Sunday, March 21, 2010


JH: I don't think of purity when writing a poem, though when writing lyric poetry I try to follow the poem's unfolding as a poet while contributing little to nothing as a writer. The less writer and the more poet in a poem, the more that poem gestures toward purity. In "Of The Coronation", the word "the" was not called to the first sentence, but it was called to the second sentence. The words "the" and "this" are called as much as "Scylla" and "Actaeon". The names "Scylla" and "Actaeon" are instances of expansive reference, which is a reference to mythology, history, or literature, fields where a name or phrase attracts many other names, phrases, treatments, and commentaries. This, like the polysemy of words that aren't proper nouns, allows an inclusiveness that would thwart purity were multivalence not a facet of poetry. A poet's receptivity to poems can resemble method, a poet's approach to poems. Style is a poet's receptivity. Style is immediacy, the way some people can read English at a glance and others cannot. One can write, through habit or will, a certain kind of poem for years and then, in a day, receive one's style from a very different kind of poem. Was style present, unfinished and inaccurate, among the sentences or lines of one's poems outside one's receptivity? If so, is this seen only in retrospect, or does detection precede receptivity? Indeed, your poems are without excesses of manner. An example of your stylistically exact, which is to say pure, poetry is "Stage One", recently posted to Wryting-l:

Robert Grenier is a relevant undertow, and Robert Lowell is a causation while limp. Or pine is a memory of non-pine, on a beachhead, with news from Elizabeth Bishop. Meanwhile, a telltale romance develops with numerous words organized as hash marks in the stadium. Definite impulse, throne room, a buttress or two. We read these maps, camouflage.

You are the flock that stays, says Lowell to Bishop.


Could you speak of this poem, please?

AHB: I was much mastered by the reading that I did. This is not unusual in the young writer, but it took me a long time to free myself from those explicit sensations of impact from other writers. Robert Grenier, my teacher (for one year), is indeed a relevant undertow for me. He was whence I learned of the writers that would influence and inspire me. Thru him, Olson, Creeley, Stein, etc. And I struggled to obey the instructions from those writers. But the point is not adherence to their rules, it is to find my own. I feel that I have.So if my work really seem without excess of manner, it is because I learned not to value manner. Hence, I suspect, my antipathy towards Robert Lowell. On my blog, I give thought to Lowell’s manner. I think his poetry depended on manner.

Someone who could have seemed mannered, but never did, was HD. Her invocation and evocation of ancient Greece is so immediate. Which is exactly how I feel about your poetry, which lately has hearkened muchly to Greek myth. So much so that the reference to The Sorceror’s Apprentice (and its suggestion of Mickey Mouse) natheless sounds a pure seeming ‘ancient note’.

This Actaeon

A lyrist makes of absence a hound. His pack of hounds increasing, is this Actaeon more accurately likened to Marsyas or The Sorcerer's Apprentice? What challenge in sight, what lyric -- exultations, these, or queries?

I do not know how you capture this ancient sense.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010


JH: The poem "On Eileen Tabios' Novel Chatelaine" comes from Eileen Tabios' novel as come, to take one example from the poem, "red roses / from immense crystal vases." The idea of issuance is probably what inspired me to write the poem. "Neglect oranges / a vineyard." is by way of variation -- the sentence could be re-phrased along the lines of "Orange comes from neglect". I've written two other poems on works by living poets: Seamus Cain and Lanny Quarles Theatre is one of three elements in literature that have occupied me lately. The other two are coincidence and, to put it quickly, milestone. Of coincidences, their appearance and also their refusal to appear: are coincidences more common with the literary? It's common for me to think of a book or a text and have it appear, or at least the name, soon after. Is coincidence the manifestation of memory as a map unfolding? Would the study of coincidence be the study of memory? Is coincidence analogy? Is there a relation (I almost wrote "coincidence") between coincidence and motif? There are milestones that are identified (as milestones) either at the time or soon thereafter, and there are milestones that are identified years later (and there are also lost encounters that are identified years later, and would perhaps be as ephemeral as though they had never happened). One milestone in my life that wasn't identified until years later was the encounter with reading Greek and Roman drama—the start, imperceptible at the time and some time after, of a fascination with Greek and Roman mythology—if it is the mythology fascinating me, and not the names which I must commemorate. Any such milestones in your life? If the personal is duplicable (by returning to themes in one's writing, or to habits in one's life), how personal is it? Is the aleatory, the milestone unacknowledged and unclaimed, more personal? AHB: I think I would answer yes to most of your questions, perhaps on the theory that doing so presents the most possibilities. I have just started reading a bio of Robert Lowell, by Paul Mariani. I do not care for Lowell’s work (I am trying to decide how fair my antipathy, longstanding, is fair), and I thought Mariani’s bio of WCW was a crock, but Lowell is interesting for his forceful sense of milestone. His poetry depended on important moments. That is fine but he goes awry, I think, and I think a lot of writers do likewise, by making a milestone. He had a practice of creating importance, which is of a falsity that wearies me, however much I myself am guilty of it. I think I have eschewed that tendency. I know that your own work is not so troubled. I am frankly fascinated by the restraint and direction of your work. Do you think in terms of purity? I know such a word is loaded, but I think your willingness to follow the strictures that you have discovered, that are implicit in each poem’s development, suggests purity. Just recently, you posted to Wryting-L this poem:
Of the Coronation
Doubtless, says Cephalophore, this head fell from a bough and I hitherto headless gathered it up: in a grove nothing is out of place. The world making sylvan study, Scylla has her hounds as surely as Actaeon. This crown that betimes gnaws me I name Absalom.
* * * * *
I love the phrase “in a grove nothing is out of place”. It seems like Poetry’s purest possibility. The names within this piece all seem earnestly invited. In that, I would hearken to HD. You do not seem to be investing the writing with the outer rind, id est, self -consciousness. You invite. I know that you use aleatoric techniques. I also know that you do not use them exclusively. Here is an impression, which I ask you to discuss. I feel like in my writing, I have worn off the excesses of manner, I have learned to avoid the sort of traps that Lowell could stumble into. Your method, in contradistinction, aligns with a ceremonial or ritualistic process that cannot step wrong. Is there any validity to such a sense? Do you, sir, write crappy poems at all?