Rolling Contemporary Poetry

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Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 497
11 HOURS AGO

Big news announced this week, the upcoming (April 2021) CD release by Omnivore Recordings of Howl at Reed College (from February, 1956, the first recorded reading).
Variety in its announcement notes the background:

“The tape went forgotten until 2007, when author John Suiter found it in a box at Reed’s Hauser Memorial Library while doing research on another poet who read at the college that day, Gary Snyder. Its discovery made the news after being verified the following year. But it was to still go unheard to the general public until a Hollywood-Oregon connection made its release inevitable.

Reed named Dr. Audrey Bilger its president in 2019. Bilger happens to be married to Cheryl Pawelski, the Grammy-winning co-founder of Omnivore Recordings, who had moved to Oregon herself upon Bilger’s appointment. Omnivore already had history with Ginsberg, having released The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience in 2017 and The Last Word on First Blues in 2016. Using her existing connections with the Ginsberg estate, Pawelski sent the tape to Grammy Award-winning engineer Michael Graves to have it transferred, restored and mastered.”

Chris Lydgate in Reed Magazine tells more:

Its first public reading took place at San Francisco’s famous Six Gallery in October, 1955. Along with Ginsberg, the evening included readings by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. Poet Kenneth Rexroth was the emcee; Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Neal Cassady were in the audience. Unfortunately, no one thought to record this historic moment. Ginsberg was recorded reading the poem at Berkeley a few months later in March, 1956, and for many years literary historians thought that recording was the first. But they were wrong. Earlier in 1956, Ginsberg and Snyder went hitchhiking through the Pacific Northwest, and arrived at Reed, where they decided to hold a poetry reading in the common room of the Anna Mann dormitory. On February 14, Ginsberg read the first section of “Howl,” still very much a work in progress. And this time, someone brought a tape recorder.”

John Suiter, also in Reed Magazine, back in 2008, provides the essential account:

“Before launching into “Howl” itself, Ginsberg pauses to briefly prime his listeners for what’s to come. “The line length,” he says. “You’ll notice that they’re all built on bop—You might think of them as built on a bop refrain—chorus after chorus after chorus—the ideal being, say, Lester Young in Kansas City in 1938, blowing 72 choruses of ‘The Man I Love’ ’til everyone in the hall was out of his head—and Young was also . . .” (This was pure Kerouac, straight from the prefatory note to Mexico City Blues, wherein Kerouac states his notion of the poet as jazz saxophonist, “blowing” his poetic ideas in breath lines “from chorus to chorus.”)
(He) then begins with his now-famous opening line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .”—delivered in a rather flat affect. First-time listeners may be surprised at how low-key Ginsberg sounds at the outset of this reading of “Howl,” though this was typical, and soon enough his voice rises to what he later called “Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath.”
“I still hadn’t broken out of the classical Dylan Thomas monotone,” Ginsberg later wrote of his early readings. “—the divine machine revs up over and over until it takes off.”
The Reed recording of February 1956 is superb, faithful in pitch and superior in sound quality to any presently known 1950s version. Allen is miked closely, so his volume is even throughout. His enunciation is clear, his timing perfect; he never stumbles. His accent is classic North Jersey Jewish, intelligent and passionate. The poet-as-saxman metaphor comes demonstrably true as we hear Ginsberg drawing in great breaths at the anaphoric head of every line. It’s a recording to be breathed with as much as listened to…..”

links: https://allenginsberg.org/2021/01/f-j-15-2/

Roll on Omnivore---from my Uproxx ballot comments re: 2019:
Allen Ginsberg: The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience (Omnivore)

Baaahing at and from what no more can be seen from the darkening green, then venturing through rounds in the smokey city, letting the good and bad times constantly roll back and forth through each other, Blake and Ginsberg's magisterial and magical realness trespass is sometimes given pause and detour by evidence of a woman in there somewhere, as the wordmazes make way, even more---something to do with Ginsberg's choice of poems to include: no valentines, but some things that shake the darkness deeper, where Beatrice is unseen, also unsought, it seems. Eventually he meets Arthur Russell, who joins Bob Dylan etc. for nocturnes but hold on now when they meet, it's in a San Francisco park including a Buddhist troupe that AR is living with: here they keep rolling up and down though a thunderclap of drone.

