Bits from Kenneth Goldsmith in the April 2015 Poetry

Writers try too hard to express themselves. We're working with loaded material. How can language--any language--be anything but expressive?

Writing on an electronic platform is not only writing, but also doubles as archiving; the two processes are inseparable. 

Somehow during Christmastime in a small house crammed with extended family, reading the Sunday paper is acceptable, but reading a book is considered antisocial and rude. Many times I've been asked while reading, "Is everything alright?"

Poetry is an underutilized resource waiting to be exploited. Because it has no remunerative value, it’s liberated from the orthodoxies that constrain just about every other art form. It’s one of the great liberties of our field — perhaps one of the last artistic fields with this privilege. Poetry is akin to the position that conceptual art once held: radical in its production, distribution, and democratization. As such, it is obliged to take chances, to be as experimental as it can be. Since it’s got nothing to lose, it stirs up passions and emotions that, say, visual art hasn’t in half a century. There’s still a fight. Why would anyone play it safe in poetry?

More: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/250240

"These were the moments I lived for"

 --Louise Glück

"My story begins very simply"

--Louise Glück

The Old Woman Leaves the Sea

I cut my hair, threw it at the desert sage.
My curl is natural; this picture is a cage.
I'm leaving it. I've had my time among
stones and water. I'm going to the garden.
I want black earth, bronze mud, yellow
daffodil, green grass. I want to ride a bicycle,
sing a cappella. I want to take the train to Rome.
I've put all my eggs in one basket. I'll get clothes
that fit. I've finished fasting. I'm definite. 

I lie back to stare at the sky. It's another day
in the life of my grief. There's water everywhere.
I'm not doing enough, just gathering stones,
sitting here by the sea. I'm not the only mother 
whose son has died. Why do I think I deserve 
to laze here after seven years? I move my leg
right, then left, against the sand, watch
for an opening between sky, water.

--Sharon Charde

Moonrise

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the 
walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail 
held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark 
Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, 
not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so 
easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poetry: cure for our pervasive skepticism about whether language works

I take it that our having to ask ourselves what poems and pop songs are for, and our compulsion to suggest answers, is a good thing—that it’s the fields that are certain of their purpose and their standing that lend themselves most to reified thinking. I mean principally the natural sciences, which shade now so easily into the most preposterous scientism. Evolutionary psychologists will tell you that the arts exist to—well, there’s only one reason any human endeavor exists, according to evolutionary psychology. Phillips suggests that it’s worth asking what poetry’s good for because science is always providing answers to the question of what science is good for—vaccines, Google, drone strikes, showrooms filled with fabulous prizes. And for Phillips, poetry—and pop, I’d add—provides a “cure for our pervasive skepticism about whether language works.” Whether, that is, the right words can, as psychoanalysis teaches, make us better off.

--Michael Robbins

At My Best

August is the cruelest month: never enough daylight, too much
heat, no holidays and nothing matters except September’s

dawning responsibilities, but the August of 1994 I was Holden
Caulfield, summer camp senior counselor for the junior trail

blazers, black and brown children two weeks shy of first, second,
and third grade. Nothing is as positive, as motivating a force within

one’s life as a school bus full of kids singing along to the local
radio station blazing hip-hop and R&B. (Imagine this cherubic

chorus riding upstate to Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper.”
[“Muuur-derah!”]) My workday is filled with hazards like chocolate

melted sticky swim trunk pockets, insistent sunburn, and the assorted
rah rah of parental unsupervision, but those bus rides back from

upstate water parks and pools were my favorite times working.
Have you ever ridden in a cheesebus with ashy children asleep

against you, staring at sudden trees — more numerous than project
windows — blurring along the highways like confusion giving way

to doubt, the heady smell of dried chlorine and musty towels
lulling you into the soft timbre of a Midwest falsetto? Tell me

what it is to fall in love with a lightskin girl covering the Isley
Brothers. I was not two weeks into 21 years old. I had yet

to wear a box cutter in my fifth pocket, or see a semi-automatic
aimed at my center mass, to feel its dumbness against my spine.

My life was uncertain, save for its unlikely length under my control,
like the pilot who falls short of what he says, what he says

he’s all about, all about. All my homeboys were still alive, just
like Aaliyah Dana Haughton, not yet an angel of the cruelest August,

begging a boy, who may not be in the mood to learn what he thinks
he knows, to look beyond his world and try to find a place for her.

--John Rodriguez