Mallarmé’s Hand

Jack Hanson reminds us that Stéphane Mallarmé's effect on English-language poetry was, and is, profound:

Broadly speaking, Mallarmé’s influence in Anglophone poetry cuts two ways. The first and most prominent is the heritage of the Symbolists, a combination of religious and philosophical preoccupations with a deep concern for musicality and rhythm. The latter of these is in part what makes Mallarmé so difficult to translate. The nearest English equivalent to my mind is Wallace Stevens, a poet whose work is in constant conversation with his French predecessor. (Consider the task of translating even Stevens’ most famous poems, such as the “Emperor of Ice Cream,” which opens, “Call the roller of big cigars, / The muscular one, and bid him whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.”) Through the American Modernist quadrumvirate of Stevens, Frost (with his insistence on the “sound of sense”), Pound, and Eliot (though, true to form, he cited the more obscure Jules La Forgue as a decisive influence), Mallarmé’s hand can be seen in all of what might be called “mainstream” poetry of the 20th century.

The other strain of Mallarmé’s influence comes down through the more experimental line in Modern poetry, from Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams to such diverse practitioners as Surrealists like André Breton, the Language poets, and, in our own time, the nascent movement of digital and computer-generated poetry. This loosely defined nexus of formally and conceptually experimental poets, who often relate intensely in their work with other art forms, can be traced directly to Mallarmé’s final work, Un coup des Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard.

Genuine Primitive

Jeffery Donaldson admits his early ambivalence about John Thompson's poetry:

I’ve been slow, lazy even, in coming to Thompson’s work. I felt I understood his place in the big picture. He was gathering up the energies of the Poundian Imagist and Vorticist movements from the teens and twenties, shaping a hybrid sixties expression of them in familiar nature poems that were complicated by cryptic psychological interventions. The quintessential Canadian themes were there: bone, wood, axe, hammer, chopping, digging, the underground root, the buried specimen. It is the work of a genuine primitive looking to build simple sustaining structures out of the materials of nature. I felt I understood the experiment: the poems were an exploration of the spare style (“laconic, controlled, percussive,” is Sanger’s excellent formula) leaning in the direction of the private, enigmatic, and recondite. I was stuck between feeling that his poems were either too hard or too easy, that I didn’t have the patience for either, and didn’t in any case know how to decide.

He seems to have come around—a little:

It may be that Thompson left us the best key to his poems in the title of his first book, At the Edge of the Chopping There are No Secrets. Thompson tried to work at the edge of the chopping, to find a way of getting words to say something that they weren’t already going to say. To chop away at their own underbrush, make new clearings. Poems that cut and split and pile: breakings-off, severances; out of it, a whole assembling. What is rightness but that feeling of astonishment when the axe falls keenly, just so?

(Photograph by Thaddeus Holownia of the Jolicure woods, site of John Thompson's former home)

Alphabetic Instability

Kaie Kellough, who creates complex verbal soundscapes with his voice, explains his fascination with the alphabet:

i like that the alphabet is a linear 26-step sequence that we have all so deeply internalized (digested?) that reciting it happens naturally, as effortlessly and thoughtlessly as a biological process. consequently, when that sequence is ruptured, or parts of it are rearranged, when suddenly the recitation halts as it advances and riffs backward, or sounds the letters out of their “natural” order but in a way that is much unlike spelling, and that doesn’t in fact spell anything, the effect on the person hearing that rupture/recitation can be very profound. it can reach to the core of a person’s relationship to language, and i think that that level of human engagement, through language, is one of the reasons why we produce poetry and is one of the aims of poetry. and this is further interesting to me because it tells me that any similarly profound engagement with language might require—or at least can be achieved by—destabilizing the familiar structures and mechanisms of language. creating a climate of systemic alphabetic instability…

Sunday Poem

#WorthThePriceOfEmission 

The only thing left to deal with is our addiction to being killed by monsters.
What was all the hating over?
Christmas sneaks up like a rusty train.
Sit still and see if you can feel your cerebrospinal fluid pulsing.
Thoughts get in deep like drains and infections.
Sky isn’t just air anymore.
What if you die before the next Star Wars comes out?
Slush crunches like knuckles on day six.
Children imagine that at night their toys come to death and have tea parties.
We cling to our most useless things like grudges.
Solar powered forgetfulness.
Our habits are dollar stores that sell us our own plastic shit.
What if sickness is the only homunculus?
A tether runs from each free man to the satellite watching him.
Vaccines hang in their ampoules and dream of escape.
If there’s one lesson life has taught us all it’s to not don’t be a rock star.
Leaf through The Divine Sitcomedy.
Stats show SubQ RFID chips increase the frequency of worker implants.
A closet filled with wedding dresses filed in ascending size.
Which towel should I use if the hypothetical mess I need to clean is blood?
The mind can be a couch or the space under it and still come up with the same thing.
Artificial intelligence is a framed doctorate diploma.
The angry woman has her own reasons as well as her mother’s.
Beauty is a bunch of organized holes in the face.
I need to stop buying beer so I save enough money to do the things I want like buy beer.
Hang on a moment while I look at photos of this new spider.
Blowjobs are the Rome of everything after Rome.
Only desperate people actually believe they’ll be better by Thursday.
I’ve lost track of what favourite even means.
Smooth jazz is God’s peristaltic grumble.
What if we are flown like kites from a ground beyond the grave?
Restart the stop-time of this moment with trumpet blat and a James Brown scream.
Vice screws itself tight around your head.
The end happens when the poisons reach the children.
Wallpaper everything with Ebola maps.
How many times do I have to tell Paul Celan I’m sorry?
Joy lasts as long as distraction.
Listen to the background hum of the dishwasher.
What will happen when Santa figures out how to spread our sins among the whole family?
Everyone is one measure or another away from jackass.
This year I’m giving the gift of shutting the fuck up.

From Diversion (ECW, 2015) by George Murray

Memory of a Stanza

Dahlia Lithwick—who, as a student, was forced to commit to memory sections of Macbeth, The Tempest and Hamlet—defends learning poems by heart, despite how useless the task may appear at first:

I am not that old, but I fear that I couldn’t memorize another poem for love or money or a guaranteed A anymore. I can barely memorize my Facebook password. But I do know that at more than one turn in my life, I have stumbled backward into a memory of a stanza or a phrase that suddenly made the moment briefly beautiful, and connected, and deep. And that the dogged memorization of hateful poems, which sucked mightily at the time, later became the template for sorting the serious from the silly, before we knew what silliness really was.

Ghastly Bosh

As part of a North American speaking tour, Oscar Wilde gave a talk in San Francisco on March 27, 1882. In the audience was Ambrose Bierce, well-known as a biting—and cruel—satirist. Bierce wasn't impressed by what he heard and, five days later, published an attack on Wilde in the magazine The Wasp

That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it—says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft.

Sunday Poem

MIMES 

I open the door to find a storm.
Twenty rooks busy at worms
abandon the green hillside and disappear

in the branches. Even animals who know
their place in the system will hide.
Leaving the trees, they reach

dissonant suspense. It’s a long overture.
With no help from their elders,
they beat their wings and squawk.

Most animals and clouds choose to live
in a thunderstorm with their familiars.
No story I could tell you about

them would do justice.
Still, it’s in our nature to ask them
to repeat their gestures. Birds, clouds,

and other vulnerables
flutter in the wordless present.
Any moment now, they’ll break

character. They teach me how
to behave. I have no double.
They don’t say a thing. 

By Nyla Matuk, from New Poetries VI (ed. Michael Schmidt and Helen Tookey, Carcanet)