Oops, that was originally from 2017, pasted into 2019 comments re Arthur Release.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Michael Robbins' new collection:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/156119/it-just-sort-of-happened

Alien vs Predator was a fun collection, but I like the excerpts of the longer poems that hint at a different direction here.

Lineated prose isn't poetry, as much as Robbins and many others want it to be.

michael robbins sucks

his work just feels empty to me despite/because of how dense with reference it is. and when he employs rhyming like a guy who read john berryman once i want to saw my own head off

I like referential work but there's nothing sly or ambiguous about Robbins' work, which makes it really uninteresting to read.

But then again, I am an enormous hater of most popular contemporary poetry, so whatever.

i mean my opinion is partially informed by how the guy had been a known asshole and idiot online in communities we were both a part of well before he became the pop music poetry guy

I guess the title poem is free to read online, already five years old at this point, though I never read it, despite being at least a lukewarm Robbins fan:

https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/6808/walkman-michael-robbins

It definitely is lineated prose, not sure it can't also be poetry though.

pretty much just reads like an essay to me

an essay i would abandon reading

Maybe the prosaic style is supposed to be a gesture of Marxist solidarity with populist Instagram poets like Rupi Kaur.

there’s a great part in lydia davis essays book where she talks about how non-lineated prose can be poetry and some lineated poetry is in fact prose and she says it’s highly subjective but then tries to explain it then gives a couples examples and it’s super spot on.

lol i totally remember that one

i mean my opinion is partially informed by how the guy had been a known asshole and idiot online in communities we were both a part of well before he became the pop music poetry guy

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Monday, June 21, 2021 2:51 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i have been trying to hold my tongue about him online for YEARS but I went to grad school with him and he was an asshole then for sure. I do not admire his poetry, but I can definitely not be objective.

There are plenty of contemporary poets who write about pop music, sometimes in a very prosaic manner, who are much better than Robbins. Brandon Brown, Dana Ward, Simone White, Moten. These poets are pushing boundaries of what content and form can do in terms of a poem's affective power...Robbins often reads like he's writing a somewhat pedestrian memoir...there's no surprise, no joy, and nothing interesting about his lines.

Like it shocks me that someone would give a fuck about Robbins if they could read Simone White's work about Future.

I thought Dan Chiasson made some astute comments about Joni Mitchell in The New Yorker, not always close to the way I hear her, but worth thinking about, unlike the presentations by many official music writers. Every other time I've seen him in there, he's written about about poetry, and has led me to good stuff.

Tough crowd. I liked the Robbins book. But admittedly I am in no way up to date as far as contemporary poetry goes.

I'm planning to get the book at some point.

Tbf, if it's published by a major publishing house, most poets are going to hate it. Robbins isn't for me, and that's fine.

(it's still bad poetry)

its p boring but i can't think its *bad poetry* and i'm not sure i get the lineated prose thing, seems less so than lots of stuff that has been called poetry for at least 50 years. the line breaks make sense to me as a metering device more than they often do in poems that i think are better or funnier or more insightful or feel stranger or

I would be interested if you could expand a bit on what you mean tbh table, i'm particularly surprised bc I'm sure I've seen you post positively about people like susan howe who i'm a big fan of and whose work is very agnostic about boundaries between poetry/prose/painting etc. I guess I'm just a bit confused because I don't suspect that you are operating from a conservative position, yet i can't see how otherwise to read this 'not-poetry' calling of poetry that is itself fairly conservative. I'm trying to imagine any analogue of this where I could go along with something being called 'not cinema' or 'not music'

ftr my interest in poetry tends to be that i'm a total philistine but I like to read things that are 'experimental' or kindof high modernist (I guess mostly in a surrealist tradition). I would make no claim that I understand even half of the stuff I read so that I often find discussions of even totally canonical things I like, like New York School, absolutely impenetrable (I read a book about ashbery once that made me doubt anything I thought I had understood about it at all!).

