Poetry Monday: Howl

ModPo has moved on to the Beats. This is relatively familiar territory for me, but it doesn't mean that I get to slack off. Though much of the poetry we're readig this week appears spontaneous, easy to understand (compared at least to some of the experimental poets we just left), we need to do more than read, absorb, and chat about the work. This is a close, intense series of reading that looks, among other things at rhythm, syntax, the pouring forth of incantatory images, and, particularly in Allen Ginsberg's  "Howl", parataxis - that's the technique where dissimilar images are put together in a seemingly unrelated way, with the reader left to make the connection between them.  Here's but a fragment of Ginsberg's most well known poem - chaotic, and seemingly random ravings, but actually carefully constructed to follow, as ModPo's Al Filreis puts it: "the "syntax" and "measure" of the soul," or as Ginsberg said, "Ideally each line of 'Howl' is a single breath unit. My breath is long — that's the measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath."  So here's a taste, and if you want more, you can click on the YouTube clip below the fragment and hear the big G read it himself in full (no harmonium, though I heard him recite "Howl" in person at St Mark's Church many (many) years ago with his harmonium and never forgot it...).  Full text of parts I and II can be found  here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
  hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
  fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the 
  starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
  supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
  cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
  staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
  sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

Poetry Monday: Gwendolyn Brooks

ModPo went quickly through Gertrude Stein and I was amazed at how powerful her work ended up being for me. I don't think I'd ever read her poetry on my own. My first readings left me with no impression whatsoever, but the closer I looked the more intense the impact of the work on me, and indeed on my own work. I found myself lingering over the rhythms, going back to the lines again and again in my mind. The most oddly evocative for me was the strange "IF I TOLD HIM A Completed Portrait of Picasso". This was almost completely meaningless for me to begin with, but I kept returning. Stein's own reading was hypnotic - her voice so pervasive, that I think I shall hear all poetry in that voice now. My own poetry has started to show slight hints of that repetition and wordplay - I even began a poem last week with a quote from her "Composition as Explanation".  I'm not quite ready to leave Stein behind, but this week ModPo has moved on to the anti-modernists of the 1930s, and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance.  We're not specifically doing any Langston Hughes, though I do love him and will come back to him here at some point (you can hold me to that), but so far my favourite poem this week is Gwendolyn Brooks' "truth". Here's just the first stanza. You can get the whole poem here.

And if sun comes

How shall we greet him?

Shall we not dread him,

Shall we not fear him

After so lengthy a

Session with shade?

 

Though the poem is as political and powerful as anything written by the angry "communist poets" whose work precedes it, what I like about "truth" (and other work by Brooks) is that the message never overwhelms the medium. The poem is never didactic. It never yells at the reader. It makes its point through the inherent power of its imagery, its personification, its metaphor, and the emotive power of its rhythms.  In some way, I can see the impact of Stein even here, in the most un-experimental of places.  I may have Steinitis. 

Poetry Monday: Gertrude Stein

It's Gertrude Stein week at ModPo, and I'm afraid I'm not jumping for joy. That isn't to say that I don't enjoy the work of Stein. My uncle gave me a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B Tolklas at far too young an age (about the same time he gave me poetry books by Rimbaud and Plath) and I became deeply engrossed in the descriptions of bohemian Paris in the 1900s (the start of a kind of Francophilia that has remained with me), the warmth and camaraderie, and above all, the experimental fun and whimsy inherent in the writing.  But Stein's poetry has been something else for me altogether.  In the ModPo video on the topic, Al Filreis asks the question "How comfortable are you with something that is seemingly incomprehensible?" Like Molly, one of the teaching assistants, I'm not at all comfortable. So yes, this week I'm out of my comfort zone. But I'm in that place with an open mind, ready to work and ready, above all, to grow.  Here's the first poem that we're working on and after a few readings and a little exploration through the video discussions, I've already begun to grow a little more comfortable. The poem is "A Long Dress" from Tender Buttons. It's actually one of the more "accessible" poems in Tender Buttons, but I use the word accessible in a fairly generous way as you'll see when you read it.

A LONG DRESS.

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.

What is the wind, what is it.

Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.

****
Here are some of my early thoughts.  On first reading, "A Long Dress" seems to refer to the dress literally as  a constructed piece of fashion, created out of the machinery of a sewing machine, powered by electrical current (or even wind current), crackling with that electricity and beauty: the long line of fashion, tradition,  motion, beauty. It seems to be one complete thing: a covering, a symbol of wealth and beauty, a 'dress-up'. But when we ask what it is and what is the underlying 'current' (both in the sense of the times and in the sense of the scientific principle that drives its utility), we begin to deconstruct the dress into both the languge that makes it up in this instance. The lines we see are the lines of poetry; they are the lines of creation where we make different colours and different meanings by changing our lines, our pauses and syntax, and by the way in which we can modify and combine our lines to make many dresses, many colours, many poems, many different types of meanings where nothing is dark and everything revealed. This is the nature of human creation - to combine and create. Red and white make pink rather than black, which might be hinting at the dark places beneath the dress - the blackness under the surface, both in a sexual sense (in which case white and red equaling black is metaphoric), and in in the sense that the seeming darkness can be brought out into the light depending on the lines we create. The colours are only seemingly paradoxical. The dress is only seemingly whole. Time (currents) is only seemingly real (a fact we learned from Einstein). Our bodies are only seemingly fixed and solid (because made up of atoms and in constant motion and transition). This is what Stein is aiming to show in her work. Lines are the arrangements of our lives. They aren't any more real than this moment which is already gone, but they're all that is.

So now I've looked hard into this work and written my own little explication on it, I'm no longer feeling uncomfortable with it. I'm ready to crackle with these currents. What about you?  Does this poem make you uncomforable?