It’s not too far removed from the turn of the year, still a good time for resolutions, improvement.  What better resolution than to Be Perfect?  There’s a gentleman who would like to tell you how.  The only problem: he’s a poet. 

We’ve fallen away from an ideal of poetry as an agent of self-perfection, I think.  Even widely read poets, even those whose gentle proclamations may very well have bettered the lives of their readers, not to mention those poets who speak in anger for an entire voiceless people, become agents of justice and outcry, even they are heard, I think, with indulgence only.  We do not expect those around us to read poetry, and might not think well of them if they do.  I love poetry and my own reactions really are not so far from that quiet condescension, that scorn buried under the culturally ordained platitudes of respect we all mouth when someone close to us, or a stranger even, mentions a love of poetry.  We certainly have no expectations that poetry might better us, might be necessary to the sort of person we’d like to become.  I’m often convinced that my own consideration for poetry might be a weakness. 

Poets, most poets, do not think this way, and that’s for the best.  We want our craftsmen, our teachers, masons, executioners, to have faith in their work.  They are better for it.  But we are, I am, not a poet.  I can afford not to ignore how very silly and worthless poetry can be.

Ron Padgett, simultaneously one of the funnier and most heartfelt poets writing today, believes that poetry is worth something.  He also understands just how ridiculous that belief is.  His poem "How to be Perfect", part of which you can find after the jump, is a miracle of balance.  Straightforward platitudes abut absurdities and deprecation, all in Padgett’s characteristically simple voice.  The full poem is much longer, but I’ve chosen two passages from it to give you a taste.  It may not make you perfect, but, if Ron is right and our unthought dismissal is wrong, even reading it could make you better than you are now.

Click here to read How to Be Perfect by Ron Padgett

Art by George Schneeman (with Ron Padgett) circa 1975

Here’s another poem, this latest from New Directions‘ upcoming collection of Roberto Bolaño’s poetry The Romantic Dogs.  Nearly the entire book, including this poem, is marvelous and redolent of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.  Indeed it feels as if the novel should have been scrawled tightly in the margins and endpages of this book of poetry, in gestural pinpricks of ink between each line.

Not enough attention, I think, has been paid to Bolaño’s powerful argument for genre sensibilities, genre literacy, in even the most literary of written works.  His detectives, which feature heavily in a few of the poems and are hinted at in others, are not just ciphers for the lonely obsessions of youth.  Or rather, if they are meant to be just a drifting one-to-one analogy, they bring with them a whole suite of imagery and tones - blood, hidden clues, bipolar masculinity - that extend far beyond the detectives themselves. It allows him the neat trick of making each work feel small, inconsequential,  but so large and urgent, too. 

Lastly, watch out for some fun work here by translator Laura Healy. 

Click here to read "Verses by Juan Ramón" by Roberto Bolaño, collected in The Romantic Dogs, out next month from New Directions Press.

I had the good fortune to spend a few days up in the Catskills this week.  It’s amazing up there, all rustling beech leaves and pricked velvet night skies.  It was so nice, in fact, that it put me in the mood for a bit of pastoral poetry.  

Oh you heard me right.  We’re going to have a taste of idyll, folks.  

But just any old ode to a rustic sheep fold won’t do the trick here.  That’s like deciding you’re in the mood for a novel and reaching straight for Proust.  Yes, they’re novels, but they epitomize the form.  I want an attenuated  example of the genre, something a little more Flaubert.  Here, then, is  Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, four full pages of heavy-footed verse, which manages to shape the main tropes of the pastoral – romantic reinforcement of social hierarchies, the hidden/artificial and center/outside dialectics, a bird or two – into a poem about the unremembered yeoman.  I guess it’s more Hardy than Flaubert, but it fits the bill.  For a little more context, Gray lived from 1716-1771.  That means he wrote after Pope, as a contemporary of Samuel Johnson, and before Blake.

Read the poem by clicking here.

Photo by Chris Eccles

Here’s another poem, poached this time from AGNI 64. It’s a longer one, but that’s fitting for a narrative poem that wants to dabble in history and belief and childhood and glory and tawdry death in New York in the summer. As ever, click below for the actual poem.

   Thumb Trick by Matt Donovan

I finished John Berger’s new epistolary, revolutionary, breathlessly romantic prison novel last week. It wont be in stores until September, so I’ll say a bit more about it then, but in the meantime his literary prison idyll put me in the mood to read Nazim Hikmet again. This particular poem was written during some of Hikmet’s extensive time spent in Turkish prisons, before his exile and international acclaim. This translation is by Ruth Christie and I’ve taken it from selection of the poet’s work that Anvil Press put out in 2002 titled Beyond the Walls.  Click the title below to read the poem in full.

–> Illustration on the Cover of a Poetry Book

Lets start a new series of posts, just for kicks. How about some poetry? Everyone likes poetry right? Well, no, that was a dumb question I know. But let’s agree that you should pretend to like it, if only to impress me when we meet.

I thought something very American might be good for this week. I have a small patriotic streak I can’t seem to shake, even if it’s only a progressive’s pride at the success of our revolution . Oh, and corndogs. Corndogs make me love our nation.

The poetry I post here will more often than not jut be something I’ve pulled off of my shelf at home. Today my first instinct was to grab some Stanley Kunitz. I even transcribed one (“The Testing-Tree” if you’re curious), but it just seemed too, I don’t know, friendly. So I grabbed a selected Galway Kinnell, another great American poet. Not only is he an American poet but Kinnell is a New York poet, with a few of his best set in our neighborhood. But so much of his work is either nature idyll or scathing indictment, sometimes blending the two, that I had a hard time choosing. I’ll put some of those up later maybe; they are quite good. The one I eventually picked led back to my first choice and is decidedly Kunitz-inflected. It can also be read as a covert telling of an adolescent sexual encounter, I suppose, but I think for Kinnell it really is just a poem about a hobo. And youth and America, of course, and myth. After all, what’s more American than a hobo-meal on the banks of the Delaware? Click the title below for the full poem.

Memory of Wilmington