Anyway its not contemporary but one of the books I've had beside my bed for some time is 'experts are puzzled' by laura riding, which I think could very easily be described as 'lineated prose'; its full of these truncated little essays in plain text without line breaks, and you could argue quite easily that its not poetry at all and I'm not even sure what riding's view was on that. Yet there seems to be something about how it evades how an essay is supposed to function, and tugs at the idea of language and argument from inside, that seems to me to be poetry. I'm not sure I need or want to have a working definition of what poetry is or isn't that I can use as a criterion, but one sense I have of what it can do is that its something that plays with language to get it to do something new or interesting, or at least make me think about the relationship between ideas and the words that express them.

Anyway my understanding from that is that anything that gets designated as poetry kindof has to be taken seriously as poetry. It doesn’t mean that its interesting or makes you feel anything or make you think anything new or interesting about language, (although it might for somebody else!) . Even then, reading something like this michael robbins guy, it wasn’t interesting at first, but then it made me think about other poets whose work I like that it shares features with (refusing a ‘poetic’ language and using ordinary language, taking a shape that doesnt quite fit an essay or a story and so kind of inconclusive), and maybe it would make me think in future more precisely about those other poets work work or how poetry to other kinds of writing (about music, or food, or history, or writing) relate. It might be cheap or lazy but just to take a piece of writing that asserts itself as poetry as poetry is always to invite some way of thinking about it that is different from how I might otherwise think about it.

Your take on the Riding book is v. appealing, will check thx

Good discussion.

He's dead but I'm rereading Thom Gunn with great pleasure.

plax, my opinion doesn't arrive from a conservative view, I don't think.

When I read Bernadette Mayer, for instance, or someone more actively "contemporary" like Lewis Freedman, I can tell that while the poems are often composed of long, sentence-like syntactic units, that they are *meant* to be that way; that is, they were written qua poems utilizing the form of the sentence.

In Robbins' work, I'm not so sure— the line breaks seem either disinterested or obvious or both. They read, in other words, as if Robbins wrote them as sentences, then lineated them later. I guess I should admit, then, that my bit about them "not being poetry" was hyperbolic, but what I meant is that I find poetry like this to be incredibly boring— but at least Robbins isn't as boring as this absolute shithead of a human being, whose work is *about* ideology rather than arriving from it, and whose entire first book is just bland rad-left truisms like this crap.

https://t.co/Qj8BW4UOD1 pic.twitter.com/ST18bLJKFr

— Patrick (@prosepoems) June 4, 2021

He lives in Philadelphia, and honestly, I will punch him if I ever meet him.

That's a poem?

Supposedly.

One of the strains in US contemporary poetry is what might accurately be called "socialist realism," in which a usually white person writes poems that are more about showing their personal commitment to class struggle and the cause of socialism. If you don't like the poem, then that means you are an elitist snob. Trust me when I write that these people have no sense of nuance, grace, or social skill.

I think we may be overlooking the fact that poetry that is difficult to parse or understand is generally not popular, and the most popular poetry is generally pretty easy to read and understand because it follows rules of sentence formation and logic that are commonly assumed in prose.

Rupi Kaur, for instance. No socialist message, just short affirmative poems that generally read like prose-like fragments.

we're talking about poetry, tho, not schlocky self-help shit that could be on a hallmark card

That poem quoted above is way way worse than Michael Robbins, to the point that I find it really weird to bring it up in the context of Robbins's line breaks, and is from a book titled "Profit/Prophet" no less

One of the strains in US contemporary poetry is what might accurately be called "socialist realism,"

I'm sure this is right but at the same time the poet quoted above says "Some of Patrick's writing can be found in Peace, Land, and Bread, SORTES, Recenter Press Poetry Journal, Mad House Magazine, Apiary, & Bedfellows" so he's not exactly representative of what kind of work is being rewarded by the mainstream US contemporary poetry universe

Perhaps you don't understand how poetry actually operates in the world, then— almost any poetry book that sells over 250 copies is a high-selling book in contemporary US poetry. Even people whose books get published by major publishing houses don't sell much more than that. The actual "mainstream US contemporary poetry universe" consists of maybe 10 people, and many of them are (rightly) given little heed or respect. For example, no one I know gives a *shit* about Michael Robbins— he's considered an absolute joke among poets, some of whom are quite well-regarded.

