T D Carroll

Is there a poet in the room?

I had a conversation recently about Renee Gladman's Prose Architectures, a book that 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 it seems that the ecosystem itself has been conditioned or deeply affected by that color.

My reading of Event Factory, that first Ravicka book, happened to coincide with 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 while glancing at the artist striving to capture and reproduce Pissarro's yellow, an elusive goal, unattained it seems. There's also the use of color pigments among the California Paiute, which may be apposite here. The writer of a book on the subject discusses the relationship of yellow and red pigments, the Paiute sometimes deriving the latter by subjecting certain yellow pigments to fire. And back again to Van Gogh, hoping to understand his varying usage of reds and yellows. It's vague, I know; but how does it mean?

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 – and which incidentally may shed light on that conversation I mentioned. In the story about Lorentino D'Angelo, Michon addresses the 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 several monthly meetings of a now-defunct writers' group, but was unhappy with the emphasis on memoir among those writers at that time. So I opted out. The group is no longer meeting, to my knowledge. But when I mentioned them to my interlocutor, they said they'd also gone to one or two of those meetings and had also quit -- for much the same reason. They joked 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! But had they? Maybe so. But whatever the literary value of memoir, I think my acquaintance was adumbrating a trend among writers or would-be writers nowadays, who lean heavily into personal narrative, into 'story' per se, as a foil against the more demanding work of literary engagement. This resonates alongside my personal view that a surplus of junk poetry is being written/spoken nowadays – arguably precipitating from the widespread memoirist impulse in contemporary culture.

The recent issue of PNR (Poetry Nation Review #280, November-December 2024), features a piece by Andy Croft, who more pointedly says what I mean to say 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'".

Much of what Croft reveals about the British poetry scene would, I believe, be applicable here. 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.

And there's more. PNR (an inexhaustible source of ideas and inspiration, apparently) – recently published an interview with Stanley Moss, who was about to turn 100 at the time of the interview. Moss was citing an elder poet he knew. My recollection was faulty. I thought he'd reported the poet saying that back then there'd be just one poet in a crowded room; nowadays there's only one person who's not a poet!

Ok, 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'.

Moss conveys something important there. On that note, and in closing, I want to turn to Tiffany Atkinson, who has an essay in Against Storytelling, a recent collection derived from a symposium on the subject (which includes essays by Charles Bernstein and Amit Chaudhuri among others). Atkinson helpfully arrays poetry and storytelling into a productive context:

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.

So then, once more, with feeling: Is there a poet in the room?

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...

Some time ago I posted one of my poems on this website as a work in progress. I thought of it as an experiment in editing, in developing a poem into some sort of final form within the more 'public' space of this blog. I posted the poem intending to work on it in this more visible context but did not follow through. I was unhappy with the poem in some sort of vague way, couldn't find my way to a more satisfactory version, and just let it lie there, on virtual display. The poem lay fallow for months, until I finally and perhaps a bit reluctantly took it down, demoting it from 'published' to 'draft' status on this blog.*

Meanwhile, I found a way forward. Following the death of poet Louise Glück, PN Review 274 published a commemorative note by Philadelphia poet Daisy Fried, on getting poems right:

I remember going to her readings a number of times, and one particular Q&A, maybe at Bryn Mawr, when she gave some advice about revision, wherein she said that with drafts she wasn't happy with sometimes she would take the ending of the draft and put it in the middle of the poem and then keep on writing from there. This blew my head off, poets. I've passed that suggestion along (with credit) ever since. It doesn't always work, but it often does.

I took that advice and was happy enough with the result to read the poem at last year's annual meeting of The League of Vermont Writers. Here's the revised version -- still a work in progress -- with 'help' from Louise Glück via Daisy Fried:

Where does memory live?

   A clutch of elk

   The forest door

Light tilting

Against a thickening sky  

The gloaming

Tentative

then flaring

touching

         nose

         tail

         flank

Voices pitched at low thrum

"Indefiniteness is an element

Of the true music"

         says Spicer

         the poet

Cut from blue metal   

inchoate

tumbling

         Shavings drift to the floor

         smoking

         coalescing

         clustering

uniquely forming

this one sentence

Clacketyclacketyclack

  clattering

  riving

  my dream

Planetesimals whirr the dark

Seventeen billion

         spheres

Cut from hard metal

Seventeen billion

         trees

In a red-shifting forest

Our names carved

         into just

         this one

         tree

Walking these streets

Shadows blot the sun

I'm a cotton weevil

Caught in a loose cotton weave

Unbuttoning one ear

I hear the muttering voices

         Of the jabberwocky elk

Dreaming

Riding bareback through the forest

I taste the trail in my mouth

And think to write this down   

Having re-posted a revised version of the poem here, I still wonder whether the poem is 'finished' now. I tend to list any given poem of mine as a 'work in progress', such as perhaps all poems must be. That thought back of mind, I opened the current issue of PN Review (No. 279) this morning, and read an appreciation by the editor of his longtime collaborator and fellow poet Stanley Moss, who died recently at age 99:

Often he would complete a poem and then follow on with three or four revisions: these sequences are editorially fascinating. He was profligate in discarding memorable lines, heaping up darlings like Herod's babies. He usually knew when a poem, whether his own or those of his authors, was finished.

