and reproduce Pissarro's yellow, an elusive goal, unattained or unattainable, it seems. A detour: there's also the use of color pigments among the California Paiute, which may be apposite in some way. In Earth Pigments and Paint of the California Indians, Paul Douglas Campbell discusses the relationship of yellow and red pigments among the Paiute, who sometimes derive the latter by subjecting yellow pigments to fire. Yellow -- and red -- that relationship is interesting here. Back to Van Gogh, then, hoping to understand his varying usage of reds and yellows. Interestingly, according to Wassily Kandinsky in his classic Concerning the Spiritual in Art,

 

Yellow is the typical earthly colour. It can never have profound meaning. An intermixture of blue makes it a sickly colour. It may be paralleled in human nature, with madness, not with melancholy or hypochondriacal mania, but rather with violent raving lunacy.

 

Van Gogh struggled; he sacrificed an ear; he took his own life. Van Gogh had passed from the scene by the time Kandinsky wrote his seminal essay in 1914, though his impact on the generation of artists who succeeded him -- Kandinsky among them -- was profound. The Roulin novella appears in Masters and Servants, Michon's gathering of stories about several notable artists -- Van Gogh, Antoine Watteau, Francisco Goya, and others -- ascending to a meditation on forms of engagement with art (which I believe is Gladman's purpose as well). In the story about Lorentino D'Angelo, Michon evokes that painter's lost masterpiece, a rendering of the legend of St. Martin:

 

Who can know what it looked like. But it was a masterpiece, since Lorentino had given the best he had to give, had devoted himself as one should, just as each of us, doing the best we can, devoting ourselves as best we can, doubtless makes a masterpiece.

 

Several years ago I attended monthly meetings of a writers' group, but the emphasis on memoir among those writers blunted my interest, so I opted out. When I mentioned the group to an acquaintance, a working poet, they said they'd gone to one or two of those meetings too and had quit -- for much the same reason I had. They quipped that those writers may not have been up to the job of writing a good memoir and had turned to writing poetry instead. That's an arresting thought! Had they? Maybe so. Whatever the literary value of memoir as a whole or from writer to writer, I think my acquaintance was adumbrating a trend among (some) writers nowadays, who lean into personal narrative as a foil against the demanding work of literary engagement. As Paul Celan noted, "Art makes for distance from the I. Art requires that we travel a certain space in a certain direction, on a certain road." This resonates alongside my view: a superfluity of unpromising poetry written/spoken nowadays – arguably precipitating (in some cases) from the memoirist impulse in contemporary culture. That impulse may be waning, but the long view is unavailable just now.

 

The recent issue of PNR (Poetry Nation Review #280, November-December 2024), features a piece by Andy Croft, who more pointedly generalizes what I have in mind here, via a sort of in memoriam for Smokestack Books, the now-defunct small press that was shuttered last year. Croft notes that,

 

In the last twenty years the poetry-reading circuit has collapsed into a culture of slams and open mics. Adult education writing workshops have been replaced by higher education Creative Writing programmes. Local poetry festivals have been swallowed by corporate book festivals. Kaleidoscope by Front Row. Poets who used to work in community-writing residencies have disappeared onto university campuses. Yesterday's elitists are today's populists. In place of the critical culture of small magazines and poetry presses, we have life-style profiles of poets in the weeklies. Although these days the Guardian reviews new poetry only sporadically, in the last ten years the paper has published over seventy reviews, features and interviews with Kate/Kae Tempest. And every poet must have a prize.

 

Oh yes; every poet must have a prize! Croft notes that Smokestack Books was modeled on Curbstone Books in the US, and Le Temps des Cerises in France, the latter, significantly, were "publishers of 'la poésie d'utilité publique'".

 

PNR printed an important piece several years ago on this same subject – also a critique of the contemporary British 'poetry scene' (though resonating stateside too). Written by Rebecca Watts (issue #239, Volume 44 Number 3, January - February 2018), the piece is titled 'The Cult of the Noble Amateur'. Watts wonders,

 

WHY IS THE POETRY WORLD pretending that poetry is not an art form? I refer to the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their 'honesty' and 'accessibility' – buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work. The short answer is that artless poetry sells.

 

This complaint appears relatively widespread across the community of engaged poets, and much of what Croft reveals about the British poetry scene would, I believe, be applicable here. To that end I'll indulge yet another example, from Golden Handcuffs Review 32, a conversation between Habib Tengour, Charles Bernstein, and Pierre Joris, to resituate the discussion within a US context. To Tengour's question, "Is there today a major trend in poetry writing in the US, or are there multiple paths being drawn?", Joris replies:

 

Several paths, no doubt, but with one major tendency which is that of the creative writing programs and departments on our university campuses – these in the main rather sad-sack and reactionary because essentially based on the little lyrical musick of the individual expressing ("self-expression" being the impoverished aim) his/her fears, angst, etc. It is also the professionalization of poetry: you end up with a degree in writing & you go on to teach the same thing, creative writing, in another factory producing "poets."

 

Joris goes on, however, to offer a glimpse of a countervailing trend:

 

Now in the big cities, but also in the great plains, in the mountains, there is massive actual lived experience & many poets who work on a poetry deeply connected to the outside world & not just to their bruised egos.

 

Aligned with these trends is a concurrent superfluity of 'poets'. PNR 279 featured an interview with Stanley Moss, who was about to turn 100 at the time of the interview (see my November 11, 2024 post on this website for more on this interview). Moss was citing an elder poet he knew. My recollection of that exchange exposes my predilection, I suppose, since that recollection was faulty. I thought Moss had reported the elder poet saying that back when whenever it was there'd be just one poet in the room; nowadays there's only one person in the room who's not a poet!

 

Ok, then, here's what Stanley Moss actually said:

 

One of the problems with much contemporary poetry is that they have MFA classes throughout the United States, and they've got a few hundred thousand people who think they're poets. In San Francisco, I think, out of all the people who registered to vote (I don't know the number) something like fourteen thousand of them registered as a poet. I remember Kunitz saying: 'There's only one poet in the room'.

 

I'll move toward closing with something from Tiffany Atkinson's essay in Against Storytelling, a recent collection from a symposium on the subject (which includes essays by Charles Bernstein and Amit Chaudhuri among others):

 

Nonetheless, I can see, obviously, the value and merit in storytelling, so my take against storytelling here is not really so much antagonism or direct opposition...but more a kind of leaning against, an askance-ness, a benign friction or pressure that at least tries to assert the value of alternative notions of language-use. The idea of a benign friction is something that interests me now because it's how I would describe embarrassment, and recently I've been trying to follow through a hunch that more than any other literary genre, poetry is a field prickly with embarrassment, despite the best efforts of literary theory or creative writing teaching (which are aspects of my day job) to behave otherwise. This may just be making virtue of necessity since poetry has always felt like the embarrassing other of my critical work, and the predicament of actually being a poet can be just embarrassing all around.

 

Atkinson's essay helpfully recasts the question, although there's much more to her argument vis a vis embarrassment (and shame) among poets than I want to engage with here. For discussion, perhaps, at some other time.

 

Meanwhile, I'll leave the last word to Hank Lazar, his small poem dedicated to Donald Revell, from that same issue of Golden Handcuffs Review*:

 

I don't know

for whom poetry

remains

 

of interest

this space

of being

to which

 

i have given

my life

all to sense

a hidden

rhythm

 

 

 *According to editor Lou Rowan, Golden Handcuffs Review will cease publication with the current issue, #35.

 

I was unable to develop a blog post during the past month of December, but during that time I thought quite a bit about continuing or extending what I'm calling the Eupalinos thread, which I now conceive as a vehicle for capturing and conveying some part of my experience doing ethnographic fieldwork over the past several decades. I have little more to offer on this theme just now, except to repeat that the thread borrows its title from an imagined Socratic dialog by Paul Valéry. I was struck in reading the dialog by a scene in which Socrates is walking along a beach and finds an unidentifiable object, which he contemplates briefly then returns to the sea. I had a similar experience some years ago, while walking the beach at Barnegat Light on the New Jersey coast. In my case, however, I was able to identify my found object as an anthropomorphically carved stone figure, though its origins and meanings were and remain mysterious. I too recommitted my find to the tide, but the stone figure has goaded my imagination since that time.

 

Apropos Paul Valéry, there's a new translation of his collected writings on the persona he called 'Monsieur Teste'. Reading the piece titled "The Evening with Monsieur Teste" I saw the following, which I'm setting down here as a place marker for the next installment of the Eupalinos thread:

 

After much reflection, I came to believe that Monsieur Teste had managed to discover laws of the mind of which we are ignorant. Surely, he must have devoted years to this research: even more surely, more years, many more, had been set aside in order to mature his inventions and make them instinctual. Finding is nothing. The difficulty is incorporating what one finds. (translation by Charlotte Mandell, New York Review Books, 2025).

 

The cover of this edition of Monsieur Teste reproduces Odilon Redon's "Orpheus', which I've in turn chosen to illustrate this post with a nod to Rilke's 'Sonnets to Orpheus' -- thickening the matrix of allusions portended here.

 

 

Just now I have a few loosely interconnected thoughts, gleaned as usual from my reading over the past day or two. I think of these blog postings as fragmentary, mostly unfinished, to be reworked at some point. So the posts are mainly a gathering or the result of a gathering process  -- of ruminations, readings, relationships -- to be brought into focus later. For the moment what follows is best viewed sidelong.

 

Here's the latest batch of fragments, whether connected apart from my general enthusiasm remains an open question. Nevertheless, the following:

 

Reading in PN Review 279  this morning, sitting in a public space at a local hotel, with coffee, I saw the following in an interview with Stanley Moss, who died recently and who is commemorated by the editor in that issue. Here is a longish quote from the interview, or rather 'conversation' (the piece is titled 'In Conversation with Neilson MacKay'). I've interpolated initials to identify the speakers:

 

SM: My father wrote books, taught history. He knew Greek and Latin. Later in life he told me: 'What I know of poetry I owe to you.' He explained that when I was two years old and he was studying for his principal's exam, he would recite passages from Shakespeare over my head as we walked. I replied that perhaps I owed my love of poetry to him.

NM: Interesting. Eliot – or was it Stevens – has that line about the way that authentic poetry communicates before it's understood.

SM: Yes, I think there's something to it. You mention Wallace Stevens. When I joined the Navy at seventeen, I used to wake up an hour before reveille to read, write poems. I had a copy of Harmonium.

NM: Was Stevens an early influence for you?

SM: Absolutely. I met him – first at Trinity College, I think, after a reading – and again with his daughter before he died, at the house of a very rich gallery owner. I remember sitting with them at the table (it was summer), and the host said, 'Oh, look at the garden, all the trees are white'. I looked at Stevens, and he looked back at me, and we both knew the guy was horribly mistaken.

NM: What impact did he have on your writing, exactly?

SM: Well, first of all, I don't think the word exactly explains anything.

NM: I regretted it as soon as I said it.

SM: The mystery of what makes poetry go, in the debate with William Carlos Williams, who I also knew quite well (after all, I put his books together for him in some ways), I was on Stevens's side. Ordinary speech was not my thing. I didn't write the poetry they speak on the street, like Allen Ginsberg for example. But I wrote about what they speak on the street that others didn't see, and that others didn't hear.

 

I like this quite a bit -- that poetry communicates before it is understood. As with art more generally: in "Letter from Madame Emilie Teste" (from the new translation by Charlotte Mandell of Valéry's Monsieur Teste, published by New York Review Books) Valéry writes:

 

Things that are abstract or too lofty for my understanding do not bore me when I hear them; I find an almost musical enchantment in them. A good part of the soul can enjoy without understanding, and in me that part is quite large.

 

There's a little poem, translated by Louis McKee and collected into a little book called Marginalia, Poems from the Old Irish, that resonates cryptically here. Titled 'Apology', the poem says,

 

Don't be blaming the poets, man,

     it's not their fault;

You will get no more from a pot,

     than what's in it.

 

Looking elsewhere, this idea about 'authentic poetry' is reflected (and extended) in the epigraph that Thomas Meyers appends to his book, Essay Stanzas (The Song Cave, 2014), first glossing then quoting from Freud's essay On Dreams:

 

What is dreamt, it is proposed, has no more claim to sense and meaning than, for instance, the sounds which would be produced if "the ten fingers of someone who knows nothing about music were wandering over the keys of a piano."

 

Moss calibrates Freud's meaning for poetry and poets when he says, "But I wrote about what they speak on the street that others didn't see, and that others didn't hear." Presumably, Moss didn't have Freud in mind during this conversation, nor would Thomas Meyer have been in the picture for him at that time. By way of aside, the gist of this exchange may also be understood, I think, as obliquely suggesting that Freud was not a poet.

 

One more thing on this. In Philosophical Investigations (as translated by G.E.M. Anscombe), says Wittgenstein:

 

78. Compare knowing and saying:

     how many feet high Mont Blanc is --

     how the word "game" is used" --

     how a clarinet sounds.

If you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.

 

Hmm-- "how a clarinet sounds"...

 

I want to conclude this peroration with another loosely related bit from my reading this morning, arising out of my continuing fascination with what I vaguely understand to be a tradition of 'walking poetry' in Japan. I first read about this in an essay by Gary Snyder, which I've not been able to locate or identify. I keep looking. Closer to hand are the travel diaries of Matsuo Bashō, though that is a separate and distinct tradition. Closer to my purpose here: Earl Miner has an essay that was published in Pacific Coast Philology way back in 1968, titled 'The Traditions and Forms of the Japanese Poetic Diary', where he writes,

 

The significance of those two elements is such that without an appreciation of them we are unlikely to gain any adequate feel for Japanese diary literature. Compared with Western fiction, the diary is seemingly episodic and formless. Closely ordered plots are not to be found in the diaries -- or in other forms of earlier Japanese prose fiction, or in drama, or in most modern fiction. Japanese conceptions of form are in some important respects different from Western, and what the differences are can be understood in considerable measure from the diary. One of the significant differences between Western and Japanese prose fiction (as represented by the diary) is that the Japanese is formulated in close relationship to poetry, which both affects its principles of coherence and has meant that it did not need to go through the stage of the well-made novel or play before it could seek out freer forms. To attempt generalization of a larger number of works, the diaries combine or poise, two formal energies: the ceaseless pressure of time implied by the diary form itself and the enhancement of the moment, or related moments, usually demonstrated in poetry. It is the flow of time rather than the concatenation of events that is important, and it is the sudden glowing of poetic experience rather than the order of a well-lighted city that gives the diaries their sense of depth of experience.

 

'The sudden glowing of poetic experience'.

 

Echoing Stanley Moss in an indeterminate way, the following translation appears in the same issue of PNR. These poems are part of a series announced last year by the editors, and are offered by New Zealand poet John Gallas. The series is titled 'Mondo de Kvar Anguloj' (World of Four Corners), with the first entry titled 'Mondo de arboj'. The editors write:

 

In coming issues of PN Review, John Gallas will contribute to the 'Reports' pages five-poem anthologies of translations from many corners of the world. He is, after all, the author of The Song Atlas. Esperanto provides our titles going forward. The next five are proposed as:
2. Mondo de mašino
3. Mondo de dormo
4. Mondo de sunbrilo
5. Mondo de melankolio
6. Mondo de birdoj

 

The current gathering (Set 6) in the 'World of Four Corners' series is titled 'Mondo de Malverma', differing from the title previously announced as 'Mondo de birdoj'. Here's the concluding verse from one of the current set of poems:

Homesun Sands     Grímur Thomsen (1820–1896)/Iceland

Yet Homesun Sands is desolate and sad.
No sound of man or woman echoes here:
Its solitary Things commune in tongues
That few can fathom, alien and drear.

 

Understanding come follow...