This isn't meant to be a "oh whoa is me, why doesn't anyone love poetry," by the way— I'm fine with the crumbs thrown to me by the establishment, and that my last book went into a second printing. It's just that there needs to be a big adjustment as to what is considered "mainstream" in this conversation, seeing as how books that haven't sold more than 100 copies win the National Book Award for poetry *all the time.*

And given that Blagrave's poem has been shared and retweeted hundreds of times, and his magazine Prolit has been featured in a major daily newspaper, his reach is one that might be considered "large" for the poetry world.

Yeah I don't understand how poetry actually operates in the world so this is really interesting to me! I would have thought the "mainstream contemporary poetry universe" was people who were published in, like, the New Yorker or Poetry (I know those are different people or can be) and whose books came out with FSG or Graywolf (also different I know) and who, like, won the National Book Award. But looking at this longlist

https://www.nationalbook.org/2020-national-book-awards-longlist-for-poetry/

I can see that indeed close to half of the books are from presses I've NEVER heard of. (The ones I know are Wesleyan, Copper Canyon, New Directions, Graywolf to give some sense of what I'm talking about.)

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't really know what I think the poetry universe IS. I thought a lot of it was, like, the people who have jobs teaching creative writing in colleges and publishing in Tin House or whatever. Except I see that Tin House has stopped publishing which goes to show you how up to date I am.

lol that socialist realist poet reads to me as a kind of barbed irony (as in sincere but also self effacingly bald-faced)

Yeah, eephus!, it's a weird world that doesn't make a lot of sense any longer— with many writing programs relying on contingent labor, and a subcultural yet tiered market that in some ways mimics the larger literary marketplace, there's a ton of variation in terms of what gets lauded, what is accessible, and so on. For example, I have friends who have won some big awards, or been long-listed for some big awards, but none of them have books on major presses, and none of them are in academia. By the same token, I have friends who have been academics for 20+ years, but whose books never win awards and don't sell very well.

Sorry if any of my previous messages came off as dick-ish, btw! I find this conversation really interesting.

There's also the case of someone like Liz Waldner, who won numerous awards and was considered one of the brightest poets of her generation, but who could not get hired for a full-time academic gig, so kept bouncing around visiting jobs until her health took a turn...and then, she had to run a fundraiser to keep herself alive. This is one of the finest poets of her generation!

On the contrary, I think I was the one being somewhat dickish, you said "one of the strains" and I think I just hadn't grasped how multidimensional and fragmented "success" was in poetry now so I made a snarky post based on the assumption that "has never published in a magazine I've ever heard of" meant "this is a poetry nobody." (pobody?)

Haha, well yeah, I just wanted to make sure that my giving of additional context wasn't read as me being some know-it-all shithead.

Some of the most well-regarded poets aren't widely know until they're old or dead. Just the way it goes!

i think in ireland eg the situation is somewhat different, bc of the relative size of the country and also because of how literature is seen as less elitist in general i think because of the relationship between literature and 20th c historical events etc.

that is to say 'contemporary poetry' is far from hegemonic and national and local contexts will have very different metrics of success and opportunities for support.

i'm always shocked (shocked!) at what privileged backgrounds people you meet in art/literary worlds are in the UK and while I know that this is pretty much the historical norm, it feels far more accessible and diverse in ireland but also far more knitted into people's ordinary lives so I think there's something to be said not only about success etc, but also a diversity of contexts that we care about and the kinds of non-professionalised practices/platforms that we recognise.

certainly it was totally normal for people of my grandparents generation to be able to recite poetry, often people with little literacy skills.

And i remember attending a wedding where a friend was getting married to an australian guy and his family was pretty baffled at how all the irish people kept insisting on making speeches and incorporating long passages of poetry (often written by non-professional poet friends!). I'm not saying this happens at every irish wedding but its not incredibly unusual either. the speeches thing is pretty universal though!

Oh absolutely, and I only really talk about the US because my knowledge of non-US poetry and literary communities isn't large...I know a good deal about Vancouver and Montreal, but that's still so-called North America. The only poets I know personally in the UK are white dudes, for example, which is clearly not representative...

i would say the 'hottest young thing' is ak blakmore whose work, to me, is simply "i went to oxbridge and then i got a septum piercing" but thats probably more uncharitable than it needs to be