Stanley Moss 'knew' when a poem was 'finished'. As editor who would publish one or more of Moss's poems from time to time, he might be in a position to comment on the poet's skills; on the shared challenges poets must face:

My occasional complaints were with his syntax, his sporadic doggerelish rhymes, and sometimes with enjambments, line and stanza breaks.

Enjambment! Yes, I know.

But there's more. Extrapolating now... The Thinking-About-Gladys-Machine is a fascinating collection of early stories by the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero, in a new translation by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter, published by & Other Stories (www.andotherstories.org) and offered by Asymptote Journal through their translation book club (www.asymptotejournal.com). 'The Abandoned House', one of the stories collected here, comprises brief sections, each detailing the experience of a 'select few people who fall under its [the abandoned house] influence'. In the final section, 'Ants', the narrator conjures a solitary ant occupied with building a mysterious structure out of "little sticks and other small objects'. Archie the engineer in their group believes 'it's a giant engineering project' that will 'help him to revolutionize bridge-building techniques'. But the narrator thinks otherwise:

She uses them all to build something that isn't a nest; we don't know what it is, and for the ant it seems to serve no practical purpose. She walks about on it, enraptured, then forgets the whole thing, and returns, for a while, to her contemplative state.

What to make of this? The narrator:

I don't think they're bridges; I have my own views on the matter. Everyone uses magnifying glasses, everyone focuses on the detail and praises the meticulous work and delicately balanced little sticks. Personally, I prefer to see it as a whole and say that it's beautiful, and that its shape is not unlike that of an ant.

*I'm 'republishing' the original version of this poem, which can be read on the post dated October 22, 2021.

Two possibly interrelated extempore notes. Reading in The London Review of Books just now. A review of The House on Via Gamito by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky (Europa: March 2024). Reviewer Thomas Jones writes,

…Starnone is married to the writer and translator Anita Raja; they have both, jointly and severally, been fingered as the authors of [Elena] Ferrante's novels. When Jhumpa Lahiri translated Starnone's novel Lacci as Ties in 2017, the New York Times reviewer described it as 'in some ways a sequel' to Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, 'in other ways an interlocking puzzle piece' – though what other kind of puzzle piece is there? – 'or another voice in a larger conversation'. But novels don't have to have been written by the same person, or by people who are married to each other, to be in conversation with one another. That happens anyway, in readers' heads.

This right away put me in mind of something from Roland Barthes' S/Z as quoted in M/W by Matt Longabucco. (Longabucco's book is subtitled An Essay on Jean Eustache's La Maman et la Putain.) Here's the quote from Barthes (not the full passage as quoted by Longabucco):

The commentary on a single text is not a contingent activity, assigned the reassuring alibi of the 'concrete': the single text is valid for all the texts of literature, not in that it represents them (abstracts and equalizes them), but in that literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances…

Longabucco:

Typing out the passage, I feel his pleasure, the permission he gives himself, in extending this single sentence, a sentence that itself describes the vast, singular, interconnected texts we find when we turn to literature and in which we confront everywhere the intractability of difference…

In a review of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, originally appearing in the Village Voice in 1975, Gilbert Sorrentino writes that,

Spicer did not, after 1956, write single poems. He composed books that are serial poems or that have within them more than one serial poem. This conception of poetry grew out of his deepening involvement with the process of dictation and with his conviction that there is no such thing as a single poem, that "poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can."

(This review appears in Something Said, a collection of Sorrentino's writing and reviews, mainly about poetry and poets, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2001.)

I record these instances of reading here as evidence of the serendipity that persistently/insistently addresses the writer, eyes/heart open.

Following on that, another related/unrelated note: reading Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed (translated by Jennifer Hayashida; Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), I came across the following standalone poem (quoted in part):

…Mesopotamian sculptures float in the water, they suddenly rise and begin to walk toward land, lips sometimes smile in deep sleep, the body is slack yet the face possesses thousands of nerves wanting to speak to it all.

I've been reading these poems, translated from Swedish to English, cross-checking the original to mark the continuities/adjacencies of these related/interrelated languages. Here's the quoted portion in the original Swedish:

…mesopotamiska skulpturer flytter i vattnet, de reser sig plötsligt och börjar gä mot land, läparna ler stundtals i den djupa sömnen, kroppen är slapp men anskitet besitter tusentals nerver som vill tala till alltet.

I've written on this blog about the stone figure I found on the beach at Barnegat Light many years ago and later rendered into the 'Eupalinos' thread, after the invented Socratic dialog concocted by Paul Valéry. It may have been as if/that the stone figure arose from the sea and walked toward land, as the poem says, waiting for someone to nestle it. I've imagined/understood that the stone figure was ancient; erratic; remotely surfaced. Either way, the figure is strange and wants reckoning. Anything that comes to hand would help:

mayhap